Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner worked closely together in their years of collaboration. They spent a significant amount of time traveling and recording together. They got to know each other well, and Wagoner said that some of what he learned surprised him. Though Parton seemed confident, Wagoner said he found she was quite insecure.

Porter Wagoner said Dolly Parton was insecure

Parton appears to be confident and self-assured. She is able to get up on stage and command the attention of audiences, and has starred in films. Wagoner thought she was insecure, though.

“I soon found out that she was actually an insecure person — in the way she looked, in the way she was brought up, in every direction,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. 

He believed that she was particularly insecure about her looks, and thought this was why her appearance is as dramatic as it is.

“Believe it or not, Dolly never used to think she was a beautiful woman, though of course she was,” he said. “I feel sure that’s a main reason she wears the big hair-dos.”

Wagoner recalled a time when Parton cried because he knocked one of her wigs off his head.

She admitted to feeling that way sometimes 

Parton has admitted to feeling insecure about her looks throughout her life.

“The quest for beauty has always been a struggle for me,” she wrote in the book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.

She said that this was an insecurity born in her childhood.

“I can’t remember wrote ever saying that I was one of the more beautiful children they had ever seen,” she continued. “I was a pale, skinny little thing with corn teeth and hair that was fine and close to my head. And there were those hated freckles. You could not have said I was as ‘cute as a speckled pup’ without expecting the speckled pup to [pee] on your leg out of resentment.”

She said that her wigs and makeup are part of her desire to look like the “town tramp” from her childhood, though, not insecurity.

Porter Wagoner later spoke disparagingly about Dolly Parton

Wagoner was once close enough to Parton to recognize her insecurities. After they ended their partnership, though, he started resenting her. He believed she deeply betrayed him by leaving his show.

“I don’t know why she did it,” he said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “And that’s the thing. I can’t understand why a person with any kind of background and any kind of soul would be afraid to tell a person that. Because I feel that’s something I should know, why it happened. And until now, I don’t know. It’s a heavy thing for you to have that much of your life wrapped up in a certain area and spend as much time and as much energy in the production of records, then all of a sudden see it crumble and not know why.”

He ultimately sued her for $3 million.