My Life So Far (69 page)

Hugging Bruce on the set of
9 to 5.

We laughed a lot during that film.

(© Steve Schapiro)

Dolly invited all the women who worked on
9 to 5
to come to the recording studio and sing the chorus with her for the album. That’s Lily to the left of Dolly and way to the right (in the white shirt) is Dot, Vanessa’s former nanny, who was my dresser on the film.

(© Steve Schapiro)

Within weeks of our return, Colin wrote the script and Dolly and Lily agreed to be in the picture. We filmed in the winter of 1980, and the entire experience was a joy from start to finish.

Dolly thought that when shooting began she had to have memorized the entire script and astounded us by doing just that. With great comedians the work seems just to flow spontaneously, but I learned from watching Lily that it’s not like that. I once had to co-introduce someone with Steve Martin at a fund-raising function, and he reworked and rehearsed “Hello, this is . . .” for at least ten minutes before we went onstage, turning it around in his mouth, trying out different timings. I was awed. Lily’s like that—never sure it’s good enough, always wanting to do it one more time with a slightly different twist. Henry Miller once said, “Art teaches nothing except the significance of life.” To me, this sums up the work Lily does in partnership with Jane Wagner. Through her quirky and always identifiable characters, she reveals truths that lie just outside our consciousness; she wakes us up.

I had never met anyone like Dolly. She always had a wisecrack, usually high raunch, that would break us all up. My son, Troy, who was around seven, loved coming to the set just to look at her. One day Dolly asked him if he knew why her feet were so small. He turned bright red and shook his head. “Well, Troy, it’s because things don’t grow big in the shade.” He was too young to get it right away, but the rest of us doubled over laughing.

Dolly specializes in laughter. Hers is somewhere between a girl’s giggle, an explosive shriek, and a cascade of little bells. It’s not her boobs that precede her through a door, it’s her laughter. Between that and the clicking of her spike heels, we could always hear her coming.

Karen Nussbaum says she’s seen the movie five times or more and always loved to watch the women’s reaction to various scenes. “I remember being in the theater one time and in the scene where you are working on the Xerox machine and it goes wild, a woman stood up in the middle of the theater and yelled out, ‘Push the star button!’ The atmosphere in the theaters was always the same: The women went wild, shouted back to the screen, and applauded at the end. Men liked the movie but were quiet; they knew something dangerous might be happening.”

Karen, who remains an important figure in the labor movement within the AFL-CIO, says she always considered
9 to 5
the perfect example of popular culture moving a public debate forward, something that can really happen, she says, only “when there is a social basis, a nascent movement which can benefit from and exploit a popular expression. The way I saw it,” she explains, “was that before the movie we had to argue that women’s work was plagued by discrimination. The movie put an end to that debate . . . the audiences recognized it and laughed at it. Now the debate could shift to what we should do about it.” Immediately after the movie was released Karen traveled to twenty cities across the country, building what she called “the movement behind the movie.” Very soon 9to5 grew to include twenty staffed chapters, and that was when they began to lay the groundwork for their national union, District 925 of the Service Employees International Union.

The movie was a blockbuster.

Dolly wrote “9 to 5,” the film’s theme song, and got all the women in the cast and crew to record the chorus with her. The song “9 to 5” won every music award and sold over a million copies. It was the perfect movement anthem for working women.*
 
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During the filming of
9 to 5
Dolly would tell me stories about growing up in the mountains of Tennessee in a tarpaper shack with eleven brothers and sisters, how they made their own soap and candles, how hard their life was, yet how much joy they had. I also learned that besides her gift for laughter Dolly was an intuitive and savvy businesswoman—mountain savvy, I call it.

There was a project I had been developing for almost a decade, based on a magnificent novel by Harriette Arnow called
The Dollmaker.
My character was a powerful, creative woman from the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky—what we call a hillbilly—who runs her farm, raises her five children, and carves wooden toys for them. She was as far from me as any character I had ever played. I knew I would need to do a lot of research to prepare for her—and here, in the person of Dolly Parton, was my opportunity. Dolly was the only hillbilly I had ever met (until then). Though the script for
The Dollmaker
wasn’t right yet, I was already learning to whittle, and every day I would bring my knife and pieces of wood to the set of
9 to 5
so I could practice between shots. If you could tell where Dolly was by her laughter, you could tell where I’d been by the blood and shavings I’d leave behind.

Dolly, along with everyone else on the set, was wondering about my carving. One day over lunch I gave her
The Dollmaker
to read and asked if she would consider helping me find a real mountain woman to spend time with. Dolly immediately understood what I needed and also knew that her part of the country was not easy for outsiders to access. She agreed that when
9 to 5
wrapped she would have me come down to Nashville and together, on her touring bus, we would travel through parts of Appalachia and she would introduce me to her people, mountain people.

When I arrived in Nashville it became immediately clear that Dolly had put a great deal of time and attention into planning our trip, making sure I visited all the people and places that might help with my research for
The Dollmaker.
This moved me deeply. Dolly was and is an enormous star, a busy woman, and despite her amazing ability to be open and accessible in public, she is actually a very private person who does not easily or often open her personal life—her friends and family—to an outsider. I saw it as her way of thanking me for
9 to 5.

Five of us loaded onto Dolly’s touring bus. The back end of the bus was where Dolly had her stateroom and the rest of us slept in narrow bunk beds that lined both sides of the middle part of the bus. During the day we all gathered together up front. In all of those seven days not once did I see Dolly without her wig and makeup. She would appear in the morning looking like a million bucks and looked that way when she disappeared into her room at night. Usually when a woman is that accoutred it is because she is trying to hide some defect, but in Dolly’s case (and I’ve spent enough time with her to be able to say this with certainty) if you peeled it all away, what you’d be left with is a true beauty—something, by the way, that runs in her family.

We wound our way through the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas, taking the bus as far as the big vehicle could go and then meeting up with various friends of Dolly’s from her early days in radio. Up until then I had supposed that Dolly’s ability to tell a good tale was a gift unique to her. Now I was seeing that just about everyone we met on the trip had the storytelling and laughter gift.

Dolly would introduce me and explain that “Jane’s wantin’ to do a movie ’bout folk like us” and ask if they wouldn’t mind talking with me awhile. Usually this ended up with Dolly and me sitting inside a little one-room home without plumbing or electricity. I remember that the walls inside one of the cabins were covered with newspapers to keep out the cold air. There was usually a color print of Jesus hanging somewhere, some plastic flowers, maybe a faded photo of a man in uniform, and usually an old shoebox would be brought out filled with photos and other memorabilia. The folks were invariably in their seventies or eighties and had lots of memories of the Depression times when the mines had closed and many families had to move away, just the way it was for my character in
The Dollmaker.

There was a town in the Ozarks where Dolly had relatives. They put us up for the night and, as we were pulling out the next morning, presented us with a big ceramic jug of white lightning. “Passed three times,” Dolly explained proudly. “It don’t git any purer.” I learned that each time the homemade alcohol is passed through a gauze filter more impurities are removed, until what’s left is on a par with the finest eau-de-vie to be found anywhere in France. I also learned how to hook my thumb through the handle and tip the heavy jug to my lips by balancing it on my arm. We did a lot of tipping during that trip, and though the volume of laughter increased accordingly, I was not aware of being inebriated and never awoke with a hangover. (Though once home it took me a week to recover!)

It was in the Ozarks that I saw my first bottle trees and other startling signs of creative affirmation from people whose art comes not from schools or galleries, but from an inner need to beautify their surroundings with whatever lies within reach, unencumbered by concerns about how others might judge them. There was the home in which every single thing, from tables and chairs to floors and icebox, had been painted with polka dots; another in which the recently deceased owner had covered every piece of furniture in the house with the tinfoil from gum wrappers. A dead and leafless tree in one yard had been readorned with countless milk of magnesia bottles, resplendent as the sun made magic with their unique blueness. Another tree was hung with years’ worth of empty beer cans.

In Arkansas we drove to the home of music historian Jimmy Driftwood, known for, among other things, his song “The Battle of New Orleans.” After hearing what I had come to Appalachia for, Jimmy decided he had just the people I needed to meet, whereupon we all piled into someone’s car and drove through the mountains till we came to a small hamlet known as Mountain View, and ten minutes or so from there, down a dirt road that wound through the forest, we arrived at a log cabin covered with clematis. There was what appeared to be a zebra in the yard (turned out to be a very striped mule that pulled the family’s plow) and several peacocks on the roof. I was sure I’d arrived in the magical kingdom of Oz. Lucy and Waco Johnson, an elderly couple in their seventies, came out to greet us. Lucy was a big-boned woman with short brown hair, thick glasses, and proud new dentures. She carved apple dolls (faces carved into apples that when dry shrivel into interesting weathered expressions). She also carded wool from her own sheep and colored it with dye she made from the vegetables and flowers she grew in abundance. She would then weave lovely small rugs and placemats that she sold at fairs. Like my character in
The Dollmaker,
Lucy was an artist who did not consider herself such. “Busywork” was what she said she did. She was the woman I’d been looking for.

As we prepared to leave I said to Lucy and Waco, “If we ever get the movie script right, I’d like to come back and spend time with you.” They nodded, expecting never to see me again.

Three and a half years later I returned. The moment Bruce and I had a good script and a date set for filming, I had written asking if I could come stay with them for two weeks, “but only if you let me work for you and not tell anyone who I am.” They were surprised but agreed to the arrangement.

It was Easter and bitter cold in Mountain View. Waco, now seventy-eight, had been chopping wood, the fireplace being their only source of heat, and on my first day there I insisted he let me take over the job. I had never chopped wood in my life, but I figured, Heck, he’s in his seventies and I’m the fitness queen. No sweat. I awoke the next morning unable to move my hands, much less lift my arms. I developed boundless admiration for Waco and realized the depth of the problem that faced folks like them: What would happen when Waco got too old to chop wood? Their children, like most of the young people from the mountains, had moved away to cities and towns. This was a way of life that would soon disappear before most Americans would even know what it had been.