Juanita Dale Slusher---Texas Women Series

    No listing of notable Texas women would be complete without reference to Juanita Dale Slusher.  Writing poetry was not chief among her accomplishments, but held an important place in her heart.  She poured out her soul in poems such as this:

Hate the world that strikes you down,

A warped lesson quickly learned.

Rebellion, a universal sound,

Nobody cares, no one’s concerned.

Fatigued by unyielding strife,

Self-pity consoles the abused.

And the bludgeoning of daily life,

Leaves a gentle mind…..confused.

     Juanita wrote this poem in 1962, while serving time in the Goree State Prison Farm for Women, outside Huntsville, Texas. At the time, she was married to a fellow named Jack Sahakian, the Hollywood “hairdresser to the stars” of that day.  Jack was Juanita’s third husband and they were married in 1959, while she was headlining at a the EL Rancho Vegas Hotel.  Two weeks later, she was arrested by the FBI.  Her four-year-old daughter stayed with Jack while Juanita Dale served her time.

Who needs captions?

     You may know of Juanita by her stage name—Candy Barr.  Barney Weinstein, owner of both the Theater Lounge and the Colony Club in downtown Dallas, gave her that name because of her teenage craving for Snickers candy bars.  It was 1951 and she was a sixteen-year-old divorcee with an angelic face and  unbelievable body.

     Juanita was born in Edna, Texas, on July 6, 1935, the youngest of five children.  Her mother died in a car accident when she was nine, and her dad remarried.  The stepmother was physically abusive, and Juanita experimented sexually with a teenage neighbor boy and an older babysitter.  Knowing Juanita's proclivities, it was playful sex among consenting adolescents, but today it would be considered sexual abuse.  When she was thirteen, Juanita ran away.  She left the ninth grade and moved to Dallas, where she grew up quickly.

     Juanita Dale worked as a chambermaid in a cheap hotel and, when she was fourteen, was briefly married to a safe cracker named Billy Joe Debbs.  When the marriage dissolved, she started working as a cigarette girl and cocktail waitress in seedy men’s clubs.  Because of her perky good looks, quick wit, saucy humor, and willingness to share that fantastic body, she quickly became a favorite of the lonely patrons. 

     While most girls her age were learning ninth-grade geography, hoping to make cheerleader, and holding hands with their boyfriends, Juanita was dealing with drunken salesmen, obscene conventioneers, and immature frat boys.  She learned to dispense her charms in direct relation to the size of the bills the customers stuffed into her skimpy costume.  Most of her patrons were allowed a suggestive pat or perhaps a kiss on the cheek, but some of the more generous were invited to share her bed.  It was more Texas hospitality than outright prostitution.  As Reba McIntyre said, “Be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they’ll be nice to you.”

     By the time she was sixteen, Juanita was five-feet-three, voluptuous, and absolutely beautiful.  A “producer” approached and asked her to do a screen test for a starring role in a movie.  She should have wondered when the “screen test” was held at a San Antonio motel.  She said she was drugged and coerced at gunpoint into making the fifteen-minute hardcore film, but that did not hurt her performance.   The 8mm pornographic movie was called “Smart Alec” and became an “underground” sensation

      At the urging of Barney Weinstein, she bleached her hair, stepped onstage at the Colony Club and soon became the most sought-after stripper in Dallas.  Weinstein named her “Candy Barr” and paid her $85.00 per week, about the same as a good civil engineer made in 1951.  Her trademark costume was a white cowboy hat, pasties, bikini panties, cowboy boots and two pearl handled six-guns, strapped low on her hips.  At sixteen years old, she brought the house down as she finished her act firing the cap pistols into the air while strutting offstage.

     In 1953, she married Troy Phillips, a night club denizen who became her manager.  In late '54, she had a daughter.  Business at the Colony Club suffered when Candy was out with her pregnancy.   When her body regained its dazzle, Weinstein signed her to a $2,000.00 per week contract.  The sweet-looking, abused teenager from Edna, Texas, was making a $100,000.00 per year on the stage, taking off her clothes in a theater full of drunks. She was a product of the times.

38-22-36  But who's counting?

     Candy’s marriage went on the rocks and she filed for divorce from the abusive Phillips.  At five one morning, very drunk, he came to her apartment and kicked in the door, intending to beat her.  After warning him three times and trying to run away, she shot him in the lower stomach with a .22 rifle.  In her statement to the police, Candy said she missed high.  Charges against her were dropped when Phillips recovered and verified her story.  It was early 1956, and Candy was just twenty years old.  Next year, she could legally vote.

     After the public sensation caused by the shooting, Candy was more popular than ever.  She had long been playing to standing room only crowds, but the Colony Club was now forced to turn away customers.  Her notoriety caused the powers that be in Dallas to feel that Candy’s lifestyle was staining the reputation of the city. 

      Police started a wire tap on her phone, which soon led to her arrest for possessing four-fifths of an ounce of marijuana. According to Candy, she was keeping it for a friend. At that time, the penalty for such an offense in Texas was up to life in prison.  Even though the police burst into her apartment without a warrant, and the wire tap evidence would be illegal in today’s world, Candy was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.  Today, if prosecuted at all, the same crime carries a six-month sentence. 

     No one knows who ordered the wiretap, or why it was done.  Candy obviously ticked off someone downtown, and  it may have been as simple as refusing sexual favors to some well-connected, vindictive official.  In any case, she received a call, asking her to hold something for a friend.   The friend dropped by, and two hours later, the police raided her apartment.  The police never admitted the wiretap or revealed the name of her "friend." She was a victim of the times.

     I was one of the endless stream of  “immature frat boys” who went to Dallas periodically back then for football games and weekends of debauchery.  My friends and I went to the Colony Club, the Carousel, or the Theater Lounge, depending upon who was on stage.  The rest of Texas, and Lubbock in particular, had no such entertainment.  The strippers were hard-looking older women, the clubs were sleazy, and I always left feeling dirty.  Even so, I went back every return trip to see if conditions had improved.
  
     I stared at the poster of Candy Barr in front of the Colony Club, but never saw her on stage.  I will always remember the picture.  Her face was so sweet, it made June Alison look slutty, and her 38-22-36 body was absolute female perfection.  I opined the picture was touched up and probably many years old, but a friend who had seen her on stage told me it did not do her justice.

     As the long appeal process continued, Candy took her act on the road.  She appeared to packed houses in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Hollywood.  Everywhere, men lined up to pay for the privilege of watching her take off her clothing.  She became involved with Mickey Cohen, a west coast gangster, after appearing in the Largo Club on Sunset Strip.  Cohen helped pay her legal bills and financed the appeals process.  He introduced her to Hollywood.

     Twentieth Century Fox hired Candy as a choreographer and technical advisor for the film, Seven Thieves.  She taught Joan Collins how to striptease for her part in the film.  Collins said, in her autobiography, “She taught me more about sensuality than I learned in all my years under contract.”  Joan also said, “…she was a down-to-earth girl, with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face.”   Candy was twenty-four years old.

      In late November of 1959, Candy married Jack Sahakian, her hairdresser.  Her appeals of the marijuana conviction exhausted, she entered the prison farm two weeks later on December 4, 1959.  Juanita used the prison time to augment her eighth-grade education and served three years and three months before being paroled on April 1, 1963.  The terms of her parole forbid her return to exotic dancing or living in Dallas. 
  
      Candy returned to her family home in Edna and began a quiet life, raising pure-bred dogs.  She married her fourth husband, a railroad worker, and lived in seclusion.  Candy was pardoned of the marijuana charges in 1967 by Governor John Connelly, and returned to the burlesque stage briefly in 1968, her dancing career all but over.  She spent a weekend shacked up with Hugh Hefner in 1971, but nothing came of it.  They both must have felt the other would look good on their resume. 

      In 1972, Juanita published  A Gentle Mind....Confused,  a thin book of  poetry.   When she was a 41 year-old grandmother, in  1976,  Candy posed, scantily clad, for the cover of Oui Magazine.  For several pages of alluring nude pics, and the cover, she was paid $5,000.00.  Her last appearance as a stripper took place in the Ruby Room in Dallas in 1997, when she was sixty-two.

     Juanita died at age seventy in Victoria, Texas.  For business reasons in 1970 she changed her legal name, and those of her children, to Barr.  Her grandson, Ryan Barr, named his first daughter “Candy” after her.  Another of her great-granddaughters is named “Snickers.”

    



Candy Barr was a product and a victim of the times--beneath it all, she was a gentle mind....confused.