Dolly Parton has admitted that her public persona is at least partially a character she created. She dresses and styles herself in an exaggerated manner and relies on a cycle of jokes and anecdotes to get through interviews. In the early days of her career, friends said Parton was too afraid to show the public her true self.
She feared people wouldn’t like what they saw. “I look one way and am another. It makes for a good combination,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly, adding, “I always think of ‘her,’ the Dolly image, like a ventriloquist does his dummy. I have fun with it. I think, what will I do with her this year to surprise people? What’ll she wear? What’ll she say?”
Parton’s friend said this was all an attempt to get people to like her. She didn’t believe her fans would appreciate her as she was, so she created a character to appeal to them.
“I think the most important thing in Dolly’s life is that people like her,” a friend told Alanna Nash in the book Dolly. “Because it’s real obvious that she does not think they do. She once told me, ‘If I showed myself just like I was, nobody would like me. No one would think that I was a star.’” Parton’s friend believed the singer liked glowing attention, which was why she enjoyed spending time around men.
“This woman has been put down quite a lot, but I think most of the putdown came when she was a kid,” her friend said. “I think she gets along better with men than she does with women because she likes to be courted. She likes somebody being overwhelmed by her.
Maybe she has this dream of being able to dangle fifty men on a string. Since Dolly’s whole life is fantasy anyway, maybe she sees herself as having all these men who really, really love her and think she’s beautiful, and she can be a capricious b****. No matter how she treats them, they’ll like her anyhow.”
