Dolly Parton was everything she had been taught not to be

‘Listen carefully, I’ve got a gun in my handbag and so far I’ve let it slide because that’s how I was brought up, but if you try that again, I’ll turn you from a cockerel into a hen in one fell swoop.’ The line wasn’t from Dolly Parton, but from Patricia Resnick, who wrote the story and screenplay for the film "9 to 5", in which the marvellous girl from Tennessee – who passed away on Tuesday at the age of eighty – played the secretary to a despicable bloke who’d throw papers and pencils on the floor just so she’d have to bend down to pick them up and he could ogle her breasts at his leisure. It wasn’t her line, but it could very well have been. This article, too, could have been written by listing, one after the other, her one-liners and the lyrics to her songs – as The Guardian did a few hours ago – and it would certainly have been better, because it would be clear to you that someone who replies to an interviewer who mocks her for her look by telling him to take it easy because “it costs a lot of money to look so cheap” is an absolute genius from whom we can only hope to learn something. However, we have a point to prove and we wish to attempt it nonetheless, so let us begin again with the film and the concerts: with that plunging neckline, the towering hairstyles, the extremely tight-fitting dresses and the high-heeled clogs, Dolly Parton was everything that the style guides of those years – the Thatcherite 1980s of bow-tie shirts and pleated skirts, and John T. Molloy’s ‘dress for success’ – taught us not to be; so, everything we’d have loved to be able to get away with, including jibes at the teachers who made a pass at us and the wretches who offered us work placements with dinner included – despite the pleated skirts.

Dolly Parton recounted how she had drawn inspiration for her character from the village prostitute, a woman whom even her own mother – the wife of a farmer worn down by a life of hardship and repeated pregnancies – looked down upon: “She had red-painted nails, lipstick and bleached hair; she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen”. It takes courage to exaggerate, but it also takes a great deal of intelligence not to be overwhelmed by one’s own exaggerations, and she possessed both, including the ability to view herself through the proper lens of irony; and beneath that glitz, amongst the millions of books donated to children all over the world, in her generous support for Covid-19 vaccine research – because, yes, if we have Moderna, it is also thanks to her – she taught everyone to be at ease with who they feel they are.

Dolly Parton was the original ‘woke’ figure, without slogans, the product of a natural inclination towards solidarity that emerged whilst her mother sewed her dresses from offcuts – for which she was bullied – whilst she, and this too is one of her own quotes, found them marvellous because ‘there was love in every stitch’. A superwoman the likes of which Europe has never known, because our heroines – even those of the past, not just the sorrowful champions of today’s clichés – do not laugh, do not have a quick wit, and above all conceal their breasts, even if they are endowed with them. We’ve had our Virginia Woolfs who wanted rooms of their own but kept their half-sisters—perhaps mentally ill, perhaps not—confined there; those who played on ambiguity like Sarah Bernhardt; and the fake sisters like the Wolcott Perrys. Our feminism has always been penitent; Dolly’s would pin you down to your own stupidity with a laugh, and when the law on toilets was passed, she replied that she would wee wherever she happened to be (like all intelligent women: this idea that ladies’ toilets are immaculate sanctuaries must be debunked). Aware that his electorate had draped their front doors in mourning, Donald Trump ordered that the flags of the fifty federal states be flown at half-mast for a whole week. She had refused all the honours that the Commander-in-Chief would gladly have pinned onto her stunning chest.