What kind of movie star was Dolly Parton? Brief, for one: Five movies in a dozen years. That’s a number I had to check because surely the correct proportion is a dozen in five. But no, at her Hollywood peak, that’s just how outsize she is in memory: more of her than there actually ever was.
Parton had just what you need for movie stardom. Control. Of a plot, but also of a persona. Didn’t matter what the character did — secretary, brothel madam, hairdresser, radio show host, shock absorber for the bench-press singing of Sylvester Stallone — the women she played knew who they were, knew their value and knew it was worth nothing if they couldn’t spread the wealth.
I don’t know how she learned her lines, but Parton always made sure they came out true to her, that they sounded like the truth, whether it was wisdom or a joke. Nobody in movies talked the way she did, with a stagy candescence. “You know what burns my ass?” she asks Burt Reynolds in their popular 1982 musical comedy “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” “A flame about three feet high.” Gotcha, Burt.
Parton was a terrific movie star that way — like Mae West or Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli or Bette Midler or Cher. If a movie had them, it had no choice but to flaunt them, these vocalists who never ceased to amuse themselves, oddballs who nonetheless found themselves sexy, stars who could make a kind of sex essential to the comedy. Stars who couldn’t disguise what they felt because, as very different singers, feeling is their currency. Makes sense that of all the down-home godheads Parton could’ve played in “Steel Magnolias” (1989), she wound up with Truvy, the one whose name sounds most synonymous with “candor.”
Little about Parton made obvious sense. Petite but bodacious, kind and then canny. A woman of the lord and the loins. Artificial yet mood-liftingly, gravity-defyingly herself. Those of us who lament the abuse of “authentic” as a descriptor of both personalities and salads weep because Parton put that word out of business decades ago. All we should discover on its dictionary page is her photo.
In it, she’d surely be smiling. That smile is the reason we’ve been a wreck in the wake of her death. That smile felt permanent. It seemed profoundly meant. It was the capstone of her distinctly piquant Americanness, proof that life is worth the living, that she couldn’t be sunk, that, as a poor girl from rural Tennessee, she could’ve been somewhere else, but instead, she worked and worked to get here. “If you see somebody without a smile, give ’em yours,” she chirps to Reynolds one night in that brothel movie.
Setting aside her string playing, that pluck couldn’t always be detected in the songs. What Parton’s honeyed, drawling soprano often conveyed was unvarnished ache, even during her glorious, latter-period bluegrass era. But at the movies, the glass was always half full. The smiling could culminate in chew-toy squeals of amusement. A Dolly Parton squeak is the opposite of nails on a chalkboard — it’s nails on the back. Look at her, sexually harassing Dabney Coleman’s Mr. Hart to tears during a weed-induced fantasy in “9 to 5,” from 1980. The pot lets Doralee, her character, reverse role-play a harassment scenario we’d have watched her resist, in reality, with blithe consternation. But the comedy of the fantasy comes from how naturally and pleasingly revenge suits her. She luxuriates in comeuppance.
“9 to 5” was her first film, and there’s a world in which the title song she wrote for the opening credits is the real star. But she and Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin help take this strange, exuberant movie (feminist anthem, stoner flick, office comedy, sex farce) to some harmonious sororal realm. And Parton’s joy is the emotional sealant. If she’s there, even when their schemes fail, everything will still somehow work out. You’re not rooting for people, per se, you’re rooting for friendship. And nobody leaves “9 to 5” — or “Steel Magnolias,” for that matter, which is all but built around Truvy’s beauty salon — thinking anything other than Dolly Parton is the best friend.
Once, in the late 1970s, in an interview with a vividly skeptical Barbara Walters, Parton was forced to defend her cosmetic self-construction. (“I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable,” Parton tells Walters she’s always been fond of saying.) In the movies that authenticity was expressed as a refusal to desist, as owning how she looked. Normally, a star acts and we come to watch. The way it worked with Parton is she’d act and we’d ogle. When she and Fonda meet in “9 to 5,” Fonda finds herself stealing glances at Parton’s chest, patting her more modest breasts as she walks away, checking for them. But I always interpret that moment as proof of how it must have felt to encounter this radiant, beaming, ethereally earthen woman. Ostensibly, Fonda’s comparing cup sizes. She’s also checking to see if her heart can begin to measure up.
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