Candy
Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend.
(Page 5 of 6)
But, why Brownwood? She had tried Dallas, L.A., Vegas, New Orleans, Mexico City, Huntsville. She had seen their bedrooms, their bars, their jails. When Candy returned to Edna after her parole in April 1963, overweight and overwrought and badly jolted by the experience, she met a woman named Gloria Carver and they became fast friends. When Gloria moved to Brownwood a few years later, Candy followed. “I felt safe here,” she had told me in one of our telephone conversations.
That feeling of security didn’t last too long. In 1969, she made headlines again when a Brownwood cop acting without a search warrant found a handful of seeds and stems in a shoebox in her apartment. Candy was out of town at the time. The case was dismissed, to the great relief, I gathered, of almost everyone. Brownwood wasn’t that kind of town.
Certainly those were difficult times: sewing men’s trousers in a prison workshop and appearing once a year at the Rodeo hadn’t exactly prepared her for a new career. Old friends like Mickey Cohen and Sammy Davis, Jr., had their own problems now. Under the conditions of her parole she couldn’t even set foot in a place that sold alcoholic beverages. “What was I supposed to do, work in a root beer stand?” she had said. “They were pushing me into a corner all over again. It was either get on my back or do something silly.” The one old friend who did help was Jack Ruby. Jack gave her $50, an air conditioner, and two breed dogs “so you won’t have to go out and sell yourself.”
After Abe Weinstein pulled a few strings in Austin, Candy made a brief comeback at the Colony, then she just sort of wandered off. There had been a lot of talk about movie and recording offers in the weeks following her parole, but all of it came to nothing. Abe, who was still technically her manager and agent, tried to hustle her prison poetry—scrawled, overlabored cries on sheets of paper decorated like some fifth-grade art project with glossy photographs clipped from Vogue and Ladies Home Journal. Abe even spread the word that the poetry was “in the hands of Doubleday right this minute.” To Abe’s way of thinking, this was true. He had stashed the pages with is friend Bill Gilliland at the Doubleday Book Store in downtown Dallas.
After Candy had saved and borrowed enough to publish her poems, she would make brief, unannounced appearances at events such as the chili cookoff in Terlingua, trying her best to promote the book. Even then, she played the star. She would wait for a crowd to gather, then she would pop from a trailer, looking sexy and posing for pictures with the book in her hand. Some people bought out of curiosity, but most of them just gawked and waited for something else to happen. Nothing did.
She made many tentative agreements with writers and editors to do her life story. “She must have sold ten per cent of herself about two hundred times,” writer Larry King says. Then, unexpectedly, in October 1975 Oui offered her $5000 to pose and be interviewed. The idea originated with writer Gay Talese, who suggested to a friend at the magazine, “Instead of those teenybopper dipsos, how about some pictures of a mature woman?”
Talese’s motive was not altruistic. A year earlier he had visited Candy in Brownwood, hoping to do research on his own long-awaited book on sex, society, and the law. The interview had been a disaster. Candy refused to talk into a tape recorder, and when Talese asked specific questions about Jack Ruby, Mickey Cohen, Joe DeCarlo, prison, and Dallas in the fifties, she wouldn’t talk at all. Instead, she wanted to talk about her memoirs, which she assumed Talese wanted to write. Talese tried to explain that he had enough problems with his own book, which he had been working on for several years. After a day and a half of wrangling and getting nowhere, Candy did one of her dramatic flip-flops. She stripped naked and positioned herself on the floor, as she had so many other times when there didn’t seem to be another choice. What happened next depends on which party you care to believe, but shortly afterwards Talese grabbed the first plane out of town.
The purpose of the Oui offer then was a second chance for Talese. Unfortunately, it developed pretty much as it had a year earlier. Candy still refused to answer questions. The interview, such as it was, was finally accomplished by flying Candy and her companion Gloria Carver to the Chicago offices of the magazine. Talese told me that he accepted no fee, other than expenses, for his troubles. He wished Candy well and hoped that the $5000 and publicity helped.
“Good luck with your own story,” he said.
When I telephoned for what I already knew was going to be the final time, Candy invited me to come for supper and spend the night.
I thought of Commerce Street and my old Army buddy Jim Frye as I stood in front of her small, white clapboard cottage, shielded from prying eyes by an unpainted plywood fence and a yard of junk. She called her cottage Fort Dulce, dulce meaning sweet. Like Candy. The license plate on the Cadillac was Dulce 1. Dulce Press, Inc., was the publisher of her poetry. On the shelves which separated the living room from the kitchen there were many jars of candy—candy kisses, lemon drops, jelly beans, peppermint, candy corn. Twenty years of waiting and I felt like a character out of a fairy tale.
Susan, three dogs, and four cats met me at the front door. She said Candy was still dressing. Two hours later, Candy was still dressing. When she finally made her appearance, shortly before 10 p.m., she hit the room like one of Sgt. Snorkel’s ping-pong smashes. Her blonde hair was in curlers. She had scrubbed her face until it was blank and bleached as driftwood. Her green eyes collapsed like seedless grapes too long on the shelf. She wore a poor white trash housedress that ended just below the crotch, and no panties.
“Don’t think I dressed up just for you,” she told me.
The next twelve hours were like being trapped on the set of a Fellini movie, without Fellini. On one level Candy was doing her best to cook supper, and on another I was trying to interview her: the stereo blasted top volume with rock and Jerry Jeff and the kind of blues you heard in the black hovels of Dallas in the fifties; dogs and cats prowled under foot; a pet spider named Brutus spun a web above a portrait of Jesus saving New York City. I was confused because I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and she was angry because I wasn’t listening. I asked questions about her life as a teenager on the streets of Dallas, and she rambled about Jesus, daddy, and Lord Buckley, three of the men she found worth remembering. She accused me of having a secret tape recorder, and when I told her I hated tape recorders, she scolded me for using the word hate in her presence.
She smoked Virginia Slims and made bad puns about “coming a long way,” and sometimes she broke out with a few lines from a song that happened to cross her mind. Susan watched the TV set with the sound turned off, and every ten or fifteen seconds walked to the front door to let the dogs and cats in or out. Scott attempted to make himself obscure.
“My God, what have you done!” she shrieked, lifting a dripping black iron skillet from the sink where Susan had put it to soak. “Don’t ever, ever put that skillet in dishwater. And I told you to sharpen this knife. Look at it!” Candy whacked the knife blade into a tomato, disfiguring the inoffensive fruit. Susan said she would try to do better.
“Before my mother died,” Candy said as she dipped pieces of chicken in flour, “she instilled in me a lot of wonderful things like tolerance and patience. After she died, I talked to Jesus a lot. I wanted to be a missionary.”
“Then tell me about that,” I said.
“I walk around talking to the Chief a lot,” she went on. “I tell him: you’re a groovy cat. He was far ahead of his time. I argue with Him. I ask a lot of damn questions and get some answers. Sometimes I don’t agree. Sometimes He seems too severe. Hey! Give me some slack! Daddy never gave me pain seven days and seven nights. But nobody is gonna make me change about what I feel about Him. Not even Him.”
She started to tell me about “an incident that scared me for years, something that happened a year or two after mama died,” then she got interested in mashing potatoes and refused to think about it. Instead, she talked about what a luxury it was to visit her grandmother, the big feather bed, the indoor plumbing, the jars of candy, being able to go to church, and the unexcelled biscuits her grandmother made. Those biscuits will never be duplicated, Candy said, taking a can of store-bought biscuits from the refrigerator and cracking them against the corner of the table.
She looked straight at me and her green eyes swam. “This is very, very hard for me … talking to you,” she said in a little girl’s voice. I could see that it was. Candy’s necessary illusion was control: no matter how chaotic or predoomed the situation, Candy required the illusion that she was in control. No matter how counterproductive it appeared, when Candy detected the irresistible forces of logic and authority, she became the immovable object. When Pat Gannaway put the heat on, she threatened to sue him. She remembered that when she was a child, “I kept my eyes closed so nobody could see me.”
My Library
