Believability is everything in entertainment, but we all know better than to believe what we see. Take the life of Dolly Parton, whose many famous quotes include, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
The NBC movie Coat of Many Colors—named for the iconic
autobiographical song about Parton’s impoverished Appalachian
girlhood—aired last night, and it is full of faith, folksy wisdom, and
holiday cheer (Dolly introduces the film from Dollywood in red velvet
bodysuit and a sled). It’s also wildly different from the story Parton,
who built an empire around being uncommonly open, has told about her
actual childhood. Coat of Many Colors leaves out a whole lot of the good
stuff—which is to say the bad stuff. As she sings on “In the Good Old
Days (When Times Were Bad)” from the late 60s: “No amount of money could
pay me / To go back and live through it again.” And she doesn’t go back
and live through it, instead presenting an audience with a shrewd and
boringly edited version of her genuinely incredible life story. Why
would a woman who has made a career of honest unburdening herself
through song omit the most interesting parts of her growing up from her
life story, in favor of a bizarre, lazily religious, heavily altered
account? (An undoubtedly, unabashedly spiritual woman, she has declared
herself “certainly not a Christian” in interviews.)
Here’s a few scenes from Parton’s life, as recounted in past interviews and taken from her 1994 autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business,
that we don’t get in the NBC movie, but that sure would have made the
movie a lot more fun, and maybe even a little sweeter, if you can
imagine:
Dolly and her sisters singing in the middle of an ecstatic
evangelical church service, only to see, mid-song, the preacher pull out
handfuls of poisonous snakes, and her daddy busting in and stopping the
whole service, yelling, “You get them Goddamn snakes away from my
kids!”
Winning $250 in a greasy-pole climbing contest,
and buying her family’s first television set so they could see her
perform on local television. (And her father getting rid of the
television when the neighbors refused to leave the screen.)
Dolly as a girl telling her mama she was gonna buy her “diamonds as big as biscuits” when she was famous.
Dolly adding “dirty drawings” to the graffiti on the walls of her grandpa’s church.
Just
a little older than she is portrayed in the movie, Dolly nearly drops
out of high school, after classmates spread a rumor that she has been
gang raped.
At her high-school graduation, declaring
“straightforwardly” that she was “going to Nashville to become a star,”
and getting laughed off the stage . . . all the way to the bus station.
It’s important to draw a distinction between Dolly Parton the brand
and Dolly Parton the artist (which is not a bad thing if you’ve ever
enjoyed or been appalled by an afternoon at Dollywood or the Dixie
Stampede and then gone home to swoon over “Jolene”), but she’s able to
succeed as a brand now because she was an artist with whom people feel a
heartfelt connection first and foremost. (And she still is releasing
acclaimed and moving music.)
It is her openness as a songwriter, a performer, and as a woman that
has made her beloved over five decades. She’s more in charge of her own
image than any artist or performer probably ever. Her omission of
perceived childhood wickedness (in her autobiography and in interviews,
“horny” is a frequently and joyously dropped description of herself) and
recoloring her childhood to be appropriate for a prime-time Christmas
movie is as calculating a business move as when, still an unknown
artist, she refused to sign over publishing rights to “I Will Always
Love You” when Elvis came calling.
The queen of country, as she was once called on the cover of Playboy
(mostly clothed), has set the standard for celebrity control of their
own images. What started out as an integral move in keeping artistic and
professional integrity (especially for a woman whose body has been so
readily, often cruelly objectified and joked about) has perhaps gone a
little too far: such a tight grasp on an image that appeals to a
church-going, CD-buying audience has, certainly in Coat of Many Colors, strangled the harsh, human, sinful, and complicated life that shaped the woman who has inspired so many.
In her autobiography, Dolly offers an anecdote about her mama having
all of the Buddha statues her decorator bought relocated from the house
to the lawn—no “false idols” in the house of any of her kids. Dolly has
become an idol herself, and she has most definitely had several lives,
from a child performer to a cultural icon whose lyrics are now more
often flipped to objectify the men who once objectified her. (“Romeo” is
not her greatest song, but Taylor Swift’s #girlsquad
inspiration could very well have come from that music video, where Dolly
and a host of other famous women artists ogle Miley Cyrus’s dad’s butt). Dolly told Barbara Walters just after her first million-selling crossover album, Here You Come Again,
that she wanted “to be able to walk in any place and say, Well, there’s
Dolly Parton. Be known by the people. I want to be a star. A universal
star.” She has done that, but can’t a star still be a person?
Walters ends her Special by asking Parton to complete the
“fairy tale” of her own life. Parton gives a deceptively simple reply:
“She worked hard and dreamed a lot and one day it came true and she was a
fairy princess and she lived happily ever after.” Her autobiography
begins, if you can believe it, “Once upon a time . . . “ and she has
achieved a level of almost-supernatural success. Porter Wagoner, years
after their famously bitter professional spit, their brief reunion, and
then further estrangement, offered up on a mid-80s Country Music
Television program, titled Greatest Country Feuds, “Dolly wants
to do everything that is possible for her, but she lives in a fairy
land.” I wonder if he ever made it to Dollywood.
Chet Flippo, a friend of Dolly’s and the author of the wonderful 1977 Rolling Stone
profile in which he describes her as an “angelic, creamy-skinned,
honey-wigged, golden-throated, flashing-eyed, jewel-encrusted,
lush-bodied, feisty enchantress,” discloses that “Dolly did not have a
happy childhood and she seems continually destined to rewrite it.” Coat of Many Colors
is only the first of four NBC movies about her life. I hope in the next
one, there is room for the human Dolly alongside the self-made legend,
but maybe that’s best saved for her songs. When you’re a universal star,
the prototype of modern celebrity, your life can be whatever you dream.
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