With a media frenzy surrounding her appearance on the cover of Playboy, Dolly’s limelight shone brighter than ever. Although she had reservations about gracing the cover of such a “wild” magazine and worried that some among her conservative country following might take offense, the overwhelming response to the cover—and especially the interview—was encouraging and positive.
It seemed that the only person not in love with Dolly Parton was Porter Wagoner. Her former boss and partner was interviewed in October 1978, shortly after Dolly’s Playboy hit the stands, and their long-simmering feud came to a boil in a cover story for the Tennessean bearing the headline, Porter’s Bitter Remarks Turn Dolly’s Happiest Hour Sour. “Dolly wants to do everything that is possible for her to do,” Wagoner told the reporter, “but she lives in a fairy land. . . . I don’t believe a country girl singer would do things in the manner she’s done them. Like the Playboy thing. Do you think Kitty Wells would do that?”
Dolly didn’t respond to Wagoner’s criticism for many years, but finally detailed their dispute to Kevin Sessums of Vanity Fair in 1991: “I thought, Well, I guess not. I don’t think Playboy would want Kitty Wells on the cover. But it was that kind of mentality: Kitty Wells wouldn’t do that, Loretta Lynn wouldn’t do that. Well, I’m not Loretta Lynn. I’m not Kitty Wells.”
Wagoner insisted in his interview that he was not bitter about the duo’s breakup but went on to say that their parting wasn’t Dolly’s choice, but his. “No, no, no, she couldn’t stay,” he told the Tennessean. “I let her go. Dolly didn’t quit me. I gave her notice in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that she needed to get her own band together because I wasn’t going to travel and have’a girl that I had to fight with on the road with us. I’m not bitter because Dolly left my show in any sense. I was just disappointed to find out she’s not made of what I thought she was. . . . To me, Dolly Parton is the kind of person I would never trust with anything of mine. I mean, her family, her own blood, she would turn her back on to help herself. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t care about talkin’ about it ’cause most people would think I’m bitter at Dolly. I’m not bitter at her at all.”
When asked about the feud and Porter’s remarks to the press, Dolly told Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin she had no comment. “I won’t put myself on his level. I will say that it was unfair and untrue and that’s all I’ll say. . . . It kills you when somebody tells things that just aren’t true. It just killed my daddy, it was just so bitter and untrue. But I really don’t care to discuss it if you wouldn’t mind. I could say a lot of things, but I’m a more considerate person on that level. I don’t think I have to slander people to be accepted.”
For Cosmopolitan, Laura Cunningham hit the road with Dolly and her entourage and penned this fascinating “day in the life” profile of the star at her first of many zeniths. The ins and outs of touring were explored, with every aspect detailed: the band, the bus, the motels, the fans, the makeup, the wigs, the costumes, the diets, and, of course, the dreams. Spoiler alert: What makes this piece extra special is that Dolly’s reclusive husband, Carl Dean, came out of hiding long enough to make a rare appearance in this feature, and Cunningham was on hand for his thirty-sixth birthday celebration at a Howard Johnson in Albany, New York.
It should be noted that, like a handful of journalists before and since, Cunningham attempted to capture Dolly’s distinctive dialect and country twang, as evidenced in the stylized spellings found here. For example: rul = real, mah = my, yer = your, wus = was, and so on. Apparently, these stabs at phonetically sounding out Dolly’s speech patterns irritated her. When writer Gerri Hirshey (whose work appears elsewhere in this collection) showed her a piece by a writer in Green Bay who quoted Dolly as saying “Ah” for “I,” Dolly became livid and exclaimed, “She tried to make me sound like a country bumpkin!”—Ed.
You know about her six-inch wigs, slinky glitter getups, and truly amazin’ figure. But there’s more—yes, more—to this prodigiously talented lady than meets the bedazzled eye . . .
Dolly is the one with the breasts, the high blond wig, and the six-year-old-child’s soprano. That’s how she fits into the hierarchy of the Four Sisters of Country Music: Loretta is the sad one, with sucked-in cheeks. Tammy is the soft one, who’s suffered through all those divorces. Crystal’s the young, cool one, in control of her life. And then there’s Dolly—pouter-pigeon chest, cotton-candy hair, and the baby voice that begs:
“Jo-lene, Jo-lene, Jo-lene,
Please don’t take my man . . .”
Not since Marilyn Monroe has a blonde defused her blatant sexuality with such obvious vulnerability. Like Marilyn, Dolly is adored by women and children as well as by men, a fact that needs explaining if you’ve seen only her photo. For, truly, doesn’t she look, in her skintight, sequined jump suit, like someone women would resent? And yet, it ain’t so, it ain’t so . . .
Why ain’t it so?
To discover the real woman encased in the impossible body and behind the lacquered image, I track down Dolly Parton and her touring band, Gypsy Fever, to a Howard Johnson’s motel near Albany, New York. By a fortunate coincidence, my car radio bleats a Dolly Parton favorite:
“My life is [likened] a bargain store,
And I may have just what you’re looking for,
If you don’t mind the fact that all the merchandise is used . . .”
The song ends with Dolly’s invitation: “The bargain store is open, come inside.” “The Bargain Store” was banned in some parts of the Bible Belt.
Ringin’ in my ears, too, is the love song of Dolly Parton’s public-relations lady: “I cried. The first time I heard her sing that song about li’l Andy, I just cried. And I heard people sing before. But no one has moved me like Dolly.”
Dolly has moved her PR lady not only with her singing, but with her downright goodness. “I would never say a curse word in front of Dolly. I mean, she is Little Mary Sunshine!”
Also drumming in the echo chamber of my brain—the intriguing phenomenon known in music circles as the “New Dolly.” Dolly Parton has recently become the darling of more than a few unlikely fans: Mick Jagger and the other Rolling Stones, and a complete entourage of Beautiful People, including Tony Perkins and Berry Berenson. Indeed, she has even made an admirer of New York Times music critic John Rockwell. While praising her “asymmetrical freshness,” Rockwell also observed that she is “at the brink of a radical shift that should, if there is any justice in pop-music heaven, make her one of the great stars of American entertainment.”
Popular ever since her 1967 teaming with country-music star Porter Wagoner and her solo debut two years later, Dolly’s career really took off in 1977 with the release of the album New Harvest, First Gathering, an album which was, not so coincidentally, the first she’d produced herself.
In quick succession came Here You Come Again and her current smash, Heartbreaker, both certified million-sellers. Though RCA executives are reluctant to discuss figures, the revenues from Dolly’s albums are believed to exceed those of any other country-western songstress. A new Dolly Parton “single” shoots automatically to the number-one spot on the country charts, and even such “classic” hits as “Jolene” and “Love Is Like a Butterfly” continue to sell and sell . . .
Piled almost as high as her earnings are the awards she’s amassed. In the past few years, Dolly has lugged away more than 100 trophies, including last year’s Songwriter’s Hall of Fame “Hitmaker’s Award,” a tribute given previously to such stars as Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Bing Crosby. In 1978 she was the Country Music Association’s “Entertainer of the Year.” Nor has her enormous popularity been overlooked by Hollywood; 20th Century-Fox has reportedly offered her a three-picture contract.
No question: Dolly’s act has been a-changin’ and she’s getting hotter and hotter. Yet many unanswered questions remain. She has a public image that’s harder to crack than Pollyanna’s and no one knows much about her private life at all. She’s been written up in the tabloids as the wife of a “mystery husband” who has never heard her sing or watched her perform. What kind of relationship does she have with a man who, according to her own press releases, refused to have his picture taken with her?
Hmmmm.
I board her bus, “The Coach of Many Colors,” now parked in the Howard Johnson’s motel lot outside of Albany. Through the wide windshield, I catch my first glimpse of Dolly: tottering across the asphalt on five-inch wedgies. Dwarfed by her mountain of sprayed platinum hair, she looks like Marie Antoinette in jeans and a plaid shirt.
Motel doors pop open, and vacationing Howard Johnson’s guests emerge, clicking Instamatics as Dolly walks toward the bus. It is just sunset, and 100-degree heat practically presses people to the asphalt, yet they keep coming. Children emerge, like dolphins, from the nearby swimming pool, to wave and cry: “Dolly!”
Dolly pivots, as pretty and automated as the Dolly Parton dolls that are licensed by her corporation. (The “Dolly Doll” stands twelve inches tall, has the biggest bosom on any children’s toy, and sells for about ten dollars.) Now the real Dolly assumes her public persona: Again and again, her cheeks dimple in a smile. Again and again, she bends, breasts pooching forward, rear-end cleavage equally defined, to sign autographs.
“Thank ya, thank ya,” she says, easing up the bus steps. Single red roses (a customary offering from her fans) are clutched in her tiny, bejeweled hands. Her standard remark for the evening, repeated over and over, in reference to the weather, her performance, or whatever, is: “Ain’t it amazin’.”
She has just returned from a day trip to New York City, and is tuckered out by the record-high, egg-fryin’-on-the-sidewalk temperatures: “Ain’t it amazin’.”
“You ’n’ me will talk sometime,” she says, then vanishes into the bowels of the bus. Which leaves me up front—with the cologned members of the Gypsy Fever band.
The Gypsy Fever band—seven male musicians and one “girl” singer—are, themselves, human indications of the new, changed Dolly. All but one or two of the musicians have only recently joined her. The group itself is just two years old—new as such backup groups go—and changes are still being made. Given country-band standards, they are an eclectic crowd. Not for them the cowboy hats and studded belts that mark most Nashville ensembles. The young men wear fresh sport shirts and plain slacks, while the girl looks pretty in a sundress. They could pass for college kids on summer vacation, instead of a country-western band. Gypsy Fever has drawn its talent from places as obvious as Nashville and as uncountry as Los Angeles.
“Dolly is just trying for the right sound,” explains Gregg Perry, her piano player, an ascetic fellow who munches sunflower seeds and reads serious literature.
All the band members are young—the eldest, macrobiotic Gregg, is a mere lad of twenty-nine. This, too, is unusual for a country band, which generally will contain several aging cousins of the star. Even the bus looks different from other country buses: “The Coach of Many Colors,” despite its name, is subdued and routinely upholstered in gold and black vinyl. Other country stars have let their imagination run riot on the décor: Loretta Lynn’s bus is a fantasy of flocked purple velvet and “marbleized” rococo toilet seats. The only “standard” of the tour bus: At the back are six red corduroy sleeping bunks. “We call them ‘the coffins,’” jokes Gregg Perry. “We sleep in them if we’re doing one-night shows. But this trip’s been real easy, so we’ve been able to stay at motels all the way.”
Other sleeping arrangements exist—in case. The very seat I’m sitting on can bunk two more musicians. And the luggage space at the very rear can become a bed for Dolly’s thin road manager, Don Warden, who, along with Dolly, is a “rul country” person. In fact, Don Warden, with his giant diamond steer ring, adds Nashville color to the group. (It may help to know that back home Don has an office containing a statue of a nude girl; to keep her glistening, this statue is regularly wetted down with sprays of cooking oil.)
On to the auditorium—a few miles further outside of Albany, in the town of Colonie.
At the Colonie Coliseum, an outdoor hardtop summer theater that seems to be made of fiberglass, we head for the dressing rooms. There, the girl singer fluffs her hair and drinks Tab. Dolly herself remains in the bus, where she keeps her supply of custom chiffon costumes.
Next: Show Time. The Gypsy Fever band literally beats the drums, and voilà! Flying in like the Good Witch in Oz, chiffons aflutter, diamond wand waving . . . Dolly Parton!
This is the fantasy I have read about: the extravagant dream in which More is More. Not enough to wear two wigs, in sprayed splendor, but also—a fake rose is pinned in back . . . And then, then, it’s not enough: Glitter! Diamonds! Sausage-tight salmon pants . . . a flowing salmon-pink sheer veiled top . . .
She raises her tiny white hands: a queen’s greeting to her subjects. The crowd roars. And everywhere, people cry: “She’s so beautiful!”
And, incredibly, she is! More is more. She must be seen in the flesh. Her look “hardens” in photos, but here in the fiberglass coliseum, she glows . . .
Dolly sings buoyantly—her voice rising to the hardtop and floating out to the humid night. “Higher and higher. . .” she sings, and nothing could hold her voice in . . . the sweet chime seems propelled, somehow, by the voluptuousness of her breasts. Perhaps the breasts work, like bellows, beneath the hot pink chiffon.
She is working, all right—rotating on a high stool to face alternate sections of the audience. “I apologize to those of you who have to look at mah rear end!”
“That’s all right,” growls a heavy-necked man next to me.
She intercuts her songs with a repartee with the attentive, sweating listeners. “We’ve had some nice folks, but yer the best batch yet . . . We have some pretty people here . . . There were some ugly ones last night . . .”
Her stage patter contrasts with her songs: Singing, she soars. Speaking, she goes canned and flat: “I heard some folks brought binoculars to see if they’s as big as they heard they wus . . .”
Some laughter.
“Wal . . . I don’t know whut yer laughin’ at . . . I wus talkin’ ’bout mah wigs . . .”
Performing, she’s all over the stage: picking up a zither, plucking a banjo. She skips from exuberant rock to dip into sentimental country ballads. Her voice is so pure, she succeeds in making you believe the impossible: that this glittering miniature Mae West is indeed:
“Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon . . .
Watch the kids a-playin’ with June bugs on a string . . .”
But the most incredible transformation comes with a song she has not yet recorded, but sings only in person: “Me and Little Andy.” The song recounts the death of a little girl and her puppy. And it’s more than a tear-jerker, it’s a tear-yanker.
Most singers couldn’t get away with it, but Dolly does—denying her physical appearance to become, on stage, a six-year-old girl.
“Ain’t you got no gingerbread, ain’t you got no candy?
Ain’t you got no extra bed for me ’n’ little Andy . . . ?”
Dolly, as the song’s narrator, does have a bed—and the little girl and her puppy lie down and die in it. The song would be to throw up over if Dolly performed it in a cutesy way. But her little girl is not a Shirley Temple moppet. Her voice projects another kind of child—a starved, terrified orphan . . . unwanted and slightly resentful.
Dolly, with her diamonds, her rose, her salmon chiffon, disappears, by some magic in her voice, and is replaced by a ragged, knock-kneed little girl.
All around me, there are sniffles. A few Kleenex come out, and the honk of a nose being blown echoes under the hardtop.
Dolly performs other songs . . . some lilting, others wistful; but the songs that seem to play upon the audience’s collective spinal column are those in which Dolly reverts to the plaintive child. Even in “Jolene,” the song in which she begs “the other woman” to leave her man alone, she sounds oddly adoring, like a little girl to an admired big sister:
“Your beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair . . .”
Hearing this, I recall the first time I ever listened to a Dolly Parton album. The occasion: a country-western songfest in the Los Angeles home of actress Susan Anspach. Before such country enthusiasts as Wayne Rogers, Robert Duvall, and Susan Anspach herself began to sing, Susan turned on a record player and said: “I want you all to hear this. This is it. The most vulnerable song ever written or sung by any woman. To sing this song, a woman must have no ego. Listen . . .”
Vulnerable. That’s the word most often applied to Dolly. And, perhaps, an explanation of why women are so drawn to her: How can you resent someone who is so damned vulnerable?
Standing in full regalia, she seems to be saying: Go on, laugh at me, tell me I look ridiculous. And so, by God, you can’t.
The crowd roars—she flies for the stage door, the bus, and then, back to Howard Johnson’s.
There, a unique event is shaping up. Tonight is her husband, Carl Dean’s, birthday. And we (I now feel like one of the team) are springing a surprise party for “the mystery husband” in the best dining room of the Howard Johnson’s Inn. There are two dining rooms, and the better room is to the rear, sealed off by sliding fake-wooden panels.
We—the Gypsy Fever band and I—stand in semidarkened readiness. On our heads: plastic cowboy hats. In our hands: colored paper noisemakers. We anxiously peer through the window to catch sight of Dolly and her man.
This will be a double surprise party—a surprise for Carl Dean and a surprise for me. Having heard that he never travels with Dolly, I never dreamed I’d get to see him in the flesh. All I’ve ever read about Dolly’s husband is that “Carl Dean prefers to stay out of the limelight and tend to his asphalt paving business in Tennessee.”
“He never goes with us,” concurs Gregg Perry, who is staging this fete, “but this week, he’s made a real exception. I guess ’cause we’re here for an entire week, and also, ’cause it’s his birthday.”
“Hey . . . here they come!” the girl singer cries.
I look: Dolly Parton, still a vision in hot pink, floats through the main room of the Howard Johnson’s. Diners look open-mouthed, ignoring their frankfurts grilled in butter, as she nods graciously to each in turn. Behind her, a Lincolnesque man walks slowly toward us . . .
The crucial moment is blown: A waitress pulls back the sliding panel, revealing all of us in our cowboy hats—
“Happy Birthday!” we cry, prematurely.
The lanky stranger—is it really He?—turns, enters the room backward, as if making way for yet another person behind him. He makes mock gestures of greeting to some invisible person.
But—there can be no mistake . . . Dolly is hugging him. It’s him!
“Wal,” he laughs, turning around to face the group, “I thank you from the bottom of mah crotch.”
He is an unusual fellow, this mystery husband. Tall and good-looking, rather like a young Gregory Peck, he has a way of moving his angular body so that he seems to come toward you in sections. He also makes exaggerated faces, talks to his right shoulder, hangs his head, looks under the table. Still, there’s real charm along with this strange series of tics. Carl Dean announces that he is a fan of television and night-club comic Steve Martin, and no doubt that explains a lot. His occasional speeches to our group, as we assemble at the party tables—to be served HoJo drinks and fried clams—all have the style of an impersonation.
“You sure are a rul nice bunch a folks,” he announces, several times.
“Wal, yer seein’ mah husband,” Dolly calls to me across the table. “Did you see that picture The National Enquirer sneaked of him last month?”
I had—the photo showed Carl, his mouth hanging open, at the wheel of his asphalt truck.
“The photographer hid in our bushes to git that,” Dolly explains. “And when it come out, everybody said, ‘So that’s why she keeps him hid.’” She leans against Carl and giggles. “He was all covered with mud and tar, too.”
Carl grins. “No wonder ya got to hide me.” Then he notices me, and asks: “Who is this nice young lady?”
Dolly tells him, and he pales (he does like his privacy). And immediately, he says, “Fergit whut I said about the bottom of mah crotch.”
Never.
The Party goes on. Domestic champagne flows, the fried clams are passed around for sampling in one of the plastic cowboy hats—“You’ve never had fried clams until you’ve et ’em from a hat,” says Dolly, who didn’t et them.
“All I kin eat is this itty-bitty steak,” she explains, holding up a fork. “Ah bin fastin’ twenty days . . . on Dr. Robert Linn’s Last Chance Diet. On special occasions, I kin have a piece a meat.”
For the rest of us, there is a HoJo birthday cake, decorated with orange and turquoise roses. “Oh, it looks so good,” cries Dolly, slicing up the sections.
A young blonde has joined the group—she is the girlfriend of one of the band members, just here for the night. Dolly passes her an orange frosting rose on a napkin: “Here, I want you to have this.”
The girl delicately places the rose in her purse, then turns to me with shining eyes: “She’s made me feel so welcome.”
The night is young—after the refreshments, we all run out to the back lawn of the Howard Johnson’s for a game of volleyball under the stars. Carl Dean hands me the champagne: “I want you to have this,” he says. We pass the champagne around for quick swigs between games.
Overhead, constellations sparkle like the rings on Dolly’s fingers and the diamonds at her ear lobes. But Dolly herself cannot play—not tonight, or any night. She props herself onto a chair, sits cross-legged. “I cain’t play ’cause of mah nails,” she tells me, holding up her vermilion-tipped Madame Nhu fingertips.
She has taken off her wig, though, and, in its place, wears a ruffled bedcap. She has exchanged the pink chiffon, too—for a shirt and jeans. As is her habit, she kicks off her five-inch wedgies, and tucks her little white feet under her.
I take part in the volleyball, but am continually aware of her small presence beside the court. The neon lights from the Howard Johnson’s sign, and the white streak of nearby Route 87, illumine her ruffled headdress. As tiny as she is, she looks still smaller with her legs tucked under her. She has sat out countless games this way—and will, doubtless, sit out countless more. I see her as a sort of totem, carted from Howard Johnson’s to Howard Johnson’s, propped up as a Buddha-like symbol of benign rule and ritualized sex appeal.
Dolly’s role is to applaud the good serves and high-flying returns. When the volleyball soars up to the starred and neon-lit sky, she calls out: “Aw-right!”
The volleyball bounces, and champagne flows . . . until the sky over Howard Johnson’s blanches and the stars pale. “The bugs is bitin’ me, I’m gonna go to bed . . .” Dolly slips on her high heels and walks tippy-toe to the volleyball teams to kiss Carl good night. He’s not ready yet to call it quits.
“Gee, thanks, Da-dee,” she says in her baby voice, performing a mock curtsy.
Carl, delighted, rolls over and over on the grass. There will be no morning for Dolly. “I wake up at one in the afternoon,” she tells me. “So you can come see me after that, and we kin have our talk.”
For the band, the morning is Vacation Time: We lounge by the Howard Johnson’s pool, sunning and swimming. “Dolly hasn’t appeared in a bathing suit in years,” the girl singer tells me. “She caused too much of a stir. And she’s really very modest about things like that.”
She is also determined that no one (except possibly Carl) see her without her wigs and makeup. Of the entire group, only one band member has ever seen her face au naturel. “It was strange,” confides the young man (who prefers to remain unidentified on this topic). “She looked entirely different—much younger . . . at least ten years younger.”
I ask if the musician feels Dolly doesn’t want to be seen because she thinks she’s less pretty without her makeup and fixings.
“Yeah,” he says, and his voice is sad. “I think that’s it. And you know, she is beautiful.”
At around two P.M., a curtain pulls open at Dolly’s ground-floor room. I see the bubble of her blond wig, and realize she is ready. Opening the door to a royal-blue curtained dimness, Dolly Parton greets me. She is, as predicted, in full regalia: double-decker wig, pancake makeup, blue eye shadow, mascaraed lashes, pink-creamed lips.
The funny thing is, even with this virtual mask, you can see how perfectly symmetrical her features are, how dense and cream-cheesy perfect is her complexion. I’m sure, if her face were scrubbed, she would look like an angel. And her hair, she tells me, “is the same color and length as mah wig–only it’s baby fine and just hangs there.”
Meanwhile, just in case—I see through the door to the adjoining room that two more perfectly sprayed platinum wigs sit on a bed. The blond headdresses, fixed on their blue Styrofoam forms, look eerily like decapitated heads (Marie Antoinette again). A bed-light aims at them, and the whole time I’m talking to Dolly, I never quite escape this sight of the two more Dolly Parton heads waiting in the wings.
Because Dolly has been wearing two wigs during this record heat wave, I ask her, “Don’t you get too warm?”
“Wal,” she says, taking her seat in a Danish modern chair by the window, and kicking off her wedgies, “I always wear ’em, so I don’t know. It’s like mah panty hose . . . I always wear them, too, and people say, ‘Don’t they get hot?’” She puts her tiny white feet up on the coffee table, which already holds her gallon jug of distilled water, a bottle of predigested liquid protein, and a copy of The Last Chance Diet.
“I’ll give you a tip,” she offers. “If yer hippy lak I am . . . never wear panties. They jest make it look worse . . . the panty line shows. Wear panty hose, and that’s it.”
She takes a swig of the predigested liquid protein. “Tastes lak garbage,” she says, “but it rully works. You shoulda seen me before. I was all blowed up. And you cain’t afford to get fat, not when yer known for yer hourglass figure. You wouldn’t believe the weight I was carryin’. I couldn’t get into mah costumes. I don’t know whut caused it. I guess turnin’ thirty, mah metabolism changed. I went on every diet there wus . . . and din’t lose nuthin’. I fasted on water for one week and lost one pound. This Last Chance Diet wus the last chance for me.”
I compliment her: “You looked very shapely in your costume.”
“Yup, I look good in mah costume, and I look good nekkid, too. Jest in regular clothes . . .” She gestures to the “civvies” she has on—tight jersey and jeans. “When I sit down, I kind of double over.” She tugs at folds in her belly which, considering the massive ledge of bosom above, doesn’t look fat at all.
Tentatively, I bring the subject around to What Is It Really Like to Be in That Body?
Dolly sighs, the breasts bobbing. “They hurt.” She reached for the back of her neck. “I git aches there, from carryin’ the weight.”
She goes on, to give me the History: “They come in when I was eight. Yes, I’ve had titties since I was eight. Got mah period when I wus nine. I jest grew up rul quick. Took after mah father’s people, more than mah mamma’s. I looked grown-up when I was eleven . . .” Soon after, the boys of Sevierville, Tennessee, pursued her. “I was purrfect,” she recalls. “Purr-fect for country, that is.”
She whips out a brochure which features family and school portraits. “Here I am at seventeen.”
I lean over, expecting to see the nymphet Dolly—fresh-scrubbed and natural. Instead: Dolly, much as she looks this very day—complete with six inches of sprayed bouffant blond hair. There is another photo, though . . . Dolly at age eight, with cropped blond hair and wide blue eyes. A tomboy face.
“Yes . . . that surprises people, that I was sort of a tomboy . . . always out in the fields, chasin’ butterflies. That’s how come I love butterflies so much, and I sing about them all the time.”
Talking about her childhood, Dolly’s voice tends to go flat, as it did during the canned chatter of her performance. She has told the story so many times, that’s only natural, I suppose. But she is monotone as she reports: “I was one of twelve keeds. We were poor, but we were so rich in love.” She does better when she giggles, remembering: “We all lived in three rooms, we had three beds in a room. We all slept together, jest piled in, din’t matter if it wus boys or girls.”
But she goes flat again, as she continually characterizes herself: “I am a happy person. I am a positive person. The only thing I hate is negativity.”
She takes an angry swallow of her predigested liquid protein. “That’s the one thing I won’t put up with . . . negativity.”
She is used to being on the defense about her appearance: “I don’t look this way out of ignorance. I don’t look this way because I’m dumb. It’s a gimmick. I want people to know it’s me when they see me comin’ and when they see me leavin’ . . . I look extreme anyway . . .” She checks her bosom. “So I figured I might as well look even more extreme.”
I agree—saying her look is right for her. And it is. I do ask if turning thirty two years ago made her feel differently about herself.
She stands up to her full five feet. “Sure . . . that’s when I decided to git goin’. I had to make a lot of changes. I had to let a lot of people go. I changed my managers.”
Two horseflies suddenly zoom toward Dolly. Perhaps they are attracted by her magnolialike perfume. She goes after them with a folded Dolly Parton brochure. Whack. Whack. “They seen me comin’ . . .”
Returning to the subject of her managers: “I was dreamin’ big, and nobody there was dreamin’ as big as I wus! I just had to git!”
The hardest part of becoming the “New Dolly” was when she had to change her band. Her former group, The Family Band, was just that—Dolly’s cousins. “People say I fired mah own family!” Dolly cries. “Wal, it ain’t so. When I explained it to them, they were all happy for me. They understood. They had their own things to do, anyhow. Still, I had to go away for a while and think, before I told them. But I knew whut I wanted. I’d jest been spinnin’ mah wheels.”
The horseflies dive for Dolly’s hair. She waves them off again with the glossy publicity flier. The flies buzz off.
“Whut rully hurts me,” Dolly confides, “is when people are layin’ on that I’m changin’ mah music . . . I’m goin’ pop . . . Wal, basically, I’m still country. The smart ones saw whut I wus doin’ . . . The other ones . . . Wal, I could kill those people and bust their heads. Mah show will always be me!” She goes on to explain her new audience—of celebrities and gay people.
“Wal, I love people, so they love me. And the gay people—I guess they’re happy, that’s why they call ’em gay . . . and I’m happy, too, so they lak me.” But, she stresses, “I’m singin’ lak I always wus. And I feel more free singin’ other kinds of songs. I do it ’cause I want to, not to make more money.”
Happily, the money pours in, too. Dolly is reputed to be a million-dollar baby. She owns her own company, Velvet Apple Music, as well as 51 percent of Owepar, which also publishes music, and 50 percent of an operation called Dolly’s Doll House, which licenses the Dolly Parton doll. “She has her own little stage costumes. I think she sells so well because she’s one of the cutest dolls around.” Also in the investment department, Dolly has bought a great deal of real estate. She owns a vast white ante-bellum–style plantation house outside Nashville which Carl built for her, and which she shares with him and her kid sister, Rachel.
Home is where Dolly’s heart is, too—“I can’t wait to get back next week,” she says, dimples creasing. “That’s whut I work s’hard for . . . so I can have that.”
When she goes home, she will break completely with her professional life. “I block it out. I won’t see people from the business at mah home. I won’t have parties. Carl is not a party person. And I don’t entertain fans. When I go home, I don’t lak people comin’. Mah house is built so I kin see them, before they see me. I kin go nekkid in mah yard. I love mah fans, and they know I love ’em, but I spend more ’n half mah time with them. I got to have time to relax, go without no hair, without no makeup. That’s how I keep mah sanity. I have never needed a psychiatrist.”
Dolly settles back into her chair and sips more predigested liquid protein. “Mah marriage is separate, too. I have mah life on the road and mah life with Carl. He has seen me perform, once. But we have our own life at home—without music people.”
Dolly stares at me for a moment, “You ’n’ me can be friends lak now, here . . . but . . .” She heaves her chest. “I could never invite you to mah home.”
I nod. It’s okay.
“Only way I kin keep mah sanity,” she stresses.
The door to the adjoining room flies open, and Carl, bony-legged in trunks, slams through, picking up some gear for the pool. Dolly and I both watch him lope out again . . .
“He’s the only man I’ve ever been in love with,” she tells me. “Doesn’t he look jest lak [Don Galloway] the guy on ‘Ironside’? We’re funny together—he’s so tall and thin—I call us ‘Spaghetti and Meatball.’ We fell in love when I was eighteen—on my first day in Nashville.”
But now she’s on the road, away from him most of the year?
“I think it’s healthy for us to spend time apart. And I don’t git jealous. It never crosses mah mind. And if he does somethin’, I never want to know.”
Dolly herself admits, “I’m flirty, I love men, and I’m friendly. But if I ever did somethin’, I’d never say. I love Carl and we have a rul happy marriage. He’s a gentle man . . combs mah hair . . . in the back. If he died, I couldn’t stand it.”
Will they ever have children?
“No, I don’t think so. We’ve raised my keed sister. I don’t miss it, and he doesn’t want ’em. Besides . . . .” Dolly brightens, her dimples digging in, and her perfect, even little white teeth flashing, “I’m Carl’s keed. I even call him “Daddy’. . . I got the idea from the movie Bonnie and Clyde, the part where Estelle Parsons’s husband is shot and she leans over him and cries, ‘Oh, Daddy. . . Daddy.’”
With no plans for a family, then, what does Dolly see in her future?
She recites: “I want to be a better writer . . . a better singer . . . a better entertainer.”
The slant of the afternoon sun changes then, and a beam hits Dolly on the face. She shades her eyes with one hand. “This fasting will clear yer head. I was up all last night. Wrote four new songs, and they’re gonna be . . . .” She frowns. “Now, whut was I thinkin’ . . . ? I had a rul sharp thought jest passin’ through mah head . . . Oh, wal, it’s gone.” She shakes her head; her blond hair remains stationary.
“I know one thing, I’m gonna get me a house in Hawaii . . . get away from all this . . . get a place where mah kinfolk can come an’ visit . . .”
There’s a knock at the door.
Dolly cautiously opens up. Two little flaxen-haired girls stand outside. Each girl holds a ruby-red rose.
Behind the girls, a tall man, bald pate reddening under the summer sun, mimes, while pointing to the head of the littler girl: “This one loves her!”
Dolly chats with the children, accepts the roses: “Ain’t it amazin’ . . .”; the father keeps pointing at his daughter’s head, repeating the lip-sync: “Loves her . . . loves her . . . loves her . . .”
And the child’s eyes are wide and blue, her face upturned . . . just as Dolly Parton’s will be, tonight, when she becomes her own little girl again.