Читать книгу Texas Confidential - Michael Varhola - Страница 16

Rumor spreadin’ around, in that Texas town

’bout that shack outside La Grange

and you know what I’m talkin’ about.

Just let me know, if you wanna go

to that home out on the range.

They gotta lotta nice girls….

—ZZ Top, “La Grange”

WHETHER OR NOT IT WAS ACTUALLY “the best little whorehouse in Texas” is probably a matter of personal opinion, but there really was a brothel in the southeastern town of La Grange that inspired first a Broadway musical and then a film.

A picture of the notorious Chicken Ranch probably taken shortly before it was shut down for the last time in 1973.

One is probably safe assuming, however, that singer Dolly Parton—who played the madam of the establishment in the 1982 movie The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—was somewhat more charming and savory than the woman known as “Mrs. Swine,” the widow who opened La Grange’s first cathouse in 1844.

In the early days, the whorehouse was run out of a hotel next to a saloon and staffed by three young women from New Orleans who used the lobby for meeting and getting to know their clients and rooms upstairs for entertaining them in private. Mrs. Swine’s establishment thrived for nearly two decades, until the eve of the Civil War, when the locals finally had enough and drove her and her working girls out of Fayette County—for being loyal to the Union and unwilling to swear loyalty to the Confederacy!

The story of the Chicken Ranch inspired first a Broadway play and then a film, both titled The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Prostitution in La Grange continued in the years following the war, mostly operating out of the local saloons, but there is not much information available until after the turn of the century. Then, in 1905, a woman known as “Miss Jessie” purchased a small house on the banks of the Lower Colorado River, about two-and-a-half miles from the center of La Grange, and turned it into a bordello.

Whatever her morals, Jessie Williams was a canny businesswoman, and she managed to keep her establishment relatively respectable by banning drunks and protected by welcoming lawmen and politicians. This gave her early warning of a local anti-vice campaign and prompted her to sell her house and move her operations to just outside of La Grange. There, on a ten-acre lot located just off of the highway running from Houston to the state capital of Austin, Miss Jessie continued with her business as usual in a small farmhouse.

These sorts of connections allowed the brothel to remain in this final location and to operate illegally but with impunity for nearly seventy years and to become a veritable regional institution. In 1917, during World War I, Miss Jessie even began to advertise her establishment by having some of the girls who worked for her send letters and packages to servicemen.

Between spreading the word and the proliferation of automobiles, which allowed more people to easily make the trek out to the increasingly popular institution, the brothel enjoyed a boom in business. Miss Jessie even had to expand her house, adding rooms as needed until it had fourteen rooms and a number of outbuildings. Its entrance was in the rear, and there was nothing overt to indicate what it was used for.

Miss Jessie is said to have stringently policed her establishment, patrolling the halls when patrons were in the house and intervening if any were out of line, going so far as to chase them out with an iron bar. She also prohibited the girls in her employ from getting tattoos, drinking, or frequenting bars in town and required them to get examined by a doctor on a weekly basis.

It also could not have hurt that the madam was on good terms with county sheriff Will Loessin. According to local lore, he would drop by every night to trade gossip with Miss Jessie and find out if she had gotten wind of any criminal activity from her clients. Numerous crimes were reportedly solved as a result of this exchange of information. Miss Jessie also fostered goodwill amongst the people of La Grange by alternating which businesses she purchased goods and services from and contributing to local causes.

When the Great Depression struck in 1929, men had less money to spend (and more women were forced into prostitution, increasing supply), so Miss Jessie had to first lower her prices and then go over to a barter system altogether in order to stay in business. It was during this time that the clever procuress began to charge one chicken for each sex act performed by a customer. As the volume of poultry at the establishment proliferated and Miss Jessie began selling eggs and chickens to supplement the income of the house, the brothel became known as the Chicken Ranch, a nickname it would keep for the rest of its existence.

A new sheriff named T.J. Flournoy took office in 1946 and reportedly had a phone line installed directly from his office to the Chicken Ranch so that he could continue to use it as a source of information but not have to be bothered driving out to it every night. He also began fingerprinting, photographing, and running background checks on the girls Miss Jessie hired to work at the bordello.

One base even reportedly provided a helicopter to ferry troops to and from the Chicken Ranch.

Miss Jessie was getting on in years and around this time started to suffer from arthritis, so in 1952 she turned the day-to-day management of the brothel over to a younger resident named Edna Milton. The cathouse continued to flourish under her direction and throughout the 1950s employed sixteen prostitutes.

After Miss Jessie died in 1961, Miss Edna bought the ranch and, while she continued with many of the traditions her predecessor had started, renamed it “Edna’s Fashionable Ranch Boarding House.”

The 1950s and 1960s were certainly the heyday of the establishment, and the women stayed busy and worked hard, each of them entertaining from five to twenty customers each a day. On weekends, there was generally a line of men at the door, many of them students from Texas A&M University or personnel from one of the local military facilities. One base even reportedly provided a helicopter to ferry troops to and from the Chicken Ranch. And students at Texas A&M University made sending their freshmen there as an initiation into an informal tradition (ostensibly because so many of the girls who worked there had attended the school).

At its peak, the ranch brought in more than a half million dollars annually. During this period the girls typically charged $15 for fifteen minutes, had all of their living and medical expenses covered, and remitted three-quarters of what they earned to management (although at some particularly lucrative points they were allowed to keep as much as $300 a week beyond this).

The permissive attitude of La Grange law enforcement toward the Chicken Ranch did not extend to the state level. In November 1972 the intelligence team of the Texas Department of Public Safety covertly watched the place over a two-day period, during which they observed some 484 people entering it. It was hard for anyone to deny what was going on at the ranch and, at the prompting of the DPS, local law enforcement was forced to briefly shut it down.

In July 1973, however, the existence of the Chicken Ranch became public knowledge when Marvin Zindler, an investigative news reporter for Houston television station channel 13, KTRK-TV, launched an exposé of it.

“Action 13 received an anonymous complaint about two alleged houses of prostitution,” Zindler said in his initial broadcast. “The complainant said the houses were operating openly in our neighboring towns of Sealy and La Grange. It’s illegal to operate a house of prostitution in Texas. And past history shows they cannot function without someone in authority protecting them.”

Zindler himself was not playing it completely straight with the public but stuck to his story for twenty-five years. He finally came clean in the late 1990s and admitted that his anonymous source was really Tim James, chief of organized crime division in the office of Texas Attorney General John Hill. Hill, who was reportedly concerned that the ranch was part of a ring being run by mobsters, had asked Fayette County District Attorney Oliver Kitzman to shut it down. Knowing that his constituency wanted the brothel to stay open, however, Kitzman declined to take action. James then contacted Zindler in the hopes that the high-profile reporter could bring to bear enough public attention to get the ranch shut down.

Zindler interviewed Kitzman in the course of his exposé, and the county attorney admitted to knowing about the brothel but gave as his reason for declining to shut it down that “we have never had any indication by anyone that these places are a problem to law enforcement.” The journalist also spoke with Flournoy, who had served the county as sheriff for twenty-seven years, and he asserted that he had never received bribes to keep the ranch open and that it was in no way affiliated with organized crime.

Zindler then approached Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, who was prompted to launch his own brief investigation of the brothel. It revealed no evidence of mob links, but he and Attorney General Hill nonetheless ordered that the Chicken Ranch be shut down for good.

Sheriff Flournoy stepped up to do his part for the cathouse and, carrying a petition signed by three thousand people opposed to its closure, went to Austin to speak with Governor Briscoe. The politician refused to meet with the sheriff and, on August 1, 1973, the Chicken Ranch closed its doors for the last time and a Texas tradition came to an end.