Texas Guinan Made ‘Whoopee’ a Source of Fame

She was a purveyor of speak-easy booze--and other illicit pleasures--whose advice to other women would have set even a tepid feminist’s teeth on edge:

“If you women would amuse your husbands when they come home, they wouldn’t slip away and pay a $5 cover charge to get a little excitement,” Texas Guinan once told members of a Los Angeles women’s club. “Humor them! Don’t nag them! Do you know what made me a rich woman? Wives who talk to their husbands about gas bills and curtains.”

It wasn’t exactly an example of elevated consciousness, but it was the sort of unembarrassed pragmatism that took a small-town Texas girl from the music hall stage to the silent screen to the glamorous gin mills of the Great White Way and back again--with stops in between for appearances in various courtrooms, where she also was something of a hit.

Years before she achieved a kind of celebrity--or notoriety--as the wisecracking “Queen of the Nightclubs,” which she ran for the New York mob, Guinan was a Catholic schoolgirl in Waco, Texas, the daughter of Irish immigrant parents to whom she was born in 1884.

She was christened Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan and took the name “Texas” when she joined a traveling theater troupe, appearing in vaudeville and rodeo shows. She astonished audiences--and her family full of priests and altar boys--by singing ballads while scantly clad and suspended high overhead in a basket.

In 1910, three years after divorcing her first husband, she made her first big splash in Los Angeles, starring in a silent film, “The Gay Musician,” followed by a series of appearances in the 1912 “Passing Show.”

She would later have two more husbands and various lovers.

“It’s having the same man around the house all the time that ruins matrimony,” wisecracked the woman who later would welcome patrons to her clubs with the trademark greeting, “Hello, Sucker!”

Soon, she was not only a minor silent film star, but also a local celebrity who regaled gullible Angelenos with tall Texas tales that she had ridden broncos, single-handedly rounded up cattle on a 50,000-acre ranch, attended an elite finishing school and run off with a circus.

Always on the lookout for a fast buck, Guinan found a new way to supplement her income in 1913, when she became the shapely newspaper pitch woman for a fat reducer easily obtained through her own mail-order business on Los Angeles Street.

“Famous Actress Loses 70 Pounds of Fat! Texas Guinan, star of the ‘Passing Show,’ offers her own marvelous new treatment to fat folks,” proclaimed the ad.

When reporters asked her why she went on a diet, she quipped: “To get as thin as my first husband’s promises.”

But when some “stout” Angelenos complained that all they lost on her program was their money, including one woman who pawned her watch to buy the remedy that cost as much as $20, postal inspectors began investigating whether Guinan was using the mail in a scheme to defraud the public. She agreed to take her diet off the market.

As the country went into World War I, Guinan starred in a series of one- and two-reel silent westerns in which she was cast as a tough-talking, gun-toting Calamity Jane type who beat the men at their own game.

Promoted as the “straight-shooting heroine with a punch in her gauntlet and a snap in her rawhide whip,” she enjoyed a modest success, starring in 36 silent films and launching her own short-lived production company.

By 1922, after completing the film “Spitfire,” she had holstered her guns permanently to begin a new career in New York.

There, she threw in her lot with mobster Larry Fay, who gave her a cut of the profits and backed her up with a sexy chorus line. On the threshold of middle age, the savvy showgirl reeled in customers, and the money poured in. (In 1934, Fay died in a hail of bullets outside his Club Casablanca.)

When a happily inebriated patron started doling out $50 bills to the entertainers in her club, Guinan asked what business he was in.

“Dairy produce,” he answered.

Without missing a beat, she exhorted her audience: “Give a big hand for the big butter-and-egg man.” Playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in the audience, knew a great line when he heard it and quickly lifted it to use as the title of his classic play “The Butter and Egg Man.”

Guinan’s clashes with the police and courts made frequent front page news in New York. Prohibition enforcers shut her down repeatedly. More than once, she signaled her band to play “The Prisoner Song” as lawmen arrived.

The party began to fizzle in 1928, when Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, better known as Mad Mabel, ordered a special mop-up squad to shut down Broadway’s classiest speak-easies and charge everyone in sight with conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act. They somehow missed Guinan.

Deeply insulted at being left out, Guinan fumed all the way down to the courthouse, where she created such a ruckus that officials locked her up, too.

At Guinan’s trial, she was accused of “encouraging the making of whoopee.” Her defense attorney exposed the four federal undercover sleuths who had posed as good-

time Charlies to get the goods on her. He calculated that they had billed the taxpayers for so many nights of revelry that they had consumed about $75,000 worth of champagne during their four-month investigation.

Appalled jurors set Guinan free.

Broadway celebrated her liberation with around-the-clock libations. Congratulatory telegrams from all her best customers, including about 50 U.S. senators, poured in, along with job offers. From among them, she chose a contract to make her first talking movie: “Queen of the Night Club.”

Two weeks after her landmark courtroom victory, she headed back to Hollywood as a national celebrity.

During the Depression, she did her best to keep the good times rolling, briefly returning to the front pages of Los Angeles newspapers when she visited the temple of flamboyant Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

“I’m becoming philosophical in my old age,” she reflected. “I’m a good Catholic. I’ll be a good evangelist. It’s right up my alley. Once or twice, late at night sometimes, I’ve felt I could show people the way to happiness. You know what I mean. Not gin and jazz.”

The frenetic pace of hitting the road with her traveling troupe caught up with her in the Pacific Northwest, where she died of peritonitis at 49 in 1933, just two months before Prohibition was repealed.

Texas Guinan was buried with diamonds in one hand and a rosary in the other. Irish Catholic schoolgirl to the end, she left her considerable fortune to her mother.