Gerri Hirshey first interviewed Dolly from a Green Bay, Wisconsin, motel room for Family Circle readers some thirty years before this Ladies’ Home Journal cover story. Their reunion produced one of the more substantial and thorough interviews given by Dolly during a period in which most of her responses to questioners were essentially variations on her trademark Dollyisms. Amidst the wide-ranging topics here, Dolly poignantly recalls the last hours of Porter Wagoner, whose death occurred on October 28, 2007.
At the time of this feature, Dolly’s Backwoods Barbie album was flying up the country charts, ultimately reaching Number 2, after having made an impressive debut at Number 17 on the all-encompassing Billboard 200 chart. The title track, “Backwoods Barbie,” was written as part of the score for 9 to 5: The Musical, which had been in development for several years. The musical adaptation of the 1980 film was unveiled in Los Angeles in the fall of 2008 and opened on Broadway the following year. —Ed.
In a rare exclusive interview, Dolly Parton opens up about the power of prayer, her battle with depression, and how she took control of her destiny
Up since 4 A.M., Dolly Parton is several hours into a workday that would set a lesser mortal whimpering. “I’m a workhorse dressed up as a show horse,” she says as personal assistants, managers and techies bustle through the hallways of her Nashville business compound.
Click, clicky-click, Parton’s high-heel boots rap a crisp flamenco beat on the Mexican-style tile. Despite the va-va-voom iconography—big hair, major makeup and that famous frontage—she is a finely cast porcelain miniature. At “5 foot nothing,” barely 100 pounds tucked into tight, crisply tailored knee pants and Western shirt set, I doubt she could arm-wrestle an Olsen twin. Her waist size would turn Scarlett O’Hara emerald with envy. She is sporting a spiky, punkish wig du jour—a little startling this early in the morning.
Neatly she sidesteps a large live cactus, one of many spined and gnarly specimens here that are hardly native to Music City. “I bought this corner,” she says of her business quarters, “and I built it up from scratch.”
And how. Tucked away in an absolutely unfabulous part of town between car part joints and convenience stores, Parton’s block-wide fortress is a mirage as extravagant and singular as the star herself. Built in Southwestern adobe style, replete with a Spanish mission bell tower, the gated complex is suffused with the complex bouquet of Nashville celebrity: strong coffee, breakfast biscuits and gravy, scented candles and nail varnish. In Parton’s airy dressing room, a quartet of platinum wigs, in styles that range from Marie Antoinette to intergalactic space vamp, sits on their stands like backup singers.
“I call the whole complex Seven Angels Mission,” she says. Ask why and she grins. “Right this way. I’ll explain.” This stuccoed labyrinth serves as the nerve center for Parton’s booming enterprises: her new independent label, Dolly Records, which has just released her first mainstream country album in 17 years, Backwoods Barbie; Dollywood, her Tennessee theme park; four Dixie Stampede dinner theaters (think thundering buffalo between courses); a water park and her Imagination Library, a children’s literacy charity so expansive it helped earn her a Living Legend award from the Library of Congress.
At 62 Parton is the iron butterfly of country music: most honored, most prolific (she’s published more than 3,000 songs) and easily the most business savvy. Reported estimates of her worth hover at $300 million. The European leg of her tour is nearly sold out; Dollywood draws about 2 million visitors annually—more than three times the number who pay their respects at Elvis’s Graceland. Nashville disk jockey Ralph Emery summed her up most succinctly: “She has the brains of a computer, the heart of an artist and the spirit of a minister.”
Not bad for the fourth of 12 children born in a one-room cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee. The doctor who delivered Dolly Rebecca was paid with a sack of cornmeal by her tobacco-farming father, who supplemented the farm’s table with whatever protein he could shoot, trap or net: squirrels, groundhogs, frogs, turtles. These days more than 1,000 hosts and waitstaff dish up a tonnage of barbecue and roast chicken at her dinner theaters.
“People think I’m always so happy,” she says. “I’m not. But I always try to be happy. I have a lot to be grateful for.” And lest she forget, there is a custom-built chapel here for attitude adjustment. “I go in there and pray all the time,” she says. “Or I go in there because it’s real quiet. And I just sit. And think. And breathe. I have a little church like this on all my properties. And in my house I have a little prie-dieu, just a place to kneel and say hey—to remember it’s not about me, that I need to bend my knees and be humble.” She laughs. “Now and then.”
This chapel, with its murmuring fountain, holds the key to whatever happiness she’s found—those mysterious seven angels. “There are seven people—whom I will not name—key people in my life that I feel God appointed to help me. Some you know—my husband, Carl [Dean], and Judy [Ogle, her pal since third grade].”
As to the rest, she’s offering no hints. Nobody knows better when to hold her cards and when to flash them. Amid endless cycles of separation rumors, Parton has stayed married for 41 years—“but together for 43,” she corrects. And despite her red-carpet life, nary a fan could pick the handsome, very private Carl Dean out of a checkout line at a Nashville Piggly Wiggly. Parton even had the artist stylize the faces of her personal angels in the etched-glass art piece she commissioned for the chapel—the better to keep their identities private. Though Parton has been the target of the tabloids’ most creative and persistent ambushes since her early years as the bodaciously endowed protégé of the spangle-suited ’60s country star Porter Wagoner, she is protective of those closest to her.
“The thing that bothers me the most about the tabloids is that sometimes they hurt members of my family. It’s embarrassing. They don’t know how to deal with it. I just say, ‘Hey, you think I like this? I am truly, truly sorry. This is what you get for being my buddy. So please accept my apologies. There’s not a thing I can do about it.”
Musically, Parton takes it all on—image, sex, spirituality, friendship and m-e-n—in Backwoods Barbie. “It takes me around my whole life,” she says. In the first single, “Better Get to Livin’” she confesses, “I’m not the Dalai Lama.” Yet among family and friends she is considered so wise and centered they call her the Dolly Mama: confessor, confidante, platinum-hearted girlfriend.
Parton confesses she’s feeling a little bit tender herself, owing to the recent death of Wagoner, who first showcased her, sang with her, cannily encouraged rumors of a romantic liaison, then sued her when she left to go solo. Their painful break was the inspiration for “I Will Always Love You,” which she wrote and recorded divinely.
She says there was never any longtime feud. “I was with Porter the day he died,” she says. He had lost consciousness and she joined his grown children in the hospital. “We sang and we cried and I sat and held Porter’s hand. I had my hand on his heart ’cause it was just flyin’. I knew it wasn’t long. He died at 8 that night. It was like losin’ a piece of me, like losin’ your daddy.”
Her time with Wagoner was not the only charged relationship in her Nashville career. For years country music was run by a provincial male-dominated cadre of record execs. “When I came in,” she recalls, “it was always that the men were better than us. We were second-class citizens.” In 1968 Parton’s frank, sassy “Just Because I’m a Woman” was not played by some U.S. radio stations. And Parton took plenty of heat from Nashville purists for ’70s pop crossovers like “Here You Come Again.”
By her 40s, “they stopped programming me on the radio because of my age,” she says. In 2006 her musical achievements won her the coveted Kennedy Center Honors award. But back in Music City, it garnered her little r-e-s-p-e-c-t at the conference table. “Even with major labels I couldn’t get a real good contract,” she recalls. “They’d say, ‘Hey now, let’s get real, Dolly. It’s not like you’re as young as you used to be and you’ve had your day.’” Some of what she told them is inappropriate for a family magazine. But she was not about to be shown the pasture gate. “I still kept going,” she says of those quiet days. “I kept saying, I’m going to make my records even if I have to sell them out of the back of my car.”
The solution to her Nashville freeze-out was hardly that low-tech: A new Web site, DollyPartonMusic.net, dispenses information from her label and links to sites for Dollywood, her charity cookbook, Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s, and a lively fan club that keeps the faithful updated on her latest career: Broadway lyricist and composer. “Backwoods Barbie,” her CD’s title cut, is from the score and lyrics she just completed for a stage musical of 9 to 5, the 1980 movie she starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The musical is set to open in Los Angeles this September, starring Megan Hilty (late of the Broadway smash Wicked) as Parton’s stacked heart-of-gold secretary, Doralee Rhodes.
Parton feels that “Backwoods Barbie” is as autobiographical as “Coat of Many Colors,” that ’70s heartbreak plaint about her lean but loving childhood. “It’s Doralee’s story but it’s really mine. Her statement is ‘don’t judge me by the cover ’cause I’m a real good book.’ I know my style has been a joke to a lot of people and still is. I’ve used this line often but by now I hope people see that there’s a brain beneath the wigs. And a heart beneath the boobs.”
Ah, yes. Them. I wonder—don’t we all?—just what Parton’s relationship is with those storied breasts. Not long ago she playfully named them “shock” and “awe.” “They do seem like public property in a way,” she says. “They served me well—I don’t know if I’m supporting them or they’re supporting me. I’ve always had nice ones but of course I’ve had ’em jacked up a bit. And they’re part of the persona—it almost takes a little pressure off me.”
Given her philosophy that the best defense is a good offense, Parton has armed herself with a quiver of bristling zingers on cosmetic surgery. To wit: “I’ll never graduate from collagen,” and a quip she attributes to her husband: “Why should I cheat on her when I get a new woman every six months?”
Parton refused to have 50th- or 60th-birthday bashes; instead she marked the occasions, as she does each year, by writing a song on her birthday. “The numbers don’t fit my mind,” she says. “Ain’t nothing I can do about the numbers but there’s plenty I can do about how I look. And how I act.”
The girl who sneakily surgically clipped the shoulder pads out of her grandma’s coat to fashion a pair of falsies at 13 is not shy about most of her beauty secrets: “If somebody asks me point-blank, ‘Have you had plastic surgery?’ it’s like, well, duh. I never talk about it unless someone asks me. But I don’t want to lie about it.”
The scent of temptation has begun to drift down the Seven Angels corridors, past the chapel and into Parton’s pastel office: fajitas, nachos, burritos—an entire Tex-Mex lunch is being laid out. The boss seems immune to its seductions, making do with a sour candy. Parton gives no quarter to recent tabloid charges of eating disorders but she does listen to those closest to her. “My weight is in line for someone my size, but people are telling me I’m too skinny now so I’m going to gain 10 or 12 pounds. People worry about me but I’m healthy.”
Somebody always has her back, she says. “I think there’s nothing in the world like girlfriends. I have five sisters and every single one I could tell anything on earth—just like they can with me.” I ask her to describe a perfect girls’ night: “For me it’s to be with friends where you can be your perfect self. Or your imperfect self. Whether you eat too much, drink too much, talk too much and get pissed off. Where you can feel like any emotion you have is okay. To cook, to laugh, to eat. To gossip, try to solve problems. Just being able to vent can be the best healing and therapy.”
She doesn’t know what she might have done without the girls when her hormones blindsided her with depression and weight gain in the early ’80s, the only time she can recall her writing tablets filling with thoughts of self-pity and suicide. “It was just a big depression. Everybody goes through it, some more severe, some for longer periods of time. Having trouble with the hormones, I just didn’t feel good.”
She says it lasted 18 months and scared her witless: “Man, I saw how it is when people get depressed, get to drinking and drugs. I’ve never done that. And that’s another reason I think I’ve lasted. Because I’ve had to kick my own behind. And if I don’t kick my behind, somebody that loves me dearly would. A good friend or family member would say, Well, that’s enough of that.”
She would not describe her husband as a confidant: “I don’t like to trouble him,” she says. “I always lean on my sisters or Judy.” She insists she is still crazy about the skinny, gentle but hard-to-fathom young man she met at the Wishy-Washy Laundromat her first day in Nashville. She says that when he was courting her, Carl Dean never told her he loved her—never even proposed outright before they tied the knot on Memorial Day, 1966. His taciturn emotional style, she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, left her “as mixed up as a road lizard in a spin dryer.”
That’s also an apt description for those who have tried to dissect their unconventional union in the years since. “They have me and my husband divorcing every three years or so. We’ve never even talked about it. We’ve never had a big argument in our whole marriage, other than just smart off a little bit.” Not many outsiders are invited to the farm they’ve long shared outside Nashville, nor is there a sighting of Dean at any performance or public event. “My husband and I are great friends,” Parton says. “We were together before I became a star so we don’t have that between us. I knew he loved me because of me.”
They don’t give a hoot what anyone else thinks of a lifestyle that requires long periods of separation and veers from Broadway to the barnyard. Ask about a typical day at home and she says, “I cook, he lays around in his La-Z-Boy. He goes over to the barn, mows a bit. We have an RV. We take it and go out to fast-food restaurants, stop at the supermarket, go out and picnic. It’s private for us, we don’t have to go into a restaurant. Our life is very simple and very peaceful.”
She and Carl never had children but they more or less raised some of her younger siblings, who came to live with them over the years. She reasons, “I’m childlike enough that being with kids gives me an outlet, too. I love my nieces and nephews and though I don’t have children of my own I realize that’s probably good. Now everybody’s kids can be mine. And I do love it.”
Parton’s voice is still strong and supple; even in sprawling arenas and cow palaces, the notes fall soft as mountain rain. Musically, her good girlfriends include Emmylou Harris and the much younger Alison Krauss, who burst into awed tears the first three times they met until Parton begged her, “Knock it off, I’m not that special.”
Ask her about what’s ahead and she insists that she plans to do what mountain folk have traditionally done—go out singing. “I just think I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. I like what I do. I like who I am and I know who I am. I was a country girl. Grew up with real strong values. I felt like what talent I had God gave me. He wasn’t going to hand me everything, he was just going to guide and help me.”
She is on the move again, striding past a rack of sequined gowns, blowing away a pesky shock of wig that’s been worrying her lipstick. Clickety-click, just try and keep up with the Dolly Mama, who is talking—again—about the brush of angel wings on her cheeks. “Every day I pray that God brings the right things and right people in, and takes the wrong out. I have such a good spiritual life.”
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Death
“I want to be like one of those little fainting goats that get scared and then just fall over. I want to go and go and then drop dead in the middle of something I’m loving to do. And if that doesn’t happen, if I wind up sitting in a wheelchair, at least I’ll have my high heels on. It’s not like this is a job that I hope I do good at. It’s a joy, and it’s just my nature. And I’ve made it into something I can make money doing. And thank God for that. Because nobody can ever make enough money for as many poor relatives as I’ve got. Somebody’s got a sick kid, or somebody needs an operation, somebody ain’t got this, somebody ain’t got that. Or to give the kids all a car when they graduate. Let them shine, let them do what they want to. And not just family—it’s for a lot of other people to have their dreams, too. Going into a new business, you make a certain amount of money, build your name, build your brand, and it’s prestigious, but it gives other people opportunities, too, even if it’s not something I particularly want to do myself. I’m creating jobs. I’m like Obama! O-Dolly and Obama!”
—To Jesse Green, New York, April 27, 2009
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Her Musical Life
“I don’t want to wait until I’m dead for my music to become important. I want it to happen while I’m living because I’m living it every day.”
—To Alison Moore, Maverick, September 2011
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Joyful Noise
“Many times, people tend to think you don’t do anything because you’re not on the big screen. But, the truth is, I just hadn’t had any good scripts come along. I’ve had a lot of junk come my way. Right after I did the movie Straight Talk, I was in one of those periods where a lot of women find themselves—being told I was too old to play young parts and too young to play the older parts. Until something good like this movie came along, where I could basically play my age and still be young in spirit, I felt this was a perfect script for me. I thought this character was all the things that I believe myself to be. She’s got a big heart, big hopes and big hair. . . . This was one of those scripts that when I read it, I thought it was not only a great movie, it’s great for the times we’re in: it’s about family; it’s about hope; it’s about the music, so I thought was great. So many wonderful people worked on this film. I think it’s going to appeal to all kinds of people. It was a joy to do and it has the perfect name. We did make a joyful noise and had a joyful time.”
—To Sandra Varner, Talk2SV.com, January 2012
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Songwriting and Her Career
“Songwriting is just as natural as breathing to me. It was a song that brought me out of the Smoky Mountains and sent me everywhere around the world. Everywhere I’ve been it’s because of the songs that I love to write. Now that I get older I get even more humble about it and I’m so grateful and thankful that I’ve had a chance to see my dreams come true unlike so many people in this world that never can say that. [This career]’s had its hard times for sure, and [is] not as glamorous as it looks, but I wouldn’t trade it and I wouldn’t change it and I’m grateful for it.”
—To Jonathan Sanders, Pop Matters, May 20, 2014