Uncomfortable truth about Dolly Parton’s six-decade marriage: The lesbian rumors… moment that nearly made her grab a gun… and Jolene’s real identity

An 18-year-old Dolly Parton rocked up in Nashville hoping to become a star – and on that very first day met the man who’d become her husband. She was standing outside the Wishy Washy launderette when Carl Dean, three years her senior, pulled up in his pickup truck.

The couple were married two years later and Parton was on the path to fame and fortune – documenting it in her songs as she went.

All the drama was there: the grinding poverty in the eastern Tennessee mountains where she was born; the nine-to-five slog; and the heartbreak when a girl ‘with flaming locks of auburn hair’ tried to steal her beloved Dean.

Indeed, Parton, whose death at the age of 80 after a cancer battle was announced on Tuesday, seemed to live a life straight out of a country music songbook.

Dean died in March last year, with Parton paying tribute to ‘the love we shared for over 60 years.’ She had once declared the two were a pair of ‘old mountain goats’ who ‘will be together till one of us dies.’ And so they were, though Parton only outlived Dean by 18 months.

It is tempting to say that, since Parton died so soon after her beloved husband’s death, she never really recovered from the loss. Certainly, he was the one constant in her often-tumultuous life. But behind the scenes, of course, the truth was rather more complicated.

Dean’s death undeniably hit Parton hard.

‘She’s definitely been going downhill since Carl died earlier this year,’ a source told the Daily Mail. ‘They were married for almost 60 years. His death took a huge toll on her.’

She was publicly devoted to the shy businessman, who owned a local asphalt firm and was rarely seen at her side – but the relationship was far from simple.

Parton, the fourth of 12 children, wanted to be a mother herself, but a partial hysterectomy prevented the couple from becoming parents.

And in the early 1980s, she cheated on Dean, describing in her 2017 memoir a secret ‘affair of the heart.’

She never named the man, but she left enough clues to point to her band leader, Gregg Perry.

The end of their relationship was so devastating, she wrote, it ‘just about killed me.’

Indeed, Parton described finding a gun in her bedside table and considering suicide.

‘I don’t think I’d have done it, killed myself, but I can’t say for sure,’ she wrote. ‘Now that I’ve gone through that terrible moment, I can certainly understand the possibilities even for someone solid like me if the pain gets bad enough.’

She was romantically linked to Burt Reynolds – her co-star in the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas – but denied it, jokily replying when asked: ‘Shoot, no! Burt and I are too much alike to be involved. We both wear wigs and high heels, and we both have a roll around the middle.’ He was reportedly furious at the line.

She, however, insisted repeat rumors of infidelity were standard in showbusiness.

‘I’ve been accused of being involved with every man I’m ever seen with or worked with,’ she told ABC News in 2012. ‘Maybe I have, maybe I ain’t. I never tell if I have. But you know people are always saying that.’

A source told the Daily Mail: ‘Dolly always seemed happy and laughed at any rumors, she thought the false reports were silly.’

Yet Parton provided conflicting accounts of her situation, insisting one minute that she would kill her husband if she ever caught him cheating, and the next confirming they had an open marriage. Open, she said, merely in the sense of flirting.

‘Yes, it’s an open relationship, but not sexually and I would kill him if I thought he was doing that,’ she said. ‘He would shoot me too. At the end of the day, we love each other madly.’

The song Jolene, she said, was written due to her intense jealousy over a red-haired bank clerk who was flirting with Dean.

‘She got this terrible crush on my husband,’ Parton told NPR in 2008. ‘And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us – when I was saying, “Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.”‘

‘So it’s really an innocent song all around but sounds like a dreadful one.’

The jealousy, heartbreak and rivalry might be all part and parcel of her country music world, but there were other rumors perhaps too controversial for Nashville to note.

Parton always denied that she had for decades been in a secret lesbian relationship with her assistant and childhood friend, Judy Ogle, insisting on Nightline in 2012: ‘I’m not gay. If I was gay, I would have come out of the closet just a-flying.’

The rumors persisted, however, fueled by her husband’s reticence and by Parton’s admitting that she and Ogle regularly shared a bed.

‘Judy, my friend, they just think that you just can’t be that close to somebody,’ said Parton on Nightline. ‘Judy and I have been best friends since we were like in the third and fourth grade.

‘We still just have a great friendship and relationship and I love her as much as I love anybody in the whole world, but we’re not romantically involved.’

Certainly, she was unabashed in her support for gay rights and became an icon in the LGBTQ community for her activism.

She wrote a song for the 2005 film TransAmerica, starring Felicity Huffman as a transgender woman, and spoke out against the controversial 2016 North Carolina bathroom bill dictating that people could only use restrooms matching their sex at birth.

‘I don’t want to be controversial or stir up a bunch of trouble, but people are going to love who they are going to love,’ she said in 2014. ‘I think gay couples should be allowed to marry. They should suffer just like us heterosexuals. Ha ha ha!’

And in 2023, she condemned laws in her home state of Tennessee that legalized discrimination against trans people.

‘I just want everybody to be treated good,’ she told the Hollywood Reporter. ‘I try not to get into the politics of everything. I try to get into the human element of it.

‘I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts – all within my own family.

‘I know and love them all, and I do not judge.’