From This Moment On (41 page)

A pen materialized, and I began signing autographs and smiling through it, but the more I signed, the more the size of the crowd just mushroomed until, finally, mall security came along to break it up. As they escorted us out to my car in the parking lot, I could feel whatever normalcy remained in my life slipping away. A simple outing to a mall with my sister and nephew was no longer simple; would it even be possible anymore?

To this day, I make every effort to be gracious, patient, and polite to anyone who treats me with the same respect. I do my best to live up to the public’s expectations, but of course it’s impossible to please everyone, all the time.

Before the promotional tour for
The Woman in Me
was over, I had to hire a security staff for being out in public. Maybe if you are born to royalty, you get used to that, but for me it was a very hard adjustment. It’s pretty impressive, in an adrenaline rush kind of way, the first time you’re part of it—like a paparazzi car chase, for example; you feel like you’re starring in a James Bond spy thriller. The tension can get hairy and scary; after all, look what happened to Princess Diana. Things can get out of hand pretty fast. I can’t imagine being president or the Queen of England. All I can say is that everyone at the beginning of her public career is faced with a transition from not famous to famous, which for some celebrities can come seemingly overnight. It’s an adjustment and gets very little sympathy or understanding from the press or the public. Whatever that means to you; I’m just sharing my perspective based on my initial, youthful experience of having a public profile.

You know what’s ironic? The whole purpose of making music is to connect with people, and yet the more your popularity grows, the less you are able to interact with your audience any closer than from the stage and through your records. Fame can be isolating. I know it was for me for a very long time.

When I’m making a public appearance, I consider it a pleasure to set aside time for the fans. If not for them, entertainers simply would not have a profession. But it can be frustrating when a line is crossed. Once, I was out at a restaurant, minding my own business, and a woman approached me to ask if I would mind wishing her friend a happy fortieth birthday. They were sitting in a private room nearby, and I obliged, following behind the lady. When she reached the doorway to the birthday room ahead of me, she held her hand behind her, signaling for me to stop, and then bellowed into the room, “Hey, everybody, look what I found!” This spoke volumes to me about what I truly represented to this person. I was an object, not a person. I was an “it,” not a “who.” This is the reality a lot of the time when you are a display item, as is often the case for a celebrity. If you are someone looking to be famous, make no mistake, this is all a part of that reality.
Of course, today I personally accept that this comes with the territory and just go with the flow as much as the situation allows me to.

Earlier in my career, however, while still adjusting to this type of treatment, my way of coping was to walk with my head down, avoiding people’s gazes. Because once you established eye contact, it was as if you had extended an invitation for someone to intrude upon your personal space. I also began to walk really, really fast, everywhere. I used to laugh watching the security guys in the cars ahead of me jump out practically before they’d come to a full stop in order to get a head start. Otherwise, I’d be halfway down the street, with these big bodies panting to keep up. What a pain I must have been for them!

Most of my communication was happening through things like interviews and work meetings, so all I ever talked about was career related. This was soul destroying, as conversation rarely went on to subjects not related to my professional life, and I never got to talk about the inspiration I drew from exploring and experiencing new things, like vacationing somewhere of my dreams and meeting new people who were interested in the real me and not the “Shania” me. After a while, you start to develop two very different existences. The private world of me, Eilleen, is safe for her to be herself, to swear, to drink too much, to wear the wrong clothes, to sing out of tune, to be late, to behave regretfully—the list of imperfections that I’m allowed to display without being judged or criticized goes on and on. As Shania, however, I’ve spent years being overly attentive to how people perceived me, at all times. I’m less concerned in this regard now than I was even five years ago, however. Not that I would say I don’t care what people think; in fact, I’m less likely to pose nude for
Playboy
today than ever before, especially now that gravity is having its way with me. But I am more relaxed about criticism and sense I’m less affected by the things I cannot control.

Trying so hard to keep up with what I expected from Shania, I began retreating from people and keeping them at arm’s length. This can get to become such a habit that it spills over into your personal life. I
found myself feeling increasingly distant from childhood friends and even from my family. On the road, it was next to impossible to find a block of uninterrupted time to chat on the phone, and although I would invite friends and family to meet up with me, they could not just drop their jobs and families to come hang out. Not that we got to do all that much hanging out on the rare occasions when they could get away; mostly, they got to watch me work. It was wonderful for me, as I felt buoyed by their presence and moral support, but less so for them.

In a way, the people I was living with day in and day out—Sheri and Kim and publicist Patty Lou Andrews—traveled with me the most and became a surrogate family. Road siblings, I called them. We went through so much together and bonded quickly, kind of like a platoon of soldiers who’d served together and come home with war stories that only they can fully understand. Mutt’s love was in the studio, not on the road, and we spent long stretches of weeks and sometimes months apart, as my schedule was relentless, and unless he came to me, we simply didn’t connect.

I had moments of sheer desperation over these years, and although I never contemplated suicide, I was looking for an escape. I even wished I would catch the next bad flu going around, so that I could get a forced rest, or for the album suddenly to lose steam so it would be time to get off the road and pass my hours with my guitar just writing in peace with a few friends around the fire. I hoped for doom because a break was no longer optional. Rest was a selfish request that compromised the success of my work, and so many people were contributing to what I was doing: from my record company and my own staff to Mutt and every person related to the project who was relying on me to carry the torch until it burned out. I felt as if it was all riding on me. It was clear that when I stopped, the whole machine stopped.

I didn’t drink alcohol at all, took no drugs, barely even a painkiller, let alone Ambien or other soothing helpers. I didn’t turn to food to comfort myself, nor did I have a therapist. I was alone in this mess
with seemingly no way out. I was meant to be a soldier and just stick it out in this prison of exhausting loneliness.

I remember speaking to Luke on the phone from a Las Vegas hotel room. It was a large suite and had huge floor-to-ceiling windows that spanned the width of the living room. I was way up somewhere on who knows what floor towering over what seemed to be everything else. Although it’s hard for me to imagine my thought process in the moment back then, this was what I was experiencing. The living room was spacious, and as I was talking to Luke, listening with one-half of my brain and contemplating with the other, it occurred to me that all I had to do was move the coffee table out of the way, and I’d have a good, clear run at the window with enough force to actually break through and jump. It wasn’t anything Luke was saying that brought this on, of course, as Luke was always very compassionate and sensitive to me personally. I may not have even told Luke more than that I was tired and could use more rest, but I wouldn’t have expressed the true depth of my desperation that night. I was too strong, or maybe weak, depending on how you look at it, to burden anyone with my pain. It would have been more painful to do that than to jump through the window, in my mind. I was experiencing amazing success, and my thinking was that I didn’t have the right to complain about it.

Over the course of these two years, my schedule allowed for pit stops at home near Saint Regis Falls only every two or three months, and for no more than a few days each time. During one trip home, while promoting “You Win My Love” in the early spring of 1996, the loneliness and sheer exhaustion of the past year caught up with me.

Still more singles were in the pipeline, and I just didn’t feel like I could go on. I was soaking in a hot bath one night, feeling alone and very sorry for myself. That day I’d finally implored whoever would listen—a hometown friend, Mutt, or a road sibling—that I needed a break and wanted a couple of more days at home to rest, but everyone’s response was the same: “Come on, Eilleen, you can do it. You
have everything going for you. Anyone would cut off their right arm to be in your position. Stop complaining.” Breaking commitments could come back to hurt me in the future, was what I learned to believe. What’s more, the team had worked so hard on putting the machine in motion for the new record, and it would be a shame to let them down. Basically, I felt pressured to suck it up and do whatever it took to make the most of the record’s success. I should have leaned on my family at that point in my life, but I wouldn’t allow myself to display what I considered weakness on my part. Being the self-sufficient, strong one was how I’d come to view myself, and I wasn’t about to tarnish their image of me.
My
image of me. Besides, what good would it have done? I’d just sent out a distress call and was rebuffed.

I lay in the hot water a long time until it began to cool and I started to cry. But to myself. Mutt was taking a break from the studio for a couple of hours to watch a sports match of some kind on TV, and I didn’t want him to hear me. I did not want anyone to hear my weak, pathetic breakdown. When the tears stopped, I went to bed alone.

I can imagine someone reading this and miming playing an imaginary violin. “Oh, boo-hoo. Your second album is selling millions of copies, you’re doing all this cool stuff. Please, spare me.” Exactly. I said the same thing to myself plenty of times. I felt guilty, because what right did I have to complain about anything? With all the good fortune that was coming my way, how could I possibly be unhappy?

The Woman in Me
took other completely unexpected honors that I never could have imagined, including the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Country Album and Album of the Year at the Country Music Awards. The success of that period would also earn me trophies for International Rising Star (British Country Music Awards), World’s Best Selling Female Country Artist (World Music Awards), and Top New Female Vocalist (Country Music Awards).

That sort of recognition helped to offset my fatigue as we set our sights on the next record. Good thing, too, because I would have only about four months to finish writing and recording in order to meet the targeted fall 1997 release date. It helped that I could do some of the work in Saint Regis Falls, roughly twenty miles from the Canadian
border. I guess you could call it centrally located: about eighty miles southwest of Montreal and eight miles southeast of Ottawa. Yep, centrally located right in the middle of nowhere. Which was exactly what Mutt and I had wanted—and, more to the point, needed.

The idea was to restore some measure of sanity to our lives by limiting the amount of travel I’d have to do, especially since I’d planned all along to support this CD with my first full-scale concert tour. However, we did end up traveling quite a bit so that Mutt could capture certain musicians in their own environment, and so that they didn’t have to travel. We also wanted to change up the scenery for ourselves as writers, to be in new places we could draw inspiration from. The Saint Regis Falls home was something we built with the idea of spending many creative years there as a base, as nature was all around us in the miles of forest that circled the house and the lake that was centered in the property. We designed deep porches all round the building so that we could sit outside and take in the sounds of the northern woods that echoed over the lake.

We named the secluded property Loon Echo because at sunrise and at dusk, the loons would call to one another. Hearing the large birds’ fluty cries bouncing across the glasslike surface of our private lake reminded me of my childhood in Canada; I’d get positively giddy at the sound. The spacious office, the hub of all things in Mutt and Woody World, featured large picture windows that overlooked the inlet. Between the breathtaking view, a deep porch, and the aroma of Kim Godreau’s masterfully baked apple pies wafting from the kitchen, it made for the perfect setup.