In The Three of Us, Georgette described her dad as “anything but” the boozing, life-of-the-party troublemaker he was often painted as. Rather, she wrote, “George Jones drank to fit in with the partyers, not because it came naturally.” She thinks he started overdoing it when he was first playing clubs and that was the sort of crowd he fell in with. “It was almost a defense mechanism,” she wrote, “a weapon against his introverted nature.”
Wynette may have been the tougher cookie, but “in a nutshell,” Georgette wrote, “my mom never trusted stardom, and my dad never liked it.” Jones “admitted he was shocked that people hold him in such esteem,” his daughter recalled, and if Wynette “heard that a movie star or a president was a fan, it never failed to amaze her.”
Wynette was also plagued by health issues that led to her own substance abuse troubles. According to biographer McDonough, she had a hysterectomy after Georgette’s birth in 1970, after which she developed an infection that caused a build-up of scar tissue and chronic gall bladder issues that left her in constant pain. She ended up addicted to painkillers, and then moved on to shots of Demerol when the pills stopped working, and she started taking Valium on tour.
