The ‘trashy’ Dolly Parton joke that she said would probably wind up on her tombstone
Dolly Parton was always quick with a self-deprecating “Dollyism” — but there’s one that she repeated so many times, she figured it might go on her tombstone.
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“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” Parton, who died at 80 on Tuesday, famously said while starring in the 1982 movie, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”
The famous phrase became a Parton motto, and she told Vanity Fair in 2008 that that phrase would probably make it onto her epitaph, in addition to making “several requisite cracks about her ample bust size.”
Her humor about her signature bottle-blonde bombshell look was born from Parton’s early days growing up in rural Sevier County, Tennessee – and what she called a “country girl’s idea of glamor,” she explained in a 2006 interview.
“Well, cheap lookin’, flashy lookin’,” Parton said about her style, before diving into a story about her hometown of Locust Ridge.
“I kind of patterned myself after what they called the town tramp in my hometown, when I was little,” she told CBS “The Early Show” anchor Julie Chen in 2006.
“There was this woman that was very much a loose woman, but I didn’t know what that meant and I just told her how beautiful she was, ’cause she had this beautiful yellow hair.
“She left a big impression on me, and I would talk about how beautiful she was and different ones would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash!’ And that is how I look,” Parton continued.
Despite what critics said, Parton never felt ashamed of her “trashy” persona throughout her life, she said during an appearance on the WorkLife Podcast with Adam Grant in April 2022.
“Everybody said, ‘She’s trash.’ And in my little girl mind, I thought, ‘Well, that’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.’ It was really like a look I was after. I wasn’t a natural beauty. So, I just like to look the way I look. I’m so outgoing inside in my personality, that I need the way I look to match all of that,” she said.
Another fan-favorite phrase from the musical icon included, “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.”
She also made light of her over-the-top beauty routines and her lengthy list of artificial cosmetic procedures over the years.
“People say, ‘How you stay looking so young?’” Parton told BBC Newsnight in 2019. “I say, ‘Well, good lighting, good doctors and good makeup.’”
She later confessed in her autobiography, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business”: “I have 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.”
And, she told the Guardian in 2011, “If something is bagging, sagging or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it.”
“It’s like what I always say: I may look fake but I’m real where it counts.”
Other classic Dollyisms were spotlighted during a David Letterman interview in 1995 about the country music star’s biggest pet peeves.
Among her hilarious answers were, “Trying to play guitar in these five-inch fingernails,” “When the county declares my hair a fire hazard” and “Rhinestone rash.”
Her biggest bugger? “Nobody notices I’ve got a great ass, too.”
Parton’s lengthy list of cosmetic procedures reportedly included breast augmentation, a facelift and eyelift, liposuction and excess skin removal surgery. She also was a proud fan of fillers and Botox.
However, “You’ve just got to be very careful not to overdo it because you never know,” Parton warned during an interview with Howard Stern in November 2023.
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“Anytime you go under the knife, you could come out looking not good,” she said.
The 11-time Grammy Award winner revealed in another memoir, “Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones,” that her extensive beauty routine – which was more than just a 9-to-5 – began when she arrived in Hollywood in the 1980s.
At that time, “I started sleeping with my makeup on, partly because of the earthquakes.”
Additionally, “I thought, ‘I’m not heading out on the streets without makeup in case there are cameras out there! I’m going to be ready to go!’” she wrote.
Parton’s family announced her devastating death in a video posted to social media Tuesday.
It remains unclear exactly what the country crooner died from, but she was reportedly admitted to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center Friday for autoimmune and kidney problems, TMZ reported.
She also told PEOPLE on Friday she was “dealing with some health issues,” something she had repeated in various interviews over the last year after she’d canceled several appearances and performances.
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