I Put Dolly on the Cover Twice. Here's What She Taught me About Life.

Dolly Parton died yesterday in Nashville at 80, and her family put it better than any of us could. "A rhinestone life that shone bright enough for the world to see," their statement read, "Dolly will forever stand as an inspiration not only through her timeless music and prolific songwriting, but also her wit, warmth, and kindness that made us all feel like family." She had told fans just days earlier that she was "still healin', still workin'," which, if you knew anything about her at all, was exactly the note you'd expect her to go out on.

I was editor-in-chief of People magazine for three years, and in that time I managed to squeeze putting Dolly Parton on the cover twice, then went back and asked for more. Normally a star gets a People cover once every few years if they're lucky. Dolly was the exception, because I knew our audience loved her and wanted as much of her as they could get. Honestly, every audience loved her. Young, old, right, left, male, female, black, white, brown, Midwesteners, Southerners, Northerners, the West, Dolly appealed to all of us. She was one of the easiest stars I ever worked with. There was no subject our journalists couldn't raise with her, because she had nothing to hide. She had mastered a life in the spotlight and knew exactly what she would and wouldn't do. There is a lot to learn about being a star from looking at Dolly's life. There is just as much to learn about being a good human being.

She spent sixty years being underestimated, either as a hillbilly with a big wig or a punchline with a big chest, and she spent sixty years quietly outworking, out writing, and outlasting everyone who underestimated her. She turned herself into a one-woman instruction manual for how to survive fame, poverty, Hollywood, Nashville, and the tabloids with your sense of humor and your soul fully intact. She wrote it all down for us too, mostly in one-liners so sharp they could cut glass. So today, instead of just mourning her, we are doing what she would have wanted. We are stealing her life lessons so she lives on in us.

Don't forget where you came from.

Dolly grew up one of twelve children in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, and no amount of Nashville or Hollywood glamour, or a net worth in the hundreds of millions ever pulled her away from it. She called her lifelong habit of working before dawn "a Parton family trait," passed down from a father who "was always up early, even if he had to go to bed late." She put the money back into the ground she came from, funding the Imagination Library and turning Dollywood into the economic engine of the county she was born in.

Find your identity early and be unapologetically yourself.

"Find out who you are, and do it on purpose," she said. The day after graduating high school in Sevierville, she packed a bag for Nashville to become a star, and became one. Most people discover who they are over decades. Dolly clocked hers at seventeen and spent the next seven decades sticking with it. Her mother gave her the line she said she lived by ever since: "To thine own self be true." Coming from a woman in nine-inch heels and a platinum wig, the contradiction was rather the point. She never toned down the accent, the look, or the personality for anyone, and made the industry meet her on her terms instead. Authenticity might be the buzzword of the last decade, but Dolly had been practicing it for eight decades.

Embrace what you've got.

"I'm no natural beauty," she said. "If I'm gonna have any looks at all, I'm gonna have to create them." So she did. I didn't grow up watching a lot of American TV, but when I sat on the edge of our mustard cord sofa in the eighties watching 9 to 5 on TV, I was transfixed by the over the top camp, the huge hair, the tight outfits. She was like a perfect cartoon character to a young, closeted kid. But she was well aware of the judgment aimed at her looks, and got to the joke before anyone else could: "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." The line disarms the critic and confirms the look was deliberate, not an accident she was embarrassed by. As she put it, "it's true I look totally artificial, but I like to think I'm totally real where it really counts."

Laugh at yourself before anyone else gets the chance.

Ask about a wardrobe malfunction and she'd tell you, "you will not see a nipple ring, it'll be more like a hula hoop." Ask about someone threatening to pull her hair and she'd warn them off, because the wig was real hair, "just not hers." She called a "warped sense of humor" the secret to her fifty-six-year marriage. Every joke about herself took the punchline away from anyone trying to use it against her.

Embrace the rumors.

Dolly's tabloid line was never denial, it was disarmament. "A lot of those stories in the tabloids are based on some thread of truth, but usually it's so frayed by the time they get done with it, you don't hardly even recognize it," she said, then added, with a shrug you can practically hear, "I've been guilty of most of the stuff that's been said about me to some degree. And if I ain't done it, I probably will." What actually upset her wasn't a false story. It was one that hurt other people. That's a useful filter for anyone who's ever had a headline written about them: is this wounding, or just noise?

Work harder than everyone else in the room.

The 3am thing wasn't a bit. "I don't need a whole lot of sleep," she said, describing an internal clock that woke her before dawn her whole life so she could write before the world started calling. And it worked. She wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" the same day, in her twenties, then spent fifty years building a theme park, a book charity, film careers, and a Broadway musical on top of her music. Talent got her noticed but her work ethic built her huge empire and legacy.

Pave your own path.

"If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one," she said, and she meant it literally. She turned down Elvis's people when they wanted to record "I Will Always Love You," because his manager demanded half the publishing, a decision that looked insane until Whitney Houston's cover made it one of the best-selling singles ever.

Hardship doesn't have to mean struggle forever.

She treated hard times and failure as data acquisition long before it was a wellness mantra. "Storms make trees take deeper roots," she said, and she'd earned the line after a childhood without indoor plumbing, decades in an industry that didn't know what to do with a woman who wrote her own songs and owned her own masters.

Look for the good.

"If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain," she said. Coming from a woman written off for decades as a novelty act before becoming one of the most respected songwriters this country has produced, it wasn't a corny greeting card phrase but how she actually operated, I chatted to her after a charity gala a few year’s ago and her positivity just shone through after a long night of performing.

Don't judge other people.

"I try to see the good in everybody, and I don't care who people are as long as they're themselves," she said. It's not hard to see why the LGBTQ+ community loved her back. She was writing lyrics about accepting a gay family member in 1991, on the track "Family," decades before it was an easy thing for a country star to even talk about, and she was still doing interviews saying things like, "Sure, why can't they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do." Those aren't small things for a proud, devout woman from rural Tennessee, and she never treated the two as being in tension. Asked to pick a side for sixty years, she simply declined the premise.

Keep your politics to yourself.

When ABC's Nightline pushed her on politics in 2018, she cut it off cold: "I learned a long time ago, you keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business. I'm not in politics. I'm an entertainer." Her reasoning wasn't fear, it was arithmetic: "I've got as many Republican friends as I've got Democrat friends and I just don't like voicing my opinion on things." She'd watched the Dixie Chicks lose half their audience overnight for speaking out and decided that wasn't a trade worth making. Declining to pick a side isn't the same as having none. It's how she kept sixty years of fans, of every stripe, in the same room.

It worked right to the end. Within hours of her death, Donald Trump was posting on Truth Social that "there has never been anyone like her, and never will," ordering flags lowered nationwide for a week. Bernie Sanders, on the same day, called her "a lifelong philanthropist and advocate for literacy, education, LGBTQ+ rights, healthcare and disaster relief." Neither man would agree on much else. Both of them meant every word about her.

Keep your marriage out of the spotlight.

Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years until his death in 2025, made his position clear after one BMI awards show early in their marriage: "Don't ever ask me to go to another one of these damn things because I ain't going." Dolly's response was total acceptance. "Carl has never been in the limelight and all, never wanted to be in it. He don't like it," she said. "I never asked him and he never did."

Give back generously.

"When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids," she said. By the time she died, the program had put well over 200 million free books into children's hands across four countries. The rest of her philanthropy read like it was designed to make everyone claim her: scholarships and a wildfire relief fund for her own corner of Tennessee, a children's hospital and COVID vaccine research at Vanderbilt, a million dollars of her own money after Hurricane Helene, and decades of quiet support for LGBTQ+ organizations most stars her age wouldn't go near. Nobody has ever totted up a single lifetime figure, and Dolly never seemed to be counting either.

Dolly used to say, "If there's a heaven, I hope to hell I go," which might be the most Dolly sentence ever spoken about the afterlife, reverent and irreverent in the same nine words. If there is one, we like her odds. If there isn't, she still left the rest of us the rules above, in one-liners sharp enough to cut glass and warm enough to fit everybody who ever loved her, which was everybody

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