Sometime in the mid-1960s, Edna Milton, the madam in charge of the Chicken Ranch in La Grange, Texas, received a phone call from a regular customer who had become an aide to President Lyndon Johnson. The man wondered if Milton had access to a “closed car” (not a convertible), because “someone’s wanting to come out there, but they don’t want to go in their own car.”
Milton only had a convertible available, so the visit never happened.
But as Jayme Lynn Blaschke writes in the action-packed history of the brothel that inspired the Broadway play and film “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and the ZZ Top hit “La Grange,” that “someone” was the most powerful man in the world. If he couldn’t get to the ranch, he’d bring the ranch to him.
Even as president, Johnson was a larger-than-life figure who had no qualms bragging about his sexual prowess to all who’d listen, referring to his penis as “Jumbo” and displaying it at any opportunity. “His secretarial pool,” Blaschke writes, “consisted entirely of young, attractive women, which Secret Service agents referred to as his ‘harem.’ ”
“Penny,” a woman who worked at the brothel from 1966-1969, recalled the day the local sheriff dropped by to inform her that the president was at a ranch nearby, and said, “Would you like to meet him? He likes brunettes.”
According to Penny, she met the president “as many as eight times” over the next few years, “always on private ranches between Austin and La Grange. Because she had a clean-cut, girl-next-door look about her, Penny was always introduced as a ‘friend of the family’ before the president would slip away with her.”
Penny says these visits became a release for the president in more ways than one.
“[It was] an extremely stressful time [for his presidency]. The guy had so much on his mind and on his plate. He just needed to break away from everything . . . you know what I’m saying?”
The exact origins of the Chicken Ranch — initially called the Chicken Farm — have been lost to time, but lore puts its opening in the 1840s. Milton, the inspiration for the character played by Dolly Parton in the film, would tell how two women and a man were crossing the country in a covered wagon when it broke down in La Grange. Stranded and broke, with little work to be had, the women took to selling themselves for sex to make money.
It’s said that everything is bigger in Texas, tall tales included. As the covered-wagon origin tale is apocryphal, so are oft-told versions of how the Chicken Farm got its name. One says that around the time of the Great Depression, since no one had money, the brothel began accepting chickens as payment.
“Before long, the going exchange rate became jokingly known as the ‘poultry standard’ — that is, ‘one chicken, one screw.’”
Milton would tell a different version, saying that throughout earlier years, there would be occasional investigations into the brothel by moral crusaders. To foil them, the madam at the time would buy 100 chickens and let them roam the property’s 11 acres, allowing her to claim it was a chicken ranch.
Milton was the person who really modernized the brothel.
Born in January 1928, Milton had already divorced, lost a love to deployment in World War II, and buried a 2-month-old son who died of jaundice by the time she was 17. Despondent and broke, she began accepting money for sex to make ends meet, starting work at the Chicken Farm in her late teens.
After a few rocky years including a horrifically damaging back-alley abortion, she began saving her money in her 20s. When the brothel’s previous owner could no longer run the place, Milton bought the Chicken Farm for $28,500 in November 1961.
A tough talker with a love of bawdy jokes, Milton laid down strict rules for working girls and customers alike. The women were required to get medical check-ups weekly, and illegal drugs would not be tolerated.
“Somebody walk in this house with narcotics,” she said, “I’d tell them, ‘Get that s–t off my property and don’t come back, because I’m through messing with you. I will call the law on you in a damn minute.’ ”
If a working girl got on Milton’s bad side, watch out. Once, after one of her girls tried to tell her how to run the place, Milton threw a table at her, saying, “This is my G.D. whorehouse! I’ll run it the way I want!”
She could be just as tough with men when needed. When two showed up at the ranch threatening to take it over, she screamed, “If you want to run a place, get you a bucket of grease and bend over, because you ain’t running mine!” before chasing them off with a few rounds from her .38.
Throughout the years, the ranch maintained close, cordial relations with its town and community.
During World War II, the girls wrote letters to servicemen, and the ranch donated money to local hospitals. It also maintained a solid relationship with the town sheriff, including providing tips, as robbers would often head to the ranch just after committing a crime, then brag of their exploits.
Airmen at the local Bergstrom Air Force Base would even take surveillance photos of the ranch on Milton’s request.
The Chicken Ranch was often seen as providing a much-needed service in troubled times. For nearly 100 years, until 1970, any customer could get the “Aggie Special,” where, for only $8, a man could be with a girl for as long as it took for “a Four-Get: Get up, get on, get off, get out.” (The price for a “straight lay” had been raised by 1970 to $20.)
That said, many could afford it with no problem, as the Chicken Ranch’s customers came from all walks of society. One tale in the book tells of a Boy Scout troop that regularly embarked on cookout trips to a nearby ranch. Strangely, every single time, the scoutmasters would forget certain important supplies, requiring a last-minute emergency shopping trip. The boys discovered only years later that the dads’ main purchase was time with the girls at the ranch.
Celebrities were well aware of it as well. Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill from ZZ Top were customers. “I went there when I was 13,” said Hill. “A lot of boys in Texas, when it’s time to be a guy, went there and had it done. Fathers took their sons there.”
And after a successful show in Houston in the early ’50s, Bob Hope, writes Blaschke, treated his road crew to a night at the ranch.
The Chicken Ranch might still be with us today were it not for a crusading TV reporter and former deputy desperate to make a name for himself.
Marvin Zindler (Oy VEY!!! Also a 33rd Degree Freemason) was a former deputy with a reputation as a ferocious publicity hound who became the yellowest of yellow TV journalists. He once broke into the home of a local celebrity couple to photograph them having sex, and another time, taking pictures of a stabbing victim at the crime scene, he splashed ketchup on the man’s chest because “he didn’t think [the man] looked injured enough for a newspaper photo.”
As a crusading, showboating consumer-affairs reporter for ABC affiliate KTRK, he became known for busting “negligent landlords, shady home-repair vendors and crooked used-car dealers.” He was famous in Houston, but desiring renown on a larger scale, he sought a bigger story that could go national at the same time some in Texas law enforcement began a crusade of their own against the ranch.
The lawmen found themselves battling a brick wall, as Texas politicians — many with direct connections to the ranch via their own patronage — wanted nothing to do with the inquiry.
In 1973, Blaschke writes, a desperate assistant attorney general named Herb Hancock fed his files on the Ranch to Zindler.
Zindler and a reporter named Larry Conners conducted undercover surveillance on the ranch, including “infiltrating” the brothel.
For their mission, the TV station promised Conners and cameraman Frank Ambrose — Zindler stayed back in the studio — “a miniaturized Minolta spy camera” and “a stealthy unmarked car.”
What they received instead was “a regular 35mm camera with a very large lens” and “a beat-up old van painted a garish orange with curtained windows.”
At the ranch, Conners, wearing an army field jacket to hide the camera despite the summer heat, said he was waiting for some college friends to join him, and played Hank Williams songs on the ranch jukebox while drinking overpriced Cokes, snapping pictures whenever he could.
In the brothel, Conners could stall no longer, and decided he had to “take one for the KTRK team” by sleeping with one of the girls. (KTRK received a very atypical expense report that week.)
In time, Zindler’s investigation grew to include Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe. Once Zindler, in July 1973, asked the governor on camera why an illegal brothel was being allowed to operate in Texas, the die was cast.
La Grange became “a three-ring media circus,” and despite a petition from town residents in support of the ranch and many community leaders speaking out on its behalf, the governor ordered it closed. The infamous Chicken Ranch, after more than a century as a Texas institution, served its final customers on July 31, 1973.
But the Chicken Ranch name did not die, giving the brothel a bizarre legacy. The ranch’s front parlor was physically removed and transported to Dallas to become part of “The Chicken Ranch on Greenville,” a Hooters-type restaurant that briefly employed Milton as a hostess, and failed miserably in short order.
Milton, who served as a consultant and nonspeaking cast member in the Broadway play for several months, died on Feb. 25, 2012, from head trauma suffered in a September 2011 car accident.
While the ranch is no more, its impact on Texas has not been forgotten. “It was a whorehouse,” Hill said of the Chicken Ranch, “but anything that lasts a hundred years, there’s got to be a reason.”
