American History Hit - The Texas Chicken Ranch: Famous Brothel to Broadway

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

When it closed in 1973, the Texas Chicken Ranch was the oldest continually operating brothel in the United States. Why was this brothel able to survive for so long? Who were the women at work there? And where did it get its name?In this episode, Don explores the brothel behind the Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds musical with Jayme Blaschke, author of Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch: The Definitive Account of the Best Little Whorehouse.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Outside the city limits of LaGrange, Texas, sits a ruined ramshackle of a building splintered by time and exposure to the elements, vandalized by locals and littered with the marks of curious, musical-loving sightseers. But now, imagine this place 75 years ago.

It's a farmhouse, whitewashed in the Texas sunshine, inhabited by a hive of busy women, living under the strict rules maintained by their matriarch, the Madam of the House. They eat at a point at times of day. No vulgar language is permitted. These girls are to behave as ladies. And each evening before 7 p.m., they are expected to change into evening dresses. And await the bell that calls them to the parlor, where they'll greet their nightly guests. Welcome to the Texas chicken ranch. But in this house of ill-reput, there is very little interest in poultry.

Hey, it's Don Wildbin here. Welcome back to American History Hit. And today we've got an unusual, rather bawdy story to tell. Remember that great blues guitar anthem from the 70s? La Grange by Zizi Top? Here, I'll give it my best shot. Dun, dun, dun, dun, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Oh, hey, so good.

And then there was the long-running Broadway show that was called Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, you heard of it, which eventually got made into a big, splashy Hollywood musical starring Dolly Parton and Bert Reynolds. Now, what esteemed institution of the American West do you expect deserved such cultural commemoration? Well, it was the Texas Chicken Ranch, that legendary house of ill repute, located for most of the 20th century in or around the city of LaGrange in southern Texas, halfway between Austin and Houston. And today we have Jamie Blaschke, author of Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch,

the definitive book on the subject, says so right there on the cover. Hello, Jamie, welcome to the podcast. Nice to have you. you, Don. Happy to be here. It's quite a subject to undertake the history of an infamous brothel. It's unlikely rise and some would say tragic downfall. What drew you into this particular nook of nooky? It was not intended, I can assure you. I grew up in a small town about 20 miles away from La Grange. So growing up, I heard references to it constantly. When I went to college, I went to Texas A&M, which has a history that is intertwined with the chicken ranch.

And in 2007, when Marvin Zindler, the Consumer Affairs Reporter for KTRK in Houston, died of pancreatic cancer, all the obituaries led with the fact that he was the television personality that closed the chicken ranch. And so I talked to my wife, I said, you know, we'd never heard the true story, the real story behind it, you know, because we suspected that the movie with Bert Reynolds and Dolly Pardon wasn't a documentary, you know, kind of went out on a limb there. So we started looking around and realized that there had never been an actual serious history written about the place. And this offended me and upset me and bothered me.

And one day my wife said, quit complaining about it and write the book yourself. So I was kind of on the spot. So let's establish right away, when was it started and how did it get its name, Chicken Ranch? How it started is kind of a moving target. You can trace sex work back to LaGrange, which was one of the earliest settlements. in Texas is certainly one of the earliest Anglo settlements in Texas, going back to about 1844, which is when Texas was still an independent nation. Since it was a small place, you can kind of trace the lineage from this bravel to the next brawl to the next brawl all the way up to the

point where it becomes the chicken ranch. The chicken ranch, as we know it, started in 1915, when local bravel owners recruited and brought in Jesse Williams to act as a front to their operations. At the time, there was a lot of reformations, anti-vice campaigns going on. Jesse had owned a bravel in Guytown in Austin, a vice district in Austin, up until 1913 when the city passed an ordinance closing it. And so she was out of work. And so 1914, they brought her. into La Grange to take over and be a front for their operations, thinking, I suppose, this is speculation here, that a woman's face would soften the image of the bravles and make it more

acceptable. Well, Jesse had owned her own bravel and she wasn't content just to be a front. So within a year, she had taken over and consolidated all the vice in Lagrange under her leadership, her ownership, and seeing these campaigns going on in other cities around the state and around the country, bought 11 acres of land outside the city limits and relocated out into the county away from the city. So kind of out of sight, out of mind. And then when she established the brothel out of town, she began a public relations campaign, started donating money to various charitable causes in town. It was a very straight, Laced, upright brawvel.

If that makes any sense, it was probably one of the most conservative brothels you could have come across. Right. I mean, that's what gives it its good name is the sense that it was apparently very well run compared to most. I want to give this a little historical context. Hollywood, it's stock stuff in the westerns portraying sex work in the Old West as this kind of whimsical affair, the crinoline gowns.

She's the trusted pal of the protagonist. Yeah, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. Yeah, or Cloris Leachman and Butch Cassidy, these hard-bitten faded flower. women. I suppose there was some truth to this character, but is it fair to put the Texas chicken ranch into that context at all? The thing that people have to realize that the chicken ranch was not special in any way, shape, or form, just generally speaking, and most of 20th century Texas, certainly the 19th century Texas, you could not throw a stick without hitting a country brothel. It wasn't elegant. It was a country farmhouse that happened to house sex workers. A lot of

them had the euphemism, it's a boarding house. The borders there, the sex workers, would entertain guests, you know, on a continuous basis. And the chicken ranch was probably distinctive in that, well, first of all, it was the last one standing by the 1970s. All the rest had closed through various means or circumstances. But through the 20th century, it was owned first by Jesse Williams and then by Edna Milton. And that set it apart because the women were treated better. They had better food to eat. You know, if you research prostitution, sex work in Texas throughout the 20th century you're going back for it, it was really horrific. It was not a good thing. Many careers, many ways and means of earning a living were closed off to women by law. There were many laws in place that

says women are not allowed to do this. So often sex work was the only option, especially if you had a child out of wedlock or had become a quote-unquote fallen woman through some other means. And so often sex work was the only option for them. At the chicken ranch, they were treated much better than they would anywhere else. And a lot of people ask me, was the chicken ranch good or bad? And I said, well, throughout the majority of the 20th century, the chicken ranch was the least worst option for any of the. women. Exactly. How does the name chicken ranch come to pass? How do they get that name? Okay, the popular story, the one that Jesse Williams promoted, was that during the Great Depression, nobody had any money.

So the patrons that they had, who were mostly poor farmers, would pay in livestock, predominantly poultry. And after a while, there are chickens roaming all around the property. When I interviewed Edna Milton, she threw up her hands and insisted that was the most of the most of the most of the property. And I said that was the most ridiculous story, that the real story, you know, Jesse heard someone say that and said, hey, this is great, because these women were really good at marketing and said, okay, I'm going to repeat that. But the truth was that in the early 1930s, there was a grand jury seated that was looking into various vison brothels and looking to clean up Fayette County. And so some of the power brokers in the community suggested, well, you know, there's a lot of people setting up

little chicken farms around here. So if you go down to the hatchery and get yourself some chicks and turn them loose, go down the tax rolls as a chicken farm, and maybe they'll just kind of let you slide. And so that's what she did. The grand jury's term expired, and, you know, the name chicken farm stuck. Eventually it morphed into chicken ranch, but it's a little less interesting of a story than saying various patrons and farmers would come in there with a bag full of chickens to pay for the services of the sex workers. So the movie, the stories are about. the fight to keep the place open, that sort of classic, let's beat the man of this game thing. But this was already a kind of legendary place. Can you just break it down into some eras for me?

You're mentioning Edna and Jesse, historically speaking, how do they go through the 20th century? You know, Jesse Williams grew up in Waco, Texas, which is interesting because Waco was the first city in Texas to have a legal vice district. And actually the second in the U.S. to have a have a legal vice districts, which people find ironic today because it's the home of Baylor University, the largest Baptist college in the nation. As she moved when her father remarried, her mother died in the late 1880s, I believe. Her father remarried in the late 1890s. She was still Faye Stewart at the time. Fay and her sister moved from Waco to Austin. At some point, they, or at least Faye, changes her name to Jesse Williams, starts working in the Guytown Vice District in Austin. Because remember,

this is the turn of the century. Legalized vice districts, restricted areas were considered the best way to deal with Vice, whether it's predominantly prostitution, sex work, or gambling, you know, just segregated into a restricted vice district and keep it from spilling over into the rest of the community. Don't you find it interesting that most of American vice, be it sex work, alcohol, drug abuse, you name it, has gone through this passage of there was a time when people did it. They tried to sort of control it by allowing it to happen. And, you know, it was sort of known about. And then it gets repressed. And then it finds its way out. It's the same journey for all these different kinds of experiences. It's such a theme of American society. It's absolutely cyclical. And greater minds than I have. have tried to come up with the solution on how to manage vice, whether it's sex work or anything else. And thus far, you know, they've pretty much failed. You have Europe and the Scandinavian model, which seems promising. You have Nevada with legalized sex work there, which has some issues and there's, you know, push and pull.

There's no real answer to this perpetual question that has proven thoroughly successful. And, you know, I got to say in my research through the various eras in Texas, when you've had it legalized and when you've had it illegal and criminalized, men seem to be the big problem. If I can be blunt, you know, they're pimps. Yeah. And these are essentially parasites. And regardless of your opinion on women operating as sex workers, here you have these parasitic men who are very often abusive and very often skimming. the bulk of the earnings off. And this existed, whether it's criminalized or legalized.

You know, this is a certain aspect. And that's why I found most problematic about the situation. And that's the more colorful, friendlier side of this story, is that you have these madams, these sort of domos over the operation, Jesse first and then Edna. And they kind of give the flavor of the place. And they also keep out the unfavorable, unsavory aspect of things, kicking out the drunks and so forth, but probably also organized crime, I would imagine. Well, the chicken ranch was established in the era where Texas was still very rural, extremely frontier,

and the sheriff was considered the high sheriff. This is a term dating back to European times, where the sheriff is essentially the power broker and holds the most influence within the county. And law enforcement was tolerant up to a point, and the chicken ranch was there for one reason and one reason only. And if they deviated from that, going into other areas of vice, say gambling or dealing narcotics, law enforcement was paranoid about narcotics and illicit drugs in this era. You know, during prohibition, they're not allowed to sell alcohol. The whole, you know, stereotype, get the guest in there, get them drunk, get them intoxicated, then fleece them for everything they have.

You know, that didn't happen at the chicken ranch. It was, again, straight-laced conservative. You had politicians attending. You had wealthy high rollers. But then again, you also had dirt farmers. You had college students. You had all representation of society as long as you were white and occasionally Hispanic was allowed in. But, you know, this was still Jim Crow South.

So it was pretty strongly segregated. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Hi, I'm Eleanor Yonaga. and I'm thrilled to be joining Matt Lewis to co-present Gone Medieval from History Hit. Twice a week, every week, we set out to answer the big questions that have vexed people for centuries.

Like, what did the Romans ever do for us? Roads, buildings, walls, churches, houses, manuscripts. Why did Edward first mourn his Queen Eleanor so much? He was very good at making a show for people to see that was going to influence how they would understand him or his campaigns or anything like that. Did Viking hero, Ragnius, Lothbrook really exist.

Maybe yes, maybe no. The sons who were attributed to him were definitely real people. So join me, Eleanor Yonaga. And me, Matt Lewis, for gone medieval from history hit. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So a brothel is nothing without the workers. How do these women find their way there? How long do they stay? Is it kind of a family? Can we romanticize this a bit? There can be a little bit of romanticizing. Now, I don't have as much information on Jesse's tenure because the only specific person who worked there that I was able to

speak with was Edna, and she was a little tight-lipped about that. There was turnover at that point. There was one of the sex workers had the colorful name of Def Eddie because she was hard of hearing. And she arrived there sometime in the 1930s and was one of the sex workers. She stayed long enough to age out and became sort of a houseman. manager. She was still there in the 1950s when Edna showed up and started working as one of the sex workers there. And to that extent, yeah, some of the women did stay longer than others. Now, when Edna took over, she made some rule changes. Jesse was more of a taskmaster. She required women to pay rent continuously throughout the month and work throughout the month, even during

their menstrual cycle. Edna said, you know, that's kind of ridiculous, you know, so the women who are working there, sex workers, would be able to work for three weeks and then have one week off and not have to pay. It still was ostensibly a boarding house, and so they would have to pay rent when they were there, and they would also be required to pay a percentage of their earnings, like a 60-40 split. So the house was pretty profitable. But again, it offered a refuge, particularly. when Edna was operating it, they ate very well, probably better than any other place a sex worker could be in Texas. Edna told me that some of the women would show up and they would be gaunt and skinny and have a hollow look in their eyes because they'd been working on the streets. And after a couple of weeks, they'd have eaten well, put some meat on their bones.

They wouldn't have that spooked, skittish look to them anymore. or they would be more comfortable, they would feel safer, they would know that there is not a beating or a mugging waiting for them around the corner. And according to Edna, now she's not always the most reliable of witnesses. But a lot of the women, once they started working at the chicken ranch, they would stay at the chicken ranch until they got to the point they left sex work entirely. Jamie, tell me how close this movie comes to the truth. I mean, is there any fact to this fiction?

There is fact and there are grains of truth. The Broadway play paints the story in very broad strokes and the movie takes even greater liberties to it. The fact of the matter is the Chicken Ranch closed August 1st, 1973. That's 50 years ago. After a series of television exposés by Marvin Zindler, a consumer affairs reporter in Houston on television. Zindler claimed that he was tipped off by the Attorney General's office. I learned through my research that that wasn't exactly true. Zemler was recruited by an assistant attorney general, Herb Hancock. Herb Hancock wanted the chicken ranch closed because he believed it was a front for organized crime, that there was a great deal

of corruption that was allowing it to exist and continue to operate. Now, again, realized that chicken ranch had a history dating back more than 100 years to 1844. Several generations of sheriffs had overseen it. I had a very strict operating parameters that they were continuing to function under. The Texas Rangers knew about it. Pretty much all the politicians in Austin, all the elected officials, the governors, the governor's, you know, so the chicken ranch was not a secret. And the chicken ranch had a reputation by the early 70s of this is the place you want to go to. They run a clean. ship and they are discreet, even though everyone knows about it. Okay. Realized the ZZ Top song, I always thought that it came out in response to the closure.

No, the ZZ Top song came out before the chicken ranch was closed. It came out the summer before. What had happened is that there was a corrupt officer in the Criminal Intelligence Division, Houston office of the Texas Department of Public Safety. He was essentially acting as a pimp and a drug dealer. He had a sex worker placed at the wagon wheel, which was another bravall at the time, didn't have as good a reputation as the chicken ranch. And she was caught dealing drugs to customers and the other sex workers.

Well, the anti-drug paranoia at the time resulted in her getting kicked out immediately. She goes up the highway, gets on with the chicken ranch, and in short order was caught doing the same thing there. And so they fired her and kicked her out. At this time, those were essentially the only two high-profile brothels left in Texas. And this corrupt officer was incensed and went to them and said, you will hire her back or else. And Edna responded, bigger men than you have tried. Bring it on.

This is probably late 1971. 1972, the DPS office in Houston starts staking out the chicken ranch. Now, realize this was outside their jurisdiction. You know, Houston, even to this day, has no shortage of vice. You know, keep this in mind. There's some seriously awful stuff that goes there. In early 1970s, it was far worse. So you have these DPS officers without approval or endorsement from DPS headquarters to Texas Rangers in Austin are staking out this brawls, taking down license plates and everything, that results in a somewhat famous confrontation between the sheriff of Fayette County, who again was the king of his domain and these DPS officers. And the sheriff reportedly went to

them and said, y'all from intelligence? And they said, yes, sir. And he goes, well, don't take much intelligence to figure out what's going here. Any schoolboy in Texas knows what's going on here. And essentially ran him out of the county. And the. corrupt officer, realized that he would not be able to close down the chicken ranch through direct means. He had to use subterfuge. So they began a whisper campaign in Houston. How can we be expected to enforce the vice laws here in Houston when, you know, 45 minutes up the road, these other brawels, these country brothels are operating openly. Everyone's laughing at us. We're a laughing stock. Pretty soon they had, that attitude had infected not only the DPS,

division there in Houston, but also the sheriff's department, the Houston City Police, and the district attorney there, who was Herb Hancock. Herb Hancock was hired by the newly elected state attorney general, John Hill, as an assistant attorney general. Herb Hancock brought this mindset that there was this massive corruption, cancer eating at Texas from this supposed organized crime that was keeping these brothels open. And he realized that he could not. close them through, you know, direct means. There was no appetite in Austin at any level of law enforcement to go after the chicken ranch because you had governors, you had state legislatures, you had all these powerful figures going there. He was friends with Marvin Zimmer,

who had been in the sheriff's department. He was one of the deputies working in the Harris County Sheriff's Department until there was an election turnover and he lost his job and he was picked up by the TV station. So it's really the fact that the news station gets involved and all this sort of media happens and the governors there, that's when things get very dramatic. The unspoken aspect of this, which I find fascinating, is the emergence of Texas in the larger national scheme of things. I mean, it's already an incredibly important place, but it's getting to be a more sophisticated cosmopolitan, diverse state over this course of time, right? I mean, something is happening in Texas that is being accounted for. Well, you have absolutely hit the

nail in the head because this is a case where the old Texas, the rural frontier, agrarian economy came into direct conflict with the modern, high-tech urban space age, Texas. These are two very, very different cultures. The old frontier with the cowboys and horseback and everything, they didn't have, you know, broadcast media. This was still new at the time. And suddenly, everyone knew the chicken ranch existed in the state. The only people who didn't know that the chicken ranch existed, were the people who didn't want to know the chicken ranch existed. And that was fine. But as soon as you put that and start broadcasting this on television, and it went national, it was picked up coast to coast. There were stories about this.

Suddenly, that's when it becomes bad. That's when it becomes unacceptable. And, you know, the population of Lagrange really resented outsiders coming in and telling them, hey, y'all shouldn't be operating this way. Well, we've operated this way 150 years. who are you to come in and tell us how to do it? But when they started getting that television coverage, that attention was unwanted and that was where the problem lies. I think you've nailed it with your book and that this is an incredibly important story larger than itself in this era that we're in now because Texas emerging as a different

kind of state, I dare say purple state coming down the road, is going to play an increasingly huge role even bigger than it already has in the story of the United States, forward from this moment. And the Texas chicken ranch, as charming as that is, is kind of a symbol of the old times meeting the new, very particular in its telling. But I mean, it's, it's nonetheless a symbol of the old Texas versus the new Texas and what's really happening down the road for the country at large. It's amazing that in the course of a decade, you can see just how much the chicken ranch perceptions change. In 1972, I believe it was, who would become Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby ran for election, he went to Sheriff Lornaut, the sheriff of Fayette County, and asked,

you know, can you help my election campaign? And Flournoy said, yes, give me whatever materials you need and we'll get it done. So after the election, Bill Hobby's wife was sending out thank you notes. And she came to Bill and said, Sheriff Lornaut is being very evasive when I'm asking him, who helped send out our campaign mailers in Fayette County. Can you talk to him? So he went and talked to And the sheriff goes, well, I took all your mailers to the chicken ranch, and those ladies there addressed them and stamped them and mailed them out. I think we want to keep that to ourselves. Okay. So literally, the chicken ranch helped Bill Hobby get elected.

This guy is a legend in Texas politics. Fast forward to the late 1980s and the governor's race between Anne Richards and Clayton Williams. It came out during the course of the campaign that Clayton Williams as a student, at Texas A&M, frequented the chicken ranch. And that was, again, a big national scandal. And he ended up losing the governor's race to Ann Richards in part because of that revelation. So the chicken ranch had gone from electing politicians to torpedoing those politicians' campaigns. That's very fast, very quick turnaround, you know, in historical terms. Interesting. I mean, as Texas goes, so goes the nation, in my opinion.

opinion, my humble opinion, I think there's lots of other ways of putting that as well. But I think that you're going to definitely find a still emerging state. I mean, for years, I wanted to do a TV series that just stayed within the borders of Texas because I think you basically have the entire nation there. You know, it's big enough to be its own nation, of course. But where Texas will go in the next 50 years is where America will be. And it's a fascinating tale. I'm going to plug your book one more time, Jamie. It's called Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch, the definitive account of the best little whorehouse. You love the play. Now read the book. This is the 50th anniversary edition because it was 1973. The Chicken Ranch shuttered its doors forever. And it's been 50 years.

It's hard to believe that some people don't even realize all of this was based on actual true history. I'm old enough to think that 50 years doesn't sound like that much time anymore. You and me both. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.