Tex Guinan danced her way through Chicago — until it killed her
Texas Guinan had no reason to be concerned about her health when she left Chicago in 1933. The city’s medical authoritieswere slowto trace an outbreak of amoebic dysentery to the CongressHotel, where visitors in town for the city’s World’s Fair had stayed. Most guests didn’t become ill until returning home.
Besides, at 49, Guinan took pride in still being able to sing and dance herway through a nightclub audience, pausing only to rub a bald man’s head while salaciously whispering in his ear. She and her troupe of showgirls had put on four appearances a day at theCentury of Progress, as the lakefront exhibitionwas titled.
The fair’s managementwas uneasy about booking Guinan because of her reputation as a risque performer with mobster admirers. But one venue, the Pirate Ship, was sinking in red ink. So they took a chance, and her “Century of Whoopee” revue packed them in.
“The old Guinan girl is both a persona and a personage, not only a great showman but a great show,” wrote Ashton Stevens, the Chicago American’s critic.
FromChicago, Guinan took her act through the Midwest and up theWest Coast. By LosAngeles, she felt unusually tired.
She’d long fantasized about a second career as a evangelist, and in aTacoma, Washington, church she gave it a try. “What a sap the pastor and the congregation must have thought me,” she wrote to a friend.
In Portland she already had been having severe stomach pains. During a performance inVancouver, she asked to be taken to a hospital where she died of intestinal ulcers onNov. 5, 1933.
“The ulcers may have been caused by amoeba,” Guinan’s physician inVancouver telegraphed the president of the Chicago Board ofHealth.
“The wirewas received just as her body passed through Chicago en route toNewYork for burial,” theTribune reported. The train paused just long enough for local friends to pay their respects. Guinanwould take refuge in Chicago when shewas in trouble with theNewYork police.
“The showwoman calledTexas has headed for the last round up after years of bizarre notoriety,” the Tribune’s farewell tribute read. “The story of her sensational life, garnished with the wisecracks in which she specialized, is becoming part of the legend of the prohibition period, nowat its close.”
Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan was born on Jan. 12, 1884, in Waco, Texas. Her Irish-immigrant parents supposedly operated a nearby ranch and she claimed that’s where learned to ride and shoot.
Buffalo Bill, the famed cowboy showman, might or might not have told her father: “Guinan, I’ll bet that little girlTexaswas born in the saddle and cut her teeth on a six-gun.”
“Exaggerate theworld,” Guinan advised showbiz hopefuls. “Dress up your liveswith imagination.”
She certainly didn’t run away fromhome withHank Miller’s 101 WildWest Show, as she suggested in later life. Her biographer, Louise Berliner, couldn’t find any records of a Guinan ranch, and Texas Guinan’s timeline and Miller’swere out of sync.
“I concluded thatTex didn’t exactly rewrite the past, just reimagined it, shuffled the pieces a little,” Berliner reported in “Texas Guinan, Queen of theNightclubs.”
Guinan first emerges fromthe clouds ofmythology in 1905. She was a newlywed and newly arrived in Chicago, living first in a furnished roomon Goethe Street, then in an apartment at 410N. Dearborn St.
Her husband got a job as a cartoonist at the Chicago Examiner newspaper, andMarshall Field awarded her a scholarship to the American Conservatory ofMusic, as she told the story. Neither Field’s department store nor the school had any record of that.
But she seems to have taken vocal lessons somewhere, because she had a trained singing voice by the time she left Chicago, and her husband, forNew York in 1907.
There she started as a chorus girl, became a star and eventually was the producer of her own lavish nightclub shows.
But en route, her career took a hit froma 1913Tribune headline, “Actress Quack Plays ‘Fat Lady’To
Get TheMoney.” The accompanying article said that she lent her name to a scheme to bilkweightconsciouswomen with a phony “Texas Guinan’sWorld Famed Treatment for Corpulency.”
She claimed her “new, fairy
slenderness of figure” had wowed a famous theatrical manager who’d said shewas fat. The AmericanMedical Association said that the useless product sold for $3 cost only 30 cents to make.
She gave evidence against her partner in the scheme, so the feds went relatively easy on her. But lawsuits for damages cost her plenty.
“Every time I ran downthe aisle of a theater and kissed a baldheaded man hewould stick a summons downthe back ofmy gown,” said Guinan of the ensuing lawsuits.
So she addedHollywood gigs, often a playing a cowgirl, to her nightclub appearances and touring productions.
“The Guinan is byway of becoming an institution inNew York,” aTribune correspondent reported in 1927. “Tourists have them on their lists of things to be seen if possible and all our natives want to see them at least once.”
Shewas then starring in “Padlocks of 1927,” which theTribune’s critic described as “a lively burlesque. Not too bare but bold as brass— brass that is beginning to tarnish.” The titlewas an allusion to clubs padlocked for selling liquor during Prohibition.
Between acts, the critic wrote, Guinanwould introduce anybody in the audience whowas somebody. One evening itwas Philadelphia’s censor of plays, whom she introduced as Doc and badgered into repeating a little joke.
“‘I only told her,’ the flustered Doc muttered, ‘thatwewere a little strict in Philadelphia. We insisted that all naval displays must be held in the river.’ ”
Shewelcomed customers with her trademark greeting: “Hello, sucker!” Reporterswere her club’s regulars. Guinanwas a font of snappy quotes.
In 1929, Guinanwas tried for violating the ban on booze. Ajury needed only an hour to render a verdict of not guilty.
TheTribunewanted to host a debate onWGNradio between her andMabelWillebrandt, the Justice Department’s Prohibition enforcer. Told thatWillebrandt was indignant, Guinan quipped: “I didn’t knowshe had any dignity.”
Yet, despite herwisecracking, Guinanwas troubled. While she got laughs, her audience didn’t look like happy people, though they could afford the stiff cover charge. Could they need new kind of gospel— one of joy and happiness rather than the fires-of-hell message they usually heard?
Guinan’s theological speculations date to the night Aimee SempleMcPherson visited a GreenwichVillage speak-easy. Guinan introduced the famous evangelist andwas fascinated by her stage presence. Sheworked an audience just like she herself did.
“Stop before it is too late,” McPherson urged Guinan’s patrons. They responded by banging the wooden noisemakers with which they’d applauded a chorus girl writhing like aHawaiian hula dancer.
Guinan’s initial reactionwas jealousy. She challenged the evangelist to a debate. Itwas rejected, just like the invitation to the Prohibition enforcer. But during her final tour, Guinan visitedMcPherson’s AngelusTemple in Los Angeles.
“I’m not good enough to save souls now,” Guinan said, kneeling at the altar. “But I see the time comingwhen Iwill take the evangelistic trail when I retire fromthe showbusiness.”
She didn’t get the opportunity. She died shortly after preaching at theTacoma church. Her funeral inNewYorkwas pure showbiz— lots of glamour with a bit of illusion. Fans and celebrity worshippers besieged the Campbell Funeral Church on Broadway.
Aphalanx of flowers, mostly chrysanthemums, flanked the coffin in which Guinan lay dressed in a gray chiffon gown.
“On her handswere diamonds as big as headlights— or at least they seemed to be diamonds,” the NewYorkDailyNews reported. “Adetective fromthe pickpocket squadwho stood in line to gaze on Tex expressed his doubts.”