Kenny Rogers Didn't Consider Himself His Daughter Carole's 'Dad'

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Kenny Rogers had five children, but he didn't raise all of them. Rogers was married five times, with the first marriage happening pretty early on. The Gambler was 19 years old when he tied the knot with Janice Gordon in May 1958. By then, Gordon was about halfway through her pregnancy with Carole Lynne Rogers, who was born the following September. However, the relationship was short-lived, with the couple divorcing just two years later. Gordon remarried, and Kenny lost touch with his young daughter.

From then on, Gordon's new husband, David Billingsley, took on the father role in Carole's life, an agreement they all reached 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. Back then, he didn't feel like he had much of a choice. According to his version of the story, his split from Gordon was forced on them by her parents. "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.

In his 2013 memoir, "Luck or Something Like It," Kenny noted that his own parents were against the marriage, though for different reasons. "They saw it from the perspective of losing another wage earner in the family," he wrote. He felt that his and Gordon's relationship was up against bigger forces, so he ultimately did what everyone wanted him to do. Kenny died in 2020 without ever fully getting to know his eldest child. 

Around 1980, Kenny Rogers reportedly made an attempt to mend his relationship with Carole Lynne Rogers, flying the then-22-year-old and Janice Gordon for a visit. At the time, they were said to have gone on a vacation to Hawaii. The father-daughter duo seemingly had a relationship in the following years, with Carole accompanying Kenny to the 12th People's Choice Awards in March 1986. It's unclear what kind of contact they had and what happened afterward, but Kenny always maintained that David Billingsley occupied the role of Carole's father throughout her life.

In fact, Billingsley formally adopted Carole, who took on his last name. "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," Kenny wrote in "Luck or Something Like It." In the Fox News interview, Kenny noted that he never resented his ex-wife's new husband for any of it. "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," he said.

However, that doesn't mean he was okay with the situation. "The divorce was hard enough, but losing Carole was extremely painful," he wrote. Even though Kenny got divorced three more times, until the end, he argued that he would have stayed with Gordon and helped raise Carole had their parents not gotten in the way. "I loved her. At 19 I thought, 'This is ok with me,'" he said in the Fox News interview.