Chuck Norris is a name that many of us have known – and feared – over the years, but what about the secrets behind the hard-man image? And where has he disappeared to now?

It turns out that Chuck’s father left the house when he was a youngster, and life was left to his mom to deal with. However, young Chuck Norris was determined to step up and become a father figure and role model to his two younger brothers.

Chuck Norris wasn’t always the lean, mean, fighting machine that we know and love today. In fact, the star was once a shy introvert who would apparently try his best to stay away from everyone.

As if that wasn’t enough, it’s said that Chuck always struggled at school. It looks as though being the man of the house, as well as coping with his step-father’s addiction, all took their toll on young Chuck.

From a young age, Chuck decided that he wanted to sign up to the police force. He eventually landed his chance to carve his dream career when the youngster enrolled in the U.S. Air Force as one of the air police officers.

From there, Chuck was deployed to South Korea where he would work out his time in the military. However, it was moving across the world that gave Chuck the chance to discover martial arts.

That’s not all the Air Force gave Chuck. In fact, his time in the military also gave him his name! That’s right – before he signed up to the Air Force, Chuck was known as Carlos Ray Norris.

Throughout his time at school, the star was always known by his birth name. It wasn’t until he was a young adult that he earned the nickname Chuck. This was a name that was about to stick for the rest of time.

Although Chuck’s time in the military helped to shape his life, it also changed it forever. The star inspired his younger brother, Weiland, to sign up to the forces all those years later.

Weiland was deployed to Vietnam where he served for four months until tragedy struck; he lost his life on the battlefield. Chuck admits that losing his brother is probably one of the toughest moments he has encountered in his life so far.

Resigning from the military left Chuck with a new question: what was he supposed to do? Although he landed a job in an aircraft factory, Chuck wasn’t making enough money to support his new lifestyle away from the Air Force.

He was left with no choice but to teach karate in his mom’s yard. Thankfully, everyone was desperate to learn the new skill. To top it off, Chuck also fell in love with teaching for the first time.

All of his time practicing martial arts meant it wasn’t long before Chuck picked up a trick or two of his own. So what better way to cement your name into the tough guy history books than by creating your very own martial arts?

Yup, Chuck Norris is the proud creator of Chun Kuk Do. It’s said it’s a mixture of karate and Korean martial arts that aims to emphasize fitness, grappling, competition, weapons, and self-defense.

As well as teaching martial arts, Chuck also competed in the sport for many years. In fact, the sports star was only defeated by a handful of people his entire career.

As if that wasn’t enough, Chuck hasn’t lost a single fight since 1968. He later went on to retire in 1974 after defeating most of the lineup standing in his way. By the time he was done, Chuck had been crowned the professional full-contact karate middleweight champion.

Steve McQueen rose to fame as one of the most prominent anti-heroes of the ‘60s. So where did this action star learn his skills? From none other than Chuck Norris, of course.

It’s reported the actor signed up to Chuck’s martial arts studio, and the pair soon struck up a friendship. That’s not all. It was apparently Steve that gave Chuck the push that he needed to break into the world of acting – a decision that would change his life forever.

Being a movie star gave Chuck the opportunity to meet fellow martial arts legend, Bruce Lee. The pair had trained together throughout the ‘60s and were now about to start work on a new movie together.

Lee had already signed up to The Wrecking Crew and knew he wanted Chuck to be his fighting partner. Chuck agreed, and the two created one of the most memorable fighting scenes of all time. The best bit? It was all ad-libbed.

Chuck’s love of karate has gone much further than anyone ever imagined, as the movie star has since created his own charity, Kickstart Kids. The organization aims to teach character values to teens, but Chuck needed some help.

It was during a conversation with a former President that Chuck explained his dreams of taking the sport across the nation. The former President was so impressed that he immediately invested in the plan.

It looks as though this was the beginning of an epic friendship. As if starting a charity wasn’t enough already, Chuck and the former President were about to take their relationship to the next level.

He explained to Chuck how he had always wanted to skydive, and chose his 80th birthday as the perfect time to jump from a plane. Although Chuck was hesitant to join the dive at first, he soon got geared up with a parachute and joined the team.

They say a man of few words is one who is thoughtful in speech. While it seems as though being one of the toughest guys on the planet might mean you no longer have to explain yourself through words, there might be a reason for Chuck’s silence.

The actor has admitted he will say nothing if there is nothing nice to say about someone. So that silence means Chuck is probably judging you inside his own head. You have been warned.

Chuck was still just a youngster when he met and fell for Dianne Holechek. To top it off, he was 18 years old when he found himself walking down the aisle with a new wife on his arm.

The couple were married for 30 years and spent the majority of their adult lives together until they eventually split and divorced in 1989. Unfortunately, Chuck admits that Dianne left a massive hole in his heart the day that she walked out the door.

Although Chuck seems to be a family man on the red carpet, it looks as though things haven’t always been that way. That’s right; the actor once had an affair with another woman during his first marriage and fathered another child.

However, Chuck had no idea about his missing daughter. Dina was born in 1964, and she reports that she knew about her biological father for ten years, but didn’t want to interrupt his family’s life with her groundbreaking news.

It wasn’t until Dina was 26 years old that she was brave enough to tell her father the truth. It was 1990 when Chuck Norris received the news that he had a daughter from all those years ago.

Could this be another person hoping for their shot at fame by claiming they have celebrity parents? It seemed not. In fact, Chuck stated that he knew Dina was his daughter from the first moment they met.

Chuck believed he would never find a love that made him want to marry again. That was, until he met and fell for Gena O’Kelley. The couple dated for some time until Chuck decided it was time to make it official.

The actor only had four days of vacation at Thanksgiving and asked Gena if she could plan a wedding in six weeks. The model replied that she hadn’t said “Yes” yet, and Chuck remembered to pop the question officially.

The couple tied the knot in 1998 and welcomed twins in 2001. However, their arrival was about to throw a wrench in the works. Chuck decided that he no longer had the time in his schedule to continue filming, as well as raise a family.

Therefore, the newborns were all the excuse Chuck needed to put an end to the show Walker, Texas Ranger. His fans were devastated, and it was the beginning of Chuck’s disappearance from the limelight.

Many were devastated to see Walker, Texas Ranger come to an end – let alone the crew who had all worked on the show for many years. However, they might have been closer than we imagined.

In fact, Chuck’s brother, Aaron, was one of the many who got the chance to direct four episodes of the show. To top it off, his son Mike directed five episodes, while his other son, Eric, was the director of a whopping 17 episodes!

Gena and Chuck first met in a sushi restaurant after one of Chuck’s close friends introduced the pair. The actor has admitted that he had no idea what to say to Gena at first but knew he already had strong feelings for his future wife.

The couple has been together ever since. Unfortunately, their relationship was going to get put to the test in 2013 after it was revealed that the former model needed to undergo several medical tests.

Gena was soon booked in for a scan to see if she had developed rheumatoid arthritis. All she needed to do was have an MRI scan with a simple injection to see the results of the scan clearer.

Everything seemed simple. That was until the substance was injected into Gena, who later confessed it felt “As if acid had been passed through” her entire body. It looked as though she was having an adverse reaction to the injection.

Gena was about to spend the next five months in the hospital as she needed 24-hour nurse care. The former model was also hooked up to an IV at all times in a bid to save her life.

It was this moment that changed Chuck’s life forever as he abandoned his acting career to focus on his family. The star then spent every night sleeping on a couch at the hospital as he didn’t want to leave Gena alone.

Things got worse and worse for the couple as Gena’s health continued to deteriorate. Thankfully, the former model has been able to claim a portion of her previous life back and has since been discharged from the hospital.

It was in 2017 that both Gena and Chuck decided they wanted to get justice for the actions of the hospital. Chuck is now putting all of his effort towards getting Gena the compensation she deserves for her troubles.

The pair believes that it was a metal known as gadolinium that was in the injection that was the cause behind all of Gena’s issues. Gena and Chuck feel as though they weren’t properly warned or educated about the substance the hospital would be using, and they could have prevented the entire reaction.

So far, the couple confesses they have spent more than $2 million on Gena’s health bills, and want $10 million in compensation for the event.

Gena has since been left with several medical issues that have changed her life forever. Chuck is determined to change the medical laws surrounding his wife’s treatment. However, that’s not all.

Chuck also hopes to improve everyone’s entire outlook across the nation. The star hopes that all the hate in the U.S. will one day come to an end as he regularly gets bothered by the conflict happening in the world. Perhaps he’s more about peace than war, after all?

Dolly Parton is one of country music’s most beloved stars. Her success can be seen as emblematic of the American Dream, given her rural upbringing in a large family with little means in the mountains of Tennessee. One of Dolly Parton’s lesser known accomplishments, however, is her long-lasting marriage to the ever elusive Carl Dean. Their love story is far from unusual, except for the part where she’s a public figure, and he seemed to lead a mundane life away from the spotlight. Somehow, they’ve figured out a way to keep their relationship going. After years of speculation, Dolly is finally opening up about the secret to their success.

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 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.

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 “rare thing for me,” she said—and “seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

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.

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 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.

There’s no doubt Dolly has always, and still is leading a life full of accomplishments, both personal and professional, that she can definitely be proud of.

But despite taking pride in being completely open with her fans, there’s one thing miss Parton has made sure to keep to herself. This involved her husband, and it’s something that many fans, and even people she knows personaly, may be surprised by.

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 engagement.

“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.”

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.

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.

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 roller coasters.“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Dolly revealed that her husband has some interesting thoughts about Jennifer Aniston. She claims he is one of his favorites and is so obsessed with her that Dolly believes he fantasizes about them. Aniston was stunned to hear the claim but was flattered none the less.

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.

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.”