Focus : The Private Side of Dottie West

To prepare for her portrayal of Dottie West in a CBS biopic, Michele Lee wore the country superstar’s original spandex. She rerecorded her hit songs and applied her makeup identically. She even read a book that West kept at her bedside: “Women Who Love Too Much.”

West had marked a passage in the self-help book with the note, “Read Again.” Reciting from this page, Lee reads to her visitor: “It means measuring the degree of your love by the depth of your torment.”

The book provides a clue that one of country music’s glitziest and most beloved performers struggled with a tragic past, one that Lee tries to capture in “Big Dreams & Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story.” When West died in a car accident in 1991, most of her assets had been seized by the IRS and she had declared bankruptcy. Throughout her life, she struggled with a troubled childhood. She had three failed marriages.

“A lot of the psychology in the movie is from women who love too much,” says Lee, 52, who is also executive producer of the movie with Ken Kragen. “She was trying to find something at the end of her life. She was looking. I would like to feel that she would have gotten there anyway.”

Other movies have depicted the rocky lives of country music stars--Hank Williams Jr. and Patsy Cline are two of the biggest to have their stories splashed across a screen. But West kept much of her private side to herself.

“Her fans didn’t really know, where (fans) knew all about other country singers,” Lee says. “There’s something about this down-home lady. All they heard about her was her taking care of other people, cooking lavish dinners for hundreds of people. Discovering people. They didn’t know about the other aspects of her life.”

Neither did Lee nor Kragen when they set out to make the movie three years ago. At the time, they did know about West’s impoverished childhood in McMinnville, Tenn., and her move to Nashville, where she achieved fame as part of a tight-knit group of artists that included Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson (both appear in testimonials). And they knew when she hit it big.

Wearing outrageous outfits and wild hairdos, West broke out of the country mold. She shattered the gender barrier in 1964 when she became the first female country performer to win a Grammy for “Here Comes My Baby.”

“There was a dichotomy in her personality that said, ‘I’m an old-fashioned country girl,’ and a part of her that said, ‘I am woman. Watch me roar,’ ” Lee says. “I knew this woman had a complicated personality. There was so much more there.”

Lee, who was just finishing a 14-season run on “Knots Landing,” called West’s daughter, Shelly, 36, and flew out to meet her.

“When we came face to face, there was something there that sparked,” Shelly West says. “(Lee) is just full of life. She’s very sensitive to people. And that’s the way Mom was. She looked deep into a person.”

Confident she could trust Lee, Shelly West and other family members told of the stormy parts of West’s life, including childhood abuse by her father. The movie, written by Karen Croner, alludes to the incident.

“There’s some tough stuff in it,” says Shelly West, who now lives in Nashville. “But it has to be the way it was.”

Others recounted West’s uncontrollable spending habits: Department stores would open during the middle of the night so she could shop after work. On another occasion, her second husband Byron cuts up her credit cards. She also had a drinking problem, especially as she faced financial problems in the late 1980s.

“The research uncovered things even I didn’t know about Dottie West,” says Kragen, who managed West’s career in the 1960s. “What we had to do was take love and care and not sensationalize it.”

In one scene, singer and friend Larry Gatlin (playing himself) confronts West over her drinking. She resists. That’s as far as the film goes in addressing the problem.

“We didn’t hit anything on the head,” Lee says. “It was done in a way that it said what it had to say and that was it.”

To be sure, the movie dwells just as much on West’s talents. Lee sings West’s hit songs, including a duet of “Everytime Two Fools Collide” with Kenny Rogers (appearing as himself). Rogers and West hit the top of the charts with a 1977 version.

“I know everything Dottie has done,” says Lee, who had a recording and Broadway musical career before “Knots Landing.” “I listened to them and studied. I phrased as she did, but I didn’t want to mimic her. I did the flavor of Dottie.”

To resemble West from her 20s to her late 50s, Lee wore six different wigs.

The result: Gatlin was convinced when he popped into Lee’s trailer.

“He just said, ‘Dorothy Marie,’ ” Lee says. “He always called her Dorothy Marie.”

“It freaked us out,” Shelly West says about her first glance at Lee as her mother. “Our mouths just fell open. It was just spooky.”

Off the screen, Lee and West have become almost like mother and daughter, both say. West sent Lee a Mother’s Day card, and serenaded her over the phone on Thanksgiving with another Dottie West hit, “Country Sunshine.” Last month, Lee showed Shelly West and her daughter the movie for the first time.

“I was so nervous,” Lee says. “Here I am playing her mother over four decades, with scenes where I was holding her as a baby, having fights that she had with her mother. But she loved it. It was like three generations of women watching Dottie’s movie.”

“Big Dreams & Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.