"Hello, Suckers!" Every night she flung that greeting at the Jazz Age flappers and gents who crowded in to see the "Queen of the Nightclubs" work her magic. They came to laugh and drink and forget the world outside - and Texas Guinan kept the party going. She was the wittiest nightclub hostess in New York, and her clubs had the best floor shows, the most elegant decor, and all the bootleg liquor that furtively exchanged dollars could buy. Here is the story of Texas Guinan - nightclub hostess, theater and vaudeville actress, and star of silent westerns. Louise Berliner, a granddaughter of the lawyer who defended Guinan at her notorious "public nuisance" trial in 1929, follows the whole course of Guinan's life (1884-1933), from her childhood in a devout Catholic home in Waco, Texas, to her celebrity funeral and burial with diamonds in one hand and a rosary in the other. Like a female Gatsby, Texas Guinan invented a past appropriate for the character she became. Berliner explores this fascinating process of self-creation, separating fact from the fictions that Guinan wove about her life. In so doing, she illuminates the era of early musical comedies in New York and on the vaudeville circuit, the two-reeler silent westerns in which Guinan starred as a lady gunslinger, and the New York club life that Guinan promoted as "an essential and basic industry." Texas Guinan seemed to know everyone in the Roaring Twenties - the Prince of Wales, Ruby Keeler, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Walter Winchell, Mae West, Aimee Semple MacPherson, and even President Harding - and Berliner offers intriguing views of Guinan's relationship with many of these varied personalities. This timely book, the first fully documented study of Guinan's life, will be important for everyone interested in popular culture, the Jazz Age, and women's studies. It brings to life a woman of amazing vitality and surprising contradictions, as captivating as any character imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs

Biographies & Memoirs

Berliner, Louise

Regional U.S.

Univ of Texas Pr

"Texas Guinan was a night club hostess-funny, magnetic, loud."So begins the story of the notorious Roaring '20s personality who, with her signature "Hello Sucker!" transformed the simple grab-a-drink Prohibition speakeasy into a glamorous club with dancing girls, entertainment, and a star-studded clientele. Her friends and guests ranged from newspapermen like Walter Winchell, who quoted her daily, to Mae West, Rudolph Valentino, the Prince of Wales, and President Harding.Guinan was a devoted mythmaker and publicity hound, and her fictions were just as much of her story as the facts. Berliner's biography explores this as it chronicles Guinan's journey from small town Waco through multiple careers in vaudeville, musical theater, and the 2-reeler silent westerns that billed her as the "Female Bill Hart," to her emergence as an icon of the '20s. It follows the nightly shenanigans in Guinan's clubs, complete with her tangles with gangsters and U.S. Prohibition agents, culminating in her arrest for maintaining a public nuisance, i.e. working at a club that sold liquor illegally. She hired a young lawyer to defend her and 60 years later, his trial notes were uncovered by his granddaughter, the author.

Texas Guinan: Queen of the Nightclubs

Arts & Literature

CB Studios

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