Several of them have described it in interviews across the years.
Carl Dean, the man who wanted nothing to do with any of it, became the adult male in a house full of pardon teenagers.
He drove them places.
He set rules.
Some of them called him a father figure.
He and Dolly never had children of their own.
She has addressed it exactly the way you’d expect from a woman raised on editing.
She has said that they talked about it early, that they left it in God’s hands, and that God clearly had other plans.
She was meant to look after everybody’s children instead of her own.
That is her version offered consistently and without elaboration, and there is no credible documentation contradicting it.
There is also this.
She was 9 years old when her mother had a baby boy named Larry, and the family gave that baby to her to look after, and he did not survive infancy.
She has spoken about him as her child.
Whether the two facts connect is not something the record can prove, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but she has connected them herself in her own memoir more than once.
Then came 1982 and the part of the story she volunteered without being asked.
In a 1986 interview with Lady’s Home Journal, she described having been consumed a few years earlier by what she called an affair of the heart with a special friend and the disloyalty involved.
Her phrasing was that it just about killed her, that she cried an ocean, and then in the same breath that she wasn’t going to talk about it anymore because she had to keep some mystery.
She never named him.
She never has.
Elsewhere, she has described the same period as a time when she was genuinely in love with someone other than her husband and had to make a choice.
Understand what she did there.
She confirmed the most damaging fact available about her marriage on the record in a mainstream women’s magazine and simultaneously sealed it.
No name, no dates, no third party who could be doorsteped by a reporter.
