Dolly Parton is Exuberant, Aquiver With the Life-Force She Brings to the Stage
“Just because I’m blonde, don’t think I’m dumb.” From the Dolly Parton’s first record,”Dumb Blonde” written by Curly Putnam.
The Washington Star, August 16, 1979: ”My husband puts it this way. He says I’m like a cartoon character, exaggerated in every way. He likes the way I look. He finds it very sexy.”
Dolly Parton, sitting on a straight chair, feet on the seat, legs scissored under her, is leaning forward so far you think she’s going to lose her balance and topple forward. Netted like a butterfly for an hour before her concert at the Saratoga Center for the Performing Arts, she’s fidgety, aquiver with the life-force that will soon burst out through the open auditorium and startle the soft night. She shifts her weight, and grabs her ankles with her hands, her nails are nearly an inch long and blood red.
“Acrylic coating,” she says, explaining their durability and righting herself with athletic grace. Acrylic. Hard as carpenter’s nails and a necessity for all that pickin’ she does on her banjo and ‘git-tar.’
Dolly is not what you’d call à reticent interview. She greets a five-foot tall reporter exuberantly: “Oh! Someone my own size! And wearin’ the same kind of clothes I do.” What’s caught her eye is a green and purple batik-dyed silk shirt with a huge butterfly on the back, from the Mamori shop, in Washington. Arrangements are soon made to get her one like it. “Any color. I love any color,” she puts in her order.
“I feel I’m almost ‘nekkid’ unless I wear bright colors,” she says, with her radiant smile, chatting on non-stop in her soft, high-pitched sing-songy voice; a funny, gregarious uninhibited woman. She is wearing a green printed shirt, faded blue jeans, large, thin wire hoop earrings and five-inch pink heels. Her short blonde wig frames a face out of a Fragonard painting. Small-boned, delicate, perfectly proportioned and perfectly made-up, her greenish-blue eyes highlighted with mauve eye-shadow, her lips richly red and shiney.
Her wigs are a glorified version of the big, bouffant teased hairstyles she wore during her high school years — “Beehives and everything,” she grins. They save damaging her own hair from all that backcombing and bleaching. (Yes, her own hair is blonde.) Along with her ubiquitous five-inch heels, the wigs also add several inches to her own five feet. “I need height,” she laughs, “I’m big-busted and big in the hips.” She’s also on a diet — as usual.
In an era when thin is in, Dolly Parton, blessed with what once was called an hourglass figure, has made the most of it. “People don’t expect me to be stylish. I’m projectin’ my true personality,” says Dolly, whose fashion image crystalized in the 1960s. The look is sexy but Dolly doesn’t jiggle. Her style preceded the no-bra decade; the form-fitting low-V necked blouses she wears have a no-nonsense foundation. Dolly may be flippant about her large bosom, but she’s not frivolous.
She and her band have just arrived here via her specially outfitted bus, on a tour that brings her to Wolf Trap tonight. Sold out, it should be added. Dolly will be back, at Ford’s Theater, Oct. 2, for “Celebration of Country Music,” a to-be-televised fund raiser that’s bringing all the greats out of the Tennessee Hills
But — musically, at least — Dolly Parton is coming from another direction, these days. Los Angeles. She’s traded her Travelin’ Family Band — which consisted of Tennessee folk, some kin — for a troupe of creative, high-powered show musicians who give her a dazzling backup without upstaging their Superstar boss. Randy Parton on guitar, is one of her six brothers. Dolly is being marketed now by an L.A. PR firm, L.A. agents and L.A. managers.
“Success ain’t going to knock on your door and drag you out by the hair and say, this is your time.” But this is Dolly’s time. And Dolly’s ready. She is a woman with supreme self-confidence in her star quality. “I’ve got more guts than talent,” she says, laughing. “I’m lucky and thankful I was born with a free spirit and an outgoing personality.” And, obviously, she is smart: “I have good, old common horse sense and that’s helped me more than any. thing,” she tells you, earnestly.
She came by these traits early, she says, growing up with her 11 brothers and sisters. “There were so many of us kids,” she explains, “we lived in a log cabin on a farm and were left free to develop our own personalities. But we were taught to love one another and love other people. The main thing we had was our religion. When you’re isolated the way we were, you learn to depend on your faith. And the Scriptures say, ‘All things are possible.’”
So Dolly is out running, leaping to meet her success. She’s always on tour — here and abroad. She’s writing songs, poetry, children’s stories. She’s going to do some television specials. And she’s been signed by Twentieth Century Fox to star in three movies. “I don’t want no cornpone thing,” says Dolly who has yet to see a script she likes. “Most of them are junk. I don’t mean to sound vain, but I thought, my Lord, I know I can beat that.” She may, with her own novel-in-progress for Bantam Books, “Wild Flowers.” “It’s about the lifestyle of people like myself. It’s got a lot of sex, religion, violence and pain. It’s not my life story but it’s part of me; it’s human and it’s sad.”
And with all, Dolly is still singing plenty of country music — “Good, true country music is the best music there is. To say somethin’ bad about it is like saying somethin’ bad about my Mamma and Daddy.” But now she’s doing rock, too, what some folk have called “crossing-over.” The words make her flinch. As she sees it, she’s broadening her base, but there are some who would say she’s gone Hollywood.
Her eyes welled up. Some, in fact, said it to The National Enquirer recently. One of them, a “bitter” musician Dolly had to let go, others disgruntled because she wouldn’t co-author a book with them. “It just almost killed me,” she says, her eyes welling up again. “Oh, it was so painful. I cried for days just because of it.” The article was called, “The Ugly Side of Dolly Parton,” she says, “and it said I wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe.”
Dolly says, “All I’m tryin’ to be is Dolly.”
In the evening, she is three-quarters through her concert, giving the crowd its money’s worth, her voice growing husky, sexy, overextended, when the people in the audience, minds blown by the whirlwind on stage, begin to give her standing ovation after every song. “Thank yew,” she says, fulsomely, taking it as a sign. “I’ve been having some trouble lately, reading some stuff in the newspapers,” she confides. “I’m glad you folks are with me.”
There’s also the matter of a $3 million lawsuit hanging over the sunny Dolly like an angry storm-cloud. Porter Wagoner, her original mentor, and her partner until 1974, is the one who’s suing and she’s been told not to talk about it, “But I will say,” she hurries on, frowning, “I’m sorry it happened. It’s sad to see it happen with someone you’ve known so well, and I hope it all ends without pain for anyone.”
Dolly has been married for 13 years to Carl Dean, a former asphalt contractor who now runs their farm. And no, it’s not true he’s a mystery man. She laughs at the idea. It’s just that he’s a homebody, content to let his wife have the limelight. “He loves the fact I’m in it. He’s so real, so genuine. He’s a very down-to-earth man.” He will travel with her, if she’s going to a state fair. “He likes to look at the livestock.”
Dolly, like a true Superstar, is happiest when she’s performing. She told Playboy Magazine — in an issue in which she appeared on the cover as possibly the most wholesome of all Playboy Bunnies — that “sometimes I get so excited over a certain moment on stage I could swear it’s the same thing as sex.” For a “family newspaper,” she says, that might not sound so good. “But I love the love shared with an audience. I get so energized. My emotions reach a peak, it really is …” she hesitates, then rushes on, but in a whisper, “almost like reaching a climax. It’s a total feeling of satisfaction. I’ve left them feeling good and they’ve left me satisfied.”
She’s an earthy lady, sprung from the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children her Mama had before she was 35. “Imagine that,” says Dolly, who has no plans to have children of her own. “Not for any selfish reason,” she says. “My husband and I kinda like being each other’s kid.” She giggles.
Besides, she always surrounded herself with kids. Her five youngest brothers and sisters came down from the mountains to live with her and Dean in the large farm estate near Nashville they call Tara. “Not because Momma and Daddy didn’t want them, but they wanted to live in town,” Dolly adds, quickly.
She’s built a “Fantasy Island” in the pond at Tara. “I’m going to have a small castle on it with secret tunnels and rooms for the kids to play,” she says, sparkling. “Now, there’s an old ship marooned on the island and two treasure chests, one half-buried in the sand.” It’s a dream Dolly and Dean share.
[This article originally appeared in the The Washington Star, August 16, 1979 as Hello, Dolly! You’re Swell, Dolly, and It’s Your Turn Now. #175 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]
