Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is a recurring celebrity presence in Andy Warhol’s diary, most notably as the subject of a portrait commission that failed to satisfy its intended recipient, Sandy Gallin. The episode begins with an unusually direct phone call, passes through a guarded visit and a hurried portrait-making process, and ends in a dispute over a $10,000 payment. Later diary entries place Parton in the publicity orbit of Neiman Marcus and at a party marking her move to CBS Records, showing her public image circulating across art, retail, television, and music.

A call and a portrait commission

Parton first enters this strand of the diary by calling Warhol herself. She identifies herself by asking whether he knows who is speaking; he recognizes her from her distinctive voice. She wants a portrait for her agent, Sandy Gallin, and asks how much it would cost. Warhol feels too embarrassed to name a price, so he directs her to Fred Hughes or Vincent Fremont. Because Parton is due to leave for Los Angeles on Friday afternoon, they arrange to take the photograph at eleven that morning. The casual scheduling contrasts with the elaborate work that a Warhol portrait required.

The general process began with Warhol taking about sixty instant photographs of a sitter using a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected four images for a screen printer, then chose and cropped one, altering it cosmetically before it was enlarged for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvases with colored backgrounds, and Warhol painted selected areas beneath the screened image; slight shifts in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic displaced effect. These commissions were an important source of income, and a portrait normally cost about $25,000 for the first canvas, with additional canvases priced at about $5,000 each. Parton’s later dispute concerned a specific $10,000 payment, rather than those usual listed rates.

A guarded visit and a rushed result

When Warhol and a group including Keith Haring went to see Parton at Gallin’s home, the visit carried a security concern: Parton did not want her address known because she had received death threats. The diary records Gallin having measured the places on the walls where he wanted the portraits to hang. The carefully planned display and the worry over revealing the home’s location place the commission between public celebrity and private protection. Warhol also noted that Parton seemed appalled by the number of people who had come along, as the group had wanted to make the day unusually star-filled.

The work did not proceed at the pace Warhol wanted. On September 6, Jean-Michel Basquiat knocked paint onto the portrait while in a stupor, damaging it. Gallin kept calling for the work, while Warhol wished he would stop rushing him because the portrait was not ready and he wanted to make it good. Five days later, Warhol recorded that some of the portraits came out light and some dark. After repeated calls from Los Angeles asking whether they were ready, he finally said they were, though he felt he could have done better. The contrast is central to the episode: the client’s demand for delivery and the artist’s sense that the pictures were unfinished pull in opposite directions.

Disagreement over the pictures

After hearing nothing further from Gallin, Warhol called and learned through Gallin’s secretary that Gallin was embarrassed and disliked the pictures. She said they did not look like Warhol’s art, and that Gallin had expected something more colorful and more Pop. The secretary then asked whether he could get his $10,000 back. Warhol agreed that he could, while asking whether Gallin would rather have him do the portraits again. The exchange leaves the commission unresolved as an artistic judgment: the objection was not simply that the likeness was poor, but that the pictures did not meet an expectation of what a Warhol portrait should look like.

Warhol also suspected that the transaction had been awkwardly framed from the start. As he recalled it, Parton had initially presented the portrait as a gift she wanted to buy for Gallin; after Warhol offered to give her one for being kind to Gallin, the price was recast as a reason to reduce the amount. That account is Warhol’s interpretation, not an independently confirmed explanation of Parton’s intentions. What the diary does establish is his response to the experience: he resolved that future portrait clients should inspect and approve the work at each stage, rather than waiting until the pictures were finished. Gallin’s suggestion that Warhol could try to sell the portraits, with permission, added a final sting to what Warhol described as a horrible outcome.

Public appearances and the diary’s perspective

The portrait did not disappear from Parton’s public life. In September 1986, Paige Powell took it to be taped for a segment on The Today Show connected with the Neiman Marcus catalogue. The same picture that had provoked disappointment and a refund request thus entered another promotional setting, where it could serve as part of a retail and television presentation. The diary does not say how the segment treated the portrait or how viewers responded, but its later use marks a change in context rather than a resolution of the earlier disagreement.

In January 1987, Warhol went with Sam and Len to Parton’s party at the Gotham. She was celebrating the signing of a record deal with CBS Records after twenty years with RCA, and she gave a speech about the change. Warhol noted that she had just turned forty and described her appearance through the diary’s notably scrutinizing attention to her body and styling. At the same gathering, he called her sweet. That brief personal judgment sits beside the public occasion: Parton is both the speaker celebrating a professional transition and the celebrity whose looks are closely watched by the people around her.

These appearances are mediated by Warhol’s diary rather than presented as a full account of Parton’s own perspective. The published diary was selected from a much longer record, with days, names, and passages omitted, and personal references between Warhol and Pat Hackett were edited to preserve a more general reader’s viewpoint. Within those limits, Parton’s entries form a compact record of celebrity as a series of negotiations: a portrait is commissioned and judged, a private home is protected, an image is repurposed for television and retail, and a record-company change becomes a social event. The diary’s most revealing contrast is between the control sought over an image and the different uses other people make of it.