Four decades after millions of readers saw the original magazine cover on newsstands, the recreated bunny suit belonged to an audience of one at the breakfast stove. On the morning of July 20, 2021, seventy five year old Dolly Parton stepped into a strapless black corset, white cuffs, bunny ears, and a collar with a pink bow, then carried a birthday cake into the kitchen to surprise her husband Carl Thomas Dean on his seventy ninth birthday.
After fifty seven years together he still thought she was a hot chick, and she was not about to try to talk him out of it.
More than four decades earlier in October 1978, the thirty two year old singer became the first country artist to appear on the cover of Playboy after negotiating a strict agreement that she would wear the bunny outfit on the front cover and never pose nude inside, protecting the dignity of her family and her private husband. Because Dean had always loved that 1978 photograph, Parton promised in early 2020 that she would recreate it for him once she turned seventy five.
With the magazine traditional print edition discontinued, she organized a private shoot at home and placed the original cover beside her new 2021 portrait inside a single frame. After handing Dean the framed photographs in the sitting room near the kitchen, she stayed in the bunny suit for the rest of the morning to fry his breakfast and visit with him at the table, and Dean was delighted by the surprise.
Dean, a Nashville native born to Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean and Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean, had spent nearly six decades avoiding the cameras that followed his wife around the globe. Following his service in the U.S. Army National Guard, the twenty one year old Dean was driving his white Chevrolet pickup past the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville in 1964 when he stopped to talk to an eighteen year old Parton on her first day in town, and Parton later recalled that while they stood beside her drying laundry he looked directly into her face rather than staring at her figure.
Two years later, after Monument Records chief Fred Foster asked Parton to delay marrying so she could be marketed as a single singer, the couple drove across the state line to Ringgold, Georgia. On Memorial Day, May 30, 1966, they married inside Ringgold First Baptist Church with only Parton’s mother Avie Lee, the preacher, and the preacher’s wife present.
A few months into the marriage Parton rented a tuxedo for Dean to accompany her to a 1966 Broadcast Music, Inc. awards dinner honoring her songwriting on “Put It Off Until Tomorrow.” Walking across the parking lot afterward, Dean loosened his bow tie and told Parton he had chosen her rather than her industry, and that they could keep their lives together while keeping her career separate.
For the rest of his working life Dean ran his own asphalt paving company in Nashville, preferring Led Zeppelin to country music and coming home in work boots and jeans to their Brentwood farm Willowbrook. So few photographers ever caught him in public that tabloid reporters periodically suggested Parton had invented a fictional husband, a rumor she laughed off in interviews while keeping reporters off their property.
Inside the house Dean’s tastes still shaped her catalog. His habit of chatting with a tall red haired teller at their local Nashville bank branch started the running marital joke that inspired her 1973 single “Jolene,” and her 2012 ballad “From Here to the Moon and Back” was written directly for him.
In May 2016 the pair marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary by renewing their vows in Nashville, an occasion that led Parton to record her love song collection Pure and Simple. Seven years later she recorded her 2023 album Rockstar as a nod to Dean, who had blasted Led Zeppelin and rock records around their farm since 1964.
Whenever Parton had a break between tours, the two hooked up a small RV camper and drove unannounced through Tennessee and Georgia, ordering food at drive thru windows and sleeping in roadside campgrounds where no one knew who owned the rig. At home Dean picked wildflowers from the lawn for her table and left short notes beside the stove.
Following the July 2021 birthday surprise Dean’s health began to fail, and Parton stepped away from the road in 2023 to care for him at home until his death on March 3, 2025, at age eighty two. Seventeen months later, when Parton died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at age eighty, she was laid to rest beside him at Woodlawn Memorial Park, reuniting the eighteen year old girl from the Wishy Washy Laundromat and the man who had spent fifty eight years waiting for her at the kitchen table.