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Necessity
may be the mother of invention but it can also be the mother of re-invention.
Other than perhaps Kinky Friedman, nobody exhibits that twist on the old axiom
more than Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan, known to history as Texas
Guinan and for her famous greeting: “Hello, Sucker.” Our gal Texas reinvented
herself several times over the course of a singular career.
Born the oldest
of five siblings in Waco
in 1884, she grew up on a small ranch outside of town. On the ranch, with her
parents’ encouragement, she learned to rope and ride and be handy with a gun,
practical skills from the 19th Century that would actually serve her well in the
early decades of the 20th.
As a girl, she was more interested in playing
pranks and pulling stunts than studying. Once she got a spanking for setting out
with a baby in a bathtub on the flood-swollen Brazos River. Another time she was
reprimanded for climbing to the top of a bell tower to remove the clapper from
the bell.
Her father’s grocery business went bankrupt in 1902 and she
moved to Denver where she was offered a job with a traveling theater group from
New York. She did some vaudeville and acted in several silent Westerns in Hollywood,
usually in full cowgirl regalia with six gun accessories. The movies had titles
like “The Hellcat,” “The She Wolf,” “The Gun Woman” and “Little Miss Deputy.”
You get the idea.
When
Hollywood decided that Texas Guinan
was getting a little too old for the movies she moved to New York and reinvented
herself first as a singer and then as a nightclub hostess. The fact that she was
born pretty and boisterous didn’t hurt her. She was the first female master of
ceremonies in the male-dominated New York speakeasy scene, where she greeted the
rich and powerful and anybody else who wandered in the door with the same phrase:
“Hello, Sucker.”
Texas Guinan
worked in a series of clubs because those clubs, flouting the laws of Prohibition
as they did, moved to stay one step ahead of the law. It was a heady but edgy
time on Broadway. Prohibition opened up enormous business opportunities for those
who didn’t mind breaking the law, and the well-known gangsters of the day were
heavily embedded in that scene. So were celebrities, journalists like Damon Runyon
and Ring Lardner, and artists of all stripes. They all received the same greeting:
“Hello, Sucker!”
Esteemed literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson described
Texas Guinan as “a formidable
woman, with her pearls, her prodigious gleaming bosom, her abundant yellow coiffure,
her beartrap of shiny white teeth.”
At the El Fay club, owned by part-time
cabbie and full-time gangster Larry Fay, she once asked a high roller who was
doling out $50 bills to the girls what business he was in. “Dairy produce,” he
replied. “Let’s hear it for the big butter and egg man!” Texas replied. Playwright
George S. Kaufman used that line as the title of his classic play, “Butter and
Egg Man.”
She
was front page news in New York and across the country when she went to trial
for violating the laws of Prohibition and was found not guilty. She is said to
have made $700,000 in one 10-month period (the equivalent of $6.4 million in today’s
money), but the repeal of Prohibition and the onset of the Depression made a lot
of that money disappear. Most of it, in fact.
In 1931, Texas formed her
own troupe and went to Europe with a show she called “Texas Guinan and Her Gang”
but England wouldn’t let her into that country, nor would France. Deeply vexed
by this turn of events, she proclaimed, “Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong!”
and took her show on the road in America, billing it as “Too Hot For Paris” and
“Whoopee on Wheels.”
None of this made her real popular in Waco.
Sex. Booze. Gangsters. Broadway. Hollywood. Her reputation took a nosedive in
her old hometown, but she was by all accounts a teetotaler who remained dedicated
to her parents; they lived with her in an apartment on Washington Square. She
married three times, never for very long. “It’s having the same man around the
house all the time that ruins matrimony,” she explained.
Texas
Guinan suffered a bout of dysentery after a gig in Vancouver and died at the
age of 49. She was buried in New York where she was more popular than she was
in her old hometown. Twelve thousand people filed by her open casket. The casket
was open at her request “so the suckers can get a good look at me without a cover
charge.”
©
Clay Coppedge
June 6, 2012 Column
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