Everybody on the Set of Dolly Parton’s Variety Show Was ‘Miserable’
In 1976, Dolly Parton took a major step forward in her career when she became the host of her own variety show. While this was not her first time on television — she appeared on Porter Wagoner’s show for years — it was her first experience at the helm of a show. Unfortunately, it was not a pleasant working experience for Parton or many of the other people involved.
People were not happy on the set of Dolly Parton’s show
Parton was thrilled to begin work on her 1976 variety show, Dolly. Unfortunately, the experience of working on it was not what she had hoped.
“Everybody workin’ on the show became miserable,” Parton’s guitarist Tom Rutledge said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “It wasn’t organized well, and it was time-consuming. They had a lot of technical difficulties. They wanted a more contemporary show, and that’s why they chose some of the guests … It just wasn’t very classy, and Dolly could do a classy show.”
Her makeup artist, Jo Coulter, believed part of the problem lay in the fact that the show didn’t encourage Parton to be her honest self.
“Here, again, they wouldn’t let Dolly be herself,” Coulter said. “Innately she’s a very funny person … all you need to do is turn a camera on Dolly and let her go. But some of the lines that were written for her were just not what Dolly would say. But she had a contract, and she had to abide by it.”
Parton also had to abide by the long working hours that exhausted everyone involved with the show.
“Dolly needs to learn to be a little bit tougher,” Coulter said. “[There were times] when she should have said, ‘No, that’s it.’ There were times when at 10 o’clock she needed to go home, and we would be there ’til 12. People should have had more concern for her. If you’re going to work your star to death, you’re not going to have a star.”
Dolly Parton pointed out the problems she had with her variety show
Parton agreed with Rutledge and Coulter’s complaints. She wished she had done more to make the show what she wanted it to be.
“I think I would take more of the blame for the show not being what I wanted more than anybody,” she said. “It was prematurely done, and it was too time-consuming, leaving me very little time to be creative, to write.”
She said her ideas for the show clashed with the network’s.
“Plus, I think their idea of what would be a good television show for me was different from my idea of what would be good for me,” she said. “But since they own the company and since they are the ones supposedly in the know, I didn’t feel it right for me to keep bringing up what I thought. But it wasn’t capturing me the way I really am. It seemed senseless to continue something like that. I just had a different idea of what I should do. It was misunderstood.”
She spoke about the episodes she liked
While Parton wasn’t happy with much of the experience of making the show, she said there were a few episodes that stood out to her.
“There were about three really good shows — my family show, where I had all my family on, the Milsap show, and the Emmylou-Linda show,” she said. “I was especially proud of them.”
These were the shows in which Parton came the closest to what she wanted to do.
