An Epitaph for the Chicken Ranch

Although I am the author of what I consider to be the definitive, historically accurate account of the legendary Texas bordello known as the Chicken Ranch, I had never seen the musical comedy version filmed in 1981 until recently when I caught it running on a cable channel one night. As I watched all the singing and dancing and laughed about the sappy love story at the core of that version, I couldn’t help but think how much more fascinating and dramatic the true story really had been. So, I decided to use this blog as a repository for Chapter 8 of my 2012 book, I, the People: How Marvin ZindlerBusted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It is excerpted below for anyone curious about the actual legacy of this iconic episode in Texas history. And, of course, there’s a convenient link to the Amazon page for my book, in case this taste leaves you hungry for more of the details.

EIGHT

Chicken Ranch closed—So What?

Let’s try to add some perspective: Marvin Zindler’s closing of the La Grange Chicken Ranch will never rank among the significant turning points of western civilization. Moreover, the story lacks many basic elements of drama usually required for the kind of universal appeal it managed to attain.

No one was murdered. No one was arrested or indicted. No one got convicted. No one served prison time. The story has no seriously scary villains, suffering sympathetic victims or valiantly vanquishing heroes. There is no evidence that anyone’s life was significantly changed by the event. Prostitutes still walk the streets. Even the Chicken Ranch madam, Edna Milton, went on to enjoy a certain celebrity, consulting on the Broadway play and helping at the restaurants.

Yet, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas as a musical ran for 1,584 performances on Broadway beginning in June of 1978 and inspired numerous community theater performances nationwide continuing into the new century. The Broadway production collected multiple Tony Award nominations, including for best musical while garnering best actor Tony Awards for the leads.

Hollywood took note and invested an estimated $35 million for a 1982 production starring America’s top leading man at the time, Burt Reynolds, and country music’s reigning queen, Dolly Parton, along with comedian Dom DeLuise as the Zindler-like foil. According to the Internet Movie DataBase, the film version grossed $69, 701,637 in the US, after opening to receipts of $11,874,268 from 1,400 theaters. The film garnered an Oscar nomination for Charles Durning as a light-footed governor literally tap-dancing his way around the scandal plus Golden Globe nods for Parton as best actress and for the film itself as best comedy or musical. Parton re-recorded her 1974 country favorite, I Will Always Love You, for the 1982 film version, marking the first time for a song to hit the top of the country music charts twice by the same artist.

Beyond Broadway and Hollywood, the saga of the Chicken Ranch still merits an 1,800-word historical review in The Handbook of Texas online. According to that account compiled by historian Walter F. Pilcher, the Chicken Ranch generated annual income of more than $500,000 with the girls charging “fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes” and Edna taking 75 percent of the proceeds. The girls still enjoyed weekly income of about three hundred dollars apiece with Edna providing necessities like food, smokes, taxes, shelter and, of course, weekly visits to the doctor. Sheriff Flournoy took fingerprints and photos of all new employees, according to the Handbook, and performed background checks to make sure no criminals made the staff. But he resigned in 1980 after thirty-four years as Fayette County’s sheriff, saying he and his wife “were sick of hearing about the Chicken Ranch and did not want to hear that name again.” He died two years later, still content in the belief that existence of the Chicken Ranch had aided his crime-fighting career by providing him with a window on the dark side of Fayette County.

Even the City of La Grange touts its role on its tourism website as the home of the Chicken Ranch. “What’s synonymous with La Grange, Texas?” the website asks. “Why,” it replies, “the infamous Chicken Ranch! Even though it has been closed for more than thirty years, the legendary brothel is still intriguing.” While nothing remains of the structure, the website boasts, “in our imagination, the most famous brothel of them all lives on and on.”

Can we explain the continuing allure by simply repeating the old Hollywood cliché that sex sells? While that golden rule probably holds some sway, we must still look to academia for more detailed understanding. And, many will be surprised to learn that academia had been attracted to the place even before Marvin Zindler discovered it.

“The situation I was investigating in 1971 was Miss Edna’s strategic and tactical use of folklore in social interaction—her role as a verbal performer,” wrote Texas scholar Robbie Davis-Floyd in an article published in 1973 by the Journal of American Folklore and updated in the Internet-era for the author’s personal website.

A cultural anthropologist with a doctorate from the University of Texas, Davis-Floyd visited the Chicken Ranch three times in 1971 with another female graduate student, interviewing Edna Milton, several of her girls and one of her customers, who initially tried to buy Chicken Ranch-type services from Davis-Floyd.

“He wanted to ‘try me out’ where he was staying, at the Cottonwood Inn down the road,” Davis-Floyd recalled of her exchange with a customer identified as Buddy. “I was twenty-two at the time, and was torn between feeling offended, scared to death, and trying to act professional—an early exposure to the hazards of the field.”

Davis-Floyd’s mission was to study the dynamics of an openly illegal activity, “to ferret out some illegal phenomenon which existed despite its illegality, and figure out why and how it could do so.” As a student in nearby Austin at the University of Texas, she immediately thought of the La Grange Chicken Ranch. Besides interviews at the Chicken Ranch, her research also included polls of the townspeople and, of course, a chat with Frontier Justice himself, Sheriff Jim Flournoy.

“He was sure I must be mistaken as absolutely nothing illegal existed in his domain,” Davis-Floyd recalled of her exchange with the sheriff as he smoked unfiltered Camels, one right after the other, during the interview. When she challenged him by pointing out the Chicken Ranch location on the map in his office, she said Flournoy “got very cold, very mean, and very scary. He took me by the arm, half-pulled me to my car, put me in it, closed the door, and told me to get out of town and never come back.”

Undaunted, Davis-Floyd discovered that the citizens of La Grange divided in two camps in 1971 regarding the presence of a notorious whorehouse operating openly in their midst. She found the “old-timers” of Bohemian or Slovakian descent still displayed what she called “an Old World tolerance for prostitution.” They acknowledged that men have needs, the girls kept to themselves, and the madam contributed to the community. In contrast, newcomers who had lived in La Grange for ten years or less viewed the Chicken Ranch as a black cloud that hovered perpetually over  the town and its women while making their children “the butt of jokes” when they traveled for football games or attended other events.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Davis-Floyd’s observations provided her with an appreciation for Edna Milton that still lingered forty years later.

“Edna was an entrepreneur, par excellence!” she said in a 2011 interview. “It was a female-led and run enterprise.”

In her original 1973 article, Davis-Floyd had not identified Milton or the town by name in an effort to protect the openly illegal activity from exposure. But her updated version for the website holds nothing back, acknowledging the result of Zindler’s reports and the subsequent fanfare that allowed Milton herself to become a public figure basking in the uncovered glory of her time as the “landlady” at what tax collectors knew only as “Edna’s Ranch-Boarding House.”

Most of her research focused on Milton’s verbal interaction with the girls and their male customers, leading Davis-Floyd to observe: “Edna controls her environment through verbal manipulation.”

Transcripts of her sessions at the Chicken Ranch are peppered with lively, profanity-laced dialogue and jokes with men always depicted as the fools. One highlight occurred when Milton ordered her dog, Trixie, to “Show ’em what the girls do to make money!” On that command, the dog rolled onto her back and wiggled her legs in the air to the repeated delight of her mistress. Asked how she reacted when a girl misbehaved, Milton replied: “I crown ’em, but I hardly ever have to.”

At the time of her research, Davis-Floyd said Milton had spent sixteen of her forty-three years as a prostitute with the last nine of those at the Chicken Ranch, which she had purchased in 1962.

In her update, Davis-Floyd concluded: “I have come to realize that the Chicken Ranch in fact was constituted as a mini-matriarchy—a place in which the women quite literally had all the power.”

Beyond her scholarly assessment, Davis-Floyd addressed the enduring appeal of the Chicken Ranch story in her 2011 interview, noting: “It has long been a part of Texas lore, part of our identity as Texans.”

She said, “Going to the Chicken Ranch was kind of a socially acknowledged rite of passage for young men for many years, socially recognized as kind of cool because it was so very Texan.”

Beyond declaring the Chicken Ranch saga “an important piece of Texana,” however, Davis-Floyd seems to touch a deeper truth about the story’s endurance with her observations about the townspeople of La Grange, where a generational divide had shown in 1971 that the Chicken Ranch represented a modern cultural anachronism.

“The newcomers who tried in the ten years before my 1971 study to raise public alarms about the Chicken Ranch found themselves ostracized by the old-timers,” she wrote.

“A newcomer newspaper editor once went so far as to print an article in the local paper and awoke the next day to find his lawn littered with trash,” she wrote. “He, like the others, ceased his protest.”

With its political protection and rural mythology, the Chicken Ranch stood at the intersection of modern Texas and the so-called Good Old Days. Its closing appealed to anyone who could appreciate milestones like the passing of the passenger pigeons or the migration of wolves from Yellowstone Park.

In their effort to squeeze more drama from the tale, villains were created. Writers from Playboy magazine and the musical rendition found an easy target in Zindler, who emerged as a self-promoting, windbag of righteous zeal, the ultimate party-pooper who, in real life had accepted his description by Texas Monthly magazine as a cross between P.T. Barnum and Dudley Do-Right.

But Zindler and his cohorts at the AG’s office needed to exaggerate their villains, too. And that exercise, once again placed the Chicken Ranch at the intersection of old and new as Zindler was used by the Texas law enforcement establishment as a primary weapon in their turf war with local control. For them, closing the Chicken Ranch became as much about putting Frontier Justice in his proper, Twentieth-Century place as it did about investigating organized crime.

There’s no doubt Zindler believed Flournoy was corrupt and no doubt the AG’s investigators knew the dangers of allowing an enterprise like the Chicken Ranch to endure. But it’s also clear from the emotions they displayed in recollection, the thing that really boiled their blood was the idea that Frontier Justice could tell them to get out of his county and leave his whorehouse alone. Their anger served as the match to light the fire that burned the Chicken Ranch to the ground.

Zindler truly went on to perform many courageous and generous acts in the next thirty-four years of his career. But the crowning acknowledgement of the story’s resilience still managed to lead him to the grave. The New York Times said it all with Zindler’s 2007 obituary, published beneath a headline that read: “Marvin Zindler, 85, crusader in ‘Whorehouse in Texas’ case, is dead.”