Kenny Rogers Didn’t See Himself as Daughter Carole’s “Dad”

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Kenny Rogers was the father of five children, but he did not raise all of them. His first marriage came when he was just 19, when he married Janice Gordon in May 1958. Gordon was roughly halfway through her pregnancy at the time, and their daughter, Carole Lynne Rogers, was born that September. The marriage lasted only about two years. After the divorce, Gordon remarried, and Rogers gradually lost contact with his young daughter.

Gordon’s second husband, David Billingsley, eventually assumed the fatherly role in Carole’s life—a decision the adults made together. “I would be her father but he (his ex-wife’s second husband) would be her Dad, and I don’t want to disrupt that,” Kenny told Fox News in 2012. At the time, Rogers said he felt he had little control over the outcome. He believed Gordon’s parents had pressured the couple to separate. “Her parents thought I’d ruined her life and were determined to break me. It didn’t work, and it’s really sad because I think it could have worked,” he said.

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Rogers also revisited the breakup in his 2013 memoir, “Luck or Something Like It,” writing that his own parents had opposed the marriage as well, though their concerns were different. “They saw it from the perspective of losing another wage earner in the family,” he wrote. Convinced that forces beyond their relationship were working against them, Rogers eventually went along with what others wanted. He died in 2020 without ever fully developing a relationship with his eldest child.

According to reports, Rogers tried to reconnect with Carole Lynne around 1980, when she was 22. He flew her and Janice Gordon out for a visit, and the group reportedly vacationed in Hawaii. The relationship between father and daughter appeared to continue for at least some time: Carole accompanied Rogers to the 12th People’s Choice Awards in March 1986. The details of their later contact remain unclear, but Rogers consistently acknowledged that Billingsley had been Carole’s father figure throughout her life.

Billingsley eventually adopted Carole, and she took his surname. “I wasn’t happy with the decision, but I truly believed Carole would be better off with a dad in the house with her, whose name she used, rather than trying to explain where her real father was,” Rogers wrote in “Luck or Something Like It.” During his Fox News interview, he said he never blamed Gordon’s new husband. “He stepped in at a time that was really awkward for all of us and he became her Dad, and I love him for that. He was a good guy,” Rogers said.

Still, accepting Billingsley’s role did not make the circumstances painless. “The divorce was hard enough, but losing Carole was extremely painful,” Rogers wrote. Although he went on to marry four more times, he maintained that he would have stayed with Gordon and helped raise Carole if her parents had not intervened. “I loved her. At 19 I thought, ‘This is ok with me,’” he told Fox News.