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When Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner started working together, rumors began to fly that they were having an affair. Parton said that people even thought she and Wagoner were a married couple. This wasn’t true; she married her husband, Carl Dean, before she joined the show. Still, Wagoner anticipated the rumors and had to talk to Dean about them.
Porter Wagoner talked to Dolly Parton’s husband about the rumors about them
When Wagoner and Parton first met, he knew at the end of their meeting that he would invite her to join his show.
“The deciding factor was her bein’ the type of person she is,” he said, per the book Smart Blonde by Stephen Miller. “It wasn’t necessarily because she’s a beautiful girl, which she is or because she sings good, which she does. It was because she had the type of personality I could sell to people on television and in person.”
Still, he told Parton he still wasn’t sure. He told her they should meet again, this time with her husband. Dean and Wagoner got along well, even through a relatively awkward conversation. Wagoner told Dean that people would undoubtedly speculate that he and Parton were romantically involved.
“We all agreed we didn’t want that to happen,” he said.
Ultimately, though, they were not able to avoid the rumors. They started up because of Wagoner and Parton’s chemistry, and the romantic duets they sang.
Dolly Parton said the rumors about Porter Wagoner never bothered her husband
According to Parton, Dean handled the rumors with aplomb.
“If they want to think I was livin’ with Porter, I’ve just come to the conclusion that they can think that,” she said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “Those stories never bothered Carl. We love each other. We always have; we always did.”
She didn’t think she ever could have gotten away with a full-blown affair. She didn’t think she could lie to Dean in that way.
“You know yourself you couldn’t live with a person and love em and not know if there was somethin’ else, somebody else that was takin’ away from that,” she said, adding, “You can’t fake a feelin’. You can for awhile, but you couldn’t for seven years, you know. Like I say, it was straight between my husband and me. We always knew. Porter always knew.”
She acknowledged that he could be in love with her
Parton said she never had romantic feelings for Wagoner. While there was love between them, her feelings for him were platonic. Some people believed that Wagoner’s feelings skewed more romantic.
“The main reason Dolly had such a hard time disentangling herself from Porter is because he was in love with her,” a journalist told Nash. “Porter was really torn up over losing Dolly. Really torn up. Because he really did love her, and I don’t think he’d ever been in love with anyone but himself. And about Carl Dean, well, you know Porter was the main man in Dolly’s life all the years she was with him.”
Even Parton acknowledged that Wagoner could have felt that way about her.
“Maybe he was in love with me,” she said. “But it was a love of its kind. It was not a love that could ever be shared, if he was.”
Their relationship turned ugly when she decided to move forward as a solo artist.
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