Dolly Parton: The Real Queen Of All Media

This story was first published on April 5, 2009. It was updated on June 4, 2009.

Dolly Parton calls herself "a cartoon character that I created," and neither Bugs Bunny nor Minnie Mouse ever had it so good. But as Morley Safer first reported in April, there is the other Dolly Parton - the savviest woman in show business, the singer, the songwriter.

And yet another - the Hillbilly kid from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, who grew up dirt poor in a family of 14.

She's a woman who, despite her millions, remains deeply attached to the customs, the humor and, for sure, the music of her roots.

Her latest venture is a Broadway show based on her iconic film "9 to 5" - words and music by Dolly. Writing songs and singing them is something she's been doing practically since birth.

Safer and 60 Minutes were at Dolly's Tennessee mountain home, listening, to her "whup" out some songs from her childhood.

"Tiptoe, tiptoe, little Dolly Parton, tiptoe, tiptoe, ain't she fine?" Dolly sang. It's the first song she remembers hearing around the house.

"Little tiny tassletop, I love you an awful lot…Hope you never go away, I want you to stay," she sang for Safer. That's the first song she ever made up, at age five, about a doll her father made from a corn cob.

"Puppy love, puppy love. They all call it puppy love. Now I had that little squeak, I'm old enough now to kiss and hug and I like it!" she sang.

And that was the first song she ever recorded, when she was 13 years old.

For half a century now, "little" Dolly Parton has been center stage and loving it. She's a songwriter, movie star, and queen of the quotable quotes. At 63 years old and five feet tall, she's larger than life.

She settled on the "party girl" persona when she was still a kid.

"The woman that I was most impressed with when I was a little girl was the town tramp. But I didn't know what that meant," she told Safer. "This woman had the yellow peroxide hair. She had the red nails. The red lipstick. The beautiful eyes. The high heels. Short skirt. And I thought she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. And whoever I was with would say, 'Oh, she ain't nothin' but trash.' And I make the joke. And I would say, 'Well, that's what I'm gonna be when I grow up,' meaning that's how I wanna look."

"When you started out with whatever you want to call 'that look,' did people really get the wrong idea in the sense that they didn't know that beneath that look there is maybe one of the smartest women around?" Safer asked.

"Well, I certainly got hit on a lot. And a lotta men thought I was as silly as I looked, I guess. You know, I look like a woman but I think like a man. And in this world of business, that has helped me a lot. Because by the time they think that I don't know what's goin' on, I then got the money, and gone," she replied.

Gone, into Dolly, Inc.

Early on she demanded total control, and has a sizeable staff overseeing her business, philanthropy and music publishing. And she has become a kind of national monument, one who turned up at the National Press Club in Washington with some thoughts on the State of the Union.

"Somebody said to me 'Well, you know what? You just got such a big mouth and you just know how to talk to people. Did you ever think about runnin' for president?' I said 'I think we've had enough boobs in the White House,'" she joked at the press club appearance.

The Partons were true mountain people: poor, tough and resilient. For years, they had no electricity, and no indoor plumbing. All the kids helped with the crops and looked out for each other.

"We had a roof over our head, I always say, even if it did leak. We had something to eat on our table, even if it wasn't exactly what we wanted. Had a bed to sleep in, even if there were a bunch of us in it," she told Safer.

The day after high school graduation, Dolly lit out for Nashville, the country music capital. She had already had a record or two and been on local radio and TV back home, but Nashville was one mean town.

"It was a lot of that being lonely, being homesick, cryin' every night," she remembered.

But she told Safer she was never tempted to just pack it up and go home. "Never crossed my mind. Because I figured the least I would be would just be hungry."

Eventually, she got a spot on the Grand Ole Opry, the country music mecca. And soon, little Dolly Parton was very big indeed, as singer and writer of country music classics.

She's so big back home in eastern Tennessee, they put a statue of her in front of the courthouse in Sevierville.

And nearby is Dollywood, her theme park. It's a shrine to southern culture, southern food and southern music. For nearly a quarter century, Dollywood has brought the area thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue. It's Dolly's own economic stimulus package.

One of the rooms at her museum, filled with memorabilia, is called Dolly's Attic. "I call it my arts and crap building," she joked.

And behind all the costumes, the Grammys, the gold records on display at Dollywood, there's the guiding hand of a show biz entrepreneur. "I love the business end of the business. I'm almost like three people. There's me the, Dolly, the person. There's me, the star. And then there's me, the manager," she explained.

And of course there's Dolly, the composer. On Broadway is "9 to 5," the musical, with songs by Dolly. It's a show developed from her first movie 30 years ago, one that turned her into a feminist icon. She wrote the title tune while the movie was being shot. It was right there at her fingertips.

"I have acrylic fingernails. And they make a great, you know, rhythm sound. And they sound almost like a typewriter to me. And it was all about secretaries. So I'd be on the set, I'd just go around 'Workin' 9 to 5, what a way to make a living.' So they all got a kick out of my nails. And I actually wound up playing my fingernails as part of the percussion sound on the real record," she explained, demonstrating the sound her nails can make.

One of her songs from the musical is called "Backwoods Barbie," and 60 Minutes caught up with Dolly as she was making a music video for the song.

Fittingly, it was filmed at Frederick's of Hollywood, makers of outrageous underwear. The lyrics: "I'm just a backwoods Barbie in a push-up bra and heels. I might look artificial, but where it counts I'm real."

Speaking of which…

"You have no problem talking about the nips and the tucks and the science, I guess, that helps create who you are," Safer remarked.

"Well, I don't, because people are gonna find it out anyway. I'd certainly rather say it. I don't just go in for a complete overhaul. I just go in for tune-ups," she explained.

Safer read back to her an inventory she once made of her various cosmetic procedures: "I've had nips and tucks and trims and sucks. Boobs and waist, and butt and such. Eyes and chin and back again. Pills and peels and other frills. And I'll never graduate from…"

"Collagen," Dolly said, laughing. "It is so true."

Her sanctuary is her house in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a country place built on the site of the old shack she grew up in.

She has grander places in Nashville and Los Angeles. But her Tennessee home, with its reminders of hard times past, its pictures of the worn, haunting faces of family members long gone, is where Dolly Parton comes to recharge her batteries and reminisce.

She told Safer one of the strangest, funniest stories we've ever heard about an encounter with a pig when she was three years old.

"One time there was an old sow layin' over here, feeding her piglets. I wanted to be one of 'em. So I was this tiny little thing. And I, mama, I got lost. Nobody could find me. So a few hours later, they found me over here. I had moved the little pigs, and I was down there, just nursin' with the rest of 'em. So, I've been a pig all my life. That's true. And they never let me forget it," she said, laughing.

Asked if she made that story up, Dolly told Safer, "I swear to God. I swear. It's a famous story in our family."

One family member you won't see much of is Carl Dean, her husband of 43 years. They met at the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville. He's a shy man who hates the celebrity life.

"He's just quiet, and private. He don't do interviews. But he's a good man. He's a good friend," she explained.

Music runs deep in the Parton family. Her brothers and sisters, mother and father, appeared once on Dolly's TV show, ages ago.

"Oh, that's Mama and Daddy! Oh my gosh! Where'd you get…," an astonished Dolly asked Safer.

60 Minutes surprised her with the tape. She hadn't seen it in 30 years. "Oh, that's mama," she said, watching the footage.

At one point, as her father was doing a jig on camera, Dolly told Safer. "Look at Daddy! Oh, my gosh. …Oh, look at that little fat girl he's dancing with! Who's that?"

The tape ends with the old hymn, "The Sweet By and By." Dolly sang it as a kid, in the church of her grandfather, a country preacher. It's about a joyful family reunion in the hereafter.

"Well now, what am I gonna do now? You can't get me back in line here. That's very touching to me. 'Cause Mama and Daddy are both gone now," she told Safer, crying. "I haven't seen that in so long. You just pulled at my heart there."

"Would you like a drink?" Safer asked.

"No, that's okay. Yea, whisky? Yeah, some moonshine would be nice about now," Dolly joked.

So hoist a glass to this 63-year-old dynamo, who despite the nips and tucks and wigs and such, is just about as real as they come.

"I'm a workin' girl," she said. "I work for a living, I love what I do, I've been blessed, and I just try to make the most of what talent God gave me."

Produced by David Browning and Diane Beasley