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.”
