Who Wrote the Best Little Whore House in Texas
Larry King, a pioneering journalist and playwright of "All-time Piffling Whorehouse in Texas," dies at 83. (AP Laserphoto/AP LASERPHOTO)
Before he became known the world over as a playwright, Larry Fifty. King was a reporter, a Capitol Colina aide, a raconteur, a brawler and a full-time Texan. He helped define the freewheeling New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, partly with an article he wrote for Playboy magazine in 1974 nigh the Chicken Ranch, a firm of sick repute in southeast Texas.
A few years after, Mr. King and several collaborators refashioned his article into a musical comedy most a brothel that operated for years under the averted gaze of the police. "The Best Piddling Whorehouse in Texas" ran on Broadway for nearly 4 years and has been in well-nigh continuous product since. In 1982, it was made into a Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton picture — which Mr. Rex loathed.
Mr. King, who had lived in Washington since the 1950s, died December. 20 at Chevy Chase Firm, a retirement facility in the District. He was 83. He had emphysema, his married woman, Barbara Blaine, said.
He was the author of seven plays and more a dozen books, including memoirs, a novel and collections of manufactures and letters. In 1982, he won an Emmy Accolade as the writer and narrator of a CBS documentary, "The All-time Little Statehouse in Texas," that looked at the legislature'southward behind-the-scenes horse-trading.
Mr. King likewise was known for his outsized personality, total-bore drinking and an power to tell outrageously droll stories in a profanity-laced drawl that was virtually indistinguishable from his writing voice.
"His sure cognition of his origins informs his betoken of view and his prose style," New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a review of Mr. Male monarch'southward 1971 memoir, "Confessions of a White Racist." "And this confidence in his roots is what makes Mr. King'south writing then alive, dramatic, warm, and funny."
But it was "The Best Little Whorehouse" that propelled Mr. King from journeyman writer to adventitious fame equally a playwright. He happened on his most famous story after a crusading Houston Tv reporter, Marvin Zindler, exposed the Chicken Ranch as a den of prostitution. Over a ii-solar day menstruum, Zindler said, he counted 484 men arriving at the unmarked building outside La Grange, Tex.
By the 1970s, the Chicken Ranch had been an open underground in Texas for more than fifty years. It derived its name from a Depression-era practice in which customers sometimes paid with chickens or other subcontract products.
In his Playboy article, Mr. King noted that "veteran legislators" were no strangers to the Chicken Ranch and could have found their way from the land capital of Austin "without headlights even in a midnight rainstorm."
The madam of the Craven Ranch, Edna Milton Chadwell, who died in February, was a no-nonsense field full general who would non let profanity, violence or drinking on the bounds. "Miss Edna" was also i of the leading philanthropists in Fayette County, contributing to the local hospital and sponsoring a baseball team.
Despite protests that the Chicken Ranch did niggling to harm the morals of Fayette County — "I ain't never got no complaints," the sheriff said — legal authorities had little selection but to shut downward the bordello in 1973 and send Miss Edna and her "girls" looking for some other line of piece of work.
For Mr. Male monarch, the story had all the right ingredients: sex activity, clashing egos, official hypocrisy and a gaggle of colorful Texas rascals. He and producer-managing director Peter Masterson adapted the Playboy article for the stage. The music was past Carol Hall and the choreography past Tommy Tune — both Texas natives.
"The Best Petty Whorehouse in Texas" opened on Broadway in 1978 with a no-proper name cast. It received lukewarm reviews, just audiences loved it, and "Whorehouse" ran on Broadway for 1,584 performances.
"It's non Shakespeare," Mr. King once said, "simply hell, it'south fun."
In a 1982 book, "The Whorehouse Papers," Mr. King described his frustrations with the creative process of the theater, writing that his play was "tinkered with, danced on, sang at, barked and snarled at, chopped up, tricked up, and camped up until I can hardly recognize the . . . thing."
He was fifty-fifty more apoplectic about the way his story was treated when it was made into a movie. He thought Reynolds was wrong for the part of the aging sheriff and gleefully traded insults with the flick star, tweaking him about his vanity. The feud escalated until Mr. Rex challenged Reynolds to a fistfight.
The confrontation never took place, but Mr. King was not invited to the picture show's world premiere.
Lawrence Leo King was born Jan. 1, 1929, in Putnam, Tex. His father was a farmer and blacksmith.
Mr. King, who had early dreams of being a writer, worked in oil fields in his teens and dropped out of high school to join the Army. He after spent 1 semester at Texas Tech University before leaving to work for small newspapers in New United mexican states and Texas.
In 1954, he moved to Washington as an adjutant to Rep. J.T. Rutherford (D-Tex.). Later Rutherford lost his seat in 1962, Mr. King worked for Rep. James C. Wright Jr. (D-Tex.), who afterwards became speaker of the Firm.
Although Mr. King quit his Capitol Hill job in 1964 to concentrate on writing, he kept one foot in Texas politics. In 1978, the aforementioned yr "The Best Little Whorehouse" reached Broadway, Mr. Rex co-wrote the best-selling autobiography of Bobby Bakery, a onetime adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson who went to prison on corruption charges.
In 1966, Mr. King published a novel, "The One-Eyed Human," about racial prejudice at a Southern higher, to pocket-size reviews.
He institute greater success equally a mag writer and was amid the vanguard of "New Journalists" — including Tom Wolfe, Hunter Southward. Thompson, Joan Didion and Gay Talese — who wrote with novelistic flair and deeply individual voices. In a 1966 Harper's magazine article about Rep. Joe R. Pool (D-Tex.), Mr. King coined a phrase afterward applied to other politicians: "The simply mode you can lose this election, Joe, is to become defenseless in bed with a live homo or a expressionless woman."
Mr. King flaunted his reputation as a hard-drinking renegade and took special please in unmasking charlatans and fools. He often wrote about Texas, music, sports and the scars of the Southward, and several of his stories have been reprinted in anthologies.
He contributed to dozens of magazines but was perhaps most closely identified with Harper's, which was edited past Mississippi-built-in Willie Morris from 1967 to 1971. In 2006, Mr. King published "In Search of Willie Morris" a book about his brilliant, elusive and troubled friend, who died in 1999.
"I worked with him, drank with him, laughed with him, cried with him," Mr. Male monarch wrote, and "loved him and admired him and once had a drunken fistfight with him over which of u.s. owned the angel of a certain fickle socialite in Washington."
The first of Mr. Male monarch'south three marriages, to the former Wilma Jeanne "Jean" Casey, ended in divorce. His second wife, Rosemarie Coumaris Kline, died of cancer in 1972. (Mr. King wrote touchingly virtually her in his 1986 memoir, "None But a Blockhead.")
Survivors include his wife of 34 years, Barbara S. Blaine of Washington; three children from his outset marriage, Alexandria King of Albuquerque, Kerri King Mitchell of Plano, Tex., and Bradley King of New York; 2 children from his tertiary union, Lindsay King Arnoult of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Blaine C. King of Washington; and two grandsons.
"Whorehouse" was nominated for a Tony Award and made Mr. Male monarch financially secure, but he sometimes found it a struggle to get his later plays produced.
"The Night Hank Williams Died," well-nigh a old loftier school football star with dreams of being a country singer, received the Helen Hayes Award for best new play later on its premiere at Washington's 125-seat New Playwrights' Theatre in 1988.
The production featured Mr. Rex in an interim role.
"There are times when uttering his lines and handling props evidence to be i task likewise many," Washington Mail theater critic David Richards wrote, only "there is frequently an artless truth to his efforts that is touching. His ravaged face and lumbering physique convey the price of a lifetime spent in drab places."
A heavy drinker for years, Mr. King gave up alcohol in the 1980s just continued to be an often-cantankerous presence in the literary circles of Washington and Austin.
He was often confused with the radio and television talk-show host Larry King, especially when making dinner reservations. One Washington restaurant settled the problem by asking them, when reserving a table, to identify themselves as either "Larry King 'Radio' " or "Larry Male monarch 'Whorehouse.' "
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-l-king-playwright-of-the-best-little-whorehouse-in-texas-dies-at-83/2012/12/21/6f3cf9b0-1ee8-11e2-9746-908f727990d8_story.html
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