Candy
Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend.
(Page 3 of 6)
Another example, which Abe failed to mention, was how he seized the moment when Candy shot her ex-husband, Troy Phillips. State Senator Oscar Mauzy, the attorney who represented Candy in that case, filled in the details: “They set the normal bond in the case, about five thousand, as I recall. There wasn’t much chance the grand jury would indict: Troy had a bad habit of getting drunk and kicking down her door, and he wasn’t hurt very bad anyway. When Abe heard the bond was only five grand, he hit the ceiling. He called his friend [Sheriff] Bill Decker and got it raised to $100,000. Then he paid it and called a press conference. I heard about it and got the hell over to the Colony Club. There was Candy in her costume with the toy pistols and every TV and radio newsman in town. They were just about to start when I grabbed her and got her out of there.”
Abe recalled that the Colony did near-record business in the days just after the shooting. When she got popped for marijuana twenty months later (in October 1957), the place was packed every night. And when Candy was released after serving three years and four months of her fifteen-year sentence, it was standing room only. By then Candy was making $750 a week. “I don’t know how much money you make,” Abe told me, “but I only wish you had half the money she brought in those three weeks.” Abe showed me a copy of Candy’s poetry which, I gathered, had been placed on the coffee table for my benefit. It was inscribed: “Nov. 27, 1972. To Abe, dear Abe.”
Abe shook his head sadly and said, “I read an article where she said nobody ever visited her in prison and it really irritated me. My late wife, Ginny, God bless her, and I visited her twice a month, which was all that was allowed. Never once missed a visit. Not in the whole time she was down there.”
He refilled my coffee cup and asked a question he had been leading up to. He asked me what Candy had to say about Abe Weinstein.
“Nothing very unkind,” I said. “I don’t think she’s bitter. At least she says she isn’t.”
“Then you’ve seen her.”
“Yes,” I said. “It took me twenty years, but I finally saw her.” I told Abe that I remembered the first time exactly: it was February 1, 1956, the night after I got out of the Army. Jim Frye and I were walking down Commerce Street toward the Colony Club, toward that life-size cardboard cutout which was so close to the real thing I could smell it. I had dwelled on it many times: a fat cook in our barracks who later got sent up for armed robbery had a smaller version pasted to his locker. In the age of innocence that was the face and the body and the telltale blonde hair that seemed to focus all the guilts and fantasies of the fifties. She epitomized the conflict between sex as joy and sex as danger. The body was perfect, but it was the innocence of the face that lured you on. I know the secret, it said, I can enjoy sex without guilt. But the cap pistols in her hand were a clear warning of danger. Three days earlier Candy had thrown down on poor Troy. It was front-page stuff. Now those cap pistols had a frame of reference: they were directed at me.
“How did you like the act?” Abe asked.
I told him I never saw the act. One block before Jim Frye and I reached the Colony Club two Dallas cops jumped out of their car, wrestled us to the sidewalk, clapped us in handcuffs and took us to jail. They said we were drunk. We weren’t drunk, though that was certainly our intention. Those were the days of the old How Dare You Squad in Dallas: intent was sufficient cause for arrest and confinement. Candy knew that a lot better than I did, but I bygod knew it, too. All those women’s clubs and all those wives of all those fine men who paid $500 to get their hands on Candy Barr were actively applying pressure to the powers that were, most particularly to the Dallas Police Department’s special service bureau and its hard-line director, Captain Pat Gannaway, scourge of the drug peddler and sex merchant and guardian of community sensibility. I wanted to ask Abe Weinstein, master of media manipulation, if he had ever considered that maybe he did his job of promoting Candy Barr too well. Had he ever considered that at least 10 per cent of that fifteen-year prison sentence rightly belonged to Abe Weinstein?
Old memories are masters of deceit. It wasn’t that hard growing up on a farm, and John D. Rockefeller didn’t ride around Central Park on the backs of orphans. Japs weren’t all that evil, Harding wasn’t that dumb, and Lindy wasn’t that lucky. If we cared about the truth, Alan Ladd had to stand on a soapbox to kiss Maria Montez, and Mickey Rooney couldn’t walk under a billy goat’s belly. I mention this because now, twenty years later, when they should feel remorse and more than a little guilt, the nabobs and psalm singers of Dallas still remember Candy Barr as an epic force of evil.
As far as I am able to determine, Candy made only one blue movie, Smart Aleck. Yet many of the men I spoke with put the number at eight or ten or even fifteen. The prominent auto dealer seemed to recall that her co-star in one flick was an Army mule. District Attorney Henry Wade had a recollection that she once went before a camera with a black man, which didn’t help her image, especially with the police. An old-time police reporter recalled that “everyone knew she was chipping around with the stuff,” meaning drugs. One of her defense attorneys in the marijuana case, Bill Braecklein, now a state senator from Dallas, didn’t remember the quantity of grass she was charged with possessing, “but it looked like one hell of a lot in that court room.”
In fact, the Alka-Seltzer bottle of grass that Candy surrendered to Captain Pat Gannaway and his armada of undercover agents weighed 375 grains, or 24.3 grams. Less than one ounce—a small-time misdemeanor today. We would call it a short lid. If, as Lieutenant Red Souter testified, this was an amount sufficient to roll 125 joints, I would like to invite Red to my next birthday party.
Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time. Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.” He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”
In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash—the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.
Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next:
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