Dolly Parton almost took her own life

She’s a pistol packin' mama who compares herself to Mae West, but behind that bubbly public persona is a dark side of music superstar and living legend Dolly Parton.

The undisputed 'Queen of Country Music' and crossover music star, now 71, has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. 

However, the Grammy winning, Oscar, Tony and Emmy nominated icon once considered suicide and said only her little dog, a Boston terrier named Popeye, saved her from pulling the trigger.

Back in the early 1980’s, Dolly gained fifty pounds from binge eating. She was stricken with internal abdominal bleeding and received death threats that forced her to cancel a tour. Meanwhile, she was struggling to get over the nightmare of working with Burt Reynolds on the film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Add a broken heart from an unnamed lover outside of her open, long marriage to Carl Dean to the mix, and it nearly pushed Dolly over the edge.

'I was sitting upstairs in my bedroom one afternoon when I noticed in the nightstand drawer my gun that I keep for burglars. I looked at it a long time... Then, just as I picked it up, just to hold it and look at it for a moment, our little dog, Popeye, came running up the stairs.

'The tap-tap-tap of his paws jolted me back to reality I suddenly froze. I put the gun down. Then I prayed. I kinda believe Popeye was a spiritual messenger from God,' Dolly confesses in an interview published in the new book Dolly on Dolly, Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton, edited by Randy L. Schmidt, Chicago Review Press.

'I don’t think I’d have done it, killed myself, but I can’t say for sure. Now that I’ve gone through that terrible moment, I can certainly understand the possibilities even for someone solid like me if the pain gets bad enough.'

Dolly was born in a log cabin in a 'holler' in Sevierville, Tennessee, a little town in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, in 1946,. She was the first of twelve children and the first to graduate high school.

Her mother was a housewife and her father was a construction worker. With twelve children to feed, it was hard times.

No television, no radio, no electricity but occasionally, they could afford a battery for the radio and they’d listen to the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville and the Lone Ranger.

Her mother, Avie Lee, loved catalogs – 'wishbooks', she called them – and Dolly’s dreams of glamour were born.

'Made you wish you had things you didn’t have. I wanted fancy clothes, I wanted jewelry, I wanted to be pretty.'

The family was so poor that the kids bathed in the river in the summer. In the winter, a pan of water did the trick and Dolly had to bathe every night because three to four kids slept in a bed and someone would pee in bed.

'That was the only warm thing we knew in the wintertime. That was our most pleasure to get peed on.

'If you kept the air out from under the cover, the pee didn’t get so cold.

'Lord, it was as cold in the room where we slept as it was outside.'

She said she learned the facts of life in the barn.

'We had uncles and cousins that were maybe two or three years older than us that knew a lot of stuff. When they would come to visit us, they’d teach us all kinds of meanness or tell us about this or that.

'And soon as we got a chance, we’d try it' – sexual things.

'I always had an open mind about sex. We all did. It was not a vulgar thing. We didn’t know what we were doin', we just knew we weren’t supposed to let Momma and Daddy know it.

'We would just play doctor and nurse, just explore and experiment.

'I always loved sex. I never had a bad experience with it. I was just very emotional. To me, sex was not dirty. It was somethin' very intimate and very real.'

Dolly won’t reveal the first time she had sex ‘because that would probably be real perverted. As little kids, we were always experimenting.'

Her granddaddy was an old-time preacher man who 'preached hell so hot that you could feel the heat.'

Dolly started singing in the Church of God where they shout and sing when she was just five years old. 

That progressed to her singing on a television and radio show in Knoxville at age ten, cutting a record at age 11 and then she made her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry.

The seven-year gig with country star Porter Wagoner on his show jump started her career. When she finally called it quits, she called him a strong-willed 'male chauvinist pig'. He sued and she paid.

She always knew she wanted to be in the music business and to be a star. Now, she had finally made it.

‘I really wasn’t bashful at all. I always had a big mouth’, she said, and with that early exposure, her ambitions soared.

She wanted to be bigger than Elvis, play the role of Mae West, a silver screen sex symbol for seven decades, but only if Woody Allen directed and was in the film.

'I love Woody Allen. I think he’s sexy. He is so cute that he is sexy.'

Sex was on Dolly’s mind when she and a girlfriend decided to check out a porn movie her first time in Manhattan when she was 21.

When the two headed to the theater in what Dolly called a 'slum area', they were approached on the street by men who thought they were streetwalkers.

One started to manhandle Dolly, grabbed at her and said, 'Come on, honey, I know you want it,' and offered money. 

She said calling him a 'son of a bitch' or 'dirty bastard' didn’t cool him down,  so she pulled out her .38 pistol and promised if he touched her one more time, she’d shoot him.

'I would have. I would have shot his feet off or shot at the ground.' That cooled the man’s jets and he took off.

It was the big blonde wig, skin-tight clothing and high heels that led the men to believe the girls were hookers.

Dolly calls her trademark appearance a 'gimmick'.

'I like the big hairdo, the gaudy clothes. I’ve never thought of myself as being a sex symbol and I don’t want to have to be a beautiful woman, like Raquel Welch.

'I want people to know it’s me when they see me coming and when they see me leavin'...

'So I figured I might as well look even more extreme.'

As a little girl, she painted her lips with Merthiolate, a deep red antiseptic first discovered in 1927 that stained. Her father couldn’t rub it off.

She made eyebrows with burned matches, teased her hair in high school and wore her clothes so tight she could hardly wiggle in them.

Those tight clothes bought her popularity in school as well as the dirty jokes she told.

'I’ve had titties since I was eight. Got mah' period when I wus nine. I jest grew up rul quick. I looked grown-up when I was eleven...I was purrfect...purr-fect for country, that is.'

At seventeen, she looked much like she does today with six inches of sprayed bouffant blond hair.

She doesn’t consider herself a sexy person and believes her voice is not great but it is unique. She’s learned to trill with it.

Dolly said her breasts are real but admits to having had them lifted.

Even Johnny Carson was curious enough to ask when she first appeared on his late night talk show in 1977 when he suggested he’d ‘give about a year’s pay to peek under there’.

There are more secrets the 5ft tall singer keeps under that sky-topping synthetic wig that she’s not willing to talk about – although she will confess to nips and tucks, liposuction, collagen injections.

No one outside of a precious few, including her seldom seen husband, Carl Dean, have actually witnessed Dolly au naturel.

She confirms her marriage is rock solid and she is definitely not gay and certainly not dating her assistant and close friend, Judy Ogle.

'We’re so totally open and free... I always call him Daddy and he calls me Mama or Little Kid or Angel Cakes. Sometimes he calls me Dotty to be silly.'

She might have an affair with another man but it isn’t something she’s going to confess to Dean and said she would die if he ever left her.

A secret 'affair of the heart' shattered her in the early eighties and she said 'it just about killed me.'

She said in an interview, 'I cried an ocean. But I ain’t gonna talk about it anymore. I’ve got to keep some mystery.'

Dolly later spilled enough clues that pointed to her band leader, Gregg Perry, as the 'affair of the heart' who quit the music business after The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Following the success of two movies, 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Dolly suffered internal abdominal bleeding that required gynecological surgery.

'Making that picture was a nightmare.'

Death threats forced her to cancel a tour and then endless production delays, fights and firings and struggles with Burt Reynolds after shooting Whorehouse.

Rumors circulated that she and Reynolds had an affair, a romance that cooled off because of Burt’s alleged black moods, sulks and tantrums. He had his dark moods but it was Perry who broke her heart and left her husband Dean to clean it up.

Dolly’s binge eating and hoarseness damaged her fragile health along with all the medication she was prescribed for gynecological and stomach problems, antibiotics, cortisone for her throat. She had her tubes tied so she could go off birth control pills but then she started to drink.

Gorging on too much food sent her over the top and a look at a fifty-pound weight gain.

'I was always just a hog, I still am. I’m short and I have a big appetite. I can’t do nothing just a little.

'It’s hard for me to love a little, have sex a little, to eat a little.'

A ten-pound gain in ten days was easy so she went on diets just to binge again.

'I like to do everything and I like to do it all the way that I want to do it.'

Always a junk food person, she said she could eat three pizzas, and loves the very smell of food, french fries, popcorn, peanuts and McDonald’s.

She still eats it all but in small portions.

Dolly’s willing to dish on any celebrity she’s worked with or met.

Her third movie, Rhinestone, a bomb, was with Sylvester Stallone who can’t sing just like Burt but Stallone was fun to work with, nuts, sick, crazy, a scream – as well as pretty to look at.

He and Burt – total egomaniacs, but Sly was the perfect balance of total ego and total insecurity.

'When he was in a bad mood I couldn’t wait to see who he was going to fire or curse out next.'

Dolly’s first film, 9 to 5, introduced her to Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

She fell in love with the little girl side of Jane, the shy side.

Any discussion of politics they avoided and Jane taught her tricks of the acting trade – looks, turns, pausing. When the movie wrapped, they had become good friends and it was hard to say goodbye.

The Trio album with Linda Ronstadt and Emmy Lou Harris took ten years to evolve and it was a hit. When the three music stars got together to record a follow-up album, it was  a nightmare with their temperaments.

Harris, was the sweet country purist, who painstakingly researched all material. Ronstadt, was the perfectionist diva who Dolly said ‘loves to live in the studio and works so slow it drives me nuts. I wanted to get a cattle prod and say, "Wake up bitch, I got stuff to do".'

With the pressures of her own business and music projects, Dolly asked for a delay in the release of the album until she could help promote it. Ronstadt and Emmy Lou said no so the project was dumped.

Dolly demanded that her vocals be mixed out of the track. When Linda sued, Dolly settled financially.

'I realized we’re now just a bunch of old crotchety, cranky women, set in our ways, going’ through change-of-life mood swings.'

Dolly has conquered almost every fact of the entertainment industry – music, film, television, publishing, theater, theme parks – all with her gimmick of what she calls beauty.

She famously said, 'It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.

'When I’m 80, I’ll have my high heels, nails, makeup, hair poufed, boobs...it’s just my life.' 

This article was first published on dailymail.co.uk and is republished here with permission.