Inside the lavish NYC penthouse that Dolly Parton shared with her former manager: Hes gay We were like Will and Grace

Dolly Parton may have been country to her core, but for a glittering stretch of her rise to stardom, the Tennessee songbird brought a little bit of the Smoky Mountains to Fifth Avenue.Her unlikely Manhattan roommate? Her gay manager and close confidant Sandy Gallin — the powerhouse talent manager who also represented Michael Jackson and Cher — a living arrangement Parton later summed up perfectly.“He’s gay — he had one end of the house and I had the other,” Parton told the New Yorker in 2009.“We were like Will and Grace.”Though in Parton and Gallin’s version, “Will” apparently did the decorating.For years, Parton and Gallin shared a Fifth Avenue pied-à-terre, a Manhattan home base that neither occupied full time.

Vanity Fair was still describing it as the Fifth Avenue apartment the pair shared when the magazine interviewed Parton there in 1996.The apartment was reportedly at 800 Fifth Ave., a luxury rental tower overlooking Central Park at East 61st Street, where no units are presently available, according to StreetEasy.And despite Parton’s rhinestone-studded, larger-than-life aesthetic, the place was far more Sandy than Dolly.“Everything you see is Sandy’s taste,” Parton told the New York Times during a 1979 visit to what the newspaper described as her New York “office-apartment.”Parton said she had personally chosen only “the bed and the piano.” Gallin furnished the place and assembled its contemporary art collection, introducing the self-described country girl to a decidedly more highbrow Manhattan aesthetic.“What little dab of culture I have is because of Sandy,” Parton later told Vanity Fair, describing the two of them as “burlap and satin, Tennessee and Manhattan!” The aerie even appeared in a 1980 episode of CBS’ “Country People,” which showed the typical trappings of luxury decorations from that era — among them round glass tables, maximal floral wallpaper and a massive cushioned headboard for her bed ...