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Chickens? Discussing strippers is more fun.

Speaking of strippers from years ago, here's a native Texan of some fame and notoriety.



Candy Barr, Texas legend and exotic dancer. Friend of Jack Ruby in Dallas, Texas
video posted to YouTube on Sep 22, 2022


The video's description:

Burlesque dancer Candy Barr, went behind bars after turning herself in to Bexar County Sheriff near noon, Thursday, Dec. 3, 1959, San Antonio, Texas. Under a 15-year sentence assessed in Dallas for possession of Marijuana, the stripper has exhausted all appeals. A Dallas deputy escorted Candy to the women’s prison at Goree.

The complicated life of Texas' most famous stripper.
Candy Barr, the famous stripper who was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby, was born Juanita Dale Slusher on July 6, 1935 in Edna, Texas. She began her stripping career in her native Texas, becoming famous in the clubs of Dallas (particularly after a drug bust) before playing lucrative venues in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New Orleans in the late 1950s. She reportedly made $2,000 a week (approximately $15,500 in 2012 dollars).

She first met Jack Ruby in 1952, as he operated clubs near her own clubs. They developed a casual friendship that would later deepen after her imprisonment, but she never worked for him.

In 1953 she married for a second time and had a daughter. Three yeas later she shot that husband, Troy Phillips--they were separated at the time--when he broke down the door of her apartment. Police arrested her and charged her with assault with a deadly weapon, but the case was dropped.

She tried acting, appearing a 1957 Dallas production of "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?". In October of that year she was arrested by Dallas police for possessing nearly an ounce of marijuana. Convicted of drug possession, she was sentenced under the Lone Star State's draconian drug laws to 15 years in the hoosegow. She always claimed she was merely holding the weed for someone else who set her up with the cops.

The pot bust only increased her fame and propelled her into the big time while she was still free on appeal. During a Los Angeles stripping gig, she met gangster Mickey Cohen and became his mistress. Cohen wanted to marry her and sent her and her daughter off to Mexico to evade imprisonment, but she returned to the US, as she was bored south of the border, and her relationship with Cohen cooled off. In 1959 she was hired by 20th Century-Fox to tutor star Joan Collins in the fine art of the strip-tease. Collins wrote in her autobiography that Barr was "a down-to-earth girl with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face."

Having divorced Phillips, she married hairdresser-actor Jack Sahakian. When her final appeal was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, she was arrested by the FBI and returned to Texas to begin her imprisonment. She later was a witness in Cohen's 1961 tax evasion trial.

When Barr was paroled in April 1963, she was not allowed to move to Dallas. Instead, she returned to her hometown of Edna, where she intended to become an animal breeder. Jack Ruby, with whom she was in touch via telephone, visited her and gave her a pair of dogs. At the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after Ruby shot and killed JFK's alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald . Barr was interviewed by the FBI. The agency was likely probing Ruby's ties to a possible conspiracy. As Barr had been in regular telephonic contact with him after her release from prison, the FBI, in Barr's own words, " . . . thought Ruby had told me names and places and people, which he didn't." Ironically, Texas Governor John Connally, who was wounded riding in the presidential limousine during the JFK assassination, pardoned her in 1967. Barr claimed she did not know why he did it, unless he had read her record and realized she had been framed.

Now free of the legal restrictions of her parole, she went back to stripping in 1968, appearing in L.A. and Las Vegas. She returned to Texas to take care of her dying father the following year, and once more was busted for pot possession. Barr again claimed a set-up, and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

In 1970 she legally changed her name to Candy Barr. Two years later she published a book of poems she had composed in prison, "A Gentle Mind . . . Confused". In 1976, at the age of 41, she appeared nude in "Oui" Magazine. She then avoided notoriety, though there were plans to make a film of her life starring fellow Texan Farrah Fawcett. The movie was never made.

Candy Barr died on December 30, 2005, in Victoria, Texas. She was 70 years old.

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