Forward by Martin:

About October last year I lent Murphy my copy of Dark Star to help her with this article which was for The Telegraph Magazine (a British daily newspaper colour supplement) the original intention was for it to be published around the release of  'Love Songs' and the release schedule for the MGM material on cd. However, it got put back and eventually Murphy decided that she had waited long enough and it was finally published on 6th February 1999 with no products to plug........     

Ten years after his death, the legend of Roy Orbison flourishes, as does  the woman who was his wife and  manager, Barbara, who kept the rights to most of his work. Having built up the Orbison empire, she now wants to branch out on her own.

Report by     Murphy Williams.
 
 
               A MILE AWAY from Nashville's skyline, with its searchlights and Batman-eared skyscraper, the six-floor Orbison Building stands solidly near the Truck Centre, the Off-Broadway Shoe Warehouse and a billboard shouting, 'Yippee here's Chevvyland'. From the side of the office block, a 30ff cut-out of Roy Orbison smiles through giant trademark black shades, like The Great Gatsby's Dr T.J. Eckleberg, the fading God figure who looked impassively upon the moral-free wasteland beneath him.

            Within the building, a party is being held to celebrate the latest hit of Still Working, the songwriting company set up by Roy's German-born widow, Barbara Orbison. People mill around admiring the long corridor of the Big 0's gold and platinum records, the tasteful opulence of what used to be a warehouse. Talk revolves around the country charts: who's writing Reba Maclntyre's next single; how the latest Christian label is doing. After sunset, everyone is summoned to Barbara'shuge office to make themselves comfortable on the white sofas and deep armchairs. Raul Malo, lead singer of the Mavericks and friend of the family's, has taken the mike. 'Any requests?' he asks his genial audience. 'Sing In Dreams,' calls Barbara. 'OK,' he says. 'If the Big Boss says In Dreams, In Dreams it is.'

         Barbara, owner of all Roy's songs and the rights to most of his recordings, is in an almost unheard-of position Yoko Ono and Maria Elena Holly, for instance, don't own the rights to their husbands' songs, and Elvis wasn't a writer so Priscilla Presley's main concerns  are memorabilia and Graceland. In the last decade, Barbara has promoted and zealously safeguarded Roy's legacy, posthumous albums, putting out CD and video releases to satisfy ever-hungry fans, establishing Orbison Records, dealing with daily requests to use his songs and overseeing the smart memorabilia. Among her 20-strong entourage are an archivist who dotingly tracks Roy's life and some notoriously vigorous litigators who sort out the small print. She is now marking the 10th anniversary of his death by putting out more unreleased material.

          The Big Boss met the Big 0 some 30 years ago in Leeds. That summer night in 1968, whispers and notes were flying around Jimmy Savile's In-Time disco claiming that Roy Orbison, who had once upstaged the Beatles, might come along after his show. At this point, he had recorded 22 Top-40 hits, of which Oh, Pretty Womari had sold seven million copies in 1964 alone, and Only the Lonely had spent 40 weeks in the UK charts. His overwhelming, operatic voice has been described as 'a scrawl of sonic skywriting' and 'sounding as if he was falling out of a window backwards and letting the angels catch him'
(Dwight Yoakam).

          Barbara Wellnoener-Jacobs had been visiting England since she was 12 to learn English. Now, at 17, she was a long-haired Courreges modette in mini-skirt and boots. She had heard Roy's stuff on the radio, but was more interested in dancing and bowling. She was sitting with the club manager when he suggested going over to meet the 32- year-old singer. She wasn't impressed. 'I don't want to,' she said, with Teutonic directness. 'Why should I?'
 
            Eventually she was persuaded to be introduced to the icon whose voice Elvis always claimed was the best in the world. He surprised her by remembering that Bielefeld, the name of her hometown in Germany, had appeared on a map in some war movie. One of Barbara's father's companies was a successful fashion line, Avant Garde. She took note of his Patek Phillippe watch, handmade boots, tight stovetop trousers and diamond pinkie ring. The denim jacket didn't fit, though, and she pointed it out. 'If I wear my best suit tomorrow,' Roy shot back, 'will you let me take you out for dinner?'

          Barbara is telling me the story by the side of her pool on one of Nashville's mansion streets. Stretching her long, velvet trousered legs on a table, she is smoking American Spirits and drinking a veggie shake. There are barely any pictures of Roy around the house, no music and, save the cars in the garage, no apparent links to the past. It's almost impossible to reconcile this urbane, handsome cross between Crystal Gayle and Jackie Collinss tall:ing of 'spiritual' values with the mysterious Fifties spectre of the small-town Texan star known as 'Facetus' at school. She is in colour, while surely he was always in black and white. But whatever people say about Barbara and she has been a human dartboard since they married in 1968 - they have to admit she always loved him.

          I soak up the rest of the tale. At the time, she must have been one of the few people not to know Roy had lost his first wife, Claudette (the mother of his three sons), in a motorbike accident two years before, and she softened to him when he told her. They made a date to meet the next night before his show, but she was two hours late. His driver took her to the venue. Inevitably, she was transfixed by the voice, and told him so afterwards backstage before turning to leave. After all, the vivacious schoolgirl had boyfriends wherever she went - 'I definitely liked guys and guys liked me - and plenty of money.

          For the next four nights, she would be picked up before the show and dropped back  with her friends after dinner. Back in Germany, she decided to sneak to London to see him at the Talk of the Town while her parents were away.

        They kept in touch and before long they were planning a Christmas holiday in Hawaii. But she got a call from his tour manager. Roy's two oldest sons had died in a fire at their home in North Carolina. From then on, he called daily at midnight, Tennessee time (6am, German).Wasn't the job of consoling him beyond her at17? Barbara isforthright: 'It's strange,you know, that never crossed my mind.' 'Perhaps the most important thing she has done for me,' admitted Roy soon after, 'is to help me talk about Claudette and the boys.' Roy flew to Germany to ask for her hand. Barbara's grandmother had face cancer at the time and there was a quick turnover of nurses unable to bear her grotesque disfigurement When Roy was introduced to her, therefore, he was closely scrutinised.He kissed her hello without flinching. Pop star or not, his proposal was accepted and a date was set for March.
 
         BARBARA picks up Mojo to check Roy's position in the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time (20) and titters at the 'cute' picture caption: 'The loser's champion.' She can laugh. The loser's champion had 43 collector's cars when he married Barbara, and his albums still sell up to three million copies a year Profits from the 'Roy-alties' and spin off companies mean she is one of Nashville's most powerful players, with a packed international schedule, more homes, cars and staff in California and Chelsea, and a mean collection of Mapplethorpes and Manolo Blahnik heels. And all because she had the presence of mind to refuse to sign a note that Roy's previous manager and publisher, Wesley Rose, had given her before she married Roy. It read, 'I, Barbara Wellnoener-Jacobs, assign the copyrights to you the publisher for the sum of a dollar.' He had claimed it was  protection from US law in case of divorce. Those copyrights are now worth millions, Barbara says, mouthing the  last word. She may have said 'billions'.
          By now, Barbara and I are en route for dinner in her black Mercedes. Having found the right button to heat our seats, she calls her songwriting (natch) housekeeper. 'Hey Robert, did you do anything about the right-hand gate? Man, it's moving so slow!' Could this really be the woman 'quietly embroidering a chair cover' while Roy was being interviewed in 1972?
          Despite her high-flying business family, all Barbara wanted in the Sixties was a family, albeit an untraditional one, and between bearing him two now twenty-something sons, the 'partnership's' early life was spent on the road, on the lake, on horseback, on tennis courts, on holiday, never staying in one place long enough to get bored. Their gig routine was well- established: they would roll up in the back of a limo, he would have his Coke, a last drag on a cigarette, say, 'See you, babydoll' and walk out on to the stage. As the curtain went down, she'd be there with a towel and another Coke. Clothes changed, autographs signed, evening plans discussed. No mention of the gig. Wlien he wasn't home, Johnny Cash's wife, June
Carter, eased her into Tennessee life.
         The luxury must have provided a familiar buffer to the unreality of her situation, Roy was the 'biggest fish in  these waters'. Gossip about Claudette's lurid fate (they were married, divorced  when he discovered an infidelity, and then remarried) was still flying around and suspicions of Barbara's motives for marrying him ran deep. 'Of course, everybody loves power in any form, but there has to be something here,' she says, thumping her heart. 'Olivia Harrison [George's wife] always said Roy was my New Age man,' she gleams. 'He'd sit in the kitchen and talk about anything. One time, we were sitting around with the guys who were all bellyaching about divorces. Roy said quietly, "Guys, have you wondered if  you're all divorcing the wrong woman. Maybe you should divorce your mothers first." 'And was Roy, with his passion for Monty Python and model airplanes, worldly enough for her? 'He was an avid student of history, art, poetry.There wasn't an ounce of hick in him.
          Barbara is keen to dispel rumours. In his biography, Dark Star, Ellis Amburn alleges that the couple neglected the rest of Roy's family. In Nashville, some say that his surviving son by Claudette lives in rather less glorious circumstances than Barbara does, but she talks highly of him and dismisses the book as 'horrendous' Barbara has been described to me as a control freak who once pulled the plug on a band during one of her house parties because it was 11pm. I am reluctant to let her whitewash history; but she talks so vividly that I am won over. So is she ironing out the creases in his image? 'What, like I want to protect him?' says Barbara. 'He doesn't need it.'
          Some of her answers are frustratingly brief ('How did you get along with Elvis?'  'Let's not get started on on me and Elvis'), but always 'sunny-side up' as she puts it. How for instance did she cope with the slump Roy suffered until 1986 when the use of In Dreams in David Lynch's Blue Veket kickstarted  his resurgence? At times he was playing to 50 people. 'It was a lull,' she admits. 'But I didn't even know, or examine what he meant to the world. He never boasted about knowing Elvis or John Lennon; in fact, I didn't know of half the people he knew until I met them. There wasn't one Orbison recording in the house. I knew the live shows, but it was only after he died and I became more involved in the business that I really listened to the songs.
             Didn't the sweetest man in rock'n'roll ever get petulant? Barbara doesn't tire of explaining that 'he was hardly an angelic saviour-of-the-world figure, and prone to trying to get out of taking the kids to a soccer game, but in our 20 years together, he might have got angry maybe five times. He treated me the same way in the kitchen or before 10,000 people. He'd never say, "Man, I'm hungry, what do you have to eat?" Instead it would be "Sweetheart, I'm getting kind of hungry I'll go check what we have." 'And if you've heard Roy sing 'Mercy!' in Oh, Pretty Woman, then you know his main expression of annoyance: 'mercy' was what he said when he heard one of his sons was keen on Bon Jovi
            In 1978, the magic carpet hit the rocks. At 42 Roy had to have triple-bypass heart surgery and it triggered a difficult soul-search in Barbara, then 26. Did the relaxed picture of health before me, teetotal and well up on 'therapese', give in to the high life? 'Nobody is just clean without being muddy on the bottom,' she says. 'I love the dark side, I had my struggles all the time. Roy had his, but he didn't act them out. That was the difference.'
            In 1981, a Grammy for That Lovin' You Feeling Again felt like a new lease of life. Elvis and he had joked in the Fifties that rock'n'roll might last only another three months. Now; at 45 and  refusing to be an oldie but goldie, he wanted a record in the charts.
            They moved with their sons to the Malibu colony in Califomia for a less complicated life and in 1985, Barbara decided to commit the ultimate showbiz taboo: become Roy's manager. Together they had successfully sued his previous one of 24 years for $30 million. They struck a deal that she would 'devote my vision, creativity and skills' to him for three years, until his album was off the ground. Then they'd swap, with Barbara following her dream of studying drama and Roy seeing to the kids (a commitment death prevented him from fullfillmg). So she started going to business meetings, making sure he got
celebrated. He wrote songs with Bono, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Jeff Lynne of ELO for the multi-million-selling Traveling Wilbuiys. Barbara shrugs off the perception of her as outspoken protector, shielding her meek, mysterious man from harsh realities: 'I'm extroverted, but it's usually the quiet one that controls. He was a tough soul, a thinker, whereas I'm a feeler. In  his last years, Roy complained that it didn't matter what he said in interviews, whether he was skinny, suntanned and happy, they would always write about him being podgy, pale, lonely, heartbroken. But that just wasn't him.

        Then Barbara got the news she'd always dreaded. 'We had come through so much,' she says, 'open heart surgery, losing the boys, his brother, my grandmother, having kids in trouble, the relationship sometimes in trouble, moving, career, no career. I felt we  were invincible.' Roy died of a heart attack weeks before the album Mystery Girl was released and became the biggest-selling album of his career.
       Extraordinarily, Barbara - in Germany with her parents at the time - had the presence of mind to call friends in LAto ask them to watch the gates of their home while she told her teenage sons the news, in the two hours before the wires released it. 'I need your support to physically contain the kids so they don't hurt themselves,' she told them. At the funeral she helped carry the coffin.

        Ten years on, is she surprised at how good she's been at fitting into Nashville's good-ole-boy music scene? 'Yeah,' she says, before adding, 'or how Roy's still really good at it.' She is unbending in her pride of him, but  there'a no risk of her becoming a martyr to the cause. She may one day be happy with more domesticated pleasures - painting, writing poetry and songs, hanging out with friends such as Bob Dylan and Dwight Yoakam, getting cheques through the post - but for now Orbison Records has become a springboard for other dreams. 'The rest of us are sometimes left wondering where we are headed,' says her archivist, 'but if you go with it, damn, she makes it happen. You can't knock success.'

  'I didn't want to be the  flame keeper because you're never seen for who you are.. but now my life is so much bigger than Roy's work'

        Apart from the new label, Orbie Records, which has just started signing acts, Barbara has written scripts and is considering a chat show. 'I didn't want to be the flame keeper,' she  insists, 'because you're never really seen for who you are. It's tough always being confronted with the legacy, but now my life is so much bigger than Roy's work. I have credit cards with different names, because otherwise people always ask about him.Sometimes I just need to buy a dress!'  She'll never completely escape Roy, though, and it's obvious she still needs  him close, even if she does have a boyfriend - handsome, blond producer  Bobby Blazier

        Back at the Orbison Building, Barbara bounces over to tell an old friend that Keith Richards has just called to say he'd finally found a snap of the Stones in a New Zealand hot spring with Roy, complete with shades. I'm later taken on a tour of the vault underneath the fireproof building, where everything of his has been kept since another fire, in 1993, engulfed her Malibu home and many of his possessions. Having my picture taken wearing his shades and black guitar is a strangely touching treat that thousands of die-hard fans would sell their pensions for. In his yearbook, underneath the geekily grinning Roy  the caption reads: 'To lead a Western band is his after-school wish, and, of course to marry a beautiful dish'