Friday, April 8, 2022 – SHE LIVED IN THE ROARING TWENTIES AND WAS ALL FOR THE FUN

By admin

FRIDAY,  APRIL 8, 2022




The  644th Edition

TEXAS GUINAN


IS THE 


BRASSIEST BROAD 


THERE IS

Stephen Blank

Texas Guinan was “Queen of the speakeasies” – Prohibition era joints (and high-class taverns) that ladled out illegal booze in a city awash in it. One admirer wrote: “She was a female P.T. Barnum and Mae West seductress rolled into one. A talented singer, actress and notorious bullshitter. She had a gift of gab and a talent with a well-landed insult. ‘Hello suckers,’ was how she greeted millionaires and gangsters alike.” Like Babe Ruth, Lucky Lindy and Jimmy Walker, Texas Guinan defined the 1920’s in New York City.

https://bounddv.medium.com/a-woman-you-should-know-texas-guinan-188a23a6fca6

Born in an immigrant family in Texas in 1884, Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan (“Texas” came later) was an actress, an entertainer, active in the early film business, a pitchman and hostess at nightclubs-cum-speakeasies.  She appeared in movies and movies were made about her.  She palled around with affluent swells and gangster low lives and had not infrequent brushes with the law. (“I like your cute little jail,” Texas cooed after a night in the West 30th Street slammer, “and I don’t know when my jewels have seemed so safe.”) And she’s barely remembered today.
 
Looking at her life in a world of powerful forces of change from the Victorian era in which she was born though huge technological advances, a world at war, the social revolution of the 1920s and the emergence of a new urban culture – there were few opportunities for a bright, aggressive, “brassie broad”.  Perhaps today, she would have been a lawyer, a politician, a venture capitalist. Texas didn’t take the marriage route which was the only escape path for many young women of the era. She was married briefly and was linked to many men, but she traveled solo. “It’s having the same man around the house all the time that ruins matrimony,” she cracked. For much of her life in New York, she lived with her parents.

https://bounddv.medium.com/a-woman-you-should-know-texas-guinan-188a23a6fca6

Guinan shed an early husband and moved to New York, became a chorus girl and changed her name to Texas. She scored leads singing and acting in shows and got good press. In 1913, she licensed her name and image for a weight-loss plan which turned out to be a fraud. (As a result, she was banned from receiving mail through the postal service!) She continued on stage, but figured it was time to get out of Dodge and headed west to join up with the new California film industry.
 
In a film career that began in 1917, she became part of a young industry in which women were key players. As an actress, she created a new role – the female cowpoke, a six-gun western heroine who was as skilled and tough as the cowboys. Guinan was billed as “the female Bill Hart” – film’s first Western star. 

Advertisement for Frohman Amusement Corp featuring Texas Guinan

Acting wasn’t enough for Texas, and she soon pushed into the production end of filmmaking, as a unit department head in one company, and then created her own Texas Guinan Productions in 1921 and issued several films. She continued to be involved in films until her death.

 Guinan in The Wildcat

By now, Prohibition had come to town, driving many of New York’s fancy restaurants out of business, and illegal booze joints were in – and Texas had a new career. She was hired to sing at the Beaux Arts speak, at a whispered huge salary – probably puffed up for the papers by Texas. Her give-and-take chatter with the customers inspired one producer to put together a full floor show with Guinan presiding as emcee for a bunch of Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls. Bootleg huckster Larry Fay struck a deal with them to feature the show at his El Fey Club on West 47th Street in Manhattan. Fay had run taxicabs before and hired Westside mobsters to eliminate his competition, becoming chummy with Owney “The Killer” Madden, boss of Hell’s Kitchen Gopher Gang and reputed lover of Mae West. (You really can’t make this stuff up.)
Guinan became the hostess and MC at Fay’s El Fey club, one of the city’s most infamous speakeasies. The club, on 46th Street near Broadway, opened from midnight to 5 a.m. Guinan glowed and glittered and in return for drawing in the wealthy and powerful, pocketed 50% of the profits. Pleasure-seeking patrons, respectable and not, elbowed one another for the privilege of having Texas and Fay empty their wallets. From well-heeled Wall Streeters and Ivy League collegians savoring big-city high life to famous athletes, and prominent politicians – good-time Charlies from every walk of life converged on El Fay to whoop it up with Texas and her chorus girls. We’re told that Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, England’s Lord Mountbatten and Edward Prince of Wales all showed up, plus the usual crew of gangsters and other seedy types. Ruby Keeler, Barbara Stanwyck (both Ziegfeld girls) and George Raft (a tap dancer) were discovered by talent scouts while working as dancers at the club.

“Never give a sucker an even break,” she said, charging a steep cover charge and outrageous sums for liquor, $25 for a bottle of rum, $2.00 for water. Texas didn’t drink.

After cops closed El Fey, Guinan and Fay opened Texas Guinan’s Club on West 48th Street, and when police closed it, they returned to the old location. She left Fay (Owney Madden convinced Fay to let her go) and opened her own place, Texas Guinan’s 300 Club, on West 54th Street.

Texas Guinan, pictured here from a 1929 film by the same name. (texasguinan.blogspot.com)

Guinan was arrested in 1927 at the 300 Club on suspicion of a Volstead violation. While at the police station, she sang the “Prisoner’s Song” before cops, Prohibition agents and reporters. At trial, she insisted she was only a hostess and a jury found her not guilty. 

https://bounddv.medium.com/a-woman-you-should-know-texas-guinan-188a23a6fca6

Cops and the Depression wore down the industry and Texas took her show on the road. But it would end. In 1933, Texas was touring with her Too Hot for Paris show when she contracted amoebic dysentery. She died a mere month before Prohibition was repealed.
 
Guinan was a fabled liar. A gullible press bought a wholly mythical account of her youth – that she had ridden broncos, single-handedly rounded up cattle on a 50,000-acre ranch, attended the elite Hollins Finishing School in Virginia, and run off to join a circus—all pure hokum. She claimed, too, that when the United States entered World War I, she hurried off to France to divert American boys before they faced the enemy. She claimed she received a medal from General Joffre, the French commander during the Battle of the Marne. Of course, she had never left America.
 
How famous was she? The writer Edmund Wilson described Guinan as “a formidable woman, with her pearls, her prodigious gleaming bosom, her abundant yellow coiffure, her bear trap of shining white teeth.” Journalist Lois Long wrote about her in the October 9, 1920, issue of The New Yorker: “Mind you, there is one woman who gets away with vulgarity. And that, of course, is Texas Guinan . . . . The club is terrible. It is rowdy, it is vulgar, it is maudlin, it is terrifically vital . . . . At any rate, the place, after two o’clock, is always jammed to the doors . . . . Oh, it is a tough and terrible place, but everybody should go once in a lifetime.”

https://www.vogue.com/article/texas-guinan-20th-century-actress-nasty-woman/amp

Even in death, Texas was larger than life. Guinan’s death was mourned by thousands. Her funeral was attended by 7,500 people. She is buried in New York that made her wealthy.  The casket was open at Guinan’s request, “so the suckers can get a good look at me without a cover charge.”   We’re told that as Texas lay on her deathbed, she said, “I would rather have a square inch of New York than all the rest of the world.” It’s a good closer and, if she said it, she surely would have meant it, for New York gave Mary Louise Cecilia the kind of life she wanted. And her life in turn has become part of the city’s storied past. It was a lot of fun, while it lasted.
 
This one was really fun. Thanks for coming along.

Stephen Blank
RIHS
March 14, 2022

FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

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THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

SEAL OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND,

GLORIA HERMAN, CLARA BELLA. M. FRANK, HARA REISWER, ED LITCHER, LAURA HUSSEY, ALL GOT IT RIGHT.

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

STEPHEN BLANK
Sources

https://1927-the-diary-of-myles-thomas.espn.com/texas-guinan-4c93037bbcad

https://www.city-journal.org/html/texas-guinan-queen-night-11938.html

https://bounddv.medium.com/a-woman-you-should-know-texas-guinan-188a23a6fca6

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