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The great privilege of my kind of journalism is to get the chance to meet extraordinary people – some famous, many not – and very occasionally that person is beyond extraordinary. Dolly Parton, you may not be surprised to learn, was one of them. I’ve only come across it a handful of times. It has nothing to do with extreme fame – I’ve met plenty of A-listers who are dead behind the eyes. It’s not charm or extroversion either, nor beauty, and it’s not what we’d call “star quality” because it’s less showy than that. It’s almost indescribable, but “luminous” probably comes closest. I think it’s partly innate – God-given, Parton might have said – but it also comes from living with humility, gratitude and humour. Parton was luminous, and it wasn’t just the rhinestones.
The cliche that you should never meet your heroes because you’ll only be disappointed only stands if you think famous people have somehow transcended the deep character flaws that make the rest of us human. Everyone has off days, or off years. Still, I’d been slightly dreading interviewing Parton. The machinery that surrounds a superstar interview – the holding rooms, the allotted time slots, the officious publicists – is designed to be intimidating, and it was all present on that autumn day in 2023. And then it was just Parton and me in a London hotel room, borderline uncomfortably close on a sofa, but unusually, no publicist sitting in, taking notes.
She was funnier than I expected, and warmer. Parton’s artifice – the look, the folksiness, the ready quips – was clearly part of her armour. You can deflect any tricky question, or criticism, with a well timed boob joke. But somehow it didn’t feel fake. It was her creation, but it was still her. I had no illusions I’d get to the real Parton, whatever that was, in our hour together – she even went to bed with her makeup on, she said, because she didn’t want to go to bed “looking tacky” for her husband.
Certain things don’t make it into interviews because written down they look trite, or lose power, but re-reading my transcript, I think I underestimated how spiritual Parton was. “You need to believe in something bigger than yourself,” she said. “You need to believe in at least a higher power, the higher wisdom, whether you call it nature or whatever, to get you out of yourself.” She would often break into reciting her lyrics (“Whatever you are, be that / Whatever you do, do that / Everything else is just an act”) which, in person, felt like being preached to by a beatific being.
She could deal, with humour and grace, with the sort of questions other celebrities – or at least their PRs – would throw you out for. Had she or her husband had affairs? “If there [were], we don’t know about it.” Had she ever been tempted? “I didn’t say I’d never been tempted,” she said with a laugh. “I said I’m married, not dead. Nor blind.” We were meeting partly to discuss her book about fashion, and she’d written about partying at Studio 54: how many drugs had she taken? Nothing hard, she said. “I don’t really want anything to change me. I don’t want to mess with my brains.” It didn’t make my piece – even with follow-up questions, her deflection was too practised, her answers too opaque. It’s more an illustration that she was game.
The only thing that was off-limits was her politics. Much as I admired her, I thought this was Parton’s weak spot. Her apolitical stance seemed, to me, about protecting her career, her money. If you’re political, she said, “you’re gonna lose half your audience. I’ve got as many Democrats, as I do Republicans as fans, and I’m not going to insult any of them because I care about all of them.” It was the same reason she didn’t describe herself as a feminist, she said – she didn’t want to alienate men.
I needled her (she remained good-humoured) because it seemed a cop-out – this was 2023, and life had become frightening and intolerable for many people. Tennessee, her home state, had not long banned abortion in almost all cases. At what point does silence, given her platform, start looking like complicity? “I have my own opinion about everything,” she said, “but I don’t have to march in the streets for it, I don’t have to insult other people for it. I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite. I think it makes me a loving, caring human being.”
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Three years on I’ve softened towards Parton’s refusal to add to the noise, to label herself, to take sides, to inevitably alienate and polarise and condemn. Deeds not words. Parton’s deeds – living as a feminist, if not calling herself one, and her philanthropy, and of course her music – speak for themselves. I had it for an hour in that hotel room, just the hack who happened to be chosen for that assignment, but we were all lucky to be touched by Parton’s light.
