Fact Check: A Renowned American Singer “Dolly Parton” Didn’t Think Or Believe Anyone Would Like Her if She Showed Her True character. Despite Her New… Read More

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.

In order to manage fame, Parton said she created the character of Dolly Parton.

“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.

“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.”

Parton said that when she’s at home, she’ll wear more casual clothing and go without her towering wigs. In public, though, she sticks to her uniform of sparkling costumes and heavy makeup. She said that she built this image based on a woman in her hometown.

“My own over exaggerated look came from a serious place I’ve often spoken about: the town tramp in our little country hometown,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “They called her trash, but to me she was absolutely beautiful.

She wore colorful patchwork skirts and pretty blouses and showed a little cleavage and had red nails and piled-up blond hair and red lipstick and high heels. She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. When everybody would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ I’d say, ‘Well, trash is what I’m going to grow up to be.’ And I guess my look is glamorous trash!”

Parton has stuck with this look for much of her career.