Dolly Parton’s husband is a bit of a mystery, to the point that some people wonder if he actually exists. Though Dolly, 78, and Carl Thomas Dean, 82, have been married for nearly 60 years, Carl does not appear in public with the country icon very often. Reba McEntire met Dolly in the 1970s, but despite knowing each other for decades, she has not met Dolly’s husband.
On a recent episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, Reba, 69, revealed that she’s never been invited to Dolly’s home and has never met Carl. The country singer and actress told Andy that she’s “never” tried Dolly’s food because “she’s never invited me over.”
After learning that Reba has never been to Dolly’s home, Andy asked another pressing question: “Have you met Carl?”
“No,” Reba responded. “Have you?” Andy said that he hasn’t met Dolly’s husband either, but “people do really swear he exists.”
“Yeah,” Reba replied. “I saw something the other day. They were out camping, and she and Carl went back to where they got married.”
Given that Dolly Parton has been in the limelight for many years, Andy said the fact that “[Dolly’s] been able to keep this guy a secret for this long” is “incredible” and “kind of a shocker.”
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Dolly and her husband Carl tied the knot in 1966. People have long wondered about Dolly’s mysterious husband, but Dolly has explained that “he’s kind of a loner.” In January 2023, she told Entertainment Tonight that Carl “doesn’t really like being with anybody but me.”
“He’s not one to kind of get out there and socialize that much. He loves living on the farm, taking care of the property as he has for all these many years,” she explained to the outlet at the time.
While it might seem like Dolly and her husband have dramatically different personalities, Dolly previously told People that it’s true that “opposites attract.” “We’re different people,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “But we just work so well together.”
Despite being in the public eye, Dolly has always respected her husband’s desire to remain out of the spotlight. On a November 2023 episode of What Would Dolly Do? Radio, Dolly explained that her husband went to an event with her shortly after they got married — and he realized that he never wanted to go to an event like that again.
“[He] said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to go to another one of these d— things because I ain’t going,’” Dolly said. “I never asked him and he never did.”
Respecting this boundary is important to Dolly, and she actually appreciates her husband’s more reserved personality. “I’ve always respected and appreciated that in him, and I’ve always tried to keep him out of the limelight as much as I can,” she told Entertainment Tonight in 2020. “He said, ‘I didn’t choose this world, I chose you, and you chose that world. But we can keep our lives separate and together.’ And we do and we have.”
