Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
I ain’t pretty ...but I paınt up well!
As her heartwarming new film about a plump teenager who signs up for a beauty pageant is released, Dolly Parton tells Gabrielle Donnelly how wigs, high heels and long nails came to her rescue
She’s one of the most famous women in the world, but Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. Fortunately she can see the funny side. ‘It was a Halloween party and I lost to a bunch of drag queens,’ she laughs when we meet in Beverly Hills. ‘They said they’d give free drinks to the best Dolly; we all had to walk across a stage and I’d really exaggerated myself for this party, I’d given myself bigger hair and a bigger beauty mark and all of that... and when I walked across I got the least applause of all! These drag queens really put it on. Some of them are really pretty, you know, twice as pretty as I could ever have dreamed of being – plus they’re usually, like 6ft tall, so they look good.’
There aren’t many women who’d see the amusing side of all this but, then, there’s only one Dolly Parton. ‘I thought it was really funny!’ she says, her soft country lilt alive with joy. ‘ I love it when drag queens imitate me because they do what I do every day – I get up and get dressed with my boobs pushed up and that big hair and all that make-up. I always say that if I hadn’t been a girl I’d have been a drag queen because I love all that gaudy stuff!’
There are lookalike drag queens aplenty in her new film Dumplin’, opening on Friday on Netflix. Based on the bestselling young adult novel by Julie Murphy, it features Danielle Macdonald as plus-sized teenager Dumplin’ who’s determined to enter a beauty contest, with Jennifer Aniston as her brittle former beauty queen mother, and both the voice and the spirit of Dol ly hersel f. Dumplin’ is a fervent fan of Dolly, who provides much of the movie’s music, and in a few particularly touching sequences she’s helped to gain confidence by a group of Dolly drag queens.
‘I thought those bits were wonderful,’ says Dolly. ‘I loved that they were the ones who helped her build her confidence, who gave her some kind of strength to let her know she was OK. I think this movie speaks to something very important in life, which is that we should never let other people tell us who we are or what we are, or judge us for how we look as opposed to how we feel and what we have to offer.
‘We all want to please people, and it’s never fun for anybody to have someone say negative things about you, no matter how old or young you are. It hurts your feelings! But when that happens to me, I just try to look to that better self in me – that higher wisdom, so to speak – and to know that I am a special person.’
She certainly is, the fourth of 12 children in a poverty-stricken family from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, who turned herself into one of the music industry’s most powerful figures. ‘ We didn’t know we were poor until some smart alec told us,’ she laughs. ‘Mom and Dad had a way of not letting us know it, mostly. But I would notice that every autumn my mother would get depressed, her mood would change and she’d go through a real dark time – we kids used to think it was something to do with the weather. It wasn’t till years later that we realised it was knowing that winter was coming and she wasn’t sure if we were going to have enough clothes, fearing that her kids might get sick and die and all that. But we didn’t starve and Daddy always made sure that we had a roof over our heads, even if it leaked, and some food on our table, even if it was just cornmeal mush.’
She knew from the beginning she was destined for something bigger. ‘Momma always said I came out of the womb crying in the key of D, and I don’t doubt that I
did!’ she chuckles. ‘All of my life I wanted to be a star. I used to stand on the porch of the cabin and I put a tobacco stick in the crack of the floor and put a tin can on top for a microphone and I would pretend I was entertaining the chickens and the ducks and the little kids who were too small to crawl away from me!’
She also wanted to be pretty. ‘My little song Backwoods Barbie kind of sums up how I felt,’ she says of her 2008 release. ‘I did want to be pretty but we didn’t have the money for fancy clothes or make-up, so I would improvise with anything I could find that would give me colour and let me pretty up and paint up the best I could. Very few people are born with natural beauty, and I’m certainly not one of them. I had always had nice boobs so as a teenager I looked pretty good for a country girl.
‘But I’m also too short, too this, too that, and I never had great hair. So I used to tease and bleach my hair so much it would tear to pieces. In the end I thought, “Well, I’ll just start wearing wigs,” and I did. I thought, “If I’m too short, I’ll wear high heels, and if my hands are too short, I’ll wear long nails.” I try to make positives out of negatives. I always wanted to be more and I guess I still do. You know that old saying, “Less is more”? I think that’s the biggest crock I ever heard. More is more!’
But don’t be fooled by Dolly’s flashy image. As canny a businesswoman as she is a talented songwriter and singer, she operates the hugely successful theme park Dollywood in Pigeon Ford, Tennessee, bringing – along with the three million tourists who flock there annually – muchneeded jobs and tax revenues to a previously depressed region. Through her Dollywood Company, she has also founded a childhood literacy programme, Dolly Parton’s Imagina- tion Library, operating in America, Britain, Canada and Australia.
‘I’ve seen my dreams come true,’ she says. ‘Now that I’m successful, I try to share that as much as possible with everyone I can – I don’t just want to take and take from the business, I want to be in a position where I can help people. The wonderful thing about being in a good position in life is that once you’re there, you can really get to do good things for mankind, and not just for yourself.’
A poignant little back story to the children’s Imagination Library is that in some ways it takes the place of the children she and her husband were unable to have. ‘It just wasn’t meant for me to have children,’ she says. ‘When my husband and I first met, we assumed we would have kids, and I even had names picked out, but it never did happen...’
She stops, looking wistful for a moment. Then, Dolly-style, pulls herself back. ‘But we always had a lot of family around – a lot of my younger siblings came to live with my husband and me in Nashville and some of them went to school there. They loved being with me, and I loved having them. And now I have the Imagination Library and have worked with so many kids. So my husband and I don’t regret it – we think about it sometimes and say, “Lord, if we had some kids and grandkids now, they’d be driving us crazy!” So this way, we just get to be each other’s kids.’
She has been married for an astonishing 52 years to businessman Carl Dean, who famously shuns the spotlight, leading to frequent rumours of marital strife. Completely false, says Dolly, now 72. ‘We’ll have been married for 53 years in May next year and we even renewed our vows on our 50th wedding anniversary. I got to wear a big beautiful wedding gown and my husband got all dressed up and we got to take all those beautiful pictures that we didn’t have a chance to do when we were married the first time. I had a really nice big ring made, too, although I still have our little wedding rings from when we first got married.’
So why the secrecy about Carl? ‘ He just doesn’t like to get out much,’ she says. ‘He’s a homebody and a loner and he doesn’t like to be with anyone else but me. He hardly ever goes out and that’s why we’ve lasted so long – he stays home and I stay gone!’ She laughs, then stops and looks at me, woman to woman. ‘There’s some truth to that, right?’
She has plenty to keep her out of the house coming up – not least the London opening of the musical 9 To 5, previewing at the Savoy Theatre from late January, following the recent re-release of the film that inspired it. It’s now an extraordinary 38 years since the comedy – with Dolly, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as three women employees getting even with their sexist boss – first opened. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she nods of what was probably the first film to address sexual abuse in the workplace. ‘And now it’s come back around, ain’t it? That was the first movie I ever made – I’d never even seen a movie made before then. I loved it, and working with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda was a joy.
‘We’ve been trying for years to do a sequel to it, and now with the #MeToo movement, it really seems like it’s time. But I’m telling the others that we’d better get onto it soon. Otherwise we’ll have to call it 95 instead of 9 To 5 because we ain’t getting no younger!’
‘Less is more? That’s a total crock. More is more!’
Dumplin’ is on Netflix from Friday. 9 To 5 is in selected cinemas now – see 9to5/tickets.co.uk.