On January 19 this year, Dolly Parton celebrated her 60th birthday, though some parts of her — two, in particular — are undeniably of a more recent vintage. As if to prove the point, the country legend spent the day at her doctor’s, in Los Angeles, instead of celebrating. “I had some things I had to take care of,” she says. “So I spent that week having, as I call it, my 100,000-mile tune-up — gittin’ ready for the next 60.” Encountering her in the flesh, you wouldn’t rule it out. Dolly’s extraordinary physique is a tribute to modern plastic surgery. “Whatever I need to do,” she explains, “if I need a nip and tuck here and there, now and then, I’m gonna do it.”
Ah, yes, we’ve been talking for only a few minutes and she has already brought it up — brought “them” up. Today, they are restrained beneath two layers of clothing and, quite possibly, a cantilevered corset constructed from the ribs of an entire school of whales. Yet they still loom over our conversation. The Parton bust has long been Dolly’s USP, and went on to inspire the name of the world’s first cloned sheep (because mammary cells were used).
“I thought that was great,” she whoops. “I was so honoured by that.”
There’s a black-and-white video of a much younger Dolly at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame, duetting with Porter Wagoner in the 1960s. Incredibly, almost 40 years later, she looks in some ways younger, like a cartoon of her former self. She’s slimmer, with a more sharply defined jaw and nose, lips of an entirely different shape, big wide eyes, a wasp-like waist and, most astonishing of all, the slender legs of a teenage girl. Her nails are long and red, and when I wonder if they’re real, she hoots: “They’re ree-al acrylic.”
We’re in one of Dolly’s seven houses (three in LA, two in Nashville, one in New York and the old family homestead in Locust Ridge, Tennessee). This one is a white-stucco, Spanish mission-style affair in a residential quarter of Nashville. Decorated with fake flowers and scented candles, it’s the hub of her business affairs, where a small staff supervise the multimillion-dollar income from her music (100m album sales and counting), her hugely successful Dollywood theme park (2.5m visitors a year), her chain of Dixie Stampede dinner theatres, and her Sandollar film and television production company, whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Father of the Bride movies. Not to mention her national literacy programme, Imagination Library, which gives 2.5m books to children across America every year, and her long-standing campaign to save the bald eagle.
The corridors are lined with gold discs and portraits of their owner in various stages of evolution, from big-haired country girl to big-wigged superstar (“I’ve got 365 wigs: one for every day of the year”), and there’s a private chapel, decorated with a frieze of Dolly as an angel, and a velvet pillow embroidered with her initials. Not that she’s a conventional church-goer. “I love the thought of God,” she says. “I’m strong in my faith, but I’m not religious. I always try to have a place to worship in my own way, even if I do nothing but meditate and rest my mind. The church is in my heart.”
Dolly famously likes to get up early, but today she has been up real early, at 1.30am, and fixed herself breakfast as usual. “I wake up starved,” she laughs. “Normally, I make biscuits and gravy and sausage — a good country breakfast.” This, she says, is a legacy of her childhood when, as the fourth of 12 children, she helped feed a large family. The menu has changed since — the family diet included squirrel, possum, groundhog and even bear — but to this day, she regularly cooks up giant pots of her favourite dishes (“Ever’one begs me to do my chicken and dumplings”) for family and friends. She’s even planning a cookbook, Dolly’s Dixie Fixins, and has plans to take her culinary empire still further: “One of my dreams is to have my own line of frozen foods.”
Right now, though, she’s keen to talk about her latest album, Those Were the Days, a collection of some of her favourite songs from the 1960s and 1970s. They include Vietnam-era protest songs such as Blowin’ in the Wind, The Cruel War, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? alongside the softer social comment of John Lennon’s Imagine and Cat Stevens’s Where Do the Children Play. Dolly hoots with laughter when told that The Village Voice called it “the red states’ most visible anti-war album”, but says firmly: “It’s not.”
For 40 years as an icon in the mostly conservative world of country, Dolly has avoided nailing her political colours to the mast, and she navigates her way skilfully through these potentially choppy waters. Does she take their comment as a compliment? “Ah don’t know. Should ah?” she asks, reverting to her hillbilliest mountain-girl accent. “Ah don’t even know what it means.” But this dumb blonde, as she sang on one of her early hits, “ain’t nobody’s fool”, and she has had plenty of practice at steering clear of controversy. “I wasn’t trying to make any real statements. I just found it amazing how appropriate those songs were, how right-on they were. I’d have written my own if I was trying to protest. I knew that they were timely — I thought they fit just perfect, just like they were just written. One of them (Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind) was about the Vietnam war and it fit so well about this, or any other war.”
Dolly invited Dylan to duet with her on the song: “I sent him a message saying I’d love for him to come and sing on it, and got a message back that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to.” She grins. “It woulda bin a big thrill for me to set eyes on Bob Dylan, but he’s an odd one. I think that I would probably be too phoney for him. He probably thinks I’m as phoney as I look. But I really admire his songwriting, so I was honoured just to get to sing his song.”
Dolly had better luck with Cat Stevens, one of her all-time favourite singers. She is outraged that the pair were unable to meet because of the intervention of Homeland Security, when Stevens (now known under his Islamic name, Yusuf Islam) was in midair on a flight to America in September 2004. The plane was diverted from Washington DC and Islam was detained, questioned and deported. “I thought that sucked,” declares Dolly. “I thought it was turr-ble, ’ cause they found out later that that was a different person altogether, and they had a misspelling of a name. They didn’t even have the damn decency to ’pologise.”
In the end, Islam/Stevens contributed his guitar part (he couldn’t sing in Dolly’s key) back in the UK and sent it over by e-mail. She also recruited the country star George Jones and her old partner, Porter Wagoner (who successfully sued her for $1m after she broke their partnership in 1974), for Mary Hopkin’s title track; and her old friend Kris Kristofferson for his classic Me and Bobby McGee. “I got Kris for nothing,” she laughs. “I love Kris. I was there when he wrote that song. We both came to Nashville in the mid-1960s, and we were writing songs at the same publishing company. I remember him singing it to me when he wrote it.” Other collaborators include Norah Jones and the bluegrass queen Alison Krauss.
Dolly says she has never campaigned for, or publicly supported, any political party or candidate. “And I never will. I don’t believe in being political. Not for my kinda artist. For me, you’re gonna always piss off half the people if you choose one side over another. I have my own thoughts and opinions, of course, and my own beliefs, but I am just not one to want to get involved in it. I even say right up front to people: don’t ask me to campaign because I ain’ t doin’ it.” So they do ask? “Oh, lordy, all the time.” And which side does the asking, I wonder. “Both sides. They ’sume that if I haven’t done it for one side, I must be on their side.”
She has, however, been to the White House to meet several presidents — Carter, Clinton, Bush Sr, Bush Jr — but says it’s just “a respectful thing to do, like you would for the Queen”. Bill Clinton, she reveals, is a big fan of hers, and Bush Jr is “a good country fan”, too. “He’s a likeable guy.” Her emphasis on the current president’s likeability may stem from last November’s mini-furore, when Dolly declined to travel to the White House to accept a lifetime- achievement award from Bush, preferring to attend the opening of a restaurant owned by her brother. “It wasn’t done with any disrespect to the president,” she insists now. “I woulda loved to have been there, but in order to have done it, I woulda had to cancel on my brother. And that would have broke my heart. Family comes first — sorry.”
Future plans include a Broadway musical: a stage version of the 1980 hit film Nine to Five, in which Dolly made her big-screen debut. She won’t be reprising her role, but has written all the songs for the show, due to open in the autumn of 2007. More immediately, she will be performing next month at the Oscars, where she is nominated (for the second time) for best original song for Travelin’ Thru, the theme song of Transamerica.
Clearly, age has not withered Dolly’s ambition. She says she will retire only for health reasons — hers or that of Carl Dean, her elusive and rarely photographed husband of 40 years. As for death: “I’d love to grow old busy, and to just drop dead in the middle of a song, on the stage in front of people, so they could say, ‘There she goes. I saw her when she went — she was a-singin’ and a-smilin’ and she just dropped down.’ ”
Those Were the Days is out tomorrow
