July 06

Juanita Dale Slusher's Birthday

Juanita Dale Slusher was an American stripper and a men's magazines model i At age 16, she appeared in one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic movies, Smart Alec (1951. and has been called "the first porn star." Shortly after the release of Smart Alec, and while still underage, she was hired as a stripper at the Theater Lounge in Dallas and took the stage name of Candy Barr a because of her fondness for Snickers bars. Her trademark costume was cowboy hat, pasties, panties, a pair of pearl handled cap six-shooters in a holster strapped low on her hips, and cowboy boots.

In January 1956, Candy shot her estranged husband when he kicked in the door of her apartment in Dallas. She was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, but the charges were later dropped. Dallas police subsequently raided her apartment and found four-fifths of an ounce of marijuana, which was said to be hidden in her bra.

While the marijuana case devolved into a lengthy series of appeals, her fame spread nationwide and the curvaceous, green-eyed blonde became the toast of the strip club runways, reportedly earning $2000 a week in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as at the Sho-Bar Club on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

While stripping at Chuck Landis' Largo Club on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, Candy met gangster Mickey Cohen and became his girl. According to Cohen, in his autobiography, In My Own Words, he helped her make bail after Gary Crosby told him, "One thing about that broad, she can make ya feel like a real man."

In 1959, Candy was hired by 20th Century Fox Studios as a choreographer for Seven Thieves (1960). She taught actress Joan Collins how to "dance" for her role as a stripper and was given a credit as technical advisor. Candy was quoted as saying, "Anytime Miss Collins wants to leave the movies, she has it made in burlesque. "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 Candy as "a down-to-earth girl with an incredibly gorgeous body and an angelic face."

Candy was eventually convicted on the marijuana charges and spent three years in jail . After her release, she became closer to Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in telephone conversations. Twelve hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Ruby, the FBI arrived in Edna to interview Barr. She made a statement, as Juanita Dale Phillips, regarding her knowledge of Ruby prior to the JFK assassination and Ruby's subsequent murder of Oswald. It was rumored that she knew more than she told them, but she later said, "They thought Ruby had told me names and places and people, which he didn't." The Texas Governor, John Connally, pardoned her for the marijuana conviction in late 1967. Candy briefly returned to stripping in the late 1960s, posed for Oui magazine in the 1970s, and then retired.

So let's commemorate Candy's birthday with some Candy Bar Brownies made with her favorite Snickers bars and catch a glimpse of her in a short clip from Smart Alec in A History of the Blue Movie (1970).

Candy Bar Brownies

Ingredients

1&1/2 sticks of butter
1&1/2 cups of sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder
2 TB of water
3/4 cups of unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup of all purpose flour
2 Snickers bars, cut into small chunks

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°F.
Grease a 9" x 13" cake pan.
Melt the 1&1/2 sticks of butter, then beat the butter together with the sugar in a large bowl until they are well blended.
Beat in the two eggs one at a time, then stir in the water and the vanilla extract. Sprinkle the baking powder and salt over this mixture, then mix it in with the butter and the sugar. Add the cocoa and blend it in as well, then stir in the flour until it is blended.
Place candy chunks into a food processor and pulse them at low speed until all of the candy bars have been blended into a coarse crumble mixture. Fold those crumbled candy bars into the batter, distributing them through the mixture thoroughly.
Scrape the batter into the greased baking pan and bake for about 30 minutes and the top of the brownies will have begun to crack.
Remove brownies from the oven and allow them to cool before cutting them into squares.