At the very moment Hello Darlin’ lifted Conway Twitty to multi-week number-one stardom, he and his wife Mickey were quietly ending their marriage.
The strain of his long absences had reached a breaking point in early 1970, and at that very moment of triumph the couple finalized a divorce.
The split did not last. Before that same year closed, Conway and Mickey married again in a private November ceremony, so quietly that many Nashville peers and fans across the country never learned they had parted at all.
Their story had begun fourteen years earlier, when Harold Jenkins, fresh out of the United States Army, married seventeen-year-old Temple ‘Mickey’ Medley in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1956.
He had no stage name yet, no recording contract and no country hit. He was chasing rockabilly sessions at Sun Studio in Memphis and working club dates across the South while Mickey built their first home.
Through his 1957 change of name to Conway Twitty and his full move into country music in 1965, she stayed the steady center of a household that kept shifting with his career.
In 1963, Conway, Mickey and their three young children Kathy, Joni Lee and Jimmy moved to the Oklahoma City area, settling there and in nearby Norman for nearly a decade.
From Oklahoma he rebuilt himself from the ground up, playing the Diamond Ballroom and touring with his band, the Twitty Birds, on a punishing schedule that stretched toward 300 road dates a year.
While he spent up to ten months a year on highway bus runs and inside recording studios, Mickey ran the children’s daily lives alone, carrying the quiet weight of his constant absence.
Fellow Nashville songwriters and musicians often said that nearly losing the woman who had stood beside him in his leanest rockabilly years gave his 1970s ballads a raw, choked honesty.
Determined to close the distance between the road and home, he moved the family from Oklahoma to Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1972, and spent the decade searching for ways to pull them closer to his work.
In 1975 he brought his teenage daughter Joni Lee into the studio for their father-daughter duet on Don’t Cry Joni, and he began planning a permanent estate where his family would never have to be scattered while he was away.
That dream took shape in 1982 after a year of construction and an investment of roughly $3.5 million. Twitty City opened on nine acres in Hendersonville as a brick and white-columned Colonial complex designed with input from Mickey, who had a lifelong passion for architecture and interior design.
Alongside the main residence for Conway and Mickey, the grounds held separate homes built specifically for Kathy, Joni, Jimmy and Conway’s mother Velma.
I built Twitty City because I wanted to have a place where my kids and I could always be close together, and they have homes right here
Conway explained during a 1986 appearance on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that his office sat just 100 yards from his front door.
Yet the same nine-acre property built to hold the family together also ran year-round as a public tourist complex, with gift shops, show pavilions, guided tours and massive holiday light displays.
Tour buses arrived daily so fans could get as close as possible to the singer, leaving little separation between the family’s front doors and the public.
For a private woman who had spent decades keeping a quiet home while her husband worked the road, living inside an active tourist attraction added new pressure to the ongoing absences of his touring life.
In 1984, after twenty-eight years together across two marriages, Conway and Mickey divorced for the final time.
Mickey stepped away from the tourist complex and stayed in Hendersonville, devoting her later decades to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren until her passing in October 2021 at age eighty-two.
When her obituary was published in Hendersonville, Loretta Lynn sent a public note to Joni, Kathy and Jimmy recalling the years spent on the road and at Twitty City with their mother, the woman who had been there since a 1956 wedding in Hernando when Conway Twitty was still only Harold Jenkins.