Dolly Parton could have enjoyed an enormous Las Vegas hotel room while filming Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. Instead, the country queen parked her tour bus beside Sandra Bullock's, did her own glamorous preparations onboard and spent the night sleeping in the parking lot.
Bullock, 62, shared the wonderfully unpretentious story while attending the London premiere of Practical Magic 2, just one day after Parton died at 80 following a brief battle with cancer.
The two stars worked together on the 2005 comedy, in which Parton played herself and was memorably tackled by Bullock's FBI agent, Gracie Hart, after being mistaken for a Dolly impersonator. Behind the scenes, however, Bullock discovered that the international superstar was far less demanding than anyone expected.
Bullock explained that she disliked flying at the time and traveled everywhere by tour bus, often sleeping onboard during production. When Parton arrived in Las Vegas, she pulled her own bus alongside Bullock's. It may even have been pink-because, as Bullock joked, of course Dolly Parton would arrive in a pink tour bus.
The production had already arranged an enormous hotel room for Parton, but she immediately rejected the offer.
"No, I'll stay in the bus," Parton reportedly told Bullock.
The actress then asked the obvious question: Where would one of the most famously glamorous women in show business possibly do that enormous hair and immaculate makeup?
"Oh, I'll do it on the bus," Dolly replied.
When Bullock realized that Parton also intended to sleep there, she decided she was not going anywhere either. "Then I'm sleeping on the bus," she declared.
And that is how an Oscar-winning Hollywood star and a country-music legend ended up sleeping in two buses parked side by side in Las Vegas-while a perfectly good luxury accommodation apparently sat waiting nearby. People
The story perfectly captures the contradiction that made Parton so fascinating. She built an image around towering wigs, rhinestones and extravagantly fitted costumes, yet often lived with the practicality of the poor Tennessee mountain girl she had once been.
Bullock had personally written to Parton asking her to appear in Miss Congeniality 2 and was stunned when the singer agreed. Their big scene required Bullock to chase Parton through a Las Vegas hotel before tackling her to the ground-and the physical comedy became even cheekier behind the scenes.
Bullock admitted in a 2005 interview that she felt uncomfortable lying on top of Parton during filming. Dolly, naturally, knew exactly how to break the tension.
"We're going to put the Madonna-Britney kiss to shame!" Parton reportedly joked, referring to Madonna and Britney Spears' headline-making kiss at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards.
Bullock remembered thinking, "Wow, you rock. You just rock!" She later described Parton as everything a fan could hope she would be-and more.
The actress's latest tribute mixed grief with the kind of mischievous memory that Parton herself likely would have appreciated. Bullock insisted that death could not erase the singer's enormous presence because Dolly had left traces of herself everywhere.
"All the people here and in the world will never amount to what Dolly Parton is," Bullock said. "She's here. She sprinkles everywhere. She's not going anywhere."
For Bullock, the most revealing Dolly Parton story was not about a concert, award or celebrity party. It was about the night one of the richest and most recognizable entertainers in the world turned down a massive Las Vegas hotel room, fixed her famous hair inside a bus and slept in a parking lot beside her new Hollywood friend.
