Candy
Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend.
(Page 2 of 6)
To Scott and to Susan, neither of whom was born when Juanita Dale Slusher was transforming herself into Candy Barr, this whole episode must have seemed like a pilgrimage to a mystical shrine. Scott had forsaken his first passion, mountain climbing, to sit at the feet of Candy Barr and follow orders explicitly. Susan walked around with a glazed expression, saying “far out” and rubbing her fingers over the faded newspaper clippings as though to verify they were real. “I never really knew who Aunt Nita was, just that she was someone famous,” Susan Slusher said. “When I was about nine or ten she visited us in Philadelphia. She was so beautiful in her mink coat and high heels and all. She wasn’t like an aunt, she was someone I could talk to.” Susan had been in Brownwood less than one week when the O. E. Cole mission cleaved the pattern. Now she was wondering if maybe she ought to move to Dallas and look for a job. When you got past the talking, there wasn’t a helluva lot to do in Brownwood.
Scott did the driving back to Brownwood, mountain climbing never far from his mind. Candy thought of biscuits and talked on the CB. The only thing those good buddies out there knew about “The Godmother” was that she had a husky, rapid-fire Loretta Lynn voice and a way with the double entendre. Could anyone look as good as that voice sounded? Candy Barr could. She still had it. What to do with it, that was the problem. That had always been the problem.
Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt.
When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to.
“I know in the fourth grade I was a real good student,” Candy recalled. “I got to hand out the Spelling and Spanish exams.” After school it was three or four hours washing bedsheets over a rubboard next to a boiling iron kettle under a Chinaberry tree. “When girls ask me about breast development, I say, ‘Honey, get yourself a rubboard.’”
At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own.
Many talent scouts have taken credit for discovering Candy Barr: Barney Weinstein, who paid her $15 to act as a shill for his amateur night at the Theater Lounge; his brother Abe who hired her away to become his headliner at the Colony; Joe DeCarlo, a Los Angeles entrepreneur and pal of Hefner and Sinatra, who got her away from Abe; and Gary Crosby, who once advised Mickey Cohen: “Goddamn, one thing about that broad, she can make ya feel like a real man.”
To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas.
The only place a teenage runaway could count on steady work in Dallas was at the Trolley Courts, or the other hot-pillow motels located out Harry Hines Boulevard, or along the old Fort Worth Highway. Pimps, thugs, and night clerks traded around young girls as they pleased. Candy’s arrangement with the hotel consisted of making beds by day and turning tricks at night. There were buses out of town, but they went nowhere. There were other jobs, but she had already put in her time on the rubboard. An old crook named Shorty Anderson decided she had too much class for the Trolley Courts, so he claimed her as his own and took her to live in his trailer under a bridge where he ran a school for young burglars. Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then. Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds. I remember seeing Smart Aleck at the Wolters Air Force Base NCO Club in Mineral Wells about 1955. There had never been anything like it, and for my generation there never will again. All of us had seen stag movies before, threadbare hookers sweathogging with some jerk hung like Groggin’s mule, but this was different: this was a beautiful fifteen-year-old sweetheart type and you could just tell she was enjoying it.
Candy claims that she had never seen her movie until she went to Chicago to pose for Oui. When I asked how it felt watching herself perform, she said it felt like nothing. “It didn’t turn me on,” she told me. She could barely remember having performed.
“They may have drugged me, or maybe I blocked it out of my mind,” she said. “I suppose they took me to a motel, I don’t know where. In Dallas, I guess. I had been forced into screwing so many times I wasn’t really aware that this was different. I don’t think they even paid me. I’ve read that that movie made me Candy Barr. That movie made it because I became Candy Barr.”
One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” Bill Gilliland, the manager of the Doubleday Book Store in downtown Dallas, recalled that when he was a student at SMU in the mid-fifties Candy was the sensation of the Phi Delta Theta stag held at the Alford refrigerated warehouse.
“What I remember most about Candy was her enthusiasm,” Gilliland said. “Later, when she was stripping at the Colony, I saw her many times. Sometimes my wife went with me. A lot of women were turned on by Candy. Here was one woman willing to flaunt it.”
“She made me a lot of money,” Abe Weinstein freely admitted. “The biggest draw I ever had at the Colony was Rusty Warren. What a sweetheart. But Candy ran her a close second.”
Abe, who lives alone now in a north Dallas townhouse, enjoying the fruits of retirement, actually “discovered” Candy Barr, as opposed to Juanita Dale Slusher. The first time he watched Candy upstage the amateurs at his brother Barney’s Theater Lounge, he said to himself, “That’s raw talent.” The name Candy Barr was Barney’s inspiration (she really did eat a lot of candy), but it took Abe’s sound business philosophy and promotional acumen to bring Candy uptown where she belonged. The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.
“I didn’t make Candy a headliner,” Abe told me as we drank coffee in the living room of his townhouse. “She made herself a headliner. Of course those stag parties and that famous movie—it made a flat million over the years—that didn’t hurt her image, but Candy was a real pro from the start, one of the best strippers to ever hit the stage. I don’t want to say anything about how she was offstage—she’d probably come up here and kill me—but onstage she was number one, the best. She drove ‘em crazy, women too. No, I didn’t make her a headliner, but I can say this without bragging: I knew how to make the most of what she had to offer.”
Abe cited several examples of his promotional genius, including daily newspaper ads (“I called her my Sugar and Spice Girl”), the life-size cardboard cutout of Candy with her cowboy hat and cap pistols outside the Colony, and a deal Abe negotiated whereby Candy got a percentage of the door for playing the Jayne Mansfield role in a local production of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? She memorized the script in three days, and opened after one rehearsal.
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