Candy
Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend.
(Page 4 of 6)
“Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer. Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”
Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene. Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”
“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”
No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.
They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.
“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew you couldn’t do that right before a trial.”
In retrospect, observers on both sides acknowledged that the strategy to pick an all-male jury backfired. In his book The Super Americans, John Bainbridge quotes a “native of Dallas who is possessed of a philosophical cast of mind and a family pedigree going back to Sam Houston” with a theory that, in one form or another, I heard many times: “… those eleven men [there was one woman], they got a chance to go home that night and say to their wives: ‘Well, Maude, you can brag on me for what I did today. We put that shameless creature away for a good long spell.’”
Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.
In a hotly worded fourteen-page dissent, Judge Lloyd Davidson wrote, “If that is equal justice under law, I want no part of it. If a conviction obtained under such circumstances is due process of law, then there is no due process of law.”
District Attorney Henry Wade, who took no part in the most sensational trial of 1958, beamed serenely when I asked him twenty years later if it was possible Candy Barr had been railroaded into prison. “Far as I know,” he said, “that wasn’t the case.” One of the jurors told Wade some time later that the reason Candy’s fellow citizens slapped her with so much time was something she said. She called chief prosecutor James Allen “a liar.” “That’s when her true colors came out,” the juror told the district attorney.
“At that period in time,” Wade told me, “it wasn’t unusual to get life for one cigarette. I recall we had a letter from the governor’s office, inquiring into the severity of her sentence. The governor asked us to check our records and find out what was the average sentence for a marijuana conviction. So we did. It turned out the average sentence at that time was eighteen years. So she received less than the average sentence.”
Referring to my notes, I told the district attorney that in 1960 shortly after the final appeal had been exhausted and Candy had gone inside, a survey conducted by the Dallas Times Herald revealed that nine defendants recently convicted of the same crime had received much shorter sentences for substantially larger quantities of killer weed.
“I think that if you’ll check that again,” Henry Wade smiled benignly, “you’ll find that all nine of those defendants were women.”
I checked again. Damned if Henry wasn’t right.
I spent three weeks trying to arrange an interview with Candy Barr, and although I was now calling from a telephone booth beside a Brownwood liquor store less than seven miles from her lake cottage, I had the recurring feeling I wasn’t even close. She told me to call back later. I had already called back five times. She told me that her mind was too scattered to talk right now, the house was a mess, she hadn’t been able to locate the scrapbooks she had promised to show me, she was still worried about O. E. Cole, she hadn’t even had time to shower and wash her hair.
“Why don’t you look over the town,” she said, not very convincingly. “Call me back after a while.”
I had already experienced the pleasure of touring Brownwood. It’s a pleasant, folksy little town where men wear business suits and women dress up to shop at the Safeway and motorists park in the middle of an intersection to exchange gossip with pedestrians. Big church town. Trees. Home of Howard Payne College, the Douglas MacArthur Academy, and the onetime golden boy of Texas politics, Ben Barnes, as well as small industries untroubled by labor problems, some ranches, a pecan research station, a model reform school, and a farm where little pigs—potty trained and dressed in plastic boots—never touch the ground from conception to skillet. In the summer, people play softball all night long. The remainder of the year they talk about their high school football team, which is usually one of the best in the state. Hardly a coffee break passes that someone doesn’t remember 1940 when a wee halfback named Chili Rice personally defeated arch-rival Breckenridge for only the second time in 36 years. Every Friday during football season, the town shuts down.
The people were friendly and proud to be right there. They all knew Candy Barr of course; but, of course, they didn’t know her. There is a custom among the businessmen of Brownwood that the first thing you say on meeting a stranger inquiring about Candy Barr is: “For Godsake, don’t use my name.” “My wife would leave me if she knew I’d even spoken to her,” one businessman told me. “Not that I’ve ever fooled around. But just try telling that to my wife.” Another man told me, “if you want to know about Candy, ask my son.” It was the young men who knew her best, and if they refused to talk about her it was not peer pressure but respect for her privacy. “She’s been through enough,” a college-aged man said. “She just wants to be left alone.”
“People here know how to forgive and forget,” Sheriff Danny Neal said. “Not just Candy … anyone who paid a price and is back on the street. Nobody here gives her a hard time.”
“She comes in here and shops just like anybody else,” a druggist said. “No, I can’t think of anything special about her. She buys a lot of cosmetics that I wouldn’t ordinarily stock, that’s about all.”
Though Candy lives her private life in her lake cottage with no visible means of support, she arouses little curiosity. The menfolk assume she is supported, at least partially, by a certain Brownwood banker, or by a former member of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles who at one time “kept her.” The women just naturally assume she is a hundred-dollar-a-night hooker. Candy has learned to live with the whispers. “That’s a hundred dollars an hour, man,” she jokes among friends. Recently, Candy made an unexpected appearance at a fundamentalist church, where she gave a brief testimonial to Jesus as a “superstar.” Nobody was shocked.
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