The SHOCKING Truth About Dolly Parton & Carl Dean’s Marriage

Two rhinestone smiles beamed into millions of homes every Saturday night, and the whole thing ended in a courtroom with the man who discovered Dolly Parton demanding a cut of her future. Before any of that, Porter Wagoner was a butcher's son from West Plains, Missouri, who sang at the meat counter, drove to Nudie Cohn's shop for suits stitched with wagon wheels and gold thread, and put his own show on the air in 1960 until it reached roughly 3 million homes a week. When his girl-singer spot opened in 1967, he handed it to a 21-year-old from a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee. Crowds held up signs reading "We want Norma Jean" and booed her nightly, and she outlasted every one of them. The duets charted, the Vocal Duo trophies stacked up, and so did the paperwork. A shared publishing company called Owepar, a producer's chair Porter never left, and contracts that ran her royalties, her TV checks, and her tour dates through a business with his name on it first. When she finally decided to go, she wrote a goodbye and sang it to his face in his office. That song was "I Will Always Love You." He agreed to let her leave in 1974 if he stayed her producer, then sued her in 1979 for $3 million, arguing her stardom was partly his. She settled for a reported $1 million and the two stopped speaking for years. What came next bends the story. Her solo career exploded with 9 to 5 and Dollywood while his show went off the air in 1981 and his finances slid toward bankruptcy. Quiet reports say she helped keep him afloat. They reconciled slowly, sang together again at the Grand Ole Opry, and when lung cancer moved him into Nashville hospice care in 2007, she sat at his bed, held his hand, and sang the same goodbye she'd written to leave him. Porter Wagoner died that October.