Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, were together for six decades. The couple were opposites but, according to Parton, they worked well together. Dean avoided the public eye altogether; he never joined her at events and very few pictures of him exist. Parton probably wanted it that way. A friend Parton’s said she was very protective of her husband.
Dolly Parton was protective of her husband
Dean’s reclusive nature led some to believe that he didn’t exist. Others questioned whether or not the relationship between them was purely for show. Her backup singer, Mary Fielder, met Dean. She believed the love between them was very real.
“I think her marriage is real precious,” Fielder said in the book Dolly: The Biography by Alanna Nash. “She always made it a point to say that they are very happy, and I honestly believe that they are. I don’t think it’s any kind of front.”
Fielder thought Parton was protective of her husband and worked to protect him from the chaos of her public life.
“She seems to be pretty protective of him and the way he feels,” Fielder said. “She’s sensitive to his feelings.”
An onlooker recalled Dolly Parton and her husband’s dynamic when they were in public
In the earliest days of Parton’s career, Dean joined her at an awards ceremony. He was very nervous to attend.
“I was very excited, because I’d never been [to an awards dinner] before,” she said, per the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “Carl said he’d go with me. That was the first time he’d been to any industry function with me, and it was the last. I was really nervous, but Carl was worse off than I was.”
One attendee said Dean’s discomfort was evident to everyone in the room. It didn’t help that Parton was trying to socialize.
“Carl made himself very, very scarce after he brought Dolly, and I can see why,” the attendee said. “The man was completely uncomfortable … I don’t think she wanted him hanging around and meeting a bunch of music people that he had nothing in common with. I wouldn’t say it was embarrassing to her, but he was like a fish out of water.”
Her family seemed to feel the same sense of protectiveness
Dean never gave interviews, but the press took a great deal of interest in him.
“The fact that one of country music’s most dazzling and magnetic stars (and its foremost sex symbol) was married to an almost total recluse was of enough interest that one of the Nashville newspapers ran a non-story about him on page one,” Nash wrote. “Non-story since Carl Dean had practically nothing to say; he didn’t want to be interviewed, he explained, but would gladly go sit down with the reporter and have a beer.”
Parton’s family didn’t like to see Dean as the subject of news stories. It seemed that they felt protective of him too.
“When the stories appeared, the family was anything but overjoyed,” Nash wrote. “‘Did you see that thing in The Banner about Carl?’ Avie Lee Parton asked me, so red hot she couldn’t keep still. ‘It’s hardest on Carl and us.’”
