Candy Barr, infamous 1950s stripper and stag film star once romantically linked to mobster Mickey Cohen and associated with Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, has died. She was 70.
Barr died Friday of pneumonia in an Abilene, Texas, hospital. She had lived quietly in her native south Texas for several years.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday January 04, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Candy Barr obituary -- The obituary of entertainer Candy Barr in Tuesday's California section said she died in a hospital in Abilene, Texas. The hospital is in Victoria, Texas.
Born Juanita Dale Slusher in Edna, Texas, on July 6, 1935, Barr forged a life exotic enough in the mid-20th century to inspire a biopic. (One was contemplated but never produced in the late 1980s, with Farrah Fawcett portraying Barr.)
Before the dancer's career was derailed in 1960 by a prison term for marijuana, she was earning $2,000 a week in Los Angeles and Las Vegas clubs.
It was Barr who trained actress Joan Collins for her role as an exotic dancer in the 1960 movie "Seven Thieves," earning her a credit as technical advisor.
"She taught me more about sensuality than I had learned in all my years under contract," Collins wrote in her autobiography, "Past Imperfect." Collins went on to describe Barr as "a down-to-earth girl with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face."
Barr became a landmark in the sexual liberation of Texas men in the 1950s, Gary Cartwright wrote in a 1976 Texas Monthly magazine article, the same year the 41-year-old but still shapely Barr posed nude for Oui men's magazine.
Cartwright wrote that in her early career, Barr had epitomized "the conflict between sex as joy and sex as danger. The body was perfect, but it was the innocence of the face that lured you on."
In 1984, Texas Monthly listed Barr among such luminaries as Lady Bird Johnson as one of history's "perfect Texans."
"Of all the small-town bad girls," the magazine said, Barr "was the baddest."
And Barr earned her place in the exhaustive 2004 volume published by Oxford University, "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show."
Barr said she began life as "poor white trash." After her mother died when she was 9, she was ignored by her stepmother and sexually abused by a neighbor and a baby-sitter.
She fled to Dallas at the age of 13, married a safecracker at 14 and soon fell into exotic dancing and prostitution. Later claiming that she was drugged and forced to perform, she was featured in a 1951 blue movie "Smart Alec."
She befriended Ruby, owner of Dallas' Carousel Club, who was subsequently convicted of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy. Federal agents questioned Barr after Oswald's killing, but she insisted she knew nothing about Ruby's involvement in any conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.
