There is no greater example of a celebrity portraying themselves far differently in public and private than Cary Grant, as testimony by some of those closest to him proves. Cary Grant will be remembered as one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, whose ageless good looks and on-screen charms made him a favorite of audiences. Memoirs published recently by Cary Grant’s daughter and fourth wife, however, reveal a much more complicated and human individual than we previously knew.

Although he was English, which is a generally pale nation, Cary Grant always appears on film looking very well-tanned. This isn’t makeup — in fact, he didn’t wear makeup very much at all. That’s his actual tan, which he maintained constantly. Besides his year-long tan, Cary Grant worked hard on making sure he stayed good-looking. He never weighed more than 180 pounds as well, which shows that his commitment to looking good was something he held onto until his final years.

In one funny incident, Cary Grant was with fellow English actor Michael Caine in Los Angeles, having a conversation outside of a hotel when a fan approached them. She only recognized Caine. After telling him how she had been in town for two weeks and Caine was the first star she had seen, the fan turned to Grant and commented on how you never see big Hollywood stars. When Grant heard this, he agreed with the fan, laughing.

You may know that Cary Grant was offered the part of James Bond in Dr. No before the role went to Sean Connery. Apparently, Grant didn’t think that the role was right for him, as he was 58 by then. Ian Flemming, who created the character, said that the basis for the classic spy was none other than Grant himself. This was based on his characters for the movies Notorious, To Catch A Thief, and North By Northwest, to name a few.

Faced with problems at home, Grant found solace in the performing arts. He had been awarded a scholarship to Fairfield Grammar School before getting expelled at the age of 13. Almost immediately, he joined a comedy troupe, performing in both England and the U.S. He landed a role in the 1927 Broadway musical Golden Dawn. This paved the way for more roles on the stage, many of which garnered acclaim by the critics of the day. Eventually, he signed with Paramount Pictures in 1931.

Once at Paramount, its executives confronted Cary Grant about his name. “Archie just doesn’t sound right in America,” one of them told Grant, who had to admit: “It doesn’t sound particularly right in Britain, either.” He suggested “Cary Lockwood,” but Paramount felt the last name was too similar to other surnames in the industry. Going down a list of potential names, the famous actor stopped at Grant, and Cary Grant was born. He changed his name legally to Cary Grant in 1941.

Although he would be later regarded as the archetype for a successful Hollywood actor, Cary Grant actually failed his first screen test. Fox Film Corporation gave him this in 1928 after talent scouts spotted him, with the intention of casting him in a movie they were making. He failed this test, though, because he was deemed to have too thick of a neck and be bowlegged. While he missed the silent era of movies, he was able to find success once studios moved on to talkies.

His first role on-screen was the 1932 comedy This is the Night, the first of a string of successful roles. He quickly established himself as a suave, handsome lead in movies such as Merrily Go to Hell, Hot Saturday, and Madame Butterfly. He acted alongside Mae West for her 1933 film She Done Him Wrong followed by I’m No Angel. She credited herself with having discovered him, despite his having starred in previous Hollywood movies. The following movies failed in the box office, however, threatening to end his career.

Refusing to be deterred, Grant’s perseverance paid off eventually. The comedy The Awful Truth was released in 1937, beginning a string of hits. Benjamin Schwarz, a critic for The Atlantic, called this “the most spectacular run ever for an actor in American pictures.” In the years following, he starred in Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, which are counted among the greatest comedies ever. He received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor for Penny Serenade in 1941 and None But the Lonely Heart in 1944.

Interestingly enough, Cary Grant never played a villain. This was because the studio didn’t want the audience to associate him with anything negative. The only exception is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film Suspicion, in which he plays a husband whose wife thinks he’s going to kill her. But in the end, he turns out not to be a villain at all. According to Hitchcock, the studio had ordered the film’s ending changed so that Grant’s “heroic” image would be preserved.

Grant attracted the attention of legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, who selected Grant to star in many of his greatest classics. These include To Catch a Thief alongside Grace Kelly, Suspicion, and North By Northwest. Just like Hitchcock, however, he never won an Oscar for one of his movies. He didn’t win a Golden Globe, despite being nominated for Best Actor five times in a six-year period. It has been noted that he wasn’t the kind of actor to win an Academy Award because he made it look too effortless.

Cary Grant didn’t serve directly in World War II, though he received the Kings Medal for Services in the Cause of Freedom. He was allegedly hired to spy on both his fellow actors and his wife, Barbara Woolworth Hutton, at the time of the war.  The Woolworth family was one of the richest families and were believed to lend support to the fascists. In addition, Grant donated his complete paycheck from two movies to the war effort.

Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, was born in 1966, the same year he decided to put acting aside and retire. He refocused his attention on the business world and joined the board of directors for the now-defunct cosmetics company, Fabergé. Although this was believed to be a ceremonial appointment, many were surprised to see a shrewd businessman. He later served on other such boards, including Hollywood Park (later Pinnacle Entertainment) and Western Airlines, which merged with Delta in 1987. He was made a director of MGM Studios in 1975.

Although he stopped acting altogether after his daughter was born, he had actually stopped appearing in motion pictures in 1952. He believed that the method acting by the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando was overtaking Cary Grant’s more traditional approach. In addition, he wanted to protest how Charlie Chaplin was shunned by Hollywood for his liberal beliefs. Despite this, Alfred Hitchcock was able to convince him to come out of retirement to film To Catch A Thief.

For North by Northwest, written by screenwriter Ernest Lehman to be “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures,” Hitchcock himself selected Grant instead of Jimmy Stewart. Even though Stewart was another popular actor Hitchcock loved to cast in leading roles, the director blamed Vertigo’s poor performance on Stewart looking old, apparently. Despite Grant being four years older than Stewart in real life, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Grant playing the lead role in that iconic movie.

During the last few years of his life, Grant would tour cities for A Conversation With Cary Grant. He would screen clips of his films in cities and answer questions asked by the audience. It was ahead of such an appearance that Grant suffered a stroke in November of 1986. He died shortly afterward and his ashes were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean. He left the majority of his estate to his daughter, Jennifer, and wife, Barbara Harris. He was worth somewhere between $60 and $80 million. But that wasn’t the last the world heard of him…

Barbara Harris may have been married to Grant when he died, but she was actually the fifth woman he married. Grant first married Virginia Cherrill in 1934, but he was accused of domestic abuse and the pair split. In 1942, he married Barbara Hutton, who was counted among the world’s richest women at the time. They broke up in 1945. In 1949, Grant married fellow actress Betsy Drake, and the two remained married for 12 and a half years, which is quite long in Hollywood.

This divorce was in no small part due to an affair Grant began with Sophia Loren, his costar on The Pride And The Passion and Houseboat, the latter actually being written by Drake. Grant’s next wife was Dyan Cannon, whom he married in 1965. She was another fellow actress and gave birth to his only child, Jennifer, in 1966. After retiring, Grant divorced Cannon in 1968. He continued seeking, however, and eventually married a hotel public relations agent, Barbara Harris, in 1981. The two remained together until his death.

Regarding his marriages, Cary Grant would comment on his difficulties. “It seems that each new marriage is more difficult to survive than the last one,” he said. “I’m rather a fool for punishment. I keep going back for more, don’t ask me why.” While that may be the case, don’t forget that he was together with his last wife, Barbara Harris, from their marriage in 1981 until his death from a stroke in 1986.

After many marriages and affairs, Grant’s friend Prince Ranier of Monaco said Grant was finally happier than he had ever seen him during his last marriage. This took a lifetime of trial and error, however. In the 2017 documentary Becoming Cary Grant, Grant says his marriage to Cherrill was bound to fail. “I doubt if either of us was relaxed enough to trust what we had,” he recalled. “My possessiveness and fear of losing her brought about the very thing I had feared: the loss of her.”

In 2011, Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife, published Dear Cary, a memoir about their time together. She said that although she had really liked dating Grant at the beginning of their relationship, she eventually noticed a dark streak. He was demanding and controlling, she said, as he told her to give up her dream of acting and to change how she looked. After their divorce, Cannon’s career did better. She was nominated for no less than three Academy Awards, despite his criticism.

In her book, Cannon describes a change in Grant’s attitude, which happened to occur after he had proposed to her. “He’d started criticizing my appearance and was agitated on our wedding day,” she wrote. “The following day, my ring finger started to swell up and we had to find a plumber to blowtorch my wedding ring off. If that wasn’t a sign, I don’t know what was.” It would be interesting to hear if his other wives had similar stories!

The issues didn’t end with their wedding and continued into their marriage. During Cannon’s pregnancy with her and Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, there were reportedly additional problems. As Cannon describes it in her memoir, “By the time I was pregnant, [Grant] had also withdrawn from me physically – which is hard because, before that, we had been all over each other. Things became polite, almost cold, between us.” Even though Grant was delighted with Jennifer and was an adoring father, Cannon reveals it wasn’t enough to save their marriage.

One of the most shocking things about Cary Grant is his use of a popular psychedelic compound, which he discovered when it was still legal. He suffered from depression and underwent many experimental sessions as part of his therapy. He encouraged Cannon to take it as well to save their marriage, although she said she hated it.  “When we split up,” Cannon recalled, “I was terribly depressed. I had a breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital – the doctors said it had contributed to my mental state.”

Before becoming a household name, Cary Grant was born in Bristol, England, by the name of Archibald Leach. The young Englishman eventually made his way to the U.S. where he built up a career as a performer. Soon he rose to become one of its Hollywood’s greatest stars, working alongside the industry greats during what is known as the Golden Age of Hollywood. Although he never won an Oscar for any of his performances, he was awarded an honorary one to commemorate his lifetime of work. However, while garnering huge success on-screen, many did not know what was going on behind the camera for Cary Grant.

Outwardly, Grant seemed confident and happy, but performing was a way for him to escape childhood problems that followed him to adulthood. When he was 31, he discovered that the mother he thought had died two decades earlier was still alive, committed in a psychiatric hospital in England. When Betsy Drake, his third wife, left him, he began taking recreational drugs in treatments with a psychiatrist. He said that due to the mind-altering drug, he “went through rebirth” and reportedly could confront his issues. When he died, he even left the doctor overseeing the treatments $10,000.

Dyan Cannon isn’t the only one who has written about her relationship with the Hollywood legend. Although she was only around for the last two decades of his life, Grant’s only daughter, Jennifer, also published a book about their relationship in the 2011 book Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father. Grant was described as quite an authoritarian figure about certain things, along with the love and affection. Specifically, this related to makeup; she recalls getting into major trouble for having some eyeshadow in her room that Grant discovered.

Grant had a reputation for being cheap, but Jennifer disputes this. “I always found him generous to a fault but he wasn’t reckless with his money, which was rather rare in Hollywood. He’d grown up with nothing and he wasn’t about to fritter it all away. His attitude was he knew he could walk into any shop and buy whatever he wanted. He just didn’t have to. That taught me the proper value of money.” That’s no surprise, as he came from humble beginnings.

Grant’s peers, on the other hand, describe him as extremely careful with money. One rumor said he was so cheap, he’d cut the buttons off his old shirts before he disposed of them. When asked about it, he didn’t deny it. In fact, he told the interviewer that he preferred to keep the extra buttons and that he wouldn’t have to worry about his furniture getting scratched if his maid used the shirts as rags. “I think it’s a very sensible procedure and should be adopted as a household tip,” he said.

Rosalind Russell, a friend of Grant’s and costar of his 1940 movie His Girl Friday, was having dinner with him in 1957 when his Rolls Royce came up. After mentioning he had one “just like it” in London, Grant remembered that Russell was going to London. She confirmed that she indeed was, and Grant generously offered to let her use the luxury vehicle. Russell’s delight turned to dismay, however, when Grant told his longtime friend to call his agents in London for the “rental fee and the cost of the chauffeur.”

Grant’s childhood was not easy. When he was only nine years old, his father had his mother admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She was depressed, and Grant’s father, who resorted to drinking to deal with his issues, didn’t handle it the best way possible for his son. He told Grant that his mother had died, although this turned out to be an outright lie. When Grant was 31, he discovered that she was very much alive. Meanwhile, his father had abandoned his son and to begin a new family with a new wife.

According to people who knew him in his schoolboy days, Grant liked to make trouble at Fairfield Grammar School, despite being bright enough to be awarded a scholarship. Teachers thought he was a “scruffy little boy,” remembering him for being disruptive and not doing his homework. This sort of behavior is sure to get a student on the teachers’ bad side, and his scholarship couldn’t save him. The straw that broke the camel’s back, allegedly, was when he snuck into the girls’ bathroom, foreshadowing a life of lechery.

It’s quite hard to spot, but Cary Grant actually only had one front incisor. What happened to the other one? It turns out that the other was chipped when he was a little boy playing on the ice. To avoid getting into trouble, he went to a dental college where they completely removed the tooth. His father apparently never noticed. Over time, Grant’s other teeth shifted and closed over the gap.

Other rumors said Grant was gay, but neither Jennifer nor Dyan said they saw any sign of this. “Perhaps he had what Virginia Woolf described as ‘an androgynous mind,'” Jennifer offered. In response to her mother’s description of Grant’s “dark side,” Jennifer noted that “She was his wife. I was his daughter. The relationships are quite different. It was lovely to read about their romance, but the details of their dissolution were difficult. Sadly, he’s no longer around to give his perspective on their marriage. He never wrote an autobiography.”

Although Grant left no autobiography or memoir, others besides Dyan have opened up, alleging that there was more truth than fiction to claims he was gay. Orry-Kelly, an Australian costume designer, met Grant in January 1925 and Grant moved in soon after. Both would achieve fame in Hollywood, Grant as an actor and Kelly as a set designer, but Kelly was actually the Australian with the most Oscar wins until recently. As Kelly’s recently-released memoir Women I’ve Undressed tells, Grant left Kelly chronically broken-hearted.

Fellow costume designer Catherine Martin beat out Kelly when she won her fourth Oscar, but he held the national record for over 50 years. He passed away in 1964, and Grant was notably one of his pallbearers. If you’re asking why it was years before his memoirs were published, it’s because they were found in a pillowcase. Until then, we didn’t have his account of when he was struggling to make it and met Grant. The two allegedly began an on-again, off-again relationship for three decades, and Grant tried to hide this.

Grant and Kelly were business partners as well as lovers, Women I’ve Undressed alleges. The costume designer would sell ties he made by hand, and Grant — then still known as Leach — would sell them at vaudeville shows backstage. The pair also dabbled in vice, opening up a speakeasy in Manhattan during Prohibition as well as a casino in Nevada. They were unable to pay protection money to the mafia, though, and the criminals shut down their operation and took their money.

Grant’s attraction to women, however, was something that was evident to Orry-Kelly. Kelly hated Grant’s attraction to blondes, yet also wrote, reassuringly, “though he always comes home to me.” Violence marred their relationship, with Grant throwing Kelly out of a moving vehicle in one incident. In one 1931 incident, after they both had started making it in Hollywood, Kelly had gotten fed up with Grant. The notoriously thrifty actor demanded Kelly return $365 for meals and boxing tickets, and the fed-up designer told him to go live with someone else — fellow actor Randolph Scott.

Grant’s relationship with Randolph Scott fueled rumors of his orientation. “He was adjusting to the mask of Cary Grant,” Kelly wrote. “A mask that became his career, a career that became Grant.” After leaving Kelly, Grant moved in with Scott, who took it extremely hard when Grant left him and married Virginia Cherrill in 1934, reportedly. He got over it, apparently, and the two men moved back in together after Grant’s marriage ended in 1935. After Scott divorced his own first wife in 1939, the two moved back in together.

Although he remarked that rumors of his homosexuality actually helped him get with women, who wanted to prove the rumor wrong, Cary Grant sued comedian Chevy Chase for implying that he was gay during an interview. This seemed to be an offhand comment to be taken lightly, but Grant wasn’t amused. Indeed, Grant sought $10 million before he and Chevy Chase settled out of court for a whopping $1 million, reportedly. It seems that Cary Grant got the last laugh in the end!

“As much as I loved him then – and how could I not as he was kind and funny and charming – I’d have to say I’d also fallen in love with his image and expected that image to make me happy, which was impossible,” Cannon summarized. After his death, “I felt so much love for him. I love him more now than when we were together — I understand him much better.” Cannon has most recently been working on a Broadway musical she intends to appear in, which will feature her ex-husband.

Dolly Parton is one of the most legendary American performers, but despite a life lived in the public eye, she has kept her personal life close to her heart. Finally, Dolly has revealed the secrets and struggles she’s endured throughout her long marriage.

There’s no doubt Dolly has and is leading a life full of accomplishments, but despite taking pride in being completely open with her fans, there’s one thing miss Parton has made sure to keep to herself – and it involved her husband.

Dolly Parton is rarely seen with her husband by her side, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been behind the scenes for the majority of her career. Parton and her husband, Carl Dean have been married for more than 50 years, but getting to that milestone hasn’t always been an easy road to travel. In her recently released book, Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton, she shared some surprising revelations about her long-lasting relationship.

Dolly Parton moved to Nashville the moment she graduated high school, and it seemed fate was on her side. The day after she moved, she happened to meet and fall in love with a handsome stranger who spotted her doing laundry at the Wishy Washy Laundromat. He was concerned that she would get a sunburn in her revealing clothing and saw fit to tell her so. Dolly said she immediately noticed he was looking at her face first, and the couple quickly fell in love.

The notoriously private Carl Dean finally shared his side of the story with regards to what it was like to meet Dolly. He released a statement in honor of his anniversary last year that read, “My first thought was I’m gonna marry that girl. My second thought was, ‘Lord she’s good lookin’. And that was the day my life began.” Dean had been driving past the laundromat in his pickup truck when he saw Dolly, and just knew he had to speak to her.

Dolly Parton was enchanted by the tall, good-looking stranger who seemed so worried about her creamy skin. The attraction went more than skin deep, however, as Dolly found herself “surprised and delighted” that he was looking at her while they chatted, rather than just her body. The”a rare thing for me,” she said—and “seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

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Despite their youth, Dolly was only 18 and Carl 21, the young lovers became nearly inseparable after their happenstance introduction. At the same time, Dolly’s music career was quickly picking up, and it seemed like she was on the fast track to success. Dolly signed with her first label shortly after her arrival in Music City, but she didn’t realize just how much she would be asked to sacrifice by the executives in order to get her dreams off of the ground.

Dolly and Carl were ready to get engaged as Dolly’s career was beginning to ramp up. Parton told CMT News about the moment they told Dean’s parents about their, “When Carl and I told his mother that we were getting married, she was so excited that she was finally gonna get to do a wedding. Because her only daughter had eloped. So she was so happy she would get to throw a big wedding party.”

As excited as both the Partons and the Deans were for their children, Dolly would have to deflate their joy when her label called and gave her instructions as to how they wanted her wedding to play out. Given that she was on the verge of releasing her debut album, the executives didn’t want her wedding to be a distraction from the work they’d done cultivating their image. Dolly was eager to please, but wouldn’t be deterred just yet.

Dolly revealed, “Everyone at my label had invested money in me and in building my career, so they asked me if I’d wait a year to get married. And I didn’t want to not do what I was supposed to do. Carl’s mother was just heartbroken.” Dolly and Carl were eager to tie the knot, and in the end, decided that they couldn’t wait an entire year before they got married. Though the affair wasn’t what they’d envisaged, it became a fond memory.

Dolly and Carl weren’t going to be dissuaded from tying the knot so easily. The pair decided to head over to Georgia, in order to keep the local media in Tennessee at bay. Parton took only her mother with her, but once they arrived, she found she needed one extra touch to make the union feel real. It was Memorial Day 1966, and the pair had been together for two years. It seemed to be a now or never moment.

Dolly has finally divulged the details of her secret wedding to CMT, saying, “My mother made me a little white dress and a little bouquet. But I said, ‘I can’t get married in a courthouse because I’ll never feel married.'” She continued, “So we found a little Baptist church in town, and went up to Pastor Don Duvall and said, ‘Would you marry us?’ We got pictures on the steps right outside the church.” It wasn’t what she imagined, but then again, neither was marriage itself.

As Dolly’s profile in the country music world began to grow, she had to contend with how her husband felt about her professional goals. Shortly after their nuptials, Carl Dean joined Dolly for an event that included a red carpet. He suited up for the engagement, but on the way home, he supposedly told her, “Dolly, I want you to have everything you want, and I’m happy for you, but don’t you ever ask me to go to another one of them dang things again!”

Dolly Parton may have been a star in the making when she met her husband, but despite her long-held dreams of fame and fortune, there was a time in her life when her dreams seemed to be no more than a fantasy. The Southern beauty was born and raised in Tennessee. However, that’s about all her life today has in common with her past. Given her upbringing in the backwoods of the Smoky Mountains, her success couldn’t have been more surprising.

Dolly Parton had no illusions of living a charmed life. She was born the fourth child into a family of small-time farmers, who would go on to have 12 children total. In recent days, Dolly has been more forthright about just how difficult her childhood was. For starters, her parents were so poor, they allegedly paid the doctor for Dolly’s birth with a bag of cornmeal. She didn’t know it, but she would have a long road to travel.

Parton and her family lived together in a one-room cabin. Dolly has been candid about the difficulties they faced, given that their home not only had to accommodate 14 people, but they had no electricity or running water. Oftentimes, the only respite the family had from the crushing stone of poverty was music and religion. It was in church that Dolly first discovered her voice, like many other country stars, but breaking out of the backwoods would not be an easy task.

In 2015, Dolly wrote a tribute to her late father, who had passed in 2000, in celebration of the ways he influenced her life. She explained how though they were poor, and her father nearly broke his back trying to provide for the family, the children never lacked for gratitude. In fact, they easily recognized just how hard he was working, and she said they’d fight over the opportunity to wash his feet and rub them with corn silk lotion.

Dolly also recalled the important of her father’s ‘dinner bucket.’ Lee Parton would leave the house every day with a green tin lunchbox in hand every single day, but no matter how hard he was working, she said he would always save a portion of his lunch for his hungry children back at home. She shared that it may have only been a bite of pie or a sandwich, or sometimes even just a piece of bologna, but the kids all cherished those morsels.

Without modern comforts that were afforded to more affluent areas, even in the 1950s when Dolly was growing up, the family had to make do with whatever they could find. There was no such thing as television in the Parton household, but the children and their parents, Robert and Avie, managed to entertain themselves. Most exciting of all was when Dolly’s father came into a battery, which allowed the family to huddle together and listen to country music on the radio now and again.

Though Dolly has made light of her poverty-stricken childhood, some of her stories are no laughing matter. She shared that in order to bathe, they’d use the river in the summer, but in the winter, it was simply too cold, and they’d have to heat a pan over the fire. Dolly shared that her siblings often wet the bed, which she learned to appreciate when it was the only source of warmth they had, though it caused her to bathe often in the winter.

As Dolly’s 53rd wedding anniversary creeps ever nearer, she’s continued to expand on how to keep the spark alive after all that time. In a recent interview, she exclaimed, “I always joke and laugh when people ask me what’s the key to my long marriage and lasting love. I always say ‘Stay gone!’ and there’s a lot of truth to that.” All of the time they spend apart makes them appreciate their quiet moments together even more.

It was Bill Owens, one of Dolly’s uncles on her mother’s side who began to push for the young songwriter to consider a professional career. Dolly recalled the time he drove her in his rickety car all the way to Louisiana so they could record a song they wrote together, called “Puppy Love” for a local radio station. Dolly reminisced about having to sleep in his car, but it seems the experience would all be worth it in the end.

There’s nothing quite like the thrill of hearing your first single on the radio, and the experience was no different for Dolly. She was only 12 when “Puppy Love” was released, and couldn’t have been more excited when she finally heard her voice ringing out over the radio waves. She revealed in an interview to The Guardian, “The radio was across the room and I almost killed myself, slipping in the mop water, trying to turn the volume up.”

Before Dolly made it as a big star, she had the chance to sing on the hallowed stage of the Grand Ole Opry. At that time, Dolly finally had an opportunity to hear some of the biggest country stars sing live, and there was one who she found particularly impressive. In those early years, the impressionable girl found herself quite taken by Johnny Cash. “He had this tick when he moved his shoulder,” she said, “and it was still sexy. It still got to me.”

It seems unsurprising that Dolly’s favors her famed over the top looks given the kind of deprivation she experienced in her youth, though some of her grandiose style seems to have been inherited by her mother. She shared that her mother’s guilty pleasure was looking at catalogs. She would say that these “wishbooks” as they called them “[m]ade you wish you had things you didn’t have. I wanted fancy clothes, I wanted jewelry, I wanted to be pretty.”

Despite the hardships Dolly endured as a child, her sense of humor always seems to shine through, even when discussing just how little they had. “You know they always talk about two rooms and a bath?” Parton joked about her childhood. “We had two rooms and a path.” She continued to add, “We’d have running water when we’d run to get it. We didn’t have any electricity. If fireflies were out, we’d catch them in a mason jar and put them in our bedroom.”

Long after Dolly Parton had become a household name, she wrote about some of the experiences she had as a child in some of her songs. One of the best known perhaps is ‘Coat of Many Colors.’ It might sound like an homage to Joseph’s famously vibrant coat in the bible, which it is, but Dolly shared that it was also a reference to how her mom would make clothes for the kids out of rags and other fabric scraps.

Despite the adversity, Dolly made do with what she could, painting her lips red with a chemical that couldn’t be rubbed off as a young child. By high school, she had climbed her way to the top of the social pyramid, given that she didn’t look all that different than she does now. With the help of hairspray and some money earned through radio performances, Dolly was already sporting a tall bouffant, which she paired with “clothes so tight she could hardly wiggle in them.”

When Dolly Parton met Carl Dean, she was dressed no differently than she did in high school, and it seemed her loud personality, the very same that drove her towards show business in the first place, impressed him. Shortly after their marriage, Dolly became a regular on The Porter Wagoner Show. Marriage seemed to be going as well as her career, a rarity in show business, but things were going to start getting rocky in a way the couple never expected.

While Dolly Parton began touring the country as an acclaimed and popular musician, her husband was content to stay in Tennessee and build a decidedly unglamorous business as a road paver. Dean never minded staying home to mind his business while Dolly was off living the glamorous life. She had told him from the start she wasn’t going to be content living life as a homemaker, which Dean happily accepted. He liked the country life, but he would show his support in different ways.

After Dolly hit it big, there was one thing she really wanted to do, which was purchase her childhood home. Though she wanted to preserve the rustic charm it held when the family lived in deep poverty, she also still thought it should have an update. “I spent a couple million dollars making it look like I spent $50 on it,” she explained. “Like in the bathroom, I made the bathroom so it looked like an outdoor toilet.”

Dolly’s success has spanned countless hit records and singles, but it also gave her the ability to branch out from just focusing on music. She’s quite possibly the only star, in the United States at least, who has their own theme park. The park itself is situated not too far from her hometown. There’s just one little problem….Dolly is afraid of riding on rollercoasters.“I’ve got too much to lose—like my hair!” she once told USA Today.

As Dolly’s career progressed, many rumors began to spring up about the different sort of work she had done to her body, namely that she was absolutely covered with ink. Dolly hasn’t been shy about her surgical procedures, so it seems just a little weird that she would go to great lengths to hide tattoos from the public. In truth, Dolly finally divulged that she did have some tattoos in hidden places, which she had gotten done to cover scars.

Though Carl Dean kept his profile low, Dolly and her sister Stella have been vocal about the fact that he’s always there when it matters. He was rarely if ever photographed with his wife, but there was one incident the pair still laugh about. Parton was doing a concert at a rodeo, and during Carl’s favorite song, “Higher and Higher,” she spotted him onstage, singing with her backup vocalists. As a joke, Dolly alerted security, who almost removed Dean, until they realized who he was.

One of Dolly’s most recognizable characteristics is her shapely silhouette. When she was asked about being teased for the size and shape of her assets, Dolly answered that in the beginning, she was somewhat uncomfortable on what people were focusing their attention on, Then, she added,  “I realized that it was me showing it off with tight clothes and stuff. So, it don’t bother me as long as it’s in good taste.  If it gets tacky, I don’t respond and that makes them look worse…”

There’s one thing that Dolly has never made a secret of, and that’s her love of surgical fixes. “I try to make positives out of negatives. I did whatever I needed to build my confidence, and when people don’t believe I had plastic surgery, I say “Yeah, I don’t look old but I have aged my plastic surgeons.” She continued by adding that all of the work she does is to make sure how much she really works doesn’t show.

Dolly’s 1980 film, 9 to 5, which starred the singer along with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda was a massive hit, but surprisingly, they never made a sequel. Now, she’s revealed why.”I was never willing to do a sequel, because they never came up with anything that was as good as the original. I don’t like to mess with history, you know? But this would be addressing the same issues, and they need to be addressed again and some more, in different ways.”

Dolly may have no plans to stop working, even at 72, but she did say there was one thing that would make her slow down, even just a little bit. She shared with People, “If my husband needed me, or someone in my family, I would put him first,” she says about her longtime love. “I’ve always put myself first and my career first, but if something were to happen to him, I would pull back on that.”

In the early 1980s, however, Dolly began to struggle with her marriage. While it isn’t clear whether or not their marriage is open, she has recently revealed that she had an emotional affair with another man, which almost drove her off the deep end. Though Parton hasn’t indicated that she was considering leaving her marriage, she said she was in such personal turmoil, that she found herself in a moment of sheer desperation considering ending her life.

It wasn’t just Dolly’s marriage that was giving her trouble around that time. She also found her normally steady career just wasn’t holding up as well as it once had. She needed to find a way to reinvigorate her music, which meant turning back to her roots. She brought it all home with “Little Sparrow,” which marked Dolly’s return to the bluegrass sound of her childhood growing up in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee.

Dolly recounts how she was holding the weapon she kept for home safety, when she heard her dog, a little French bulldog named Popeye come pattering into the room. “The tap-tap-tap of his paws jolted me back to reality I suddenly froze. I put the gun down. Then I prayed. I kinda believe Popeye was a spiritual messenger from God” she discloses in her new book. That moment might have been her lowest point, but she wasn’t ready to let go of Dean just yet.

Surprisingly, Dolly’s big hit song, “I Will Always Love You” wasn’t actually written about her husband, which begs the question, who will Dolly always love? The truth is, the song had no illusion to Dean or the state of their marriage, Dolly simply wrote it as a goodbye to the Porter Wagoner Show. The song has had three record-setting releases, making it the only song to debut at number one on the charts more than once.

Dolly has always been beset by rumors about possible romances that occurred with her costars. When she was working on Best Littler Whorehouse In Texas, whispers floated around that she had gotten involved with Burt Reynolds, despite her later accounts of how horrible he was to work with. Other famous men she was linked to include Sylvester Stallone, Billy Ray Cyrus, whose daughter Miley is her goddaughter, and Kenny Rogers. Dolly hasn’t confirmed any of the romances, and often states that they were simply platonic.

With all of the rumors swirling, it can be hard to tell if Dolly and Carl are in an open and closed relationship. She has said, “People always ask me if I’ve had extramarital affairs, and you can draw your own conclusions.” She continued, “He seems to know that I’ll be back, and that love affairs and relationships are just part of my dealings with people.” To add to the confusion, however, she has also said that she only means flirting, not true affairs.

Dolly has another secret that she reserves only for her husband: her tattoos. She has explained that while she is not secretly covered in ink, she has received a couple of tattoos over the years, but in hidden places where only her husband will see them. Given her flashy sense of style, it’s a little bit surprising that Dolly would be so surreptitious about her body art, especially considering how open she otherwise is about her bodily modifications.

Given Carl Dean’s preference for staying in the shadows, there have always been rumors swirling as to the nature of his and Dolly’s private relationship. While Dolly is known for her outgoing charm, it was her jealousy over the attention she perceived her husband to be getting that likely inspired one of her best-known songs, “Jolene.” She explained how she’d tease him for going to the bank so often, where a leggy, red-headed teller had a very obvious crush on Dean.

As the years passed, the public never knew what to think about Dolly and her ever elusive husband. New information has surfaced recently that Dolly may have had another dalliance with a different man who was in her close circle in the early 1990s. According to the Daily Mail, Dean is still angry with his wife about the alleged affair, which supposedly was carried out for six years. Dolly has never confirmed the rumor, but supposedly the tryst ended when she refused to leave Carl.

Given the demands of Dolly’s career, it’s not unusual for her to rely on a trusted assistant in order to get through her day to day life. Dolly’s assistant, Judy Ogle, has been a close friend since the girls were children, however, their closeness has caused tongues to wag. Some suspect the two women at one point carried out an affair, especially after Dolly revealed that they often shared a bed. “Why scream across the room when you don’t have to?” Dolly explained.

Talk of marital spats are few and far between when it comes to Dolly and Carl, most likely because Carl is so rarely seen in public. However, there was one incident that came up when Dolly purchased houses in both Hawaii and Los Angeles during the 1980s. Dolly allegedly became upset that Carl refused to visit her new purchases, accusing him that his refusal was a sign he was no longer in love with her. Somehow though, the conflict was smoothed over.

Parton and Dean never had any children of their own, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. In the 1980s, Dolly Parton had to undergo a partial hysterectomy, which caused her to have to reckon with the fact that she and Dean, who had been married for nearly 20 years at that point, would never have children of their own. It was a tough blow to the couple, but Dolly shared that there was one thing that had gotten them through the storm.

Dolly Parton’s career was started in the church, so it’s no surprise that she still considers herself to be a very religious person. She opened up that it was her belief that helped her and Dean through those rocky years in the 80s. For a woman who supposedly awakes in the middle of the night to pray and meditate, she claims her husband is even more religious than she is. However, that’s not the thing that they credit for keeping their marriage alive.

As loud as her husband is shy, Dolly has made no secret of his distaste for the glamorous life. “My husband is a loner,” she explained of Dean. “He doesn’t particularly care about being around anybody but me. He’s just always asked me to leave him out of all this. He does not like all the hullabaloo.” In fact, she shared that her assistant Judy is one of the few people other than Dolly herself that Carl can stand to be around.

Dolly’s early talent was recognized by both her parents and her uncle, who noticed the youngster was already composing music on a homemade guitar. Her first song was written about her corncob doll, the only toy she could muster in such harsh economic conditions. Dolly’s uncle could see her passion and kickstarted her career by buying her a real guitar a few years later. If not for him, she may never have had the opportunity to become the star she is now.

Carl Dean might not be much a traditional romantic, but he certainly knows how to show his love to Dolly in the smallest of ways. She recounts that for one of their earliest Christmases, he gave his wife a stove as a gift, which seems more practical, but is certainly to be appreciated. She also admitted that he will often leave her little bundles of wildflowers that he collected, along with a poem he wrote for her.

After 50 years of marriage, Parton and Dean decided to renew their vows in the gaudy ceremony they never had. In honor of the occasion, Dolly finally revealed that the secret to their marriage is all the time they spend apart. He’s as quiet and private as she is outgoing and over the top. She added, “If I had it to do all over, I’d do it all over again, and we did. I’m dragging him kicking and screaming into the next 50 years.” Parton’s husband has chosen to stay out of the spotlight throughout the years, stating that it was better for their relationship.