Back home—in Sevier County, Tennessee—everybody knew this particular Parton girl as well, not only because little Dolly was what they used to call an early bloomer, but also because from the age of eight, she liked “to paint herself up just like a harlot,” very imaginatively employing kitchen flour for face powder, burned matches for eyeliner, wet crepe paper for eye shadow, Mercurochrome for lipstick, and crayons for rouge. And despite the fact that her grandfather was a hellfire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher, when little Dolly was nine, her fascination with feminine artifice even led her to sin. While on a class field trip to a supermarket, she shoplifted a tube of bright red lipstick. “I’m not a thief, but I smelled that lipstick, and I saw that lipstick, and I could not resist.”
The inspiration for Parton’s precocious preoccupation? “When I was little, I didn’t know what a whore meant or a tramp. But there were these three women in town, and I thought they were beautiful. Especially this one. She had this beautiful blond hair, red fingernails, high-heeled shoes, and hose with the seam up the back. And she’d walk the streets every Saturday. And then the guys would pick her up. And in my mind, as a little kid, that’s how I wanted to look. I have always said that honestly and truly I have patterned my look after the town tramp.”
Celebrating her forty-eighth birthday this month, Parton still adheres to the same basic love-for-sale look. In fact, with her platinum bouffant, fluttering false eyelashes, and flashy clothes custom designed by her personal dresser to showcase her gravity-defying and, consequently, much speculated-upon breasts, she is almost indistinguishable from the women who stroll Sunset Boulevard after sunset, a few blocks north of her house. Almost indistinguishable because, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone with their rendition of pumped-up machismo, Parton carries her busty blond bimbo to the point of parody. The difference, of course, is that Parton makes it clear that she’s in on the joke—by grinning, giggling, and guffawing, by slapping her Lycra-encased thighs over her own risqué repartee. A few years back, at a birthday party for a close gay friend, for example, Parton presented the birthday cake to the blushing birthday boy with the arch directive, “Give it your best blow job.” More recently, one of k.d. lang’s gender-bending public antics inspired Parton to howl with delight, “That took some balls.”
More Mae West than Marilyn Monroe, more RuPaul than Madonna, Parton’s bawdy, wink-and-a-smile style effectively defuses the very sex bomb her appearance initially sets off. She’s all show and no go, in other words. Or as the guys in junior high school used to say, “She’s advertising, but she’s not selling.”
Also disarming, of course, is Parton’s candor. A single example will suffice: Asked why her 1987 ABC variety show, Dolly, was canceled after one season, Parton replied without hesitation, “Because it sucked.”
The disparity between appearance and reality—between the bad girl Parton appears to be and the good ol’ girl Parton is—has rarely been so extreme. Or so freely acknowledged. “You don’t have to be a whore to wear a whore’s makeup,” she says. “Some people who are so refined and so conservative are the biggest tramps in the world. I’ve always said it was more important to be natural than to look natural.” After noting the somewhat obvious fact that “makeup has been like a big, big part of my life,” Parton obligingly retraces, step by step, the daily regimen required to create the look she loves: “I always start with foundation to even the splotches out and stuff. Then I use the powder next, then I work on my eyes—I wear false eyelashes, ’cause they just open your eyes more—then I put on the shadows, then I curl the eyelashes and put on the mascara, then I do the eyebrows, then I put on my cheeks, then I do my lip liner, then I fill in with whatever color I’m wearing that day, then I touch a little mascara on my natural beauty mark—otherwise it looks like a pimple—throw on a wig, put on some cheap, stretchy bodysuit … and here I am.” Although Parton prefers to have an hour to run through her routine, she claims that after all these years she’s got it down to 30 minutes—pat-shower to showtime.
