Candy
Barr
Candy Barr, the 1950s stripper once associated with Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, died on January 2, 2006 at the age of 70.
According to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Barr was born Juanita Dale Slusher in Edna, Texas, on July 6, 1935. After her mother died when she was 9, she was ignored by a new stepmother and sexually abused by a neighbor and a babysitter. She ran away and took various jobs, eventually developing her striptease act and trademark costume -- 10-gallon hat, pasties, "scanty panties," a pair of six-shooters and cowboy boots.
Barr tried stage acting, but her legitimate career was derailed in 1957, when she was arrested for having a little less than four-fifths of an ounce of marijuana concealed in her bra. She maintained that she was framed by police and was only holding the drug for a friend. "We think we can convince a jury that a woman with her reputation, a woman who has done the things she has done, should go to prison," Assistant Dallas County District Attorney Bill Alexander told the Dallas Morning News after Barr's arrest.
"She
may be cute," Alexander told the jury in his closing argument, "but
under the evidence, she's soiled and dirty." Barr, who had arguably
never done harm to anyone, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
"I
always wanted a brick house of my own, and it looks like I am going to have
one," Ms. Barr told an assembled crowd and news media when she walked
into Goree Farm for Women in Huntsville, Texas, in December 1959.
Before
her incarceration Barr trained actress Joan Collins for her role as an exotic
dancer in the 1960 movie "Seven Thieves," earning her a credit
as technical adviser. "She taught me more about sensuality than I had
learned in all my years under contract," Collins wrote in her autobiography,
Past Imperfect.
Then-Texas
Gov. John B. Connally paroled her in 1963 and pardoned her four years later.
During her imprisonment, she took high school courses, worked as a seamstress,
sang in the prison choir and played in its band. Barr was arrested a second
time for possession of marijuana in a 1969 raid on her home, but charges
were dropped for lack of evidence.
In 1984, Texas Monthly listed Barr among such luminaries as Lady Bird Johnson as one of history's "perfect Texans." A Candy Barr biopic was contemplated in 1980 starring fellow Texan Farrah Fawcett, but the project was scrapped. We'd sure rather have seen Fawcett in this film than in her creepy "serious" films "Murder in Texas" (1981) and "The Burning Bed" (1984) (where she played Francine Hughes, a battered Michigan housewife who was prosecuted in 1977 for dousing her abusive husband with gasoline and setting him on fire as he slept).
Copyright 2006
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