Biography
The life of Juanita Dale Slusher
She was born in a small Texas town, was dancing for money in Dallas before she turned twenty, and spent the last decades of her life turning visitors away. Between those points sits one of the most reported American court cases of the 1950s.
Edna, Texas
Juanita Dale Slusher was born on July 6, 1935 in Edna, Texas, the youngest of five children of Elvin Forrest Slusher, a construction worker, and Sadie Mae Slusher. She liked to say afterwards that she had been a delayed firecracker, arriving the day after Independence Day.
Her mother died in March 1945 from injuries suffered in a fall from a moving car. Her father married Etta Agnes Goggans on June 1 that year, and the household that followed was one she described in later interviews as harsh. She left it as a teenager, by her own account at fourteen, and made her way to Dallas.
Dallas
She worked in a motel and then waited tables before the clubs took her in. The Weinstein brothers ran the Theater Lounge and the Colony Club, and it was there, as a cigarette girl and then a dancer, that she was given the name Candy Barr and told to bleach her hair. One account of the name says it came from her liking for Snickers bars; it is a single-source story and is best left as reported.
Her act was a western costume: a ten-gallon hat, boots, and a holster worn low with a pair of pearl-handled cap-gun six-shooters. She built the act around standards such as Artie Shaw’s Nightmare and became the best-known dancer in Dallas and, by the mid-1950s, the best paid. In 1955 the Colony Club signed her for six months, reported at the time as the longest engagement in the club’s history, and her daughter Troylene was born that year.
She married the Dallas man Troy Phillips in October 1954. In January 1956 she shot him when he broke down the door of her apartment; she was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and the case was dropped. Publicity, she said later, did her no harm: people came out of curiosity to see the girl who shot her husband to defend herself.
The marijuana case
On an October night in 1957, Dallas police searched her apartment and found less than an ounce of marijuana hidden in her bra. She always said the arrest was a set-up and that the drug belonged to somebody else in the flat. A jury convicted her in February 1958 and the judge gave her fifteen years, a sentence so far out of proportion to the offence that Dallas newspapers printed letters objecting to it.
She was free on appeal for two more years and worked them hard. She headlined in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for as much as $2,000 a week, and 20th Century Fox hired her as a technical adviser on Seven Thieves (1960) to coach Joan Collins in burlesque. Collins wrote afterwards that Barr had taught her more about sensuality than she had learned in all her years under contract.
During those years she was involved with the Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, who posted her bail and was for a time publicly engaged to her. The appeal ran out in late November 1959, days after her marriage to the hairdresser Jack Sahakian in Las Vegas, and she entered prison on December 4.
The Goree Unit
Barr served at the Goree Unit, the women’s prison outside Huntsville. She sewed men’s uniforms in the garment factory, took education courses and read Emily Dickinson. She sang with the Goree Girls and played percussion in the prison band at the Texas Prison Rodeo, which is where the one photograph of her that carries no restriction was taken, by a wire service photographer, on September 30, 1960.
Governor John Connally released her on parole on April 1, 1963, after more than three years inside. The conditions kept her within thirty-six miles of Edna and out of burlesque houses and bars. She married a railroad worker, James Wilson, in Edna in March 1964; they divorced the following year.
The Ruby interview
She had known the Dallas club owner Jack Ruby since about 1952. Both of them said afterwards that she had never worked for him. When Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963, FBI agents came to her house in Edna and took a statement from her on November 26; it was filed as Warren Commission Exhibit 1506. “The FBI thought Ruby told me names, places and people, which he didn’t,” she said later. She remembered the agents arriving while she was cooking a Thanksgiving dinner.
Pardon and later years
Governor Connally pardoned her for the marijuana conviction, and she recalled hearing the news from him in 1967; other accounts date the pardon to 1968. A further arrest for marijuana possession in Brownwood in 1969, while she was caring for her dying father, was dismissed for lack of evidence.
Her fifty-six prison poems appeared in 1972 as A Gentle Mind...Confused. In June 1976, at forty-one, she posed for Oui and gave a Playboy interview, then stopped appearing in public. She kept animals at a place she called Fort Dulce near Brownwood, moved back to Edna in 1992, and discouraged visitors. “Let the world find someone else to talk about. I like being left alone,” she told Texas Monthly in 2001.
Death and legacy
She died of complications from pneumonia in a Victoria, Texas hospital on December 30, 2005, aged seventy. Obituaries ran in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post within days.
The Burlesque Hall of Fame, once Exotic World, counts her among its inductees and keeps her lip prints in its collection. Texas Monthly had already named her one of the state’s “perfect Texans” in 1984, beside figures such as Lady Bird Johnson. A biographical film announced in 1988 with Farrah Fawcett was never produced. Ted Schwarz and Mardi Rustam published a book on her life in 2008.