Dolly Parton Revealed Her Surprising Fantasy Dinner Party Guest List
When asked about her fantasy dinner party guest list, Dolly Parton rattled off five names. The singer has often professed her love for cooking, but she said she didn’t host people often. Her life as a famous person means she doesn’t get much time to herself, so she cherished it when she could. Still, she’d make an exception for these people. Here’s who she’d invite, and what she’d cook for them.
Dolly Parton shared the people she would invite to her dream dinner party
In 1978, Parton gave a wide-ranging interview with Playboy. One of the questions asked was which five people from history she’d invite to a dinner party. Parton had an answer ready.
“Will Rogers would be my main guest,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “Beethoven. Bob Hope. Strother Martin. Festus, from Gunsmoke.”
Beethoven stands out among this group, but the celebrated composer makes sense on Parton’s invite list given her lifelong love of music. Still, she said she likely wouldn’t serve him the same food she gave the other guests.
“[I’d cook] fried potatoes and green beans, country-style creamed corn, corn bread and biscuits, pinto beans and turnip greens, meat loaf,” she said. “I’d probably make up a vanilla pudding. I’d have to fix Beethoven a chef’s salad. I don’t think he’d want all that grease.”
Dolly Parton often cooks a Southern dinner classic for her co-stars
While Parton didn’t include chicken and dumplings on her dinner menu, she has become famous for the dish in Hollywood.
“I cook a lot when I’m on my movie sets,” she told Today. “So I guess it would be a long list of famous people [I’ve cooked for], because whoever the stars and co-stars are. I have this huge big pot, and I make chicken and dumplings. I’m famous for it, so everybody wants me to make that or a peanut butter fudge that I love and take on set with me.”
Parton said people are so eager to try her cooking that they ask when she plans to bring some in.
“Everybody asks, ‘When are you going to do the dumplings?’ I always announce it a couple of days before so they all look forward to it,” she said. “So, I’ve had my dumplings eaten by a lot of famous people.”
She said she’d never give out the recipe despite its popularity.
She said she didn’t like to host often
Though Parton likes to cook, she said she didn’t often host people at her home. When she wasn’t touring, recording, or filming, she liked to have quiet nights in with her husband, Carl Dean. She especially didn’t want fans coming by.
“When I’m home, we don’t like people at the house other than our family and our own friends,” she said. “We don’t want fans comin’ in our yard. And there’s no artist in the business that is any more devoted and loves their fans more than me. I’ve always tried to belong to the public when I’m out there, and I’ve always tried to be honest enough with them to say, ‘I don’t want you to come up to the house unless you’ve been invited, because I may be up there half-naked.’”
