Dolly Parton Didn’t Think Anyone Would Like Her if She Showed Her True Self

Dolly Parton said she created a character when she became famous. She wasn't sure people would like her real self as much as her persona.

Dolly Parton has admitted that her public persona is at least partially a character she created. She dresses and styles herself in an exaggerated manner and relies on a cycle of jokes and anecdotes to get through interviews. In the early days of her career, friends said Parton was too afraid to show the public her true self. She feared people wouldn’t like what they saw.

Dolly Parton didn’t think people would like her true self

In order to manage fame, Parton said she created the character of Dolly Parton.

“I look one way and am another. It makes for a good combination,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly, adding, “I always think of ‘her,’ the Dolly image, like a ventriloquist does his dummy. I have fun with it. I think, what will I do with her this year to surprise people? What’ll she wear? What’ll she say?”

Parton’s friend said this was all an attempt to get people to like her. She didn’t believe her fans would appreciate her as she was, so she created a character to appeal to them.

“I think the most important thing in Dolly’s life is that people like her,” a friend told Alanna Nash in the book Dolly. “Because it’s real obvious that she does not think they do. She once told me, ‘If I showed myself just like I was, nobody would like me. No one would think that I was a star.’”

Dolly Parton’s friend thought she had a low self-image

Parton’s friend believed the singer liked glowing attention, which was why she enjoyed spending time around men.

“This woman has been put down quite a lot, but I think most of the putdown came when she was a kid,” her friend said. “I think she gets along better with men than she does with women because she likes to be courted. She likes somebody being overwhelmed by her. Maybe she has this dream of being able to dangle fifty men on a string. Since Dolly’s whole life is fantasy anyway, maybe she sees herself as having all these men who really, really love her and think she’s beautiful, and she can be a capricious b****. No matter how she treats them, they’ll like her anyhow.”

The friend claimed Parton had low confidence and relied on positive attention.

“With Dolly, she wants you to love her, but maybe she doesn’t want to have to give it back,” they said. “She really enjoys the adulation. It helps her. She has a poor self-image. Dolly doesn’t think she’s pretty. If she did, she wouldn’t wear wigs and rhinestones. People making over her is enjoyable to her.”

She shared how she built her character

Parton said that when she’s at home, she’ll wear more casual clothing and go without her towering wigs. In public, though, she sticks to her uniform of sparkling costumes and heavy makeup. She said that she built this image based on a woman in her hometown.

“My own overexaggerated look came from a serious place I’ve often spoken about: the town tramp in our little country hometown,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “They called her trash, but to me she was absolutely beautiful. She wore colorful patchwork skirts and pretty blouses and showed a little cleavage and had red nails and piled-up blond hair and red lipstick and high heels. She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. When everybody would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ I’d say, ‘Well, trash is what I’m going to grow up to be.’ And I guess my look is glamorous trash!”

Parton has stuck with this look for much of her career.