By 1984, the woman who had waited through nearly three decades of highway miles, empty chairs at dinner, and missed anniversaries finally stopped waiting. Temple Mickey Medley filed for divorce from Conway Twitty for the second and final time, closing a love story that had begun when she was just seventeen and he was still Harold Jenkins.
The heartbreak was made sharper by what had been built to save them. In June 1982, Conway had opened his $3.5 million Twitty City complex on nine acres in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a white-columned Colonial estate meant to gather his entire family onto one shared piece of ground after years apart.
Along its winding brick paths stood the main family mansion beside custom-built houses for his mother Velma and for his three children with Mickey, Kathy, Joni Lee, and Jimmy. Mickey, who loved architecture and interior design, had helped shape the Colonial home herself, from its sunken living room and two-story library to the spacious dining areas designed for family gatherings.
Yet from the day the gates opened on Music Village Boulevard, the family compound was also a commercial tourist park. In its first year alone, roughly 300,000 ticketed visitors walked the grounds to see the 21,000-square-foot show pavilion, browse the gift shop, admire his stage wardrobes and gold records, and greet the oversized fiberglass Twitty Bird mascot at the entrance.
Their story had started in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1956. Mickey was seventeen when she married a young singer who had not yet become Conway Twitty. Before his first pop hits and before his 1965 move into country music, she packed up their young family and moved to Oklahoma City and nearby Norman.
While Conway rebuilt his career at the Diamond Ballroom and carried the Twitty Birds on the road for 200 to nearly 300 days a year, Mickey raised Kathy, Joni Lee, and Jimmy largely on her own. The road gave the world its star, but at home it left long silences where a husband and father should have been.
That relentless pace had already broken them once. In early 1970, just as ‘Hello Darlin” became his signature multi-week number-one country smash, the couple quietly divorced. They did not stay apart for long, and in November 1970 they remarried so privately that most fans and music-row peers never learned the split had happened at all.
Two years after that second wedding, Conway moved the family from Oklahoma to Hendersonville to shorten the distance between his Nashville recording sessions and his own front door. A decade later, Twitty City was meant to be the lasting fulfillment of that promise, with his business office just a hundred yards from his kitchen and his children and grandchildren always steps away.
In daily life, however, the layout turned a private home into a public fishbowl. Tour buses idled along the drive from morning until dusk, and guided walking tours brought hundreds of fans past landscaped lawns and private residences to peer toward the windows of the main house.
During the winter holidays, the crowds grew even heavier for the annual Christmas at Twitty City celebration, which drew tens of thousands of cars to see more than 200,000 lights strung across trees and buildings. Even when Conway came home from a tour, he would often change into shorts and sneakers, walk out onto the grounds, sign autographs, and pose for snapshots with visitors waiting by the fences.
She had spent nearly thirty years keeping a private home for her family, only to find that even a simple walk into her own yard meant stepping into view of paying tourists.
When his bus pulled back onto the highway for the next run of concert dates, Mickey was left behind inside the gated showcase, surrounded by strangers and still waiting for a husband who belonged primarily to the stage. The estate that was supposed to end their separation had instead made her loneliness visible to the world.
By 1984, Kathy, Joni Lee, and Jimmy were adults with lives of their own. After fourteen years in their second marriage and nearly three decades together in total, Mickey chose to step away from a lifetime of waiting for a tour bus to pull into the driveway.
She left without giving a single critical interview to the press, and Conway made sure she was financially secure in their settlement before his 1987 marriage to his office secretary, Delores Dee Henry. When Conway died suddenly of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in June 1993 at age fifty-nine, the nine-acre Hendersonville complex was eventually sold and converted into a Christian television center.
Mickey remained in Hendersonville near her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren until her death on October 6, 2021, at age eighty-two. In her family obituary, she was remembered as the wife of thirty years to Harold Jenkins, the woman who gave up three decades of quiet home life so the world could have Conway Twitty.