Candy
Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend.
(Page 6 of 6)
“Let’s go in here for a while,” she said, leading me to the bedroom with the pink wallpaper and the elaborate dressing table. It was the bedroom of a star, though one fallen on hard times. The floor was carpeted and old publicity photographs collected dust on the wall by the screened porch. The bed was extra large, and so was the bathtub. Carefully crossing her legs, Candy seated herself in front of the dresser mirror, so that the face I saw was her reflection. She raked the clutter of tubes and jars and cosmetic brushes aside.
I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”
I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii.
“When I finally went to prison,” she said, and I realized now, watching her face in the mirror, this was the only way she could answer the question, “it was with a great sense of relief. Otherwise, I would have been dead or laying on some gangster’s couch. Of course I didn’t know what prison was. I guess I thought it was a private club. I ordered all these new clothes from a place in Florida—ten dresses, twenty bras, cosmetics—hell, I was gonna be there a long time. The only thing I didn’t think to take with me was the only thing I needed—money. Everything else they took away.”
She reached for another cigarette and said, “I started to tell you a story earlier. About something that scared me for years. It was one night when I was babysitting, I was dead tired from washing bed sheets all afternoon and trying to study and the baby was crying. I walked over and put my hand on the baby’s nose. That’s all there was to it, a moment of darkness, but just for a moment I knew I was capable of killing. I thought about that many times in prison. Women who had killed or harmed children were horribly ostracized in prison. I could understand why they struck out at me, but those poor women—didn’t they understand how those women hurt inside? Couldn’t they tell by the depth of their tears? Didn’t they understand that brief moment of darkness?”
Scott attempted to slip through the bedroom carrying an armload of clothes from the dryer, but Candy froze him with her eyes. She stood him in the corner by the blasting stereo and barked five or six terse, no-nonsense commands; bring in some fresh drinking water, go into town and pick up the mail, check the tires on the car. “Now repeat all that back to me,” she demanded, holding him with her eyes. Scott repeated it all, a trait, I gathered, that was recently acquired.
“Goddamn,” Candy snapped at me, “I’m supposed to be in there cooking supper. See what you’re doing to me!”
I mixed a drink from a bottle of Scotch I had brought for just such emergencies (Candy doesn’t drink) and studied the modest collection of books on her living room shelf. There was The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, Dream Dictionary, a book of Living Magic, a book called Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts, and another called Enigmas: Another Book of Unexplained Facts. There were random copies of Reader’s Digest and Ladies Home Journal.
A collection of men’s hats hung like trophies from antlers. A rack containing seven or eight briar pipes sat solemnly beside a large can of Prince Albert.
It was after 4 a.m. when we sat down to a meal of fried chicken, potato salad, corn, red beans, sliced tomatoes, canned biscuits, and iced tea. Candy’s spirits improved with each mouthful. She winked and asked was everything OK. Clyde McCoy blew his bluesy harmonica on the stereo and Candy began a monologue recalling her daddy, old Doc Slusher—how the deputy back in Edna used to ride into the yard on a white horse to question Doc about some groceries that had disappeared from the local market; how when they came to repossess his car Doc sloshed a ring of gasoline around it, struck a kitchen match on the seat of his pants, and invited them to come ahead.
“Ride the rhyme, that’s what Lord Buckley taught me,” she said. “I learned to dance when I was two … on my daddy’s knee. Daddy played the French harp. He was a blues man. Saturday was his blues day. He’d set a bottle of whiskey on the table for anybody that came around and he’d play the blues on that harp.”
She went on about how she picked cotton and made soap and bacon for the family, the big black wash pots in the yard, hunting with the hounds, the taste of possum which she couldn’t stand, and fried armadillo, which was still a favorite.
Candy showed me her fan mail and some old publicity pictures. Maybe it wasn’t much of a legacy, but it was a start. There were those who remembered her well, many more than you would ever think. “I know my kids have been hurt by what’s been written about me,” she said. “I’m not saying it’s totally incorrect, it’s the way they say it.” Sure she’d done a little dope, and turned some tricks. She’d never stolen or hurt anyone, except when it was necessary. “I’ve rebelled,” she said, “and I’ve learned that in rebellion you can become what you’re rebelling against.” Even now there were moments when she wasn’t all that certain she had it together. Not too long ago a sheriff from Bell County had called and said he’d heard Candy was working his area. “I just cried,” she told me. “Then I got it together and told him, ‘If and when I do, you’ll know it all right. I’ll be there in my Cadillac blowing your doors off.’
“I almost let them make me feel ugly,” Candy said, studying the twenty-year-old photo of the young girl with the toy pistols. “I look at these old pictures, and what I see is people grabbing my ass. From five years old on. I had my heart broke many times. I didn’t even know why people were snotty to me. I was making a living. But it was like they had a bleeper on my ass. I was making $85 a week as a cigarette girl at the Theater Lounge, and all I could think of was, I had a car, a place of my own, and now nobody could throw me back in a motel with a night porter.
“But they wouldn’t let up. Do you know what it’s like working onstage with a couple of harness bulls sitting two feet away? Why did I have to take them to the backseat? Why did I have to call them sir when they were watching me take my clothes off? They were on my level then.”
It was nearly dawn when Candy made a bed for me on the living room sofa. She covered me with an imitation bearskin rug and tucked it in. An early autumn cold front had passed through West Texas: the thin walls of Fort Dulce rattled, and I lay there in the changing shafts of light thinking not of the woman whose essence filled the room, but of a life-size cardboard cutout of Candy Barr. I knew what Jim Frye would ask. He would ask: did you get any?
It was all a fantasy. Twenty years ago Candy Barr was forbidden fruit, a symbol for the agony of our tightly corked libidos, a martyr to repressed yearnings for violence and identity, a solitary being bending into the prevailing winds of injustice and insensitivity. When you got right down to it, Candy Barr did not apply to be our symbol. Like Patty Hearst, she just got carried away.
After a few hours sleep we all felt better. The sudden cold snap had turned the lake bronze as the warmer bottom water floated to the surface. I walked down by the lake and watched Scott dig the cottage intake pipe from the mud and blow it clean so there would be clear water for Candy’s morning shower. After her shower, Candy seated herself at the dressing table and, like one of those time-lapse Disney films where a desert flower appears to blossom before your eyes, performed the ancient miracle of her sex. The blonde hair brushed out soft and glossy. Mascara arches defined the eyes which sparkled now like polished turquoise. That cave-dweller’s pallor that had appeared so unflattering in the harsh light of the kitchen took on tones of finely dusted nutmeg. In her tight hip-hugger jeans and red halter she looked like a young girl ready for a hayride.
Momentarily, she reappeared as Candy Barr, a lost vision of great beauty, warmth, and charm.
She popped open a can of biscuits and asked me to sit beside her.
“Now we can talk,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how you feel,” I said.
“I feel like . . . like I’m not vulnerable anymore,” she told me.
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