CANDY LIVES!

GOOFS JUANITA SLUSHER, the former CANDY BARR, has been called a lot of things: runaway, Jezebel, pom queen, legendary “exotic” dancer, doper, grandmother. But never dead. That is, not until D’s October “Power” issue, when some errant staffer (we’re still investigating) stuck her name in a box called “Power From Beyond” with such departed Dallas powerhouses as H. L. HUNT and ALGUR MEADOWS.

The idea seemed sound enough at the time: they’re gone, but we still feel their influence today. Only problem is, Ms. Barr-Slusher isn’t gone, unless you consider Brownwood, 150 miles west of Dallas, to be the Great Beyond. So we learned when the issue hit the newsstands.

Though she’s very much alive, it wouldn’t be surprising if Candy remembered Dallas as the flaming pit itself. She was an almost-topless dancer at the top of her game here in the late Fifties, one of the Big Three of local exotics along with CHRIS COLT and BUBBLES CASH. She had a boyfriend reputed to have gangland ties. She had glamour, money-and, according to Dallas police, marijuana in her apartment one night in October 1957. The bust led to a celebrated trial in which Candy’s attorneys claimed she had been set up, and a 15-year prison sentence. She was paroled in 1963.

Today, Juanita Candy Barr-Slusher, 55, lives quietly in Brownwood, attending the Episcopal Church, writing poetry, and working part-time for an architect. She wasn’t eager to talk to a magazine that had prematurely written her obit, but friends say she’s trying to free herself from longstanding legal entanglements with an agent. When and if she does, Candy would love to set the record straight in an autobiography.