Dolly Parton Felt ‘Alone’ for the First Time in Years When She Had to Pull Back From Her Closest Friendships
Dolly Parton places great value on her friendships. She has known her best friend, Judy Ogle, since childhood, and built solid relationships with many of the people who support her career. When she moved to Los Angeles, she relied on a network of friends in the city. Eventually, though, she had to pull back from these relationships. She said this left her feeling incredibly lonely.
Dolly Parton said she felt alone after dealing with a problem in her friendship
In the early 1980s, Parton began spending more time in LA because of her burgeoning film career. She built an LA family out of Ogle, her bandleader Gregg Perry, and his secretary, Susie Glickman.
“Judy and I had more time for each other now with Gregg and Susie managing things so smoothly,” Parton wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “We were able to take our trips together and felt good again. We were all spending a lot of time in L.A. now. After all, we were in the big time, the movies. Susie had grown up in Los Angeles and knew all of the good places to go and things to do. Life was good.”
Before long, though, her friends’ romantic relationships began to take up more of their lives. Perry began dating, and Ogle’s partner was jealous of her friendship with Parton. As a result, Parton pulled back from their friendships.
“Now I was the one who had to pull back,” Parton wrote. “Gregg and Susie were tight, and he was also dating one of my backup singers, Anita Ball, another wonderful and special friend. Everything was going well for them. Judy was a wreck but apparently determined to make a go of her relationship. For the first time in many years, I felt alone.”
Parton said that her emotional turmoil over her friendships began to manifest itself physically.
“I started to grieve a lot and eat a lot,” she wrote, adding, “I gained weight. I started to have female problems, nerves and stress mostly.”
Another one of Dolly Parton’s close friendships fell apart at this time
Around this time, Parton’s relationship with Perry changed even more dramatically. She brought him on to work as a music supervisor on The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which meant the sitting musical supervisor lost his job. She felt incredibly about this, a feeling that only compounded when Perry quit the film.
“Gregg quit altogether,” she wrote. “He told me he couldn’t take the pressure and the B.S. of the business anymore. The joy had gone out of it for him, and I’m sure I was no picnic to live with at that time. I felt responsible and betrayed at the same time. I felt I had done all I could for him. He was put through hell on that project, though. Everybody was.”
Parton and Perry had been so close that she considered their relationship an “affair of the heart.” His exit from the film devastated her.
“I was crushed when he left, and it inspired me to write one of my favorite songs, ‘What a Heartache You Turned Out to Be.’”
She bonded with Burt Reynolds because of this
Parton was in a state of emotional turmoil when she got to the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas set. This helped her bond with co-star Burt Reynolds, who was in the middle of a breakup.
“Burt was in pretty bad shape, emotionally and physically,” she wrote. “Sometimes he would just walk off the set, unable to deal with things, and I would be called upon to go to his dressing room and try to cheer him up. That was a little like the blind leading the blind, since I was in an emotional and physical turmoil of my own. We had come to love each other dearly, but neither of us was able to give the other much real support.”
Their friendship became a bright spot in an otherwise miserable working environment.
