Candy Barr Watch online

American burlesque dancer · Edna, Texas

Candy Barr

Juanita Dale Slusher left Edna, Texas as a teenager and became the best-known burlesque dancer in 1950s Dallas. A marijuana case, three years inside the Goree Unit and a governor’s pardon turned a stage career into a national story.

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Candy Barr playing a snare drum at the Huntsville prison rodeo in 1960, in a fringed western shirt.

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02Profile

Quick profile

The essentials, with figures taken from performer databases marked as such.

Stage name
Candy Barr
Birth name
Juanita Dale Slusher
Other names
Juanita Dale Phillips, Juanita Phillips (database records)
Born
July 6, 1935, Edna, Texas, United States
Died
December 30, 2005, Victoria, Texas (pneumonia), aged 70
Work
Burlesque and striptease dancing, acting, magazine modelling, poetry
Active years
1951 to 1982 by database record; her stage peak came in the 1950s
Height
5 ft 3 in / 160 cm (database record)
Measurements
41D-25-36 (database record)
Trademark act
Ten-gallon cowboy hat, a low gun belt with pearl-handled cap pistols, cowboy boots
Main rooms
Theater Lounge and Colony Club, Dallas; El Rancho Vegas, Las Vegas
Written work
A Gentle Mind...Confused (1972), fifty-six poems written in prison
Recognition
Burlesque Hall of Fame inductee; named one of Texas Monthly’s “perfect Texans” in 1984

03Life

Who she was

A short account of the record, without the legend that grew around it.

Close portrait of Candy Barr from the 1960 wire photograph, holding drumsticks.

Juanita Dale Slusher was born in Edna, Texas on July 6, 1935, the youngest of five children. Her mother died in March 1945 after falling from a moving car, and her father married again that June. She left home as a teenager, took work in a Dallas motel and then as a waitress, and married for the first time in 1951. In later interviews she described a childhood she had no wish to revisit.

Dallas showman Abe Weinstein put her on stage as Candy Barr and had her bleach her hair. With a ten-gallon hat, boots and a gun belt of pearl-handled cap pistols, she became the city’s most popular burlesque dancer and, by the mid-1950s, its highest paid. In 1955 she signed a six-month contract at the Colony Club, reported at the time as the longest engagement in the club’s history.

A police raid on her apartment in October 1957 turned up less than an ounce of marijuana, and the following February a Dallas jury gave her fifteen years. Free on appeal for two more years, she danced in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for as much as $2,000 a week and coached Joan Collins for Seven Thieves (1960). She entered the Goree Unit at Huntsville on December 4, 1959, was paroled on April 1, 1963 and was pardoned by Governor John Connally in 1967 or 1968; the sources differ on the year.

Fifty-six poems she wrote in prison were published in 1972 as A Gentle Mind...Confused. She posed for Oui at forty-one, retired from public life, and lived quietly with her animals near Brownwood and later back in Edna. She died in Victoria, Texas on December 30, 2005, of complications from pneumonia, aged seventy.

04Career

Career at a glance

Five points from a stage career that ran, on and off, for close to two decades.

  • 1955A six-month contract at the Colony Club in Dallas, reported at the time as the longest engagement in the club’s history.
  • 1957Plays Rita Marlowe in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? at the Dallas Little Theater.
  • 1957 to 1963Arrest, trial and a fifteen-year sentence; two years free on appeal, then more than three years inside the Goree Unit.
  • 1959Earns up to $2,000 a week in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and takes a technical-adviser credit on Seven Thieves (1960).
  • 1972Fifty-six poems written in prison are published as A Gentle Mind...Confused.