Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Abelard and Heloise, Vladimir and Véra, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria: to these historic his and hers, I would add Carl and Dolly. That’s Dean and Parton, the Tennessee couple whose nearly sixty-year marriage ended in March, when Dean died, at the age of eighty-two. The country-music star released a statement announcing her husband’s death (twenty-eight words) and then a song celebrating his life (three minutes and twenty-eight seconds). Together, these amounted to just about as much as she had said publicly about him the entire time they’d been married.
“This is a love note to family, friends, and fans,” she wrote a few days later. “Thank you for all the messages, cards, and flowers that you’ve sent to pay your respects for the loss of my beloved husband Carl. I can’t reach out personally to each of you but just know it has meant the world to me. He is in God’s arms now and I am okay with that. I will always love you.” And that was it. I couldn’t have felt sadder for Dolly Parton, and yet I couldn’t help but feel some amount of happiness, too: one of the most public figures in American life was keeping private the relationship that she’s protected for more than six decades.
It’s not just that Dolly—let’s dispense with the last name, which hasn’t been needed for at least half a century—is famous; she is a perpetual fame machine. So much has been written about Nashville’s “Dumb Blonde,” the hillbilly with the “Coat of Many Colors” who worked “9 to 5” and ran “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” She’s a business mogul whose Stampede restaurants and Dollywood amusement parks entertain millions each year, a philanthropist whose Imagination Library has helped educate millions more. For my entire lifetime and then some, Dolly has been loved, revived, and revered. At ten, she was performing on a local Knoxville radio station; at seventy-seven, she dressed as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and performed in an N.F.L. halftime show. She has sold not only music but just about everything else, slapping her name and image on bluejeans, tea kettles, body sprays, disco-ball tumblers, cake mixes. But what she has never once sold, or even tried to sell, is her marriage.
Dolly met Carl Dean her very first day in Nashville. It was 1964, and the eighteen-year-old had just finished at East Tennessee’s Sevier County High School, so eager to move to Music City that she’d got on a bus the morning after graduation with nothing but her dirty clothes in a cardboard suitcase. Walking out of the Wishy Washy Laundromat after starting a load, Dolly looked up to see Dean driving by in his Chevy. “My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’ ” he said in one of the only interviews he ever gave. “My second thought was, ‘Lord she’s good looking.’ ”
“Bein’ from the country, I spoke to everybody,” Dolly recalled, and she returned the stranger’s greeting with a wave. Dean pulled over to warn the busty blonde that she might get a sunburn. He was more than a foot taller than her, but infinitely shyer, her absolute antithesis when it came to attention. The pair flirted while she switched her laundry, and kept on flirting until all her clothes were dry and folded. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about,” she said. She wanted to spend more time with him, but she was staying with an aunt and uncle, babysitting their son in exchange for room and board, so Dean had to visit with her there around the edges of her taking care of her nephew. He came faithfully every day for a week, talking with her on the family’s front porch, until she finally got a day off, when he took her home to meet his parents. “That was my first chance to go anywhere with Carl, and he drove me straight to his folks’ house and introduced me to his mother and daddy. ’Cause he said he knew right the minute he saw me that that’s the one he wanted.”
Not long after, Dean enlisted in the Army. The son of a veteran of the Second World War, he served stateside for two years during the Vietnam War, and they were married on his return, on Memorial Day, 1966, with Dolly’s mother as their only guest and against the wishes of her producer, who worried that becoming a wife would thwart the singer’s rise. Dean called her Mama, Little Kid, or Angel Cakes, but never Dolly, and she called him Daddy; the most common adjectives she used to describe their relationship were “happy” and “great.” “I hadn’t intended to marry,” she told the Times ten years later. “I hadn’t intended to find anybody, but you know how love goes. And he understood that I had to do what I had come to Nashville to do. It was in my blood from a child.”
One of a dozen children, she had grown up on the shores of the nearby Little Pigeon River, reared on vernacular forms of the epic, the ballads and folklore of Appalachia, along with the higher registers of Scripture. Dolly learned to play music on a homemade guitar and began composing her own songs before she even knew how to write them down; her first, called “Little Tiny Tasseltop,” was dedicated to a corncob doll that her father had made for her. Her family had a radio but no electricity, and even batteries were a luxury; her parents paid the doctor who delivered Dolly with a sack of cornmeal. Long before she could afford cosmetics, she used honeysuckle for perfume, burnt matchsticks for eyeliner, and smeared pokeberry for lipstick. Years later, when she started her literacy charity, she said that it was because her sharecropper father had never learned to read. “He was the smartest man I have ever known,” she wrote in a letter celebrating the Imagination Library’s continued success, thirty years of delivering free books to children before they start elementary school, “but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.”
As for Dolly’s dreams: marriage didn’t slow them down, as her label feared, but only sped them up. Dean worked for his father’s asphalt business, Dean Paving Company, and a little over a year after exchanging their vows he listened as his wife’s début album, “Hello, I’m Dolly,” made its way into the world and up the charts. The most popular songs were not the stuff of newlyweds: a lament from someone whose lover has already forgotten about treating her well (“The Little Things”), a sassy retort to a man who is running around (“Something Fishy”), and a rallying cry for jilted women of any hair color (“Dumb Blonde”). But Dolly’s repertoire was always more of a jukebox than a journal, so if the songs took inspiration from her life, it was limited; by all accounts, her marriage had already arranged itself into something that wasn’t for public consumption.
The year they were married, Dean accompanied Dolly to an event at the Belle Meade Country Club, donning a tuxedo and walking a red carpet before watching as she accepted a songwriting award. On the drive home, he told her, “I want you to have everything you want, and I’m happy for you, but don’t you ever ask me to go to another one of them dang things again!” True to his word, he never attended another awards show, and although he liked recording her performances when they were televised, he rarely went to her concerts. He never took questions, and he never talked about her career, and as for his career, no matter how much money she made, he kept on working in construction and real estate. “He’s just always asked me to leave him out of all this,” Dolly told People. “He does not like all the hullabaloo.” So successfully did he excuse himself from her professional life that his existence was a matter of some debate, not just among Dolly’s fans but even among her friends. “I’ve never set eyes on him,” Loretta Lynn once said.
Whether or not you are a partisan or practitioner of marriage, it is difficult not to be intrigued by this one, for multiple reasons. First, many celebrities ditch their first spouse—the home-town husband, the starter wife—and for good measure often go on to ditch the subsequent ones, too. Divorce is common enough for any couple, and famous people have a reputation for swapping out spouses the way the rest of us change hair styles. But Dolly said of her only husband, “We’re really proud of our marriage. It’s the first for both of us, and the last.”
Second, Dolly cultivated a sex-bomb persona that seems incompatible with wearing white, to say nothing of six decades of monogamy. She likes to say that her signature diamond-studded, hourglass style was inspired by the “town tramp,” with no top too low, no hem too short, and no heel too high, and she’s never been above naughty innuendo or suggestive insinuation, either in her songs or in her banter with the press. When a Playboy interviewer teased that “someone on the road as much as you are could sleep around a lot,” she interrupted to say, “How do you know I don’t?”
“Men are my weakness,” Dolly joked with another reporter. “Short, fat, bald, or skinny—I’ve had some crushes on some very unusual men, but Carl knows I’ll always come home and I’m not having sex with these people. I’m just flirtin’ and having fun.” Women, she insisted, were not her weakness, despite Oprah-and-Gayle-like rumors about a childhood friend who often travelled with her on tour. The fact that Dolly was apparently so faithful for so long will seem to some as strange as if Bacchus turned out to be a stay-at-home dad. “People are always gossipin’ about what a weird arrangement it must be and all,” the singer said once, “but they don’t know me like he does. The man gives me what I need, which is freedom. And love. And security.”
Finally, however much of a feminist Dolly never was or ever will be, there’s something astounding about a man so willing to stand by his wife, not even alongside her but mostly in her shadow. She wrote “Just Because I’m a Woman” in their early days together, when Dean was nursing his hurt feelings after finding out she’d been with other men before they met, but he got over it, and no matter how famous she got, he never left.
Every once in a while, the public was treated to little glimpses of the private life of Carl and Dolly. Far from the stuff of checkout-line headlines, these were invariably moments of marital contentment, even bliss. Like countless everyday couples, they took care not only of each other but of both their families, helping to raise five of her younger siblings and seeing to his parents as they aged, then buying back the homeplace where her childhood cabin had stood, in Sevier County. When Dean visited her theme park, which he did periodically to check on things, he’d go through the regular line, waiting to buy a ticket like any other visitor. They loved fast-food drive-throughs, R.V.s, and low-end motels—the latter because he could check in, then sneak her into their room without having to walk through the lobby where she might be recognized. “We don’t care,” she said, “as long as the bed’s clean and there’s a bathroom. That’s how we live.” She liked saying that he was the only man who ever saw her without a wig.
When Dolly got tired of people asking if Dean was real and if they could see a picture of him, she coyly put him on the cover of her album “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy.” One of the few stories she ever told about him publicly was one she told often: how a flirtatious bank clerk had made her feel so insecure that she wrote a song about her fear that the woman might steal her husband; the only part she fictionalized was the clerk’s name, which she changed to “Jolene.” Another album, “Pure & Simple,” was written for Dean and released after the pair renewed their vows on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The title song and so many others on that album are love songs, and so was the ballad that Dolly released last month after her husband’s death.
That new song opens with a searching question—“If you hadn’t been there, where would I be?”—which by the end has been transformed into a beautiful answer: “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been there.” It’s a consummate Dolly line, plainspoken but soaring, crafted with enviable economy: sixty years of admiration, romance, and stability conveyed in nine words. I’ve been listening to it on repeat for the past few weeks, and I find the song moving not because it feels specific to their life together but because it could be the anthem of any enduring love, one that abides through life’s ups and downs, dreams and stumbles, soft places and rocky spots. So routinely is the institution of marriage criticized from both left and right these days that we seldom encounter reminders that it can also be a transformative and sustaining force. But here is Dolly with yet another bravura performance and yet another perfect song, one that is, in the best sense, a defense of marriage. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the occasion of Dolly Parton’s N.F.L. halftime performance.
Sourse: newyorker.com
