Long before Dolly Parton delivered one of the most memorable threats in “9 to 5,” the country music legend says she had already confronted a frightening situation with a real handgun in her hand.
Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, recounted the encounter during a 2021 interview with Nashville Soundbite. The story has resurfaced following her death and offers an intriguing explanation for how one of her character’s famous lines may have made its way onto the screen.
The interviewer asked Parton about the 1980 comedy “9 to 5,” in which she starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
Parton played Doralee Rhodes, whose lecherous boss Franklin Hart Jr., played by Dabney Coleman, falsely boasts that he is having an affair with her.
Doralee eventually makes her feelings toward Hart unmistakable. Armed with a revolver, she warns him that she could change him “from a rooster to a hen.”
According to Parton, Hollywood may not have invented the idea.
She recalled an encounter with a man whose advances became frightening enough that she reached for a gun.
“This guy was really coming on to me and it was scary as it could be and so he just kept on,” Parton said.
Growing up as a “country girl,” as she put it, Parton was accustomed to firearms. And on this occasion, she had one available.
“At that time, you know, I had a gun so I pulled it out,” she recalled.
Then came a warning remarkably similar to the one audiences would later hear in “9 to 5.”
“I said ‘Look,’ it was basically what they kind of based that , ‘if you touch me one more time I’ll change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot,’” Parton said.
She said she had told the story years before the movie, providing a possible origin for Doralee’s memorable threat.
“That’s kind of basically where that whole thing , because I’d told that story years before and so, so that’s kind of where that came from,” Parton explained.
Parton’s decision to carry a firearm for personal protection was not something she kept secret.
In fact, she discussed it publicly years before “9 to 5” reached theaters.
During a 1978 Playboy interview, Parton said she routinely carried a .38-caliber pistol and had obtained a permit in Nashville.
“I always carry a gun. A .38 pistol,” she told the magazine. “I have a permit for it in Nashville.”
Her explanation was straightforward.
“I just carry it for protection,” Parton said. “I feel safer when I’ve got it. I just don’t like the idea of knowin’ I’m totally helpless.”
The timing makes Parton’s account particularly notable.
Her encounter happened in a very different legal environment for Americans who wanted to carry concealed firearms.
It occurred decades before the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down New York’s requirement that applicants demonstrate “proper cause” to receive an unrestricted concealed-carry license.
It also predated the spread of “shall issue” laws across the country, under which authorities generally must grant carry permits to applicants who satisfy specified legal requirements.
Tennessee itself once had considerably more restrictive rules.
According to TennesseeFirearms.com, concealed-carry permits were difficult to obtain from county sheriffs before changes to state law beginning in the 1990s. Tennessee subsequently moved to a centralized issuing system and, in 2021, enacted permitless handgun carry for many qualifying adults.
Parton, however, was publicly talking about having a permit and carrying her .38 back in 1978.
And according to the story she told decades later, there was at least one occasion when she felt she needed it.
Parton did not say she fired the weapon. She described pulling it and delivering a warning after the man’s unwanted advances left her frightened.
That was apparently enough.