FAQ
Questions that keep coming up
Ten answers drawn from the published record, including the ones where the sources do not agree.
Who was Candy Barr?
Juanita Dale Slusher, born July 6, 1935 in Edna, Texas and died December 30, 2005 in Victoria, Texas. She was a striptease and burlesque dancer, an actress in a small number of films, a magazine model and a poet. Candy Barr was the stage name given to her in Dallas, and it is the name she was known by for the rest of her life.
Where did she grow up?
In Edna, Texas, a small town inland from the Gulf coast. She left home as a teenager and spent most of her adult life in Dallas, Brownwood and Edna, with working spells in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. She moved back to Edna in 1992 and died there in all but the last detail, in a Victoria hospital.
What was she known for in Dallas?
Her stage act and the length of her engagements. She wore a ten-gallon hat, boots and a low-slung holster with pearl-handled cap pistols, danced to numbers such as Artie Shaw’s Nightmare, and by the mid-1950s was the best-paid burlesque dancer in the city. The Colony Club contract of 1955 ran six months, reported at the time as the longest in the club’s history.
Why do people call her the first porn star?
Because of the 1951 underground film Smart Alec, which circulated widely for years after it was made. The phrase came from newspaper and magazine writing about that circulation. It was a label, not an award, and she was sixteen when the film was made.
What happened in the marijuana case?
Police searched her Dallas apartment in October 1957 and found less than an ounce of marijuana. She was convicted in February 1958 and sentenced to fifteen years. She stayed free on appeal until late 1959, entered the Goree Unit on December 4, 1959, was paroled on April 1, 1963 and was pardoned by Governor John Connally, in 1967 by her own account, in 1968 by other accounts.
How was she connected to Jack Ruby?
They were friends from about 1952. Ruby ran the Vegas Club and the Silver Spur Inn in Dallas; Barr never worked for him, and both of them said so. After Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963, FBI agents interviewed her at her home in Edna and took a statement that was filed as Warren Commission Exhibit 1506. In it she said Ruby had never told her names, places and people.
Did she write anything?
Yes. Fifty-six poems she wrote while she was in prison were published in 1972 as A Gentle Mind...Confused. She kept writing after her release, though no second collection was published.
What did Joan Collins say about her?
Collins was coached by Barr for the 1960 film Seven Thieves and wrote in her autobiography Past Imperfect that Barr was a down-to-earth girl with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face, and that she taught her more about sensuality than she had learned in all her years under contract.
Does she have an official website or social media?
No, and neither is possible. She retired from public life in 1976 and died in 2005, before social platforms existed for performers, and no verified account of hers has ever been recorded. Pages that use her name today are fan projects, merchandise or unrelated businesses.
When did she die?
December 30, 2005, in Victoria, Texas, of complications from pneumonia. She was seventy. Obituaries ran in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in the first days of January 2006.