Run Rose Run, by Dolly Parton and James Patterson

Books

Stick to the day job

Eric Morecambe, Les Dawson and Harry Secombe all tried it – now Dolly Parton has written a celebrity novel. By Roger Lewis

Ihave a shelf of celebrity novels. Madonna, Sharon Osbourne, Carrie Fisher, Ethan Hawke…. They’ve all had a go – even Gyles Brandreth.

Yet though perhaps they think they are making things up, celebrities can be inadvertently much more confessional in their fictions than they are in their official autobiographies, which are usually ghosted rubbish, full of evasions and gaps and phoney niceness.

Leading the field here is Eric Morecambe’s Mr Lonely (1981), where a surprisingly harsh picture of showbusiness is presented. Sid Lewis, to all intents and purposes Eric himself, is motivated by a permanent anger. He can never shake off his early days, when he was ‘looked down upon’ and trudged, to scant applause, around working men’s clubs, summer seasons, fêtes and police stag nights.

His wife ‘never did win a verbal argument with Sid. He was much too devious’ – and his personality as a performer is that of Eric himself: his trick is ‘Never give the punters time to think’ and he would ‘walk, talk, ask, beg and shout’ – ie keep jabbering, keep everyone distracted. In time, Sid becomes a television hit, and he is killed when stabbed accidentally by an awards statuette.

What’s hard to take are the sex scenes. Eric’s image was that of a pipe-smoking family man in Harpenden. Sid also lives in that district; has a family – but he goes off on erotic adventures. ‘Do you always do as you’re told?’ ‘Depends how big the bed is.’ We don’t really want to know Eric Morecambe’s sexual fantasies, or his philosophy: ‘Conscience doesn’t stop you from doing it. It just stops you from enjoying it.’

The formula is similar in Les Dawson’s A Card for the Clubs (1974), a lightly fictionalised account of a woebegone stand-up act in horrible northern towns. Harry Secombe’s Twice Brightly (1974) is another one, with the genial goon learning his trade in what was the Windmill Theatre, doing his no doubt hilarious shaving routine between the striptease acts.

Barry Humphries’s brilliant Women in the Background (1995), about a drag act played by Derek Pettyfer, who is ‘rich, famous, between wives’, sounds a lot like what handling Dame Edna must involve. ‘Barry Humphries’s comic novel is about a life in a goldfish bowl, in which the goldfish are piranhas,’ says the blurb.

And exactly the same may be said of Adrian Edmondson’s The Gobbler (1995), where the beloved young comedian, ‘a grotesque hero for the nineties’, doesn’t have friends; only professional enemies. Julian Mann, who may just be a portrait of Rik Mayall, or of somebody very similar, is a drinker and womaniser with income-tax problems. His life is one big ‘orgy of booze and young models’.

Anyway, you get the picture. Celebrity fiction doesn’t hold back on what it takes to be a celebrity – nor on the rage and hunger required if fame is to be sustained. Which brings us neatly to Dolly Parton’s offering, Run Rose Run. Her spanking new novel deals with ‘a backwoods innocent stumbling into superstardom’.

The book explores the relationship between AnnieLee Keyes (‘I turned 25 years old last week, and I’m asking you to give me a chance to sing up there on that stage’) and Ruthanna Ryder, not only the established queen of country and western but ‘one of the most successful musicians in the history of the business’, no less.

AnnieLee and Ruthanna seem identical to Dolly herself – her younger and current selves. Ruthanna, for example, ‘clawed her way to the top of her industry’. Now if she enters a hotel suite, she’ll expect to find displays of gigantic fruit baskets and trays of chocolate ganache flecked with edible gold. AnnieLee, meanwhile, who is starting out, sleeps rough in the park and seems to go for days without eating or requiring a hot bath.

Both women are ‘beautiful, talented

Hello, Dolly! Parton and her co-writer, James Patterson

and mean as tobacco spit’. Frankly, I’d hoped or assumed there would be an All About Eve dynamic, with the ruthlessly ambitious youngster, intent on getting to the top, infiltrating the world of her mentor, taking over from within. Or perhaps A Star Is Born – the other template about a rise and a fall.

Alas, there is none of this sort of fruity melodrama, despite AnnieLee’s being ‘stubborn and hungry and full of nothing but stupid pride’. Drama, such as there is, involves AnnieLee’s estranged husband and his ghastly henchpersons, who track her down in Nashville and administer beatings: ‘Pain, excruciating pain, flashed on the side of her head as his foot made contact.’

The men seem to want to sell her into white slavery, and are unaware of her lucrative potential as a singersongwriter, even though ‘crazy girl finds music in everything’.

She certainly does.

‘I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,’ AnnieLee tells Ruthanna, who in fairness to her doesn’t die laughing, which is what I almost did.

Instead, concurring that ‘the demons of the past were the hardest to slay’, Ruthanna continues to dole out advice: cultivate fearlessness and shamelessness and ‘Don’t let anyone else be your boss.’

In the basement of Ruthanna’s mansion is a recording studio, fully equipped with musicians. ‘I’m Ethan Blake,’ says Ethan Blake, a guitarist but also a former commando who served in Afghanistan and bulges with muscles and charisma. AnnieLee spends 500 pages refusing to succumb to the inevitable, despite his saving her bacon in innumerable car chases.

Indeed, men in Dolly’s fictional universe are to be feared and avoided and squirted with pepper spray. Truck drivers picking up hitchhikers will dig their fingers into a girl’s thigh within moments. Producers are predators. Management people exist to exploit talent, making newcomers fit a mould.

Quite how Ruthanna went from singing for throw-money in country fairs, at rodeos and weddings is not divulged – perhaps the fact that ‘she had a smile that could light up a whole concert hall’ is part of it, which would make her a miracle of dentistry.

AnnieLee makes it to the top, however, because of Ruthanna’s patronage, a process taking about three days. On the Monday, she’s homeless; by the end of the week, she has a personal stylist and an entourage.

‘The bigger you get, the more people you need,’ says Ruthanna, a sentiment that would have been endorsed by Elizabeth Taylor, who had a person on the payroll to clip her parrot’s claws.

On the tapes made in that basement, AnnieLee’s voice growls, hollers and implores; it is also sweet and affecting – in my mind’s eye or ear, I imagine a combination of Dame Edna’s squawks and Harry Secombe belting out hymns. Radio stations play the result and fame is assured.

At this point, the baddies return and AnnieLee leaps from a hotel balcony. ‘AnnieLee twisted in the air, trying to protect herself from what was coming.’ She must be the first person in history to survive crashing from the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper with only a small bruise.

Dolly’s co-writer is James Patterson, who we are told on the back flap has written many number-one bestsellers and ‘his books have sold in excess of 400 million copies worldwide’. I’d never heard of him.

What I look forward to is the tie-in album of a dozen original songs Dolly has composed to go with her novel. The lyrics are appended. Big dreams rhymes with faded jeans; lightin’ up my fuse with breakin’ all my rules. Another line, carefully transcribed, goes: ‘Mm-mmmm, mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.’

Has the singer been bound and gagged?

Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson is published on 7th March by Century (£20)