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).
Barr served as a technical adviser on the movie
Sieben Diebe (1960), in which
Joan Collins played an exotic
dancer. It was not the first movie she was associated with: she made a
pornographic film (back when they were called "stag movies"),
Smart Alec (1951), in 1951, when she
was only 16 years old. Shortly thereafter she went to work as a
stripper at Barney Weinstein's Dallas strip club The Theater Lounge.
She also worked at Weinstein's Colony Club, where she became known for
her Texas-themed outfit in which she sported a cowboy hat, cowboy boots
and a pair of cap guns in a holster slung low on her hips. 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.
