If you want a template for a happy marriage, look no further than Dolly Parton’s 60-year union with reclusive husband Carl Dean – theirs is the sort of love story that deserves its own lavish Netflix treatment with a seven-figure wig budget.
But Dolly was not a one-man woman and Dolly Parton: Bigger Hair, Bigger Heart draws back the curtain on the performers, partners and intimates who would (allegedly) share her bed, her stage and her most private life.
Take one of her most famous songs, I Will Always Love You, a soaring declaration of feeling and heartbreak – but it was not written for good bloke Carl, whom she married in 1966, but for country music star Porter Wagoner.
In 1967 Porter had hired Dolly to be the “girl singer” and sidekick on his syndicated weekly TV show and for the next seven years she would perform by his side, both on camera and on the road with his band the Wagonmasters. Their relationship was a complicated one, with Wagoner her “sometime father, sometime lover”, according to the New Yorker, though neither of them ever confirmed they were romantically involved.
Their dynamic was not an easy one, with one biographer likening Wagoner’s controlling nature and demands to one of domestic abuse; in one instance during a 1972 show, he could be heard telling an offstage Parton to “shut up”.
He also failed to pay her like his male performers, instead giving her occasional pieces of jewellery or a car. In her 2025 book Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, Parton wrote that “Porter made a lot of money as our stars rose” and while band members “all got bonus checks” he gave her “my paycheck never changed through all of that. I kept asking for a raise and never got one. He would buy me all these things and say, ‘Consider that your raise’.”
As the early 70s rolled around though, her star was starting to eclipse his and she knew she wanted a solo career, telling NPR in 2001, “I kept staying and staying, and I kept wanting to go”.
However ol’ boy Porter was, as Dolly said, “very much like my Dad, my brothers and the men I grew up with… a woman’s place was where you told her to be.”
“I just had to stand my ground,” Dolly told Martha Stewart during a 2024 podcast. “I just wasn’t going to take somebody else’s idea of who I was and live under their roof. I had my own identity and I had to fight to keep it and I’m still doing that.”
So, by 1974, after seven years, Dolly was done and wanted to go solo.
However, “Porter was dead against it”, she told NPR in 2001. “He wouldn’t hear of it, and he had a fit. We fought a lot… no matter how I would try to talk to him, I could not make him understand. And I thought, well, why don’t you just write a song about him?”
That song was I Will Always Love You as way of expressing, as she told Martha her “broken heart, of not being heard … knowing I had to make major decisions that would ultimately change my life forever.”
The next day she walked into his office and sang him the song. He told her it was the best thing she had ever written and then proceeded to sue her for breach of contract demanding the extraordinary sum, at the time, of $US3 million. They ultimately settled for $US1 million but, according to Dolly Parton, “It would take her years to pay him back in full”.
In 1991 she told Vanity Fair that she was happy she made that investment.
“When I was at my peak with Porter the biggest record I ever had was ‘Jolene,’ which sold 100,000 copies – that ain’t nothing,” she says. “I couldn’t even clothe my band and pay for my bus… I thought, Well, s**t, this is the music business – why not think of the business end of the music.”
The pair would eventually patch things up and she was with him the day he died in 2007.
Enter manager Sandy Gallin with whom, per Dolly Parton, she “became inseparable”, with the duo spending decades travelling the world together and even sharing a Fifth Avenue apartment where they would throw lavish, star-studded Christmas parties. (“He had one end of the house and I had the other. We were like Will and Grace”, she told the New Yorkerin 2009.)
When Sandy was asked about their relationship he told Vanity Fair in 1996, “she’s a sister figure, maybe, someone to hope and dream with” before deciding on them actually being “Best girlfriends”.
The duo also went into the movie business together, setting up Sandollar Productions which would make, amongst other things, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Father of the Bride.
As Dolly admits herself in Dolly Parton, “No one could quite get how the Christian Southern Girl and the New York Jewish boy could have so much in common but it was real.”
Another one of Dolly’s biggest love songs also had nothing to do with Carl.
In 1983 country singer Kenny Rogers was working on a new album in Los Angeles, with the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb producing. For four days Kenny worked on one song but, as Kenny later wrote in his memoir, “I finally told him I didn’t even like the song anymore. Without breaking a stride [Gibb] raised one finger in the air and said, ‘What we need is Dolly Parton’.”
Luck was on their side – not only was Dolly in LA but open to the idea and walked through the door to the recording studio 45 minutes later. The result: Islands In The Stream, the greatest karaoke song of all time.
“I’ve lived through earthquakes in California, twisters in Kansas, and hurricanes in Georgia, but nothing prepared me for working with Dolly,” Kenny later wrote.
Islands went to number one on the Billboard chart and the pair would go on to do numerous tours, TV shows and performances together, their chemistry obvious.
So was there, you know, more going on too?
Not so, Kenny finally revealed in 2015, for one reason: “She’s too good of a friend. It would have ruined a friendship,” he told CBS This Morning. “We had a real chemistry and love people talking about it. It was great to hear people talking about it and (she’d wink) and I would wink back. But we were too good of friends.”
As Dolly told People, “I knew Kenny very well. We’re very similar. We’re like brother and sister really.”
The 90s brought another fella into her world, Mr Achy Breaky Heart himself. After Billy Ray Cyrus’ number topped the charts, Dolly invited him to be the opener on her tour, the pair, “both country kids at heart” as Dolly Parton explains, soon becoming tight friends.
Their bond was such that, as Dolly Parton reveals, “There were even rumours the two were romantically linked”. Not true but, as she once told Billy, “That’s the stuff that sells records.”
When Cyrus’ daughter Miley was born in 1992, Dolly asked to be her godmother, going on to support Miley’s career, including the duo performing together and taking a guest starring role on her show Hannah Montana.
While Dolly and Carl never had children and their marriage was highly unconventional, she clearly had a lot of love. As she wrote in her memoir, My Life and Other Unfinished Business, “They say love isn’t about two people gazing into each other’s eyes, it is about two people gazing outwards in the same direction. I believe this with all my heart.”
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