Dolly Parton has been with her husband for decades, and she has joked about her flirtations with other men for nearly as long as they’ve been together. She danced around rumors of affairs for years. Her husband, Carl Dean, keeps his goings-on out of the public eye, but he once called Parton to inform her that he was on a date. Parton was well acquainted with his partner.
Dolly Parton’s husband took her former teacher on a date
Parton’s career took her away from home often, leaving Dean alone. This meant that when people came to town, it may be up to him alone to entertain them. Once, while she was on tour, Parton’s first grade teacher called on the couple.
“I go to Nashville about twice a year and Dolly’s folks were always saying I should call her when I came down,” her former teacher, Archie Ray McMahan, said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash.
“She and Carl had been married a year or two then, and she was with Porter. So, I called, and Carl answered, and after I told him who I was, he said Dolly was in Chicago. I said I was hoping we could get together, that I wanted to take them out to dinner. And he just sort of teasingly said, ‘Well, now, it’s just me here by myself.’ So I said, ‘Well, you come, and I’ll take you out.’ And he did.”
McMahan found their dinner very enjoyable, and the two of them spent much of their time discussing Parton. When the singer called, Dean teased her about being on a date.
“That night, when Dolly called, he said, ‘I’ve been out on a date tonight,’” McMahan recalled. “And after he’d teased her and gone on awhile, he told her who it was, and I think she got a kick out of the fact that her husband had been out to supper with her first grade teacher.”
Dolly Parton said she rarely worried about her husband’s actions
In a conversation with Barbara Walters, Parton said that her long weeks on the road meant she and Dean faced “temptations.” She danced around the subject, but said she didn’t give him much of a reason to be jealous. She certainly didn’t spend her time worrying about what her husband was doing.
“I’m just sayin’ I wouldn’t want to pry in it,” she said. “I’ve got better things to do than to sit around in my room thinkin’, ‘Oh, what’s Carl doin’ tonight? I wonder if he’s with somebody and this and that.’”
Her guitarist she’d never cheat on Dean
Parton has fanned the flames of affair rumors for much of her career, but those who know her doubt she would ever cheat on Dean.
“[S]he’s totally loyal to Carl Dean,” her guitarist Don Roth said. “Maybe not totally loyal in the sense that a Southern Baptist would say you should be loyal, but totally loyal in her own mind.”
Parton said that even if she did have an affair, nobody could replace the role Dean plays in her life.
“He wouldn’t want to know,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters With Dolly Parton. “I think I would keep it from him. He would be more apt to tell than me. He knows I ain’t goin’ nowhere. No matter who I met or what kind of an affair I might ever have, ain’t nobody in this world could take Carl’s place. There ain’t no way in this world I’d ever lose this man.”
