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Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Juanita Dale Slusher, AKA Candy Barr.

From the obituary for a stag film star:
As a young child ... she was molested by a male babysitter. When she was 9, her mother died. Her father remarried, and she said the harsh discipline of her stepmother impelled her to run away when she was in the ninth grade. A marriage at 14 to a safecracker ended in divorce.

She said a man she met at a club forced her to do the blue movie, sometimes saying he drugged her.

"I was taken, done and that was it" ...

She dyed her hair blond and progressed from cigarette girl to an exotic dancer well known enough to require a flashy name. She loved chocolate, hence Candy Barr.

She shot her second of four husbands in the stomach in January 1956 after he came home drunk and threatened her. He said that he deserved it, and a grand jury dismissed charges. She soon got a booking to strip in Las Vegas, and, in 1957, played a comedy role in a legitimate theater in Dallas.

Later that year she was arrested for possession of marijuana in a case that drew wide attention because of Texas's tough new drug laws and questions about the legality of wiretapping by the Dallas police. During her appeal, she made $2,000 a week stripping in Las Vegas and Los Angeles to music specially composed for her. Around this time, she dated Mickey Cohen, an infamous mobster in the West.

After the Texas Supreme Court upheld her conviction, she served three years of a 15-year sentence. She wrote a poetry book in prison and emerged in a somber black outfit, quoting Bible verses.
In a real life, it's better that your story have no plot.

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