The Real Chicken Ranch
In 1844, a bordello opened in a hotel in LaGrange, Texas. The original proprietor was a woman known as Mrs. Swine. Swine is most likely not her given surname, but a nickname given to her because of her physical resemblance to a pig – she was short, stout, had stubby arms, an upturned nose and a penchant for wearing the same soiled dress day after day. Although literature and film have led us to think of prostitutes as lovely ladies who were merely kicked around by life, this certainly wasn’t the case in this instance. Mrs. Swine took in young women who were physically and mentally handicapped (with nicknames like Three-Finger Sally, One-Legged Mary, Blind Nellie, Bald Betty, etc.), and most likely couldn’t have found work in any other profession but prostitution. One might have thought her a saint if not for the fact that she was, you know, turning these girls into hookers.
The house of ill-repute continued to function LONG after Mrs. Swine’s departure from the town in the 1860s, though records are sketchy until after the turn of the 20th century when Miss Jessie Williams arrived to set up shop in town. Miss Jessie brought some dignity to the profession, hiring attractive ladies, closing the doors of her newly-acquired digs to roustabouts, blacks and Mexicans, and welcoming politicians and lawmen with open arms. Around 1915, there was a short-lived cleanup craze in LaGrange, which found derelicts, hookers and outlaws being deported from the town -- but upstanding citizen Miss Jessie somehow wound up keeping her “boarding house” (as it was claimed in tax records).
At the start of the Great Depression, the going rate for a “date” at Miss Jessie’s was $3, but she lowered it to $1.50. Unfortunately, disposable cash was sparse during the era, so Miss Jessie began accepting chickens in trade for sex acts. For several years, Miss Jessie and her girls survived almost solely on poultry -- and Miss Jessie was able to supplement income by selling off excess chickens and eggs -- and this led to the brothel being known by the nickname "The Chicken Ranch" (one of the few facts the film got right).
By the 1950s, the war was over, business was booming, Aggies were regularly taking full tours of the Chicken Ranch, and a 23 year old woman named Edna Milton moved to town and took job -- then eventually was made manager of the Chicken ranch when Miss Jessie began ailing with arthritis. Following Miss Jessie's death in 1961, Milton purchased the property for $30,000 (which far exceeded the land's estimated $8,000 value) and immediately christened it "Edna's Fashionable Ranch Boarding House." Of course, the technical name was irrelevant since the name "The Chicken Ranch" had permanently stuck. By this time, the going rate for 15 minutes with her girls ranged from $8 for a traditional sex act to $40 for more perverse deeds.
Houston rock trio ZZ Top immortalized the brothel in their 1973 song "LaGrange," which would become one of the band's most successful (and signature) tunes. Unfortunately, this glowing endorsement of the well-known house of ill repute didn't serve to bring them any clientele -- in the months between the time the song was recorded and committed to vinyl, the Chicken Ranch was forced to close its doors.
Backtracking a year, it was business as usual when the Texas Department of Public Safety began their investigation of The Chicken Ranch in 1972. The DPS and the Texas Attorney General's office were convinced that both the Lagrange bawdy house and The Wagon Wheel in nearby Sealy, Texas, were linked to organized crime. The DPS set up surveillance outside the cathouse and were met by an angry Sheriff T.J. Flournoy and his shotgun-toting deputy, who strongly advised DPS officials to pack up and move out. Texas Attorney General John Hill and assistant Attorney General Herbert Hancock were determined to get the brothel closed down, but didn't have a means of doing it. So they decided to turn to the press to do their dirty work...
Hill and Hancock set their sites on a flashy Houston TV reporter named Marvin Zindler . Zindler's shocking exposées ("Sliiiiiime in the Ice Machine!"), gaudy attire (white suits, blue tinted glasses and over-coiffed white toupees), coupled with his over the top on-air theatrics (which, yes, sometimes did include singing choruses) made him a beloved celebrity on Houston's KTRK, leading him to sign a lifetime contract with the station in 1988 (his campy segments remained a staple of KTRK's news until Zindler's death in 2007). But he'd only been a KTRK reporter for around six months when Hill turned him onto the Chicken Ranch, claiming ties to organized crime and political payoffs. This, however, was never proven, and Milton had included a passage in her "Rules and Regulations" which her girls were required to read that stated: "This place nor I have any connection what so ever with any other place mob or syndicate of any type."
That was the story the Eyewitness News team set out to uncover. Because of Zindler's egocentric showmanship, he was later made out to be the villain of the story when, in fact, he had little direct involvement. Station honchos only sent single male employees undercover to The Chicken Ranch, which excluded the married Zindler. Marvin conducted interviews with several key figures (full transcripts of all of these interviews were printed decades later in Zindler's biography "White Knight in Blue Shades")
, then launched a weeklong exposé on Action News in July 1973. Despite protests and a petition started by local Sheriff T.J. Flournoy, the little whorehouse was forced to close, on August 1, so Edna and her girls migrated. People continued to flock to town until at least 1975, only made aware of the closing of The Chicken Ranch by a sign that hung on the fence outside which read: CLOSED DUE TO COMPLAINTS OF MARVIN ZINDLER.
The unusual story got some national exposure with a blurb in Time Magazine in late August, and freelance writers Larry L. King and Al Reinert to flocked to the scene. Reinert's article ran in the October 1973 issue of "Texas Monthly;" King's made it to the January 1974 issue of "Playboy." Suddenly the story had international interest. Zindler returned to the scene of the crime in December 1974 to do a follow-up on how LaGrange's economy had suffered from the closing of the Chicken Ranch, and he was greeted by a hostile Sheriff Flournoy, who bombarded the reporter with expletives before shoving him to the ground (fracturing several of Marvin's ribs), ripping off his wig, grabbing the camera and yanking the film out of it. The film footage didn't survive... but the audio did and, predictably, aired on Action News. Zindler sued and eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, which was donated to charity.