How has Dolly Parton's husband managed to stay out of the spotlight for so long? And what does
Dolly think about his reclusive ways? Keep watching for the truth about Parton's man.
After Dolly Parton graduated from high school in 1964, she did not wait too long before she
made her way to Nashville. Frankly, she didn't wait at all. As she recounted in Interview,
she left for Music City the day after she was officially done with school.
One of her first stops in town happened to be a local laundromat,
where she walked out with clean clothes and a handsome new boyfriend named Carl Dean.
"It was called the Wishy-Washy Washeteria. And so I met my husband on that first day,
and I've always joked about that that's it been wishy-washy ever since."
Parton told the publication she was "looking for anything but love" at that time, quipping,
"I had just left two boyfriends back home and I wasn't looking to get
involved because I had gone to Nashville to really get started in the business."
Whether she planned on finding love that quickly or not, it seems once she bumped into Dean,
Parton never really had a chance. In a rare statement, Dean told Entertainment Tonight,
"My first thought was 'I'm gonna marry that girl.' My second thought was
'Lord she's good lookin.' And that was the day my life began."
Reflecting on their fortuitous meeting, Parton wrote on her website,
"I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing
for me). He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about."
On May 30, 1966, Dolly Parton and Carl Dean tied the knot. The ceremony wasn't
the over-the-top sort of celebration you'd expect from the famously glitzy and glamorous Parton,
but a quiet affair with just a couple of witnesses in attendance.
The simple ceremony wasn't a matter of taste, but rather an effort to keep their marriage a secret.
Parton's label didn't want her to get hitched because they worried
it would negatively impact her image. Parton explained to CMT,
"Everyone at my label [...] had invested money in me and my budding career, so they asked me if
I'd wait a year to get married. And I didn't want to not do what I was supposed to do."
And with that, Dean, Parton, and Parton's mother headed to Georgia for an under-the-radar wedding.
The bride told CMT that on their big day, she had "a little white dress
and a little bouquet and a little Bible" and headed to a Baptist church to make
it official. While the couple doesn't regret the timing of their marriage,
Parton does feel a little regret about the way it all went down, telling People magazine,
"I never felt like I had the wedding that we really wanted."
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean hoped to become parents, but they never had children.
In a 2014 interview with the Guardian, the singer said,
"My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look
like? [...] We talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn't meant to be."
That "meant to be" is likely referring to the partial hysterectomy that Parton had in 1984,
which led her doctors to tell her she'd never be able to carry a child.
In the end, it seems Parton and Dean have made peace with the decision to
not have biological children or to adopt. She told Closer Weekly,
"God has a plan for everything and I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids,
so that everybody's kids could be mine."
She told the Guardian that she "would have been a great mother"
but she believes her career would've looked quite a bit different, telling the outlet,
"I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would've felt guilty about that,
if I'd have left them. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn't have been a star."
As with any long-standing Hollywood relationship,
rumors of infidelity have circled Dolly Parton and Carl Dean for years. That said,
it seems at least a few of those rumors aren't totally out of left field. In a Ladies' Home
Journal interview, the country megastar revealed that she once had "an affair of the heart."
She didn't say who the affair was with, but did say that it "just about killed [her]."
"How many of you go so far back that you'd remember a song of mine called 'Jolene'?"
Parton isn't the only one in the marriage to have flirted with infidelity. At least, not if her
account of the inspiration behind her famous song "Jolene" is to be taken seriously. The Independent
wrote that after singing the song at Glastonbury in 2014, Parton explained to the crowd,
"That song was loosely based on a little bit of truth. I wrote that years ago when
my husband was spending a little more time with Jolene than I thought he should be."
Parton says "Jolene" was supposedly inspired by a bank teller with whom
Dean apparently had a flirtatious dynamic.
Fueling those infidelity rumors is Dolly Parton's admission that she and
Carl Dean are in something of an "open" marriage. In a chat with the Daily Mail,
the country star offered up details about their relatively less traditional arrangement, saying,
"Men are my weakness. Short, fat, bald,
or skinny— I've had crushes on some very unusual men but Carl knows I'll always
come home and I'm not having sex with these people — I'm just flirtin' and having fun."
And as far she's concerned,
there's no shame in it. As Parton said in a Ladies' Home Journal interview,
"Of course I've been tempted. I'm married — I'm not dead."
But before you characterize them as a polyamorous couple, know that physical relationships with
others are off the table for the pair. Parton says the "openness" only extends so far, noting,
"Yes, it's an open relationship, but not sexually and I would kill him if I thought
he was doing that. He would shoot me too. At the end of the day we love each other madly."
Dolly Parton may be perfectly at home performing on a stage for millions of people, but for her
husband Carl Dean, that scenario is a perfect nightmare. And it's not for want of trying.
Per The Boot, she once told an audience about a time early on in her career where
she and Dean attended a red carpet industry event that prompted a bit of a gear shift.
Her introverted husband hated the whole affair so
much that as soon as the night was over, Dean turned to her and said,
"Dolly, I want you to have everything you want, and I'm happy for you,
but don't you ever ask me to go to another one of them dang things again!"
So this means that many of Dolly's closest
collaborators and friends have never even met Carl.
"Never met the man, so I don't know anything about him."
While some celebrities might struggle with being with someone who can't get away from
the public eye fast enough, Parton has made it work. Chatting with ET about how
she's "always respected" Dean's aversion to fame,
she said he's always been cool with her being an extremely famous celebrity. She explained,
"He said, 'I didn't choose this world, I chose you, and you chose that
world. But we can keep our lives separate and together.' And we do and we have."
Low-key doesn't mean low-romance. Both Dolly Parton and Carl Dean
prioritize doing romantic things for each other on a regular basis.
Parton once revealed to People magazine that her husband has a sweet seasonal ritual:
"We still have our little times, like in the springtime when the first yellow daffodils come
out. Even if there's still some snow around it, my husband always brings me a bouquet.
And he'll usually write me a little poem. Which to me, that's priceless."
The seasons may change, but his shows of affection don't go into hibernation.
Parton told the Mirror that Dean is an "incredibly thoughtful" person who does
small but meaningful things like making her coffee in the morning.
The gestures aren't a one-way street, either. On Dean's birthday in 2021,
Parton recreated her iconic Playboy cover — bunny
ears and all — as a birthday gift for her man who "loved the original cover."
Much of Dolly Parton's music is personal, influenced by real events or real people in
her orbit. So it's not incredibly surprising that she has an entire album inspired by
her relationship with Carl Dean. Chatting with Rolling Stone about the record in 2016, she said,
"I was just trying to think about all the different colors of love through the years.
I thought 'I'm just going to write about mine and Carl's relationship.
It's just a pure and simple relationship."
And with that, the album was called "Pure & Simple," and the songs "Forever Love,"
"So Forever Mine You'll Be," and "Tomorrow is Forever," were written for her longtime partner.
Despite the sweetness of this gesture,
Dean doesn't really love the kind of music she makes. Parton told "Good Morning Britain,"
"He likes hard rock, he likes Led Zeppelin and bluegrass music.
My music's somewhere in between. So, he doesn't dislike it,
but he doesn't go out of his way to play my records, let's put it that way."
The country star seems to take their differing tastes in stride,
commenting that his support — which he gives freely — is more important to her
than the idea that he loves each and every last one of her records.
In 2016, Dolly Parton and Carl Dean hit a huge milestone in their relationship — one that few
couples, especially those in Hollywood, manage to reach. To celebrate 50 years of marriage,
they had a second wedding, renewing the vows they'd made a half-century before.
Parton told the Mirror ahead of the event.
"It was my idea to renew the wedding vows — he is too shy and doesn't like
the commotion. But he will be glad to do it — if I tell him to […] He seemed a little
excited when I mentioned it. He would have never brought up the idea himself."
The couple held their vow renewal in the chapel at their Nashville home,
and this time around? She didn't wear another little white dress. She told Rolling Stone,
"I got all dressed up in the most beautiful gown you've ever seen and dressed that handsome husband
of mine up. [...] We didn't plan anything big at all because we didn't want any kind of strain,
any kind of tension, any kind of commotion, so we planned it cleverly and carefully."
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean decided that they will never trade verbal blows
and that decision sure seems to have stuck. As the songstress once told W magazine,
the couple simply "don't argue." And it's not because they never do anything to get on each
other's nerves, but because they've made a conscious decision to refrain from fighting.
In an interview with Amazon Music, Parton explained,
"My husband and I have never fought, we've never bickered back and forth, cause I never wanted
one of us to say bad things that we'd have to remember. We get a little pissy now and then,
but we'll just kind of walk off or go do something else, kinda let that die down."
That level of self-control, to not speak negatively to your partner when
they've done something frustrating, is impressive, to say the least. But
Parton maintains the amount of time they spend apart helps. She told Amazon Music,
"We're not, like, in each other's faces all the time. [...] There's a lot to be
said about having some sensible separation because you can't be with somebody 24/7, 365
and not want to smack their face now and then."
It was love at first sight for Dolly Parton and Carl Dean, and that love hasn't faded a bit over
the years — if anything, it's only continued to blossom. During an appearance on "The Late Show
with Stephen Colbert" in 2020, Parton told the late-night host about their connection.
"I'll often be thinking about something that's worrying me or grieving me,
and I'll pray about something kind of waiting for an answer, and he'll sometimes just
up and just say something, and it's just like, 'Well I didn't say anything to you about that.'"
"I don't know if he just senses how I'm feeling, but I have always said,
y'know, that God speaks to me, y'know, through him."
In a 2016 chat with CBN News, the songstress called the relationship "a God-send," explaining,
"God knew I was going to need somebody like him if I was going to be doing
all this crazy stuff. But He knew he was going to need somebody like me
because Carl is pretty much a loner and he really doesn't want to be with anybody but me."
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