Remembering... Texas Guinan

Already famous in vaudeville and silent films as America's first movie cowgirl - nicknamed 'Queen of the West' - shortly after Prohibition was introduced Texas Guinan opened a speakeasy called the 300 Club at 151 W. 54th St. in Manhattan...

Her clarion call - 'Hello suckers!' - greeted young and old, famous and obscure alike, and they not only loved it, they loved her for it. Her patrons didn't come for the caustic greeting or stay for the over-priced turpentine passing for hooch but to rub elbows with the cream of society and to rub far naughtier things with the parade of scantily-clad dancers she employed; Ruby Keeler and George Raft were just two of the future stars who found fame (and Heaven knows what else) while working for her...

Riding high on her newfound notoriety as a proprietress, Guinan returned to the movies. Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) and Broadway Through a Keyhole (1933) both saw her playing thinly veiled versions of herself; equally thinly veiled portrayals of her have been assayed by Mae West in the George Raft movie Night After Night (1932) and Gladys George in The Roaring Twenties (1939). She's also been portrayed on film by Betty Hutton in Incendiary Blonde (1945) and in Splendor in the Grass (1961) by Phyllis Diller.  Sadly, a rumoured musical of her life starring Madonna seems unlikely to surface...

Born on this day in 1884, Texas Guinan's life 'closed out of town' - to use the showbiz parlance - while on tour in Vancouver; it's there she contracted amoebic dysentery and died in November 1933, one month before the repeal of Prohibition.
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