Looking Swell.(The Talk of the Town)(Dolly Parton)(Biography)

Dolly Parton, whose father paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal, came to New York City for the first time in 1964, on a trip with the senior class of Sevier County High School. She stayed in a hotel (a first) and rode the subway (a first, and only). In Flushing Meadows, the World's Fair was on, and "Hello, Dolly!," Parton recalled recently, was "hot, hot, hot" on Broadway. "It was all over the cabs, and the signs, and I said, 'They must have been waitin' for me!' " The second time Parton came to New York, in 1970, she and her best friend, Judy Ogle, figured they'd get a similarly warm reception. "We came here and we stayed down on, what is it, Forty-second Street, where all the whores run?" Parton said. "We went out walking, and we saw there were all these porno movies, and we were thinking, Oh, my God, this don't look like a good place. And we were overdressed--lookin' like I do now, we did look like trash, and so we looked the part." One man pushed Parton up against a wall. "He kept trying to put the make on me, and I said, 'If you touch me one more time, I swear to God I'm going to shoot you!' " Parton actually had a gun. "But no, I don't still carry one. They'll be all over my ass with that one. Now I have bodyguards!" When she and Ogle got back to the hotel, their room was locked and their luggage was in the lobby. "We just went to the airport," Parton said. "We swore we'd never come back to New York." There's a line in the new musical "9 to 5," for which Parton wrote the music and the lyrics, that she wishes she'd thought of at the time, where a secretary says to her boss, "I'll change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot!"

Parton was back in New York last week, sitting in a red velvet seat in an empty theatre--the Marquis, where "9 to 5," based on the 1980 movie of the same name, in which Parton starred, with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, opens on Thursday. Parton was as uplifting, and as uplifted, as ever: icepick boots, blond wig in a mussed, half-up style. Her top was a leopard-print number (mesh inserts, turquoise spots, plunging zip), bought off the rack but "Dollyized," she said, with rhinestones and black fringe. A security guard had joked with Parton as she walked backstage that he might have to search her.

"He wants to frisk me? Well, all right!" Parton had replied.

If she had not succeeded at music, Parton said, she ...