Kathie Lee Gifford keeps trying to tell the story of her sexless first marriage
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: LGBTQ, Books, Biography, Spirituality, Religion

Her saving grace might be that she wasn’t particularly devout.

She’s more explicit on this point in the Post profile:

“I’ve never been a great churchgoer,” she carefully explains. “I get along so much better with the Lord when it’s me and Him. I don’t like religion. Too much has been done that’s so evil and ugly, all in the name of religion, that I think God’s got nothing to do with.”

She tried to follow the rules. As she says, she made an effort to be “the precious little wife,” and for about three months play the role of Christian housewife—finding herself bursting into tears while vacuuming.

Then she went back to work. She tells the Post: “He said, ‘Frankly you were a whole bunch more fun then.’ He liberated me to be me.’”

I’m struck by the idea of a new, sexually liberated woman happening after a gay man gives her permission to be herself.

In her new memoir, the tone is harder-edged. This is an older woman telling the facts.

She writes: “Before we married, Paul told me that he was a virgin too. We talked about how we wanted to honor God’s Word and present ourselves as a gift to the person we would eventually marry. But after we were married he wanted nothing to do with me. Nothing.”

To spend time together, they went to therapy. They see the “respected Dr. James Dobson,” she writes, “quite a few times. He was an expert on Christian marriage and therapy…”

Actually, he was a child psychologist. She writes: “We’d drive two and a half hours so Dr. Dobson could tell me he thought everything was my fault. I’ll never forget that. If I just gave up my career and stayed home and was the wife Paul needed me to be, then we’d be fine, he said.”

But Paul sides with her. “If I wanted a maid and a cook I’d hire one,” he says.

The two did seem to be a power couple for awhile. They were regulars on The PTL Club and The 700 Club. “We were on Christian magazine covers together and I was on some of them alone,” she writes. “The irony was that this image of our union was exactly what I had once dreamed it could be: a ministry beyond marriage.”

She began to realize that Christian marriages were often openly fraudulent.

She writes of being on The PTL Club: “It was all unbelievably shallow. I felt many of these evangelists probably had started out sincerely, loving God, wanting to serve Him. But then they get rich, and they get lost.”

Jim Bakker, as later disclosed, was “not just bisexual, but also a sexual predator, taking advantage of employees who depended on him for their livelihood.”

And Anita Bryant divorced her husband in 1980—for reasons she wouldn’t be clear about, just assuring everyone it was ‘biblical’. She was cancelled by Evangelicals, and culturally discarded.

Kathie Lee and Paul might’ve remained God’s new “It” couple, except she keeps trying to ignite a sexual flame with her husband. She wants to have good sex. They go to Hawaii to get things heated up. “Paul went off on his own a lot and there was nothing physical between us.”

They have a blow-up. “What on earth are we married for?” she asks.

They wrangle on, and on…and on.

She asks him why he doesn’t love her. He replies: “I can’t love you because I don’t respect you.”

That was the line you’d say at the time to someone who was sexual without inhibitions—that you didn’t “respect” them.

I wonder if she “respected” him for putting on a lot of weight. She doesn’t mention it in her books.

Paul Johnson, Reba Rambo, Kathie Lee Johnson, Dave Boyer at the White House

She takes solace in blaming herself. “I believe Paul came to see me as a spiritual phony,” she writes. “I think he lost some respect for me when my secular career took off. He openly resented the fact that I had aggressive agents and managers who were guiding my career and making me ‘a star’.”

His career seemed stagnant. Was it because of his wife? She quotes him: “She was this show-business property. That felt sleazy. It pulled me off my spiritual path, my center. It wasn’t what we had dreamed about. I felt damaged.”

The problems are seen in terms of ‘sin’, Heaven, Hell. They couldn’t just have a conversation about sex.

Johnson, then, had increasingly crippling migraine headaches. Kathie Lee writes of driving him to doctors. “Paul would be bent over in the passenger seat, holding his head in agony.” It seemed to represent, she says, “the emotional pain of our failing marriage.”

She adds: “I saw no hope for our marriage and I found myself quietly hoping that Paul would just disappear.”

And then, he did.

She narrates in her new book, again, the moment of coming home from a work trip. The front door was unlocked.

I walked into our living room and found it completely trashed. My first thought was, Oh my God, we’ve been robbed! Then I noticed that the piano was missing, and it dawned on me, No, he’s left me.

I had had no warning. There had been no discussion of a separation. Nothing.

In the kitchen I found a short note on the counter that said, “Maybe now you’ll know that I mean it,” with a phone number in case of emergency. To this day I have no idea what he meant.

Amid the rubble, she feels God saying to her: “He didn’t love you, but I do.”

She went through a long period of a spiritual PTSD of sorts, for it wasn’t just a marriage, but a religion, that she had failed, or had failed her.

“When I was divorced, my foundation was ripped out from under me,” she’d tell Redbook. “I spent almost two years being very lost. I had always been a strong person, capable and confident, but divorce was devastating. When you’ve saved yourself your whole life to be a gift to a man who then basically returns the gift and says it’s not for me, it’s crushing.”

The religion didn’t give her a path back to being ‘good’. She had to find one on her own. She tells People her final view on the matter: “I choose to trust God, and to believe that all the things that have happened to me were not a coincidence.”

Your life makes sense after all?—when you put in the information your religion tried to remove.

After her 1992 book comes out, the tabloids try to ‘out’ her ex-husband.

In an updated version, Kathie Lee writes about being told a National Enquirer article would appear, “proclaiming in no uncertain terms that my first husband was gay.” Though often said to have outed him, as best I can tell, she has always denied it.

If she privately believes him to be gay, then she’s covering for him, even as her narratives make obvious the idea that he really was. It’s like she’s pressuring him? She might be trying to get him to say it.

Johnson showed up in the press to dismiss her account. “I have much different memories of my wedding night with Kathie Lee,” he tells People. He adds:

“In spinning this yarn to have a best-selling book, Kathie Lee has documented to the world the very reason why our marriage failed. It’s impossible to build genuine intimacy with someone who converts every private and sacred moment into burlesque material for her public forum.”

But the Enquirer had found some details: “At the time Kathie Lee met Paul, he was living with a homosexual who was a singer on The Lawrence Welk Show.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out this was Tom Netherton. In the late 1970s he’d been built up as an Evangelical pin-up. He had a memoir in 1979, In the Morning of My Life, released by the Christian publisher Tyndale, and recalls meeting Paul Johnson in the early 1970s, thinking him “a genius at writing beautiful melodies and deep lyrics.”

Johnson invites him to move into his home, “because his roommate had just gotten married.” They get to work making Netherton’s first solo album, financed by Johnsons’ father. It was released on the Christian label Word, in 1974, as What a Friend.

Johnson made another appearances in the tabloids in 1999, when he attacked Kathie Lee in his own National Enquirer spread, when she was considered a public target: “It is exhausting living with someone so absorbed with themselves. Kathie Lee lives as if the cameras are rolling twenty-four hours a day. She’s always ready for her close up.”

He goes in to comment on her embattled second marriage: “I see Frank Gifford with the same confused look on his face that I used to get. To me it clearly says, ‘What hit me? How do I get out of here?’”

In her new book, the chapter about him is titled “Tell the Truth.”

She prefaces it with a bit from the lyrics of a song, “Mr. Right.” I realize she might be identifying the song as about him. I look it up—from her 2009 album, My Way Home.

The song is the story of a failed marriage. She sings: “I couldn’t bear to admit what others already knew.”

And then this:

“Mr Right had a secret—one he couldn’t admit

So there was a good reason he couldn’t commit.”

In an interview promoting the new book, Kathie Lee notes she last saw Johnson in 2011. “He never said a word about why he left me the way he did or why he married me in the first place, and I didn’t ask,” she writes. “I hugged him good night and wished him a happy life. I still do.”

She heard he became a marriage counselor. “You’ve got to love God’s sense of humor,” she says.

Tom Netherton died in 2018. A family member writes on Facebook: “I struggled somewhat with what to post here and what music would best honor his life.” The choice: his cover of a hymn, “Just as I Am,” as arranged by Paul Johnson, who’d been a “dear friend.”

I listen to the track. Maybe it’s me, but I only hear him pretending.

The family member adds: “There was usually a lot of laughter and many great Welk stories when Tom was around. He loved Jesus with his whole heart and Jesus loved him.”

No word on whether anybody had followed his lead. 🔶