Women are sure to play a critical role in this year’s election. We can be grateful that the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, established their right to vote. The fight of the suffragists was serious business, but women of a century ago were acting up in other ways to advance their emancipation.
One who smashed her share of Victorian stereotypes was Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan (pronounced guy-nin). Born to Irish immigrant parents in 1884, Guinan was famous for being famous, a woman who shook up society by the sheer force of her outsized personality.
She spent much of her childhood in Waco, Texas, where her parents ran a grocery store and a horse ranch. Their daughter, nicknamed Mamie, learned to ride, rope and shoot with the boys. She later went to Chicago to study singing. During the early years of the new century, she tried her luck as a chorus girl and vaudeville performer in New York. She changed her nickname to “Texas.”
In 1907, a talent scout lured her to Hollywood, where the movie business was just getting on its feet. Westerns were the rage. The title of her first silent film, The Wildcat, nails her movie persona. Hardly a shrinking violet in need of rescue, she used her unquenchable energy and cowgirl skills to carve out forceful leading roles in movies like Two Gun Woman, Stampede, and The Hell Cat.
When Hollywood dismissed her for her rather plain face and figure, Guinan started her own production company, a first for a woman, and cast herself in even more pictures. She made fifty films in all. And she was just getting started.
In 1922, she returned to New York. It was the Roaring Twenties — Prohibition and jazz-age enthusiasm were packing clandestine speakeasies and nightclubs. Patrons gulped down bootleg gin, danced the Charleston, and lived it up into the wee hours. Texas Guinan fit right in.
She started as a singer at the Beaux Arts Club, but she quickly defined her own role, taking over as hostess, master of ceremonies, and chief merry-maker. As the club’s main attraction, she earned $50,000 a year (more than $900,000 in today’s greenbacks).
She moved from one nightclub to another, usually after each was closed down by a police raid. Customers had to mount a stairway and stand in front of a peephole to be examined by the doorman before gaining entry — all very naughty and utterly irresistible.
The joints were anything but exclusive, attracting a mixture of gamblers and actors, millionaires, tourists, and musicians. A patron might find herself rubbing elbows with Babe Ruth, Clara Bow, Charles Lindbergh, or Gloria Swanson. During one raid, Guinan tossed an apron and a spatula to the Prince of Wales — the future King Edward VIII — so that he could pretend to be a cook and avoid the slammer.
The famous hostess slept during day, ate breakfast at eleven p.m., and traveled to the club in a bulletproof limo like the one Al Capone rode in. At midnight she climbed onto a chair, blew a police whistle, flapped the clacker she used to stir the crowd, and proclaimed her catchphrase: “Hello, Suckers! Come on in and leave your wallets on the bar.” Hot jazz, frantic dancing, heavy drinking and games of leap-frog continued until dawn.
Through it all, Guinan would crack the whip of excitement. She defined what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms.” One newspaperman described her as “a formidable woman, with her pearls, her prodigious glittering bosom, her abundant and beautifully bleached yellow coiffure, her bear-trap of shining white teeth.”
She tossed good-humored insults at the “big-butter-and-eggs-men” eager to laugh at themselves. Her witticisms appeared the next day in the newspaper columns of Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. A New Yorker journalist wrote, “The club is terrible. It is rowdy, it is vulgar, it is maudlin, it is terrifically vital.”
It was, of course, a show. Behind the scenes, Texas Guinan was a devout Catholic who shared a Greenwich Village flat with her parents and drank nothing stronger than coffee. She was an entertainer. And more. She dabbled in journalism, writing a syndicated column of her own. She briefly went back into the movies, playing herself in a talking picture called Queen of the Nightclubs.
When Wall Street laid an egg in 1929, it knocked the wind out of the nightclub scene. Guinan took her fame on the road, starring in a revue that toured the country. On traveling to Europe, she was banned in both England and France. When she returned home, she mounted a new show with the enticing title, “Too Hot for Paris.”
While traveling, she caught a stomach ailment and died on November 5, 1933, at the age of forty-nine. Thousands attended her funeral — the casket was left open at her request, “so the suckers can get a good look at me without a cover charge.” It was the end of an era — Prohibition was repealed a month later.
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View a short YouTube clip of Texas Guinan HERE.
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What a way to start 2024 with this wild, wonderful, crazy, do anything woman. Loved it!!!