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under the covers of
The Best Little
Whorehouse in Texas
background and analysis by
Scott Miller
The difference, generally speaking, between movies and theatre is that
theatre respects the intelligence of its audience far more than movies do. Stage
and screen actor Laurence Luckinbill once wrote, “Always over-estimate
the public’s intelligence. They’ll thank you for it.” And theatre tends to
do that more often than movies do. Just look at the shallow movies made from
intelligent stage musicals – Hair, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror
Show, Pal Joey, Strike Up the Band, and of course, The Best Little
Whorehouse in Texas. People who know only the movie version of Whorehouse
have a terrible misconception of what it really is. And they don’t know how
the story ends…
Musical theatre is one of the most powerful art forms in the world. It
can move people like very little else can. Despite its reputation in some
quarters as merely empty calories, that perception hasn’t been true in
decades. Musical theatre can, and often does, address issues of import in terms
so deeply emotional and with such depth that it can reach people in a way that
movies and television never will. Arguably, musicals can do it even more
powerfully and more effectively than plays that lack music because no words can
ever equal the emotional power of music. Not even Shakespeare could write a
speech that can move an audience like a great love song. Part of the reason The
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas works so well as a musical – the reason it
had to be a musical – is that it deals with people and events for which
emotions cannot be openly expressed. Miss Mona would never tell anyone the depth
of her regret over the choices she's made or the profundity of loss she feels in
closing the Chicken Ranch. But her song “The Bus from Amarillo” can get at
that depth of emotion through its music. No speech could ever convey Doatsey
Mae's secret desires without feeling a bit silly, but when blended with the
sweet, sad music of her song “Doatsey Mae,” those most hidden feelings take
on a level of legitimacy and dignity that are very moving. The Sheriff would
never say out loud that he loves Mona, so the simple, gentle waltz of “Good Ol’
Girl” does it for him.
Best Little Whorehouse tells the true story of the high-profile
closing down of a 130-year-old brothel outside the small town of LaGrange, Texas
in 1973. But Whorehouse isn’t really about sex any more than Fiddler
on the Roof is about violins. At its most basic, Whorehouse is
about how putting life on TV changes it, how it changes people, how the TV
camera impacts that which it records. The show asks questions about privacy –
when is it legitimate for a reporter to expose private behavior and when is it
crossing the line? Does it have to do with legality (and if so, that brings up
the whole issue of whether prostitution should be illegal)? Does it have to do
with harm being caused? And how does one measure harm done in cases like this?
Reporter Larry Connors actually entered the whorehouse in 1973 with a hidden
camera in his coat. Is that legitimate and responsible news gathering? Does your
answer depend on your answers to the other questions? And, ultimately, does
television, both local and national, go too far in its love for “exposés.”
Also parallel to those issues, the show is also about America’s
never-ending parade of moral and sexual hypocrisy. The Chicken Ranch, the
whorehouse of the show’s title, had been around since 1844. Everybody knew it,
and nobody seemed to care. But put it on the TV and suddenly it’s a scandal,
it’s an outrage, and one denounced by politicians who had all frequented the
place themselves.
After the Chicken Ranch was closed, Sheriff J.T. “Jim” Flournoy was
quoted in the Austin American-Statesman: “It’s been there all my life
and all my daddy’s life and never caused anybody any trouble. Every large city
in Texas has things 1,000 times worse.” The editor of the LaGrange Journal
wrote in an editorial, “I think it’s alright. There’s no organized crime
attached to it. I’ve never seen anything bad come from it and I’ve lived
here all my life. The girls buy all their clothes here, their eats. It brings in
business for the community. They pay taxes same as everybody else. It keeps down
rape, venereal disease. I think most of the people here are in favor of it.”
Best Little Whorehouse is about how lives are ruined by “reality
TV,” about how TV can be used to destroy. It's about people in glass houses
throwing lots of stones, about one group of people imposing their version of
morality on others, about America's preoccupation with sex and America's
determination to forever see human sexuality as “dirty.” And don’t believe
that that hypocrisy existed only in 1973. It still lives today and it’s the
same hypocrisy that today drives gay teenagers to commit suicide at three times
the rate as straight teens. The
Birth of the Singing Whores
Texan Larry L. King (no relation to the talk show host) had written an
article for Playboy in April 1974 called
“The Best Little Whorehouse in
Texas.” Actor Peter Masterson saw the article in early 1976 while acting in That
Championship Season on Broadway, and the way he tells it, “It hit me: Goddamn,
this is a musical!” Masterson brought it to songwriter and fellow Texan
Carol Hall. In spring 1976, Hall called King. But King didn’t like the idea.
He said, “Look, my ignorance of the subject is absolutely awesome. I’ve only
seen three musicals in my life and didn’t care for any of them. I saw a number
of dramas, but I quit musicals after three. Not my cup of whiskey.” He went
on, “As a writer it irritates me when the story comes to a screeching halt so
a bunch of bank clerks in candy-striped suits and carrying matching umbrellas
can break into a silly tap dance while singing about the sidewalks of New
York.” Hall and Masterson promised King this would be a different kind of
musical. So eventually King gave in, and the three formed a tight but often
cantankerous threesome, to write a musical based on King’s article and on the
true story of the Chicken Ranch. None of them had ever written a Broadway show
before. In October 1976, they brought some friends together and did an informal
reading of an early draft in Carol Hall’s living room. In King’s subsequent
tell-all book The Whorehouse Papers, he writes about hearing the opening
number for the first time and thinking, “My God, that’s beautiful! This
fucking thing may work!” That night, Masterson announced a workshop
production at the Actors Studio in New York.
Masterson was a member of the prestigious Actors Studio and so the Studio
agreed to produce a small workshop production, which ran from October 20 through
November 6, 1977, a total of 12 performances. Along the way, the three
collaborators fought like cats and dogs. Hall and Masterson wanted a love song
for Mona and the Sheriff. King wouldn’t hear of it. The two argued that the
Sheriff was too central a character to walk through the entire show without a
song. King bellowed at them, “I can’t see a cussing lawman and a woman who
peddles pussy for a living yowling love songs at each other like Nelson Eddy and
Jeanette MacDonald. That’d be goddamn ridiculous!”
Despite the problems and massive rewrites, the show went on. A
representative from Universal Pictures happened to see a performance and
immediately made an offer, not just for film rights but for stage rights as
well. Universal wanted to produce it off Broadway, and maybe even on Broadway.
In preparation for the off Broadway production, Tommy Tune, the up and coming
young choreographer and director was hired to re-choreograph the show and
co-direct with Masterson. Again, rewrites continued and songs were added and
cut. There was a big, over-sexed production number called “Two Blocks from the
Capitol Building” that illustrated the far more salacious goings-on in Houston
while Melvin P. Thorpe was “exposing” the Chicken Ranch scandal in LaGrange.
The number portrayed flashers, bestiality, and other perversions. It was cut.
Other songs cut included “The Memory Song,” the girls’ “Doin’ It and
Sayin’ It Are Two Different Things,” the Sheriff’s “Goddamn Everthang,”
and the Aggies’ big song, “Pussy.” (No kidding.) And “The Bus from
Amarillo” was reassigned during previews, taken away from the character of
Angel and given to Miss Mona, at the end of Act I. It would eventually be moved
to the end of Act II. Also cut was a tender dialogue scene between Shy and Leroy
Sliney (forever after called only “Young Cowboy”). Briefly, a new opening
number, Mona’s “You Tell Me Your Dream” was added before “20 Fans,”
but it was eventually cut. The show was worked on more yet so many problems
persisted – most notably, they couldn’t get the Act I ending to work –
that the off Broadway opening had to be postponed twice.
But three of the seven TV stations in New York City refused to use the
show’s title on the air, so commercials were created that never once mentioned
the title. Some stations agreed that the word whorehouse could air as a
graphic but it could not be spoken. At first, none of the New York papers would
run ads with the title. Eventually, a couple independent papers relented, and
eventually the other papers caved – except not The New York Times. It
wasn’t until ten days before the off Broadway opening that the Times
finally accepted an ad with the show’s title. Later on, when the show toured,
newspapers across the country refused to print the title and so ads were run
that sold tickets to “The Best Little Chicken Ranch in Texas,” “The Best
Little Bawdy House in Texas,” “The Best Little Blank in Texas” (no
kidding), and, most vague of all, “The Best Little House in Texas.” And the
furor still continues today. Even as recently as fall 1997, a
student production of Whorehouse at Wentworth Institute of
Technology outside Boston
was cancelled by faculty, who deemed the title “dangerous for students.”
The show finally opened off Broadway at the Entermedia Theatre on April
17, 1978, where it ran for 85 performances. Most of the critics loved it. Clive
Barnes, in The New York Post, wrote, “Considering the subject matter,
the show is beautifully clear-eyed and totally free of the gooey sentimentality
you might have feared. It calls a spade a spade with a frankness that is
exhilaratingly delicate.” Douglas Watt, of the New York Daily News
predicted the show would run Annie and A Chorus Line out of town,
calling it, “a lively, genial, unassuming musical.” Variety said,
“For sheer entertainment, Whorehouse is one of the most enjoyable
musicals of the current season.” Time magazine said, “This is the
best new musical of the season.” The Associated Press called the show, “an
arousing, and rousing, musical with a great deal to boast about.” Pia
Lindstrom on NBC said, “This is a comedy that has all the look of a show that
is Broadway bound.” Virginia Woodruff of the local Channel Ten said, “The
Lone Star State got the treatment in a livewire, sassy, classy, full-of-spirit,
fun musical.”
The show was a hit, and the producers moved it to the 46th
Street Theatre on Broadway, a theatre just vacated, conveniently enough, by the
flop musical Working, which had run only 25 performances. Whorehouse
opened on June 19, 1979, where it stayed happily for 1,584 performances. Women’s
Wear Daily called the show, “more fun than a beer-totin’ hayride at a
Mardi Gras,” and said the whorehouse was “actually located in that vast
desert between respectability and profanity.” Edna Milton, the real-life model
for the show’s Miss Mona, was given two small, non-speaking roles in the show,
although she drove everyone involved crazy. And Marvin Zindler, the model for
Melvin P. Thorpe, was flown up to see the show, which he loved. The following
January, Henderson Forsythe, who played the Sheriff, was due for a two-week
vacation, so despite profound misgivings and paralyzing stage fright, author
Larry L. King went on as the Sheriff for two weeks (a role he had played at the
Actors Studio). The Broadway
production received seven Tony Award nominations, for Best Musical, Best Book,
Best Director, Best Choreographer, Best Featured Actor (Forsythe), and two Best
Actress nominations for Carlin Glynn as Mona and Joan Ellis as Shy. The show won
two Tonys, though the Tony telecast butchered (through bleeping) the performance
of “The Aggie Song.” Sweeney Todd won Best Musical.
Alexis Smith headed the first national tour, and Fannie Flagg took over
as Miss Mona on Broadway when Carlin Glynn left. For the tour, a new song was
added for Melvin P. Thorpe in Act II, “Lonely at the Top.” Both Glynn and
Forsythe returned to their roles to open the show in London in 1981. The show
also opened productions in South Africa (where it was heavily censored) and
Australia.
In 1982 the producers got into a fight with the musicians union, and they
shut the show down, moving it to Boston for a while. Eventually, they moved it
back to New York to the Eugene O’Neill theatre, with most of the original
leads, where it ran another 63 performances. If not for the union problems and
the subsequent loss of momentum, the show might have run longer. Still it was
one of the longest running musicals of the 1970s and at one point had three
national companies touring at once. Women’s Wear Daily, one of the top
magazines of the clothing industry, credits Whorehouse for the
western-wear trend that gripped America in the early 1980s.
A movie version was made in 1982 with Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, and
Dom DeLuise, though Larry L. King had wanted Shirley MacLaine and Willie Nelson
to play the leads. Masterson and Tune were originally slated to direct the film,
but it went instead to Colin Higgins, who had just directed Nine to Five.
The movie watered down the content, rewrote the ending (despite the fact that it
was a true story) and did only moderately well at the box office. Burt Reynolds
insisted on major plot changes, character changes and other rewrites, plus
reducing the Sheriff’s age considerably. Dolly Parton insisted on writing some
new songs. But the era of movie musicals was over and Whorehouse in its
watered down state had little that was fresh or exciting about it. All that had
been taken out.
A truly terrible stage sequel was attempted by most of the same creative
team in 1994, called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public. It ran 15
performances and Universal Studios lost about seven million dollars on it. The
original Whorehouse was revived in 2001 for a national tour starring Ann-Margret
and Gary Sandy, but it was missing all the bite and grit of the original. It
Was the Nicest Little Whorehouse Y’Ever Saw.
The whorehouse now known the world over as The Chicken Ranch first opened
its door for business in 1844 in what is now LaGrange, Texas. Over the years, a
succession of women managed the house as it moved from location to location, and
a succession of sheriffs looked the other way. One could look askance at that
fact, or one could realize that every time elections for sheriff came up, the
citizenry of Fayette County had the option of electing a sheriff who would not
look the other way and who would shut the Chicken Ranch down. Even though
prostitution was illegal in Texas, the voters of Fayette County never did that.
The first proprietress of the place was a woman known in the history
books only as Mrs. Swine, so called for her personal appearance and odor. In
those days, customers did not take off their clothes, but merely undid what
required undoing. Most men reportedly preferred the girls to be on top. Most of
the girls who worked there were there because they came from extreme poverty and
ignorance, many heavily pockmarked, many severely retarded or with other
profound disabilities. Many came from families in which incest was a way of
life. And though most of them would have loved to escape “the life” through
marriage, it was rare a man who would find them attractive. Still, it did
happen, especially in the 1800s when women frequently died during childbirth and
men sometimes went through three or four wives in their lifetimes. Mrs. Swine
may have lost an employee or two in those situations, but she also made a tidy
profit in her role as paid matchmaker.
Jessie Williams (born Faye Stewart) took over the house in 1905, coming
from Waco, where she already had been a successful “working girl.” She had
started in Waco at age fourteen as a maid and serving girl, but she studied the
ways of her rich employers and learned how to act like a proper young woman.
Eventually she went to work in Waco’s most popular brothel and rose to the
top. Within a few years, she had bought her own place and employed three girls.
Soon after, she moved to LaGrange and took over what would soon become the
Chicken Ranch. One of the town’s periodic “cleanup crusades”
might have threatened Miss Jessie’s success if she hadn’t made such
good friends with local law enforcement, and if they hadn’t been such good and
regular customers. With a comfortable amount of advance warning, Miss Jessie
sold her land in Waco and bought eleven acres and a house just outside the city
limits, and just a couple blocks off the interstate. Miss Jessie made a deal
with the sheriff that she and her girls would get suspicious looking strangers
to open up to them and then pass along any pertinent info to the sheriff, aiding
him tremendously in cutting down crime and establishing an outstanding law
enforcement record.
During the Great Depression, business was just as bad for the Chicken
Ranch as it was for all other businesses. A “regular date” (no perversions
or improvisations of any kind were permitted) cost $1.50, but it wasn’t always
easy for a boy to come up with that kind of cash during the Depression. So Miss
Jessie soon made a compromise – “one chicken for one screw.” A chicken was
easier to come by than $1.50, although it seemed that chicken stealing increased
during the period. Soon the house had been nicknamed The Chicken Ranch. When
President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration set up a Civilian
Conservation Corps camp right near the Chicken Ranch, things started looking
rosy again.
By World War II, the girls were giving their all for the war effort
again. And things had changed for whorehouses. As one book puts it, “the
quality of the average whore was upgraded considerably when self-reliant young
women entered the profession by choice, free of guilt and a fear of
ostracism.” During this period, lots of female students at the University of
Texas paid their tuition by working at the Chicken Ranch during the summers.
(They say that one young woman who did this earned her MFA in piano performance
while working her summers at the Ranch, and became one of the top classical
pianists in America.) It was during the 1940s that the boys at Texas A&M
discovered the Chicken Ranch, and began making regular trips. Soon, wealthy
alumni would treat the football team to a night at the Ranch if they won the Big
Game against Texas University. Edna Milton took over the place in 1961. Not only
did high profile politicians frequent the Chicken Ranch; so did a wide
assortment of clergy. Miss Edna delicately put it this way: “We had Catholic
priests come to my place late at night, and since they’d took a vow not to
screw they’d ask to eat us and jackoff and stuff.”
A former Texas Ranger and the inheritor of a
long family tradition of lawmen, Sheriff
Flournoy was the real life model for Whorehouse’s
Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd. He had been elected sheriff of Fayette County in
1946 at the age of forty-six and was seventy-three at the time of the Chicken
Ranch scandal. There are lots of monuments in Fayette County, mostly for war
heroes, but there’s one there now for Sheriff Flournoy. An estimated
4,000-5,000 criminals were arrested and imprisoned on Flournoy’s watch, giving
him one of the best records in the state. He was the first Sheriff to install a
direct phone line from the Chicken Ranch to his office in the courthouse
building, to keep track of any trouble out at the Ranch and to more easily get
any information the girls had collected from customers each night.
KTRK-TV’s consumer affairs reporter Marvin
Zindler and reporter Larry Connors (now a news anchor in St. Louis) always
claimed that they began their 1973 “exposé” after receiving an anonymous
tip about the Chicken Ranch and another less famous brothel. (Why Zindler needed
a call to tell him about the already legendary Chicken Ranch was never
explained.) At the time, many speculated that they chose the Chicken Ranch at
that particular time as nothing more than a ratings grab. After all, Zindler had
only been at KTRK for six months, after being fired for his excessive zeal as a
Harris County deputy sheriff in charge of consumer fraud. Years later, Zindler
changed his story about the anonymous tip, now claiming that Texas
Attorney General John Hill called him and asked him to do a story because
Sheriff Flournoy wouldn’t close the place down. Larry
Connors is quoted on KTRK’s website: “[Cameraman Frank] Ambrose
stayed in the van as a third member of our party and I went inside. I was
carrying a small scope camera in my coat pocket. I was getting what pictures I
could inside, while Ambrose filmed customers. Nearly three dozen came and went
in a little over an hour. At one point, one of the girls spotted my camera. I
was sent outside, but told I could return without the camera. I kept asking if I
could buy pictures of the girls, but my request was denied.”
Zindler interviewed District Attorney Oliver Kitzman. Zindler asked,
“Are you aware of the operations of two bawdy houses that are operating both
in Sealy and La Grange?” Kitzman said, “I think most knowledgeable people in
this community have heard about those places.” Zindler asked, “As District
Attorney have you ever tried to close these places down, either in a civil
injunction or by a criminal raid of any kind?” He replied, “No, sir, frankly
we have never had any indication by anyone that these places are a problem to
law enforcement or otherwise.”
Soon the story had gotten big enough that
Johnny Carson was making nightly jokes about it on national television. After
the scandal broke, Flournoy circulated a petition to
keep the Chicken Ranch open and collected several thousand signatures, but the
governor eventually ordered Flournoy to shut it down. The Chicken Ranch was
closed down permanently in 1973. A year later, Zindler returned to LaGrange for
a report on how the Chicken Ranch’s closing had affected the town’s economy.
The Sheriff forcibly ejected him and Zindler sued. Zindler won the suit but
Flournoy bragged, “You know, my people here in this town raised the money to
pay him down to the penny. He never got one goddamn nickel out of my pocket, by
God!”
Jim Flournoy finally retired as Fayette County Sheriff in 1980 and died
in 1982 at the age of eighty-two. After his death, he was honored by the
Governor for having solved every murder and bank robbery committed in Fayette
County during his thirty-four years as sheriff. Ironically, some of the
information that led to those arrests came from the girls at the Chicken Ranch.
Today, one of the
country’s few legal brothels, this one right outside Las Vegas, is now named
The Chicken Ranch, in honor of the original, and it contains some furnishings
from the original house, including some lamps and paintings. The house itself
was partially dismantled and moved to be a restaurant. Only part of the original
structure remains. A Li’l Ole Bitty Pissant Country PlaceOne
resident of LaGrange was quoted in the original Playboy article saying,
“That place paid good taxes, friend. It was clean. The girls had good manners.
The prices didn’t hold you up. Friend, they never so much as gave a hot
check out there! I had a buddy, he was overseas during the Hitler war, and
one of the girls out there, she mailed him cookies. Regular.” Another
successful Texas lawyer said, “I went over there back in my law school days,
and it was so goddamned proper I felt out of place. It was just too goddamned wholesome
for somebody with a hard pecker hunting raunchy sin and eager to whip up his old
Baptist guilts.”
The apparent truth of the matter – and one of
the primary conceits of the show – is that the Chicken ranch was a home.
The girls were safe there, with a warm bed and three square meals a day. They
were protected, not only by Miss Edna (Miss Mona), but also by the Sheriff. Many
of the girls probably felt safer and more at home there than they had anywhere
else in their lives. Miss Edna had a long list of very strict, sometimes very
Victorian rules that kept the place more respectable than one might think a
whorehouse could be. It was a homey place where the men didn’t feel
“dirty” or “sinful,” and that no doubt contributed enormously to its
longevity and success
But despite its reported wholesomeness, prostitution is prostitution, and
many women today can’t ever for a moment consider the sex industry in
objective terms. After so many years of the women’s movement railing against
exploitation of women and their bodies, against pornography and prostitution,
many women sitting in the audience will have a problem with the way the business
of selling sex is portrayed in Whorehouse. The show treats the whole
issue as matter-of-fact, as a benign given. But for many people, the question
must be asked: can prostitution ever be benign? No answer will ever be
universally agreed upon. For some, prostitution will always be exploitation; for
others, a place like the Chicken Ranch raises prostitution up out of the realm
of disease and drugs and makes it “safe” for women to choose to sell sex.
For some, it can never be a real choice and certainly never “safe,” but
instead will always be something in which women are trapped; for others, the
business of selling sex is just another business and the opportunity to do it
safely makes it acceptable. The scene/song “Girl, You’re a Woman,” in
which the other girls all “fix up” Shy for her first day of work constitutes
a real conflict of emotions for many women in the audience. After all, Shy is
putting on a nice dress, putting on make-up getting her hair fixed, things that
usually have fun, pleasant connotations for many women, and yet she’s doing it
all in order to sell herself to strange men. But isn’t that the point? Some
people will forever see Whorehouse as legitimizing something that can
never be legitimate; others will disagree. And that divide in opinion will often
come down between the genders. Sex
and the Single Chicken
There has always been prostitution. The Chicken Ranch was just one blip
in a long history of humans selling sex to each other. But the Whorehouse
story happened at a very unique time in human history, smack dab in the middle
of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s, a weird, wild, confusing time for most
people, a time of open homosexuality for the first time in modern Western
culture (or the second time if you count the Roaring Twenties), a time of
“free love,” wife swapping and “swinging,” of a kind of openness America
had tasted briefly in the 20s but had never explored to this degree, an openness
upon which the door would shut just a few years later in 1981 when AIDS
appeared.
It’s not surprising that the Sexual Revolution burst upon the American
scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and an understanding of Miss Mona and
her girls can be found in a quick look at American sexual history. America had
gone through a very strange time in the twentieth century, first with World War
I, then the insanity and sexual excesses of the Twenties, then the Depression,
and then World War II.
In the 1950s, women were expected to be mothers and wives first, and
women second. Their worth was often judged in terms of how happy their husbands
and kids were. It wasn’t easy. Women were told to be involved in their
children’s lives but not to smother their sons for fear of turning them into
homosexuals. If women paid too little attention to their kids, they were told
the kids would turn into criminals. If they paid too much attention, their kids
would supposedly wind up gay. The television show Queen for a Day taught
women that housework was their highest calling and that if their lives were
miserable and sexless, it was all for the best anyway. At the same time, Elvis
Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show thrusting his hips
provocatively, inviting women across America to acknowledge their sexual
desires, even though they could never act upon them.
And the women who had learned during the World War II that they could
work outside the home, that they could participate actively in society, that
they could have full, interesting lives outside the home while their men were
away, were all now thrust back into the roles of wife and mother after the war.
After having discovered genuine independence and freedom, they were now put back
into their old repressive roles. A newly repressive government, cranking out new
enemies and fears every day, tried to forge a parallel in a renewed sexual
repression. After decades of social chaos and after profound freedom during the
war, the already puritanical American society became even more repressive to try
to restore the pre-war social order, desperate to find some kind of calm, some
kind of safety and predictability, trying to return to the Victorian moral
standards of the previous century, putting women back in the home, back in the
kitchen, back in proverbial chastity belts, and back on repressive pedestals,
all of which was, of course, impossible. The genie could not be put back in the
bottle. As there had been during other times of social upheaval (like the turn
of the century and the Depression), there was a real friction between the
demands for conformity and conservatism, versus the instinctive human need to
express oneself, made even worse by the taste of freedom women had gotten while
their husbands and boyfriends were off fighting the war.
Of course, while they were tasting freedom, their husbands and boyfriends
were frequenting prostitutes both in Europe and in the South Pacific. In
Honolulu, for instance, prostitution was a ten million dollar a year industry
during World War II.
Nowhere was the role of women more evident than in the person of rock and
roll’s first female superstar, Janis Joplin, a fiercely ambitious,
independent, ground-breaking rock artist who rejected old-fashioned definitions
of beauty, femininity, sexuality, and gender roles. Joplin represented one of
the biggest changes in America – women’s independence. After women found out
during the war that they could work and make money, they also discovered that
gave them profound independence. They no longer had to get married to survive in
the world. They no longer had to have sex with a man they didn’t find
attractive in exchange for him bringing home a nice, regular salary to pay for
food and clothes and shelter. They found, in short, that they didn’t need
men, and as a corollary, that they could play with men. Their financial
independence brought with it sexual independence. There ceased to be a
punishment for sexual promiscuity. An affair no longer meant the loss of
security. None of this was being talked about yet, but it was happening. By the
1960s even something as seemingly trivial as women’s role in social dancing
had changed, morphing from the ballroom dancing of the 50s in which a woman
needed a man, to the Twist in the 60s in which a woman could dance with herself
if she wanted, where independence was the norm, where men were optional.
In 1948, Alfred Kinsey had published his world shattering Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, which declared that more than 90% of American
men had masturbated, more than half had had affairs, 69% had used prostitutes,
and 39% had reached an orgasm with another man. Not surprisingly, his book was
an overnight bestseller. Kinsey hadn’t changed sex in America; he had
just told us what we were all doing, especially the things no one talked about.
Suddenly, almost overnight, Americans were talking about sex – in detail –
over their kitchen tables. Politicians immediately denounced all this as immoral
and shocking and announced that it would mean the end of The Family (just as
religious extremists in the 1980s and 1990s declared that gay marriage would
destroy The Family). Needless to say, none of these folks were happy when Kinsey
published his next book in 1953, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
This study revealed that 33% of American women were not virgins when they
married, 13% had had sex with more than six partners, and 69% of unmarried women
who’d had premarital sex had no regrets about it.
Inspired by this new sexual honesty in America and in response to the
reinforced efforts at sexual repression and demonization, Hugh Hefner published
the first issue of Playboy in 1953, with a then unknown Marilyn Monroe on
the cover and naked inside. In 1962, Harper’s Bazaar published a full
page color ad featuring the famous model Christina Palozzi, completely nude.
Perhaps the Powers That Be could have tamped all this down a bit had it not been
for the explosion of rock and roll which took America by storm in 1954 and the
years following.
Teenagers became more promiscuous than ever but had not learned enough
about birth control. Twenty percent of teenage girls who had sex were getting
pregnant. But in 1960, the world changed forever with the invention of The Pill,
the first oral contraceptive. For the first time, women had control over when
they got pregnant, which allowed them to enjoy sexual experimentation outside of
marriage with no dire consequences. Though condoms and diaphragms already
existed, the pill was much more easy, safe, and convenient, and it changed the
way women had sex. Within its first six years, five million women began taking
the pill. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown wrote her great, subversive sex manifesto,
Sex and the Single Girl, also a bestseller, which said it was okay to
have sex outside of marriage and, even more subversive, that it was okay never
to get married at all. A whole generation of woman were desperate to explore and
celebrate all the things their mothers had condemned as dirty and disgusting, as
improper and un-ladylike. The conventional wisdom on sex and the female body was
being called into question in big ways. And at the same time, Betty Friedan’s
1963 book The Feminine Mystique persuasively and controversially attacked
the myth of the “happy homemaker.” In 1966, William Masters and Virginia
Johnson, two sex researchers, published Human Sexual Response. Until
then, many people honestly did not know what the clitoris did. So Masters and
Johnson told them (most notably in a 1969 Playboy interview) and it
changed everything yet again. By the end of the 60s, many states had stuck down
their adultery and sodomy laws, and eight million women were taking the Pill.
Another interesting phenomenon of the 1960s was a sudden renewed interest
in the ancient Indian text, the Kama Sutra, which became a runaway
bestseller. This ancient religious text, describing in great detail every
possible sexual pleasure and position, was a blatant and joyful rejection of
everything our repressed, sometimes fanatically Christian nation thought about
sexuality. American was a nation born of Puritans, a nation that believed that
sex was for procreation only (if that), and the Kama Sutra challenged all
that.
In 1967, Hair changed the extent to which musicals could talk
about sex. And of course, in 1973, when the Chicken Ranch scandal broke, The
Rocky Horror Show was just opening in London, soon changing forever the way
musical theatre would deal with and portray sexuality, clearing the way, just a
few years later, for a musical about the Chicken Ranch. It was into this world,
in which half the adults were now terrified of the new sexual freedom and the
other half were leaping into sexual experiments like pigs in mud, that Marvin
Zindler’s exaggerations, misrepresentations, and scare tactics came spewing
out onto the public airwaves. Filthy,
Dark Details and Carnal Lust
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a reversal of the usual. In
the stage show (unlike the film), the women are not objectified, even though
that seems that’s what a show like Whorehouse would do. The women are
rarely seen in any state of undress. Instead, the women are the ones who have an
objective, relatively sane (though some might argue not entirely healthy)
perspective on sex, and the men are the ones who are wildly oversexed. It’s
the men who need sex, who can’t stop thinking about sex. And
when the locker room scene is done with partial nudity, as some productions do
it, that also sexualizes and objectifies the men in a way usually reserved for
women. In contemporary movies, female nudity has gotten relatively commonplace
but male nudity is still somehow shocking. With a nude locker room scene in Whorehouse,
the reverse is true. The women now are in the position of sexual control, and
the men are being objectified.
Also, the satire at the heart of the character of Melvin P. Thorpe points
out the obvious but usually overlooked point that the moralists and religious
extremists are the ones who are always thinking about sex, not the people who
are having the sex. It makes us ask why Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell
care what gay couples do in the privacy of their own homes, and why private gay
sexual practices have such a place of prominence in their work. When the
heterosexual porn industry is far larger than its gay counterpart, when the
heterosexual prostitution industry is so much larger, why do Robertson, Falwell,
and their ilk focus so strongly on gay stuff? Why are they thinking about it so
much? And similarly in Whorehouse, why is Melvin P. Thorpe so obsessed
with the sexual goings-on in a whorehouse sixty miles from his TV station?
While, Zindler was spending all his time and energy on “exposing” the
Chicken Ranch, the torture and murder of twenty-seven young boys was taking
place in Houston, Zindler’s backyard. And still Zindler went after the Chicken
Ranch.
Back during the Clinton presidency, the scandal over Monica Lewinsky was
an interesting parallel to the scandal over the Chicken Ranch – and it was
proof that this was not a phenomenon of the 1970s but an ongoing love affair
Americans have with hypocrisy. The nation was outraged that Clinton was being
serviced by Lewinsky in the Oval Office. There were months of hearings about it.
Prosecutor Kenneth Starr published the transcripts, which were put in book
stores and became bestsellers. If it was all so distasteful, why were all the
lurid details in our book stores? Why did every single newscast every night
revisit the sorry affair?
Because Americans are moral and sexual hypocrites, most of us. Even
though of us who don’t think we are probably really are, deep down. Americans
are terrified of sex. We don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to know
about it, don’t want to think about it. Many Americans would probably
prefer we all just pretend nobody ever has sex.
At the same time, we’re obsessed with it. We’re constantly talking
about it, thinking about it, writing about it. If we weren’t, no one would
know who Monica Lewinsky is. Pornography is one of America’s biggest
industries. Everyone claims it’s disgusting and immoral, that they would never
ever buy or even look at porn. But somebody’s buying it. A lot of it.
If it’s not you, it’s probably the person sitting next to you. It certainly
wouldn’t be going out on too shaky a limb to suggest that Americans have a
distinctly unhealthy and often
genuinely comic relationship with sexuality, both their own and that of others.
And that’s what The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is about.
Not sex itself, but the terror, hypocrisy, and insanity always swirling around
sex in America. The Chicken Ranch had been operating, with the full knowledge of
most of the inhabitants of Texas, since the late 1800s. But putting real life on
TV always changes it, and once Marvin Zindler sent his exaggerations and
misrepresentations out over the public airwaves, everything changed. Rational
men became raving idiots. After more than a hundred years, the Chicken Ranch was
now a very public and very “dangerous” problem that needed Action taken
against it. And in the process, people’s lives were ruined. And at its core,
the real beauty and intelligence of Best Little Whorehouse can be seen in
the way it pushes its social and political satire to the background, to focus on
the real people whose real lives were greatly complicated and in some cases
destroyed by the televised circus masquerading as news. These were simple people
leading simple lives in 1973, back before “reality TV” had become a parody
of itself, back when television was still mysterious in many ways to most
Americans, back when its awesome power was only just being discovered. Back
before moral hypocrisy had become the national pastime. Any grab for power or
attention – or ratings – usually leaves victims in its wake. Their story is
the one this show tells. She’s
a Good Ol’ Girl
Jan Huston writes about Edna Milton the real life model for Miss Mona, in
her book The Chicken Ranch, “Edna Milton’s early biography reads like
a saga of the Depression. Born to a dirt-poor Oklahoma farm couple, Edna and her
sisters picked cotton like any other Okies lucky enough to have a crop during
the dust-bowl years. But Edna found some time to sow some wild oats when she was
not picking cotton. At sixteen she was pregnant. Her family turned against her
with proverbial ‘don’t darken my door’ rhetoric and Edna left the furrowed
Oklahoma farm for the seamy side of Oklahoma City. The baby died.”
Edna moved up in the chosen profession of prostitution but soon got
married and bought a house in Austin, Texas. In 1952, she moved to LaGrange and
into the Chicken Ranch. In 1961, at age thirty-two, Miss Jessie died and Edna
bought the Chicken Ranch from Jessie’s heirs. Soon after taking over the
Chicken Ranch, she married her second husband Johnny Luke, but the marriage only
lasted few years. As far as we can tell, Edna and Sheriff Flournoy never had a
relationship, though it’s not entirely clear; and Flournoy was happily
married. That part of the Whorehouse story is probably fictional, added
in one of the few concessions to traditional musicals.
Interestingly, one of Miss Edna’s rules was that no black or Hispanic
customers were allowed in the house, and it was often her black maid’s job to
turn away minority customers. When the Chicken Ranch was closed down, it was
making awfully good money. The girls turned over between 50% and 75% of their
earnings to Edna, who provided them with room and board, all meals, clothes, and
other necessaries. It is estimated by some that Edna was taking in about
$500,000 a year gross, mostly accumulated through fifteen-dollar, fifteen-minute
customers. Of course, this meant the girls were making somewhere in the
neighborhood of $1,200 a month, not a bad income in the early 1970s. After the
closing, Edna tried opening a new house in Nevada but gave up on it. Edna
married again and moved to Gladewater, a small town in east Texas. All in all,
she’d been married four times and divorced three.
The lyric for the song
“The Bus from Amarillo” is one of the show’s most poignant and most
truthful moments. It asks, how does a girl get to be a prostitute? Mona got on
the bus with a one-way ticket, with no intention of ever returning home. She
wanted opportunity. She wanted possibility. But when it was presented to
her, it was too scary and she gave it up. Now, at the end of the show, she
wishes she had it again. She knows her fear kept her
from pursuing her dreams. Now her future lays open before her again, but now
more than half her life is gone.
The song is about making choices, and it mirrors Mona’s earlier song
“Girl, You’re a Woman,” which she sings to Shy. Mona understands all too
well the consequences of choices. She knows her life might have turned out quite
different had she stayed on the bus. She knows that Shy’s life might turn out
different, too, and Mona tries to persuade Shy to leave, to take a job at the
local diner. But Mona also knows that she offers a safe place, and if Shy is
determined to enter this life, she might as well do it here.
“Girl, You're a Woman” a song of pride, of support, sure, but also of
sadness at the road Shy has put herself on. It’s about being an adult and
taking responsibility for choices. It's about how Shy is making a choice she can
never un-make, and how she must understand and accept the repercussions of that
choice. Every girl singing the song has been there, and they all remember that
moment when they made the choice that got them where they are now. Once Shy goes
upstairs with her first customer, she can never go back. Contrary to what many
people think, this song is not a happy one. It does not extol the virtues of
prostitution or take pride in that life; the exact opposite is true. If you
listen to the lyric, it's all about dealing with hard choices and past mistakes
and horrors, about accepting the indignities of life with a stiff upper lip,
about not showing weakness or regret, about hiding the real feelings of
loneliness and disconnection, about handling heartache and despair. It's a very
sad song. Nowhere does the song glamorize prostitution. And
to underline all this, the authors chose to interrupt this song, refusing it to
end neatly, by having a customer show up at the door wanting sex. Even this
bonding, this display of empathy, must take backseat to the demands of the
customers. Prostitution, the authors are reminding us, is a business, with no
room for sentimentality.
Interestingly, “The Bus from Amarillo” was first written for Angel
(then named April), but the authors felt it was too strong a statement and too
central to the themes of the show to give it to anyone but Mona. Since Mona had
been a “working girl” as well, the song fits her fine and when she sings it,
she speaks for everyone in the house. It tries to get at the mindset that allows
a woman to make the choice to enter this life, to sell her body and her (perhaps
performed) love for money. It reminds us that the issues surrounding
prostitution, its morality, its causes and effects, its impact on society, are
complicated and messy, that there are no easy answers.
And as Mona sings “The Bus from Amarillo,” there’s additional
subtext there. Maybe Mona didn’t ever realize her dreams, but she did land in
a safe place at the Chicken Ranch, and she found a surrogate mother in Miss
Wulla Jean. And in the years since, Mona has offered the same haven for other
girls. Girls like Shy, running away from other horrors, have found a relatively
safe place in this house. And as Mona sings this last song, she realizes that
she has allowed that safe place to be taken away. It was entrusted to her, to
continue to “save” girls like her, and now she has lost it. Now those girls
who get off that bus from Amarillo won’t have a safe place to land. When this
song was originally placed at the end of Act I, it didn’t have that additional
resonance. At the end of Act II, that additional tragedy is palpable. The
Celebrated Cussin’ Sheriff of Lanvill County
The Sheriff, more than any other character in the show, feels great
emotion and cannot bring himself to ever express it. In the last moments of the
show, Mona asks him if she remembers their first time alone and together, their
first taste of genuine intimacy, on the night of John F. Kennedy’s
inauguration. And though he does remember it, every detail, he doesn’t
“do” emotion. It’s been drilled into him since childhood by his family,
Texas Rangers one and all, that emotion is for sissies, so he pretends not to
remember. It’s already so difficult for men and women to communicate openly
and honestly, but it was even more so in Texas in the 1970s, with the baggage of
old-fashioned Southern machismo thrown into the mix.
The Sheriff doesn’t handle any kind of real emotion very well, so he
stalls at Mona’s question. He riffs on the topic of Kennedy, rambling away,
saying anything to avoid the topic of that night that he and Mona fell in love.
It’s a filibuster. But the show goes further and deeper here than this single
personal moment. The Sheriff isn’t just talking about anything; he’s talking
about Kennedy, the man who, for Americans of that generation, meant hope,
safety, possibility. The Kennedy era represents for Mona and the Sheriff an
idealized, half-remembered youth, a time when choices and circumstances had not
trammeled all the other possibilities. When the Sheriff goes on to talk about
Kennedy’s death, it represents, here at the end of Whorehouse, the
death of hope and possibility, the end of a kind of innocence.
This scene is about role-playing, about all the rules changing and the
Sheriff being unable to play a new role. The sheriff is realizing his impotence,
this inability to protect the woman he loves. It’s strange and painful, and
humiliating for him and he just can’t deal with it openly. And the scene also
subtly ties the Chicken Ranch, one piece of Texas history, to the Kennedy
assassination, another piece of Texas history. But it’s also about television
– the power of Oswald’s live killing at the hands of Jack Ruby beaming
across American televisions. The Sheriff doesn’t realize it, but he knew
television’s power even back then; he just didn’t recognize it for what it
was.
The Sheriff’s one song, “Good Ol’ Girl,” tells us even more. He
never goes so far as to say he loves her. We know he does but he won’t say it.
And the things he remembers about her (he’s already talking about their
relationship in the past tense) is her lack of demands, her refusal to demand
romance and displays of affection from him, the way she never demanded
conversation from him. She understands how he is, and what he can’t offer her,
and she accepts all that. That’s the true measure of love and he appreciates
it. But even these words of indirect affection he offers the audience in the
song are too much to say to Mona. The second verse of the song is given to the
male chorus as the Sheriff calls Mona to tell her the Chicken Ranch must be shut
down. We see this phone call in mime, accompanied by the chorus. It’s an
unusual but highly dramatic choice for the show’s creators to make, but one
that reinforces for us, the Sheriff’s inability to talk to Mona the way he
would like. Here his words of love, as indirect as they are, must be given
instead to a nameless chorus while he delivers the worst news possible to the
woman he loves.
In that last scene between the Sheriff and Mona, he finally comes to
grips with his one big failure. No matter how many criminals he apprehends, no
matter how many crimes he solves, no matter how big the statue of him will be
someday, he has failed Mona. It’s unbearable for him and he jumps at the
chance to demonstrate a success. He brags about how he’s kept the media roped
off around the property so that Mona and Jewel can leave in peace, conveniently
ignoring the fact that he’s partly to blame for them being there in the first
place. He tells a story of arresting Mexican kids for stealing a goat, as if
that success can make up for this failure, as if that success will redeem him in
Mona’s eyes. What he doesn’t understand is that he doesn’t need redemption
from Mona. She forgives him. She understands better than he does the powerful
forces that had lined up against them. The
audience longs for a Great Revelation for the Sheriff at the end of the show,
but they don’t get it. One of the central points of Whorehouse, one of
the great tragedies, is that the Sheriff never learns anything from all that has
happened, that America hadn’t yet conquered television, hadn’t yet become a
part of the “TV culture.” He almost gets it; he senses that the murder of
Oswald grew in its power because it was broadcast live, that television gave it
mythic proportion, but this is all too big for him to get his mind around. At
the end, he still thinks the Chicken Ranch issue blew up just because he cussed
on TV, when that's not even half the story. He doesn’t understand that, like
killing, sex takes on much greater size and power when linked to the cathode ray
tube. (He has an inkling of this, but he doesn’t make the connection.) Melvin
P. Thorpe’s images of Texas’ beloved Aggie boys half-naked and de-flowered
being beamed into living rooms across the state gave the Chicken Ranch and its
“dangers” mythic proportion that could no longer be dismissed. Talking about
it was one thing; seeing it in your living room was quite another. Also,
it apparently doesn’t occur to the Sheriff that if Mona had heeded his early
warnings, if she had not continued with the Thanksgiving Day festivities, Melvin
never would have caught the college boys in the whorehouse in the first place.
The Sheriff knows from his first dialogue scene that Melvin’s “exposé” is
dangerous. He begs Mona to take it seriously. She shares in the blame for what
has happened, but he takes it all on his own shoulders. He believes he should
have protected her, just as he always has, but the truth is he tried.
There’s an argument to be made that Melvin merely talking about the whorehouse
on TV might not have stirred up as much furor as he hoped. But images of
(presumably) clean-cut nineteen-year-old boys running around a whorehouse naked
was more than most folks – and most politicians – could handle on their TVs.
Just like today, when fundamentalists attack gay Americans through the fiction
of gay recruitment of children, so here Melvin knows his audience and knows that
when the “loveless copulation” involves “kids,” en entirely different
kind of outrage arises in many people. As
the show ends, the Sheriff is so close to understanding all these things, but he
never makes the final connections. He has a very simplistic world view, still
stuck in the 1950s in many ways. He doesn't belong in this new world of
television and photogenic politicians. He's too simple and direct a man to
understand the complexities of what has happened. The
Language of Lust
One of the most interesting and most fun parts of Whorehouse is
its language. Since every major creator of the show was from Texas, and since
Larry L. King was a professional writer specializing in work about Texas, the
language creates a world foreign to most audiences but rich in detail and local
color. The Sheriff cusses more than any other character in a musical, even more
than the characters in Hair, but any fewer obscenities would have made
him less real, less authentic. And in this 1973 world, before cable and
satellite TV, before HBO and Showtime, cussing on television was unthinkable.
But elected officials hadn’t learned to deal with television yet. Murders and
other crimes did not require daily news briefings broadcast live. Sheriff Dodd
is ill-equipped to deal with the power and arcane rules of being on TV.
Interestingly, the Sheriff finally learns the lesson that cussing on TV is a bad
idea, but too late. And even at the end of the story, he still doesn’t
understand what’s really going on. He thinks all the problems could have been
avoided if only he hadn’t cussed on television. He doesn’t understand the
very powerful moral hypocrisy and political opportunism behind what has
happened. The Sheriff is too straight-forward to comprehend the duplicity of
Senator Wingwoah, the Governor, and Thorpe.
King had originally gone ever farther, writing one line for the Sheriff
with the word nigger in it, but Henderson Forsythe, who played the
Sheriff refused to say it. King argued that it was authentic. Forsythe argued
– rightly – that once that word was spoken the audience would be lost, if
not for the rest of the show, at least for the rest of the scene. Still, another
line remains that refers to Mexicans as “little greasers.”
Melvin P. Thorpe, on the other hand, knows how to use the medium. He
knows how to talk about “dirty” topics without offending viewers. He knows
how to be salacious without using four-letter words. In fact, what Melvin says
on camera is far more obscene than what the Sheriff says; it’s just that
Melvin knows better which words to use. And the ridiculous song-and-dance TV
show Melvin hosts (the show’s biggest departure from reality) is a prescient
social satire of America’s move more and more toward news as entertainment.
The phenomenon wasn’t nearly as prevalent then as it is now, when it’s often
very difficult to tell news and entertainment apart. That was just beginning in
1973. Today it’s an epidemic.
Language is also an issue for Mona. When Angel and Shy arrive, Mona lays
down her rules. One of the rules is that the girls aren’t allowed to use words
like johns, pussy, ass, etc. Mona prefers delicate language when talking
about sex. In her own way, she’s more like Melvin in understanding that
offending people isn’t about content; it’s about vocabulary. As many women
did at the time, Mona even refuses to talk explicitly about a woman having her
period. Mona – and all her girls – calls it “the curse.” Oral sex is
called “French.” The list goes on and on. But is this an example of Mona
being just as hypocritical as some of the other characters, trying to whitewash
human sexuality, trying to pretend that it’s something other than it is? Or is
she caving in to the hypocrisy of the rest of the world? Or might we see her
language choices as merely a business decision, an acknowledgement that her
customers are uncomfortable with honest talk about sex?
The lyric of the opening song raises issues of language in a different
way. The real Chicken Ranch was just a plain box house at the end of a dirt
road, ugly in most ways, with additions added on over the years in haphazard
fashion. But in the memory of those who love it, in the lyrics that open the
show, it had beautiful gardens, pine trees, a painted barn, a picket fence, and
other aesthetic pleasures. The song tells us that “fireflies would flicker and
float in the gloom” of twilight. This is a romanticized time and place, rich
with romantic images, with alliteration and rhyme, and as often happens memory
has made it beautiful in ways that it never was. And of course, the issue of language swirled around the show as well as through it, with newspapers and media outlets terrified to use the word whorehouse in public. The issue of moral hypocrisy was not just in the show but also around it. Other Resources
The script for Whorehouse is available through Samuel French Inc.
in New York. Vocal
Selections have been published. Cast recordings are available for both the original
Broadway cast (the best recording) and the Ann-Margret revival (not so
great), as well as the film
soundtrack. The film, which is fine for what it is, but doesn’t even
compare to the stage show, and which was greatly rewritten and cheapened, is on
both video
and DVD.
There’s also a cast recording of the awful sequel The
Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public. There are two great books worth reading. Larry L. King’s The Whorehouse Papers is out of print, but it’s hilarious and well worth finding. Amazon.com often has used copies for sale. Also, The Chicken Ranch: The True Story of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is full of interesting history on the Chicken Ranch and the real people involved in the case. ___________________________
Copyright 2002. From Scott Miller's book,
Sex, Drugs,
Rock & Roll, and Musical Theatre. All rights reserved. Miller is also the author of
Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre,
Deconstructing
Harold Hill,
Rebels
with Applause,
Let
the Sun Shine In: The Genius of HAIR,
and
From
Assassins to West Side Story |
