Privately, she was married to a man most of those viewers didn’t know existed.
The Wagner years also cost her something concrete.
She and Wagner formed a publishing company together, OPAR, the name sтιтched from Owens and Parton with her uncle Bill Owens in the mix, and Wagner held a substantial stake in it.
He produced her records.
He controlled the show, the tour dates, the arrangements, and to a degree that grew increasingly intolerable, her decisions.
Several biographers have described the working relationship as genuinely creative and genuinely suffocating at the same time.
And both things can be documented.
She began planning her exit around 1973.
She did not announce it.
She did not fight about it in the press.
She wrote a song.
I will always love you is not a love song.
It is a resignation letter set to music written for Porter Wagner and played for him in his office.
She has told the story identically for 50 years.
He was refusing to let her go.
