Dolly Parton met her future husband on her first day in Nashville, but she had several other boyfriends before moving to the city. When she moved, she left them behind, wanting to focus all her attention on her music career. She said she once left a boyfriend whose behavior hinted that he thought he came before her career.
Dolly Parton dumped a boyfriend because of his presumptuous behavior
When Parton arrived in Nashville, she took her dirty clothes to a laundromat. There, she met her future husband, Carl Dean. He seemed genuinely interested in talking to her, which felt markedly different from the boys she knew back home.
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about. What I was about at that moment was of course being interested in him. He was so different from the men I had known back home.”
One of her boyfriends began planning a future for them without taking her dreams into consideration. This didn’t work out well for him.
“Once I had a boyfriend back in Sevierville who’d bought me a ring and put a down payment on a house, expecting me to marry him,” she wrote. “Perhaps if he had asked me about it, he might have stood a better chance, but I doubt it. I had no plans to marry him or anyone else. I was here to become a Star.”
She said her future husband Carl Dean did something even more presumptuous
Parton and Dean fell into a relationship not long after meeting at the laundromat. On their first real date, he surprised Parton by introducing her to his mother.
“Inside, his mother was just putting supper on the table. Without any other word of introduction Carl said to his mother, ‘Fix this girl a plate. She’s the one I’m going to marry,’” Parton wrote. “With a nervous laugh I tried to acknowledge that he had made a little joke. But something in his voice told me he hadn’t.”
She said his words shocked her, but it didn’t go over as poorly for Dean as it had for her hometown boyfriend.
“First, I was shocked that he wanted to marry me, since he had never given me any indication that he cared that much for me,” she wrote. “Second, I was astounded. I remember thinking, ‘Who the hell does this guy think he is?’ I felt flattered, outraged, touched, turned on, scared to death, and completely confused. The boy back home who had bought the house was not even this presumptuous. At least he had said he loved me at some point.”
One of Dolly Parton’s former boyfriends shared what it was like to date her
Before she met Dean, Parton went on a handful of dates with a man named Bobby Denton. He said they always had fun together.
“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 in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash, adding, “She was always happy. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her mad.”
Still, she always made it clear that her first priority was her music career.
“And she was basically very mature,” Denton said. “Lived the music business, you know, because she knew what she wanted to do.”
