Texas Guinan: Cowgirl Actress, Film Producer & Queen of the Nightclubs

Texas Guinan

"Texas" Guinan was an American stage and screen actress, film producer, and entrepreneur who became famous for her tough female roles in the male dominated world of silent Western films. During the prohibition era she ran speakeasy clubs in New York which catered to the rich and famous. After being arrested and indicted during a law enforcement sweep, she was eventually acquitted during her trial.

Early Life and Family

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan (January 12, 1884 – November 5, 1933) was one of four children born to Irish immigrants Michael and Bessie Guinan, who had met and married in Colorado. They initially operated a wholesale grocery business together but after relocating to Waco, Texas, they ran a horse and cattle ranch.

 As a child Mary was nicknamed "Mamie", and attended parochial school at the Loretta Convent in Waco. Growing up on a ranch provided her with all the basic cowboy skills she needed, and she honed her marksmanship at a local shooting gallery. In 1898, her parents were successful in securing for her a two-year scholarship to the American Conservatory of Music offered by Chicago businessman Marshall Field. After developing her soprano vocal talents, and finishing her studies, she joined a touring acting troupe that featured American "Wild West" entertainment.

In 1904 using the name "Marie Guinan", she married newspaper cartoonist John Moynahan on December 2nd. Two years later, Moybahan took a job in Boston. The couple eventually divorced, and Guinan moved to New York to pursue a career as a singer in the entertainment business. For years, she actually claimed for publicity purposes that she was born with the name Texas, and she never let facts stand in the way of a good narrative. In a full-page 1910 interview in The San Francisco Call, she stated her father "was the first white child seen in Waco", even though he was a adult when he arrived in America, and white settlers had been there since the early to mid-19th century.

Theatre critic and Photoplay editor Julian Johnson was her companion for a decade, and was influential in the creation of her public persona. Many people believed them to be married. Her 1933 obituaries mention Johnson as her second husband, and millionaire George E. Townley as a third husband. Lacking any verification that the latter two marriages took place, Moynahan is now believed to have been her only husband.

Johnson's connection is thought to have led to a poem carrying her byline being printed in Photoplay.  An alleged connection to the US Senator from Texas, Joseph Weldon Bailey, evolved over time from a nonspecific tie to her family, to Guinan's being the senator's niece. The niece relationship seems implausible, since her parents were born and raised in a different country than either Senator Bailey or his wife. Mentions of him coincide with the timeline of her association with Julian Johnson. While he was editor at Photoplay, an article written by then-staff journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns remarked that Guinan, " ... bore a distinct resemblance to her uncle, Senator Joe Bailey of Texas."

Vaudeville and Stage Productions 

 

Initially finding work as a chorus girl, she adopted the stage name of Texas Guinan to give herself an edge in the competitive marketplaces of vaudeville and New York theatre productions. Within a year, she had the female lead in a stage production of Simple Simon Simple, during which she accidentally shot herself on stage with a loaded gun.

In 1908, she received favourable notices for her performance in The Gibson Girl Review. That same year, she placed an advertisement in newspapers offering $1,000 to any songwriter who provided her with a song of equal popularity to the Gus Edwards-penned "That's What The Rose Said To Me" 

She appeared as a soprano vocalist in many productions, including The Gay Musician, The Hoyden, and The Lone Star. 

She had achieved a degree of national stardom on stage by 1910.

John P. Slocum managed her when she appeared in his multiyear touring production of The Kissing Girl. When Ned Wayburn rolled out his production of The Passing Show on a national tour in 1913, Guinan was one of the headliners. 

Coinciding with the publicity for the tour, Guinan licensed her name and image to be used by W. C. Cunningham for a weight-loss plan. The advertisements that appeared in media across the country claimed Guinan had lost 70 pounds on the plan.  Investigative journalism by the Chicago Tribune alleged that Guinan knowingly acted as a shill in perpetuating a fraud upon the public. A subsequent investigation by the postal service revealed it to be a swindle. United States Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson quickly acted to prohibit Guinan from receiving mail through the postal service. 

Although she continued on the stage, the incident damaged her career, and was a motivating factor in her later expanding her repertoire by heading West to work in the California film business.

Guinan appeared as Zaza in the variety show Hop-o'-My-Thumb, based on a French fairytale of the same name. The show opened at the Manhattan Opera House November 26, 1913, and closed January 1, 1914.  She toured the United States with the Whirl of the World musical comedy in 1915. The tour coincided with her unverified account of being casually approached in Berlin by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who engaged her in conversation as she sat alone reading a book.

She appeared in the musical Gay Paree that opened at the Shubert Theatre August 18, 1925 and closed January 30, 1926. Guinan was also a part of the cast of the musical Padlocks of 1927, also at the Shubert.

Film Career 

 

In a film career that began in 1917 and continued through to 1933, Texas was part of the vanguard of women film makers in the United States. Her later claim of being in France in 1917 entertaining the troops, and being decorated with a bronze medal by France field marshall Joseph Joffre, has been proven false by the timeline and California location of her prolific film making. 

Triangle Film Corporation, founded in 1915 by Harry and Roy Aitken, featured Guinan in four two-reel shorts between 1917 and 1918, The Fuel of Life, The Stainless Barrier, The Gun Woman, and The Love Brokers. 

Unlike the musical genre she was known for on stage, she achieved national prominence in the ostensibly masculine domain of the silent film Western genre, and on her dressing room door appeared a map of the state of Texas, rather than her name. 

Triangle began billing her as "the female Bill Hart" in reference to the industry's first male western star who at that time topped fandom popularity polls. 

“Texas Guinan to Typify West” promised an early ad campaign for a series of her films, and, playing a tough “gun woman” rather than a timid schoolmarm in need of rescue, Guinan tailored her defiantly unglamorous image as a rowdy cowgirl who tames men as easily as horses.

Frohman Brothers were Broadway producers. In 1918, brother Daniel Frohman and partner William L. Sherrill formed the Frohman Amusement Corporation for the express purpose of engaging in the motion picture business. They made more than a dozen films with Guinan in 1918, including The Boss of the Rancho and The Heart of Texas.

Her success as a performer allowed her to assume off-screen control of her career too. During her years with Bull's Eye Productions and Reelcraft, she began to expand towards the production end of film making, and worked as a unit department Outwitted, The Lady of the Law, The Girl of the Rancho, The Desert Vulture, and at least five other productions. 

head on the films

She then created her own company - Texas Guinan Productions - in 1921 to produce Code of the West, Spitfire, and Texas of the Mounted. 

After making I Am the Woman and The Stampede for Victor Kremer Film Features, she returned to New York. 

BIOGRAPHY OF TEXAS GUINAN

Some evidence suggests that her company may have produced additional films. According to her biographer Louise Berliner, Guinan was an innovative and energetic producer, choosing to cast each film rather than employ a stock company, helping to inaugurate states-rights distribution of her films, and supervising the publicity campaigns (including staging live skits before screenings) for her new company.

Although the Western is often considered the most masculine of genres, this characterization does not easily apply to the silent period, when women played prominent roles in the production. Such popular movie “cowboy girls” as the early trade press called them, had roots in pre-cinematic media, including dime novels, stage melodramas, and Wild West shows

The prolific Bertha Muzzy Bower, under the gender-obscuring pen name B. M. Bower, published best-selling Western novels between 1904 and 1914 that were often adapted into successful films. 

Louise Lester starred in a dozen “Calamity Anne” films for the American Film Company between 1912 and 1914, and in 1919 Marie Walcamp played Tempest Cody in nine films in Universal’s “Spur and Saddle” series. 

In this context, Texas Guinan was perhaps the most significant woman in early cinema to challenge the assumption that women could only play secondary or conventionally feminine roles in the popular Western. Fond of firing guns and racing on horseback, Guinan established a tomboy presence in the Western that did not fit into the opposed roles of the refined Eastern lady or the Western dance hall prostitute that would delimit women’s roles in “mature” examples of the genre. Perhaps recognizing that she occupied an unconventional position both on screen and in the industry, in Texas of the Mounted, the first film she produced for her own company, Guinan plays male and female twins: when he is killed, she avenges his murder while wearing his clothes.

Guinan was again seen on the screen with two sound pictures. She played a slightly fictionalized version of herself as a speakeasy proprietress in Queen of the Night Clubs (1929). The New Yorker Magazine said that Guinan lacked her famed charm and vitality, and that the camera was “not kind to her looks.”

 

The film in many ways marked the end of Texas Guinan, not so much because it was a bad film but because she had simply run her course and was going out of style. The market crash later that year was the final straw. She took her show on the road, made an unsuccessful attempt at a European tour, then returned to the States.

Her final film was Broadway Thru a Keyhole (1933) written by Walter Winchell. Texas died three days after the film’s release.

 CLIP FROM BROADWAY THRU A KEYHOLE FEATURING TEXAS GUINAN

Constructing an accurate picture of Guinan’s film career, or her private life, for that matter, is difficult. Many of her films were shortened later by Melody Productions and re-released with soundtracks under multiple titles, and perhaps only a half-dozen survive, some as incomplete prints. Most unfortunately, all of the films she produced are lost, although a few of the two-reelers she supervised for Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft are available. 

By a conservative estimate, Texas Guinan starred in approximately 33 silent films made by a handful of production companies, including Mack Sennett’s Triangle Film Corporation (four films in 1917–1918), Frohman Amusement Corporation (thirteen two-reelers in 1919), Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft Film Company (twelve two-reelers in 1920), and Victor Kremer Productions (two features in 1921). These companies may be less familiar to film scholars than some of the notable directors who supervised Guinan: Frank Borzage directed her first major film, The Gun Woman (1918), and Francis Ford, Western film I Am the Woman and The Stampede, both in 1921.

director John Ford’s older brother and mentor, directed her in

Although publicity materials attempted to glamorize Texas Guinan, her stout body, broad face, and insistence on playing heroic leads didn’t allow her to be cast in conventionally “feminine” roles. Working almost exclusively in the genre that would eventually seem the most unwelcoming to women as performers or producers, her evident popularity and success suggest that our own understanding of the early Western genre requires revision in order to properly acknowledge her contribution, but also to begin to ponder the fantasies the boisterous movie cowgirl embodied for cinema’s early audiences.

Queen of the Night Clubs

In the Roaring Twenties, Texas Guinan became the undisputed queen of New York’s boozy, bawdy nightclub and speakeasy scene. The 1920 Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution put Prohibition into effect, making sales or transport of alcoholic beverages illegal. While it ruined legitimate businesses, people kept right on drinking alcohol, with those who transported and sold it known as "bootleggers". Thus began the establishment of the speakeasy private clubs, a cultural phenomenon in which Guinan excelled. 

Her introduction into the business was when speakeasy partners Emil Gervasini and John Levi of the Beaux Arts club hired Guinan in 1923 as a singer, for which she was paid $50,000.

Guinan's give-and-take dialogue with the customers inspired producer Nils Granlund to put together a full floor show with Guinan presiding as MC for Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls. Bootleg huckster Larry Fay struck a deal with them to feature the show at his El Fey Club on West 47th Street in Manhattan. There, she became known for her catchphrase, "Hello, Sucker! Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar." This is the same persona displayed in Incendiary Blonde (1945), the flashy Hollywood biopic about Guinan starring Betty Hutton. 

The El Fey Club, attracted the likes of Mayor Jimmy Walker, Actor George Raft, Actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce, writers Ring Larder and Damon Runyon, and gossip columnists Walter Winchell, Mark Hellinger, and Ed Sullivan who later hosted TV’s most famous variety show. Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck were discovered by talent scouts while working as dancers at the club.

In return for being the draw to attract wealthy and powerful clientele, Guinan received 50% of the profits. 

 

After the El Fay Club was shut down by the police, she opened the Texas Guinan Club

at 117 West 48th Street, which was also closed by the police. She and Larry Fay later opened the Del-Fey Club in Miami the same year and made over $700,000 in less than 12 months.

When Guinan returned to New York in January 1926, as hostess of the 300 Club at 151 W. 54th Street, the opening night's event was the marriage ceremony for actress Wilda Bennett and Argentine dancer Abraham "Peppy" de Albrew. Other celebrities who visited her club were Al Jolson, Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden, Jack Dempsey, American operatic soprano Geraldine Farrar, and the Prince of Wales.

 

 It was still months before the big stock market crash, but in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine you could already sense a change in its

voice; it seemed to be growing weary of the party.. As for the queen of nightlife, Texas Guinan, New Yorkers were ready for something different.

In July 1926, the 300 Club was raided by the police, who seized bottles of liquor and arrested two people for "violation of the section of the penal code forbidding suggestive dances". 

The last week of June 1928, Assistant US Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt ordered a raid of speakeasy clubs in New York.

Guinan, Helen Morgan (hostess of Chez Helen Morgan), Nils Granlund, and 104 others were arrested, and indicted by a federal grand jury. Guinan, Morgan, and Granlund faced 2 years in prison, with a $10,000 maximum fine, if convicted. The others indicted were employees and patrons, who faced lesser penalties.

At her April 1929 trial, Guinan was acquitted.

 

She said:. I never take a drink and I never sell a drink. I am paid to put on an act and I put on an act. I once gave US Attorney General Buckner a certified check for $100,000 to give anyone who has ever seen me take a drink or sell a drink. That check is still good, and so is my offer.

 TEXAS GUINAN TOASTING AT A SPEAKEASY 1928

Final years and Death

During the Great Depression, she took her caberet show on the road. She made towards Europe, but Scotland Yard threatened to board her ship if she tried to land in England, where she was on their list of "barred aliens". The show itself was banned from France under labour technicalities. Guinan had a contract with a Paris club, but French employment laws at the time dissuaded non-citizens from working on French soil. She turned this to her advantage when she returned to the states, by launching the satirical revue, Too Hot For Paris.

 PATHE NEWS FOOTAGE OF TEXAS GUINAN ARRIVING BACK IN NEW YORK

While on the road with Too Hot For Paris, she

contracted amoebic dysentery in Chicago, Illinois, during the epidemic in the Congress Hotel.

She fell ill in Vancouver, British Columbia, and died there on November 5, 1933, at the age of 49, exactly one month before Prohibition was repealed; 7,500 people attended her funeral. Bandleader Paul Whiteman was a pallbearer along with two of her former lawyers and writer Heywood Broun.

Guinan is interred in the Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York. Her family donated a tabernacle in her name to St. Patrick's Church in Vancouver in recognition of Father Louis Forget's attentions during her last hours. When the original church was demolished in 2004, the tabernacle was preserved for the new church built on the site. 

She was survived by both of her parents. Her mother died at age 101 in 1959. Her father was 81years old at his death on May 14, 1935. Her brothers Tommy and William, as well as her sister Mrs. George C. Smith, also survived her.