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 Seven Thieves (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.

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Candy Barr

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