What Dolly Told Me
I was lucky enough to interview Dolly Parton a dozen times, on two continents, and she began nearly every interview with some version of this: “Ask me anything you want to ask me, and I’ll tell you what I want you to hear!”
It was genuinely funny, funnier each time she said it, and she’d punctuate each punchline with a staccato giggle that’d swoop upward in pitch, ending in a glassy register that was uniquely hers.
At the time, I took this to be one of her many crowd-tested Dollyisms. Those words ring differently since I learned of her death on Tuesday, at 80 — less a quip, more a motto. A sentence that encapsulates a life.
There are two somewhat conflicting but both very Dolly ideas neatly juxtaposed in that one phrase.
The first part — “ask me anything” — says: I welcome you, I see you. And she did. Everyone felt at home at a Dolly concert. Men in trucker hats (and sometimes Confederate flags) stood next to men in drag. “Big-haired church ladies” stood next to women holding hands and little girls wearing coats of many colors, everyone shoulder to shoulder, singing “I Will Always Love You.”
It’s no surprise that she was nicknamed St. Dolly. It’s a wonderfully layered term of endearment. A reference to her faith? Yes. An ironic nod to her sometimes raunchy sense of humor? Definitely.
But St. Dolly is also meant earnestly. She did practice a unique brand of radical acceptance. No one would ever be thrown out of the Big Dolly Tent.
The second part — “I’ll tell you what I want you to hear” — points us in a different direction: I am in control here.
I believe this is the part of Dolly people don’t focus on enough. This is a woman who created a several-hundred-million-dollar media empire mining stories of her past. She used humor and charm to control every interview. If a male talk-show host made a joke about her figure, she’d make an even better joke about it. She was always two steps ahead of you. She never allowed herself to be a part of a story of which she was not the author.
My first interview with Dolly (for what would become the nine-part podcast series “Dolly Parton’s America”) happened on Jan. 15, 2018. She steamrolled me by recounting one delightful story after another. I could barely get a question in.
“You asked one question, and I’ve talked for two hours.”
Upward swoop laugh.
The previous night I read her memoir, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” a compendium of Tennessee Mountain nostalgia from her childhood. In the interview, many of the same stories came out, rapid-fire. The time she was 6 or 7 years old and jumped over a fence, landing on a broken Mason jar that sliced some of her toes almost clean off. (Luckily, her mother sewed them back on.) How in the dead of winter she and many of her siblings would huddle together in one bed, not minding when they peed on one another because it kept them warm. She talked about June bugs and the smell of honeysuckle.
As a scrawny Arab kid growing up in a Southern Baptist universe in Nashville during the Persian Gulf war, I’ve always been suspicious of the Southern propensity to wax nostalgic about better days. Those stories typically have an alienating effect on me. Not so with Dolly. To sit with her was to watch (and then inevitably join) a person so completely inhabiting an earlier time that suddenly the air around you changed, the oxygen molecules shifted polarity. You saw the June bugs she was seeing and smelled the honeysuckle.
At the time, I asked her why she kept returning to those stories. They are my truth, she said. I believed her and yet wondered what was being left out.
The Dolly story I keep coming back to these days has to do with how she got her start.
In 1967, a 21-year-old Dolly Parton arrives on a set in Nashville to fill the role of backup singer for Porter Wagoner, the biggest name in country music television. His TV variety show reached over three million people at its peak. At first, viewers complained about Dolly and resented her for displacing a previous backup singer, Norma Jean.
Before long, though, Dolly was all anyone wanted to see. Long story short: Her relationship with Mr. Wagoner disintegrates. He disparages her in the press and sues her for $3 million when she leaves.
In one of our interviews, I opened my laptop and called up a publicity photo and inelegantly pointed out the obvious: how Mr. Wagoner in his pimp jacket has his arm around her as if he owned her. Her response surprised me.
Well, it’s more complicated than that. I mean, just think about it. He had had this hit show for years. He didn’t need me to have his hit show. He wasn’t expecting me to be all that I was, either. When he hired me as a singer, he was just hiring what he thought was a right pretty little girl. But I was a serious writer. He didn’t know that. I was a serious entertainer. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know how many dreams I had.
There it was again, Dolly’s particular gift, to present two opposing thoughts, juxtaposed.
She said it without judgment. He simply didn’t know. She held his confusion and pain while pointing out that she was separate from him and would not sacrifice her ambition for anyone.
Trailing Dolly around the world, I witnessed so many small moments in which she owned her power without the slightest hint of fight.
On Feb. 17, 2019, I interviewed Dolly in a hotel room in London, moments before the opening night of “9 to 5: The Musical” at the Savoy Theater. The interview wasn’t going well. Members of her entourage moved in and out of the room with an urgency bordering on panic, stirring the air and making it hard to concentrate. Their nerves were understandable. Outside the window, we heard angry chanting and overlapping sirens. A citywide climate protest had brought London to a standstill. As a consequence, Dolly’s manager had formulated an almost military-style minute-by-minute movement sheet for how his team would transport her from the hotel room into a car and down a sequence of carefully mapped back roads to deposit her at the red carpet precisely 14 minutes before the show started, as I recall. The movement sheet had us leaving the hotel at 6:39 p.m.
At precisely 6:39 p.m., her manager — a lovely man but broad-shouldered and quite intimidating — walked into the room, looked me dead in the eye and drew his finger across his neck with such force that I leaped out of my seat. The message was clear. The interview is over. Disappear.
My position in the Dollyverse had always felt tenuous. I could kid myself and say that I’d earned the right to be there because of my decades in journalism. The truth is the only reason I was allowed in the room was nepotism. Many years ago, through a twist of fate, my dad became Dolly’s temporary doctor. Over the years, they became friends, then great friends. (He was with her in her last moments.) So this was a favor to him.
I immediately accepted my dismissal as both inevitable and proper. But Dolly smiled and quietly nodded at me to sit back down. She held up five fingers, as if to say, “We can talk for five more minutes.”
I knew that she didn’t have five more minutes. But she knew that the interview needed something more. A moment of surprise and grace.
As the city erupted outside and her manager turned white and left the room, Dolly sat calmly, determined to enjoy the final moments of our conversation. She would leave only when she was ready. And she did.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
posted by Ricky at 00:18
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