Chicagoans seeing a woman resembling Dolly Parton hanging from a downtown bridge in the next few months should remain calm.
It will be Parton, all right, but she won`t be attempting suicide.
”I`ve lost a $20 bill that`s blown off the bridge and lodged in the railing below, and I`ve got my foot over the rail doing tricks trying to get it back,” Parton says of a scene in ”Straight Talk,” a Disney movie that will be shot in Chicago between June 15 and Oct. 1.
”I play a radio talk show psychiatrist-well, actually an innocent girl from Arkansas who kind of accidentally gets on the radio, and they make her a big star-and James Woods plays this reporter for the Chicago Tribune who`s trying to get the dirt on me.
”We meet when I`m on the bridge trying to get my $20 bill back. He sees me and thinks I`m jumping, so he`s going to take some pictures and also try to save me, and he almost kills me in the process. Then he starts checking up on me, but in the meantime we fall in love, although he`s trying not to.”
That can happen to people who fall under the influence of Parton, the irrepressible Hollywood hillbilly who seems capable of as many comebacks as, say, Richard Nixon-while tending to be a lot more fun.
She`s moved from the depths of her widely unacclaimed ABC-TV ”variety”
series on through her role in the film ”Steel Magnolias.” And now she`s in the midst of another comeback. It includes:
– A new Nashville-recorded album, ”Eagle When She Flies,” which after just two months is the biggest-selling country-marketed record of her career. – A ”very dramatic serious acting part” in a fall TV movie-of-the-week, provisionally titled ”Wild Texas Wind,” in which she plays a Texas musician and battered woman whose stance is ”a little different than the other things you`ve seen: She`s very strong, not the victim.”
– The Disney movie, which will require her to spend 3 1/2 months in Chicago.
Parton, whose previous visits have been limited to the city`s major performance venues, she says she looks forward to getting a better sense of the place in the months ahead.
By then, she may still be riding the crest of ”Eagle When She Flies,”
whose title song is another illustration of her perseverance. Written for
”Steel Magnolias”-and rejected by its producers-the song is the centerpiece of the new album.
”I thought it was such a great song and that it would`ve helped the movie,” she says. ”I thought it really summed up about the women and the gentleness and that whole thing.
”I wrote three songs for the movie, and they didn`t accept any of them because they thought that would make it too much of a Dolly Parton movie, but I`m going to wind up using all three for other things. So nothing is ever lost.”
She says she expects ”Eagle” to be the album`s third single, following the just-peaked No. 1 Ricky Van Shelton duet, ”Rockin` Years,” and the antique-sounding ”Silver and Gold.”
With its way paved, ”Eagle”-which she says she thinks ”is the kind of song that could be bigger than just country”-will be accompanied by an expensive video.
”I`ve never really spent a lot of time or money on any of the videos I`ve done,” she says, ”but I think this is one that really merits it. I`m gonna have it directed by some great woman director and have most of the people who work on it be women, and it`s going to include a lot of great footage about the great women of our time-like Mother Teresa and (Texas Gov.) Ann Richards and Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart and Oprah (Winfrey) and Dolly Parton.
”And somewhere in the Dolly Parton part I`m gonna use a little segment of `9 To 5` with me and Lily (Tomlin) and Jane (Fonda), and a little segment of the Trio with me and Linda (Ronstadt) and Emmy(lou Harris) and then where it goes into that chorus about `gentle as the sweet magnolia, strong as steel,` I`m gonna use that very part of `Steel Magnolias` where I originally envisioned it.
”It`s really about the tenderness and sweetness of women,” she says of the song. ”It`s not like a major statement, like some women`s lib or women`s rights kind of thing. It`s really just more about women`s essence. Men like the song, too.”
”Silver and Gold” is similarly message-laden. Written by rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins, it is tinged with imagery that at first seems the antithesis of ideas that have guided the Tennessee mountain girl during her Hollywood years.
”Down inside me is a person who knows that silver and gold might buy me a big house out in Brentwood, but I`m also the same girl that left
Sevierville” in eastern Tennessee, she says.
”I don`t worship money. Love of money, not money itself, is the root of all evil. So I never worked just for money. It was important to me to use what I think was a God-given talent and make the most of it. And of course I wanted to buy things and have things and be famous and be rich just so I could be comfortable and be able to do more things for more people.
”But there ain`t never a day that goes by that I don`t know the thing that`s not most important: money. It`s important that you be happy and have some kind of qualities and some kind of principles and values, and hopefully I`ve never lost them.”
One of the best songs on the album is ”Family,” which she cowrote with Perkins. Parton says she began writing the song about six years ago and, despite working on it periodically, she hadn`t been able to finish it. She and Perkins got to talking backstage at a show in Los Angeles, which led to Parton visiting Perkins in his hometown of Jackson, Tenn., for ”four or five days” to listen to some of his songs and to cowrite some others.
”I had started writing it at one of those times when things would happen (in the family),” she recalls.
”There`s so many of us (Parton is one of a dozen children) that we`ve got some of both kinds in our family, and everybody was worrying theirself to death about one that was drinking theirself to death or one that got on drugs. ”Rather than going crazy, I would just always say, `Well, what`re you gonna do, turn `em out? Have `em shot?` Whether we like it or not, they`re ours. We`re just going to accept it and do the best we can to correct it.
”Carl was going through some stuff with his, so I told him about the song, and we finished it up in a very short time. Two of my favorite lines in it are: `You forgive them for they know not what they do` and `They`re a mirror of the best and worst in you.` That`s so true. The things you hate the worst about your family are the things you hate the worst about yourself.”
Other songs in the new package aren`t quite so heavy. Parton describes a spirited duet with young Nashville star Lorrie Morgan titled ”Best Woman Wins” as an older woman-younger woman rivalry inspired by the Ivana Trump-Marla Maples headlines.
Parton spotted Morgan on local Nashville television a decade ago and was so impressed she tried to get her signed by Hollywood agents.
Last year, she and Morgan, who had become acquaintances, were together on a couple of Nashville-Los Angeles flights.
”There was a newspaper on the seat across from us, and on the cover was Ivana and Donald (Trump), something about the divorce,” Parton recalls.
”I said, `Why don`t I write something like (her early hit) ”Jolene”
about the other woman. I`ll be the older woman and you be the younger woman. And` ”-she laughs, remembering-” `you can go to hell. I don`t care if you`re purtier long as I wind up with all the money.` ”
The album`s opening song, ”If You Need Me,” inspires the most memorable, and most Partonesque, story.
Parton says she was in ”South Dakota or somewhere” on tour a couple of years ago, staying in a run-down motel. Its curtains ”wouldn`t half close, had those little old hook things, and some of `em were hanging out.
”So I come out of the bathroom, had just washed my hair and took a shower and didn`t have on a lick of makeup nor a stitch of clothes and was just walking around singing something, singing up a storm. And then I realized I was hearin` this rattling.
”I`m used to being up three or four floors, but this room was on the bottom, and the garbage men were picking up garbage from a dumpster right outside my window while there I stood naked as a jaybird. I don`t know if they saw me-even if they did they had no idea it was me, because my hair was wet and I had on no makeup-so I didn`t want to panic or scream, act like a silly schoolgirl.
”So I just kind of walked casually over to the window and grabbed hold of both sides of the curtain. Trying to be real nonchalant, I was still singing, just something real goofy to myself as I closed the curtain:
`Iiiiiiif y`uns need me, I`ll be gone.` You know, `I`m closing up now. If you need me, I`ll be gone. I won`t be standin` here at the Dempster Dumpster naked no more.`
”So I was just being goofy to myself. But then I thought, `Hey, if you take ”you uns” out of it, that`s a great title for a song.` ”
From garbage men to the trashy rags in the grocery checkout aisles, somebody always seems to be trying to get an inside slant on Parton.
Having become a veteran subject of such pursuits, she dismisses them with not just a shrug but a squealing giggle.
”They`re still digging,” she says of the tabloids.
So are they finding anything?
”Aw, not really,” she reports with another laugh. ”Well, they are, but they`ve said so much stuff nobody knows which to believe.”
