Dolly Parton has acted in multiple movies and started her own production company. In her youth, though, she didn’t have many opportunities to go to the movies. According to one person she dated before fame, she was unable to maintain focus through a movie.
Dolly Parton was always loud at the movies
While still in school, Parton began to develop her music career. She recorded songs she worked on with her uncle and even got some airtime on local radio stations. At this stage of her career she met Bobby Denton, an operations director at a radio station. The pair hit it off and went on several dates.
For years, Parton has been a bubbly, joyful public figure. Denton said she has always been this way, which sometimes made dates difficult.
“I went with her one night to tape a TV show, and then we went to the drive-in,” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “You couldn’t watch a movie with her, because she just laughed and talked and giggled all the time. Just talked all the time, nonstop.”
According to Denton, Parton seemed to vibrate with happy energy.
“She’s got the craziest laugh in the world, and at that time, she was doing a lot of homespun humor — clichés, you know, like Tennessee Ernie Ford, stuff you don’t hear much anymore, like, ‘Don’t that beat the bugs a bitin’?’ She’d just do this in normal conversation,” he said, adding, “She was always happy. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her mad. And she was basically very mature.”
Dolly Parton later used ‘homespun humor clichés’ to influence a movie she acted in
Years after her movie date with Denton, Parton used these homespun clichés to change the script of a movie she was in. When she was in Straight Talk, much of her behind-the-scenes dialogue made it onto the screen.
“The character was one that was very close to me,” she wrote in the book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I was also able to inject a considerable amount of what might be called ‘homespun wit’ into the script. Someone would say ‘if we could do so-and-so,’ to which I would say something like, ‘If a frog had wings, it wouldn’t bump its a** when it jumps.’ The rest of the cast and crew would break up in hysterics. The next thing I knew that line was being spoken by my character in the film.”
Her parents said she rarely dated
Though Parton went on several dates with Denton, her parents said this was a relatively rare occurrence. She was so focused on watering her music career that she didn’t have time for much else.
“[She] didn’t want them very often. It wasn’t that the boys weren’t after her,” her parents said. “Dolly just wouldn’t take time away from her music. She’d break a date in a minute if a singing job came along.”
Even when she married her husband in 1966, she told him to understand that she wouldn’t let anything get in the way of her career.
