Dolly Parton shares an endearing story about her reclusive late husband Carl Dean in her new memoir.
Parton and Dean married in Nashville in 1966 and remained together until his death earlier this year, at the age of 82.
They first met on Memorial Day 1964, the same day Parton arrived in the city from rural Tennessee, while she was sitting outside a laundromat.
In her new book, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, Parton refers to the story only in passing, writing: “By now, everyone knows the story of how Carl and I met outside the Wishy Washy, and the rest was history.”
Dean, who owned a Nashville asphalt business, is largely absent from the narrative, which focuses on Parton’s touring career.
She does however acknowledge the support her husband gave her during her early days as a solo touring act. After describing the costs she incurred paying for her band, tour bus and stage outfits, Parton writes: “Thank God Carl had a good job, because a lot of times I’d have to borrow money to afford all those things. And I had to do that for many, many years before I started making any real money.”
The one lengthy anecdote that Parton shares about Dean in the book refers to him surprising her at the Kentucky State Fair in 1978.
“Carl loved the song ‘Higher and Higher,’ and I opened my show with that for a while,” she writes. “One day when we started ‘(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher,’ I thought, What in the world? The singers sounded awful! I thought, Who’s hitting those bad-ass notes? I turned around, and it was Carl!”
“Even when he joined me on the road, Carl rarely came to my shows because he was afraid if I messed up, he’d be like a daddy watching his kid — he’d want to help me but wouldn’t know how or what to do. But he loved fairs — he loved the food and he especially loved going to the stockyards and seeing all the animals.”
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Parton hadn’t realized her husband would be attending the fair, and felt he’d “pulled one over” on her by jumping on stage.
“I thought, Well, I’m gonna fix his goose,” she remembers. “So I leaned down to speak to security when we finished the song and said, ‘Did you see that guy in the white T-shirt that was up on stage singing with the group? I don’t know who that is. You need to go hold him until somebody finds out because that could be dangerous for all of us.’
“I was hoping they would take him to jail, you know, and we’d have to go get him after the show. But when security was leading him off, [road manager] Don Warden came and said: ‘No, no, no! That’s Dolly’s husband!’”
Parton concludes the tale by writing that the event was “the first and only time Carl was ever on a stage.” She adds: “The fact that he was so into it still cracks me up to this day. The other singers were sounding so good that he thought he was too! I’ll never forget that show. And I’ll never forget him.”
Parton’s husband’s decision to avoid any contact with the press contributed to long-running rumors about the star having affairs with her collaborators, stories she has not outright denied.
“I’ve been accused of being involved with every man I’m ever seen with or worked with,” she told ABC News in 2012. “Maybe I have, maybe I ain’t. I never tell if I have. But you know people always saying that.”
She has however rejected suggestions she is secretly in a lesbian relationship with her assistant and childhood friend, Judy Ogle, telling the New York Daily News that same year: “I’m not gay. If I was gay, I would have come out of the closet just a-flying.”
Star of the Show: My Life on Stage is published by Ten Speed Press in the United States today, and by Ebury Press in the United Kingdom on November 13.
