Dolly Parton once predicted that her most repeated self-deprecating joke would follow her to the grave.
The country music legend, who died Wednesday at 80, coined the famous phrase “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” while starring in the 1982 film “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” The line became so inseparable from her persona that she told Vanity Fair in 2008 it would probably wind up on her tombstone, alongside what the magazine noted would be “several requisite cracks about her ample bust size.”
Parton’s signature bottle-blonde bombshell aesthetic traced back to her childhood in rural Sevier County, Tennessee. In a 2006 interview “The Early Show” anchor Julie Chen, she described her look as a “country girl’s idea of glamor.”
“Well, cheap lookin’, flashy lookin’,” Parton said about her style, before sharing the origin story of her aesthetic inspiration.
“I kind of patterned myself after what they called the town tramp in my hometown, when I was little,” she told Chen. “There was this woman that was very much a loose woman, but I didn’t know what that meant and I just told her how beautiful she was, ’cause she had this beautiful yellow hair.”
“She left a big impression on me, and I would talk about how beautiful she was and different ones would say, ‘Oh, she’s just trash.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up. I’m gonna be trash!’ And that is how I look,” she continued.
Parton never abandoned that “trashy” persona despite decades of criticism. During an April 2022 appearance on the WorkLife Podcast with Adam Grant, she embraced the label that followed her from childhood.
“Everybody said, ‘She’s trash.’ And in my little girl mind, I thought, ‘Well, that’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.’ It was really like a look I was after. I wasn’t a natural beauty. So, I just like to look the way I look. I’m so outgoing inside in my personality, that I need the way I look to match all of that,” she said.
The Locust Ridge, Tennessee native turned her exaggerated image into a brand that spanned music, film, theme parks, and philanthropy. Her look became as famous as her voice, with Parton rarely appearing in public without the wigs, makeup, and rhinestones that defined her aesthetic.
Another fan-favorite phrase from the musical icon captured her philosophy about standing out: “It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.”
In the viral moment that cemented her self-deprecating humor in pop culture, Parton delivered the “costs a lot of money” line in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” where she played Miss Mona Stangley, the madam of a Texas brothel. The film, released when she was 36, became a touchstone in her acting career and provided the quote she would repeat for the next four decades. She never seemed to tire of it, deploying the line in interviews, on talk shows, and in conversations with journalists who asked about her appearance.
Parton died at 80 on Wednesday.