George W. Owen, a Friend of LBJ's Mistress

Madeleine Brown has often been criticized for her claim that she first met Lyndon Johnson, the love of her life, at a victory celebration party in Dallas  around the first week of October, approximately three weeks before the official party at the Driskill Hotel in Austin on October 29, 1948. 

Barr McClellan, in his book,
confirms that LBJ was involved in litigation in the court of Judge T. Whitfield Davidson in the Dallas area at about that time frame. In the days when Texas was a one-party (Democrat) state, the November election was a mere formality; the political wrangling took place in the primary and run-off elections. LBJ's opponent in the 1948 Democratic run-off, Coke Stevenson, filed a lawsuit to prevent Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot for the November election. From the documentation below, one can easily infer that Johnson was in Texas for the litigation until he first appeared back at his Congressional desk in Washington, D.C. on October 11, 1948.

 In Blood, Money and Power (at page 94), McClellan writes:

"Johnson had a team of lawyers representing him in federal district court before Judge Whitfield. One was John Cofer, who would become Clark's attorney for all criminal matters. Angry at the order allowing masters to take further evidence, the legal team contacted Abe Fortas, an old friend and later Supreme Court judge, who happened to be at a conference in Dallas. Fortas made an illegal, off-the-record telephone call, to check with his former mentor, Justice Hugo Black of the United States Supreme Court. In that brief conversation, Fortas made certain Black would rule in Johnson's favor."

LBJ's having FDR's old fixer, Tommy the Cork, in his corner of course didn't hurt.

David B. Perry, alleged researcher into the JFK assassination, concluded on his website that the party where Madeleine Brown claimed she met Lyndon Johnson could not have occurred in Dallas three weeks prior to October 29. His logic was faulty, based as it was on the assumption that Coke Stevenson and Dan Moody did not concede defeat until October 12. 

But LBJ knew by September 29, when Justice Black ruled in his favor, and the state court refused to take jurisdiction of the matter, that he had won; he didn't need to wait for Stevenson to tell him it was party time.

The rest of what Dave Perry says is just as easily discounted.  He asks: "Would Johnson actually know in advance that voting problems in Jim Wells County would be called the 'Box 13' scandal and would he really want to celebrate this budding predicament with a gala at the Driskill on the 29^th?"

Hell, yes he would. That's what made it even more fun for a man like LBJ, who sought power through secret connections and maneuvers. One of Johnson's lawyers, Donald B. Thomas, had been sent to the Valley by his law partner Ed Clark to take care of just that anticipated situation--and with enough cash to buy as many votes as necessary.

Barr McClellan tells us the initial vote count was accurate, showing that Johnson had lost. Three days after the polls had closed, while votes were still being counted, 

"Thomas added the fraudulent votes Johnson needed to win. Realizing the simple necessity for additional votes, he made up voters and added their names to the poll list and then to the ballot count."   -- Blood, Money and Power, p. 83.

THE CORSICANA (TEXAS) DAILY SUN,
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1948:

Dan Moody, attorney for Coke Stevenson, said at Austin today that Stevenson would appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court in his hot fight against Lyndon Johnson for Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate. Moody, a former Texas governor, said Stevenson intends to file a motion in the U. S. Supreme Court asking that an unfavorable order by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black be set aside. Black last Tuesday stayed an injunction issued by Federal Judge T. Whitfield Davidson which had prevented the name of Johnson from going on the general election ballot as the Democratic party nominee. The effect of Black's ruling was to allow Johnson's name to go on the ballot and to halt an Investigation of alleged vote fraud which Judge Davidson had launched in three South Texas counties, Duval, Jim Wells and Zapata. Commenting on Black's ruling, Judge Davidson said in Dallas today:

"The U. S. Supreme Court has altered my opinion, but it hasn't changed my mind."

The little gray-haired jurist said "There is nothing further I can do in the case. I must observe the ruling of a higher court."

... Asked what, if anything, he could do about the findings, the jurist said: "Nothing."

The ruling by Justice Black found that the federal district court had no jurisdiction in the case. Davidson, commenting on this, said that It had been the contention of Johnson's attorneys that the U. S. Senate was the proper place for the election tangle to be unraveled....

"This is not true," said Judge Davidson. "The senate can act in such cases only where there has been a general election. There has not been a general election in this case—only an election to determine a party nominee. No one has yet stood for election to the U. S. senate. Johnson and Stevenson only sought the Democratic party nomination." Therefore, the only thing the senate could do would be to declare, after the general election, that Johnson could not have a seat in the senate and this would not do Stevenson any good....

Johnson yesterday was certified by Secretary of State Paul B. Brown as the Democratic nominee. The State Democratic Convention had certified Johnson as the winner by 87 votes. Stevenson's appeal would be to the full supreme court. It meets next Monday.

Federal commissioners appointed by Davidson were ordered yesterday by the jurist to stop their investigations, just as the hearings were yielding some interesting developments. Out of 10 Jim Wells county ballot boxes opened over the bitter protests of Johnson's attorneys, one was empty. A precinct 13 box containing poll lists and tally sheets for the precinct was missing. It was this Precinct 13 that had occupied a prominent spot in Stevenson's application to Judge Davidson for an injunction, Stevenson had claimed that 200 votes were added to this box after the Aug. 28 second primary. It was his contention that vote frauds in the three counties had deprived him of a constitutional right to be the Democratic nominee.... The Supreme court must first grant permission for filing of the action, before it can pass directly on the mandamus petition. If it rejects the motion, that would have the effect of killing the suit.

Votes had been for sale in South Texas for many years, and Johnson, having worked in that Congressional District for Richard Kleberg, knew how it could be done. All that he needed was cold-blooded attorneys with no principles. He found that in Ed Clark and Donald Thomas. The only mistake they made was in revealing the secret scheme to their law partner, Barr McClellan, who had a sense of ethics and morality. The violence that was so commonplace in the South Texas lifestyle in those days has been further described in "What Can We Learn from Madeleine Duncan Brown?"

Madeleine Brown was relatively old by the time she began telling what she knew about the man she loved, about how he wielded power and had people killed without blinking an eye. Like all of us, her memory would have faded and been supplemented with a little creative writing. However, it's important to verify and document what she told us as much as possible because there are other statements she made that relate to events after Lyndon Johnson left office.

The most significant statement could possibly be about the meeting she described that took place at Murchison's house. Dave Perry says she always said the party took place at the home of Clint Murchison, Sr., but what she actually said is: "I attended a social at Clint Murchison's home. It was my understanding that the event was scheduled as a tribute honoring his long time friend, J. Edgar Hoover, whom Murchison had first met decades earlier through President William Howard Taft..." It is not clear whether those were her words or those of her ghostwriter, but the book does not specify that it was Murchison, Sr., although the description could not have applied to the younger Clint.

This description appears an article styled "Johnson's illegitimate Son":

When asked what time Johnson came in, Madeline said:

Well he came from Houston. It must have been 11:00 o'clock. The party was breaking up at that time. And it shocked everyone that he came in. Of course, I was thrilled to see him. Normally, I knew his agenda when he was in Texas, but that night, I did not know that he was coming. And they all went in to this conference room.

It gets a little bizarre when Madeline says, "He (George Owens) was there socially, and of course, Jack Ruby had brought one of the call girls to the meeting." When asked about the call girl, Madeline said, "Her name was Shirley. I know her, but she doesn't want to talk about this." Maybe, she's married now, and maybe, one day she will also tell her story.

When asked who picked up Nixon, Madeline said, "Nixon was already in town. He came in on Tuesday and met with Lyndon that no one knew anything about. But Lyndon met Nixon in Dallas on Tuesday."

What is most important in my opinion about what she has revealed about that social event is the fact that this man named George W. Owen (whom she calls Owens) was there. 

In a 2001 conversation she had on another occasion--an interview with John Delane Williams and Gary Severson--she revealed more information about Owen:

JDW: Now, the Murchison party. One of the things, I don't know that you ever heard this, but, what is his name, Brown, Walt Brown. One of things he's said is that everything we've heard about the Murchison party has come from you. And no one else  who was at the party has said anything.

MB: Gary Barker has come forth, I think. Galen Ross [sic], are you familiar with his new book?

JDW: Galen Ross?
[Note: This book is by Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr.]

MB: Some of them I'm not familiar with. But George Owens that worked for Clint Murchison. [Note from QJ: Owen worked for Clint JUNIOR, who owned the Cowboys team, not for Clint SENIOR.] He [Owen] passed away not long ago, and I've known George . . . George went to . . . we didn't have the DFW airport back then [1963]. Dallas only had about 450,000 people. He went out to the Bluebird [sic] Airport and George was going on camera to tell the story of what happened. And do you know the day we had that all set up he died suddenly. I mean a bunch of this . . . sometimes I feel bad.

***
GS:  Did you know of any family background of Mac Wallace?

MB: Well, I told him [George Owens?], one of our neighbors is Carl Wallace, and Carl and George Owens, who said he picked up Hoover out here at the airport, were close friends, and if George would have lived long enough, I might have got more information, you know, but this Carl Wallace's father owned the Wallace Plumbing Company here in Dallas, and the Wallace Plumbing Company was in Dealey Plaza that day, I don't know if John had.

GS: That was my next question.

MB:  Well anyway, not too long ago, I talked to Carl. He comes by once in a while with his little dog. And I said "Carl, what happened to your mother and father?" And he said, "My dad killed himself," and I wanted to say, when did he kill himself? and eventually, I want to know, why did he kill himself? Knowing what I know about the story, and the background, Big Time.

GS: Could the plumbing company be Wallace-Beard?

MB: I couldn't tell you.

GS: There is some evidence the truck in Dealey Plaza that day was Wallace and Beard.

***
GS: It's so mind-boggling.

MB: You know, I told you about this neighbor, Carl Wallace. He told me enough that in my mind, I keep thinking, George Owens died instantly, you know. What is the connection, really. Why would a man, a prosperous businessman in Dallas, Texas kill himself? You can't help but wonder.

~~~~~~~~

When Madeleine told us George Owens worked for Murchison, she would have been talking about George Washington Owen, Jr., who went to SMU on a basketball scholarship and later became a scout for the Dallas Cowboys. The team was mostly owned by Clint Murchison, Jr., except for a small percentage owned by Bedford Wynne.

We first meet George Owen through Texas Monthly's prolific writer, Gary Cartwright whose writing actually dates back in Texas journalism before TM magazine was created:

Mad Dog may have been founded in Mexico, and flourished in Austin, but its roots can be traced all the way back to Dallas, 1963, when [Bud] Shrake and Cartwright were noted young sportswriters for The Dallas Morning News who didn't think that sports were the most important thing in the universe. "Our apartment had become a late-night hangout for musicians, strippers, and other nocturnal creatures," Cartwright recalls in "1963: My Most Unforgettable Year," an essay in his recently published collection of articles, Turn Out the Lights: Chronicles of Texas During the 80s and 90s.

"One of our regular drop-bys was George Owen, manager of the University Club, a former SMU basketball player who had dated the fabulous Candy Barr before the Dallas power structure [Pat Gannaway] sent her away on a phony marijuana charge.

Two other regular visitors were Jack Ruby, the cheesy little hood who owned the
Carousel Club, and Jada, an exotic stripper. ... Her act consisted mainly of hunching a tiger skin rug while making wildly orgasmic sounds with her throat."

So George Owen managed the University Club? 

FBI reports reflect the address of George Owen’s University Club to have been 1413-1/2 Commerce, one block on the other side of the Carousel. 

Gary Cartwright also wrote the following article, using George Owen as his confidential source, in 1976:

Taking the wrapper off a Texas legend

by Gary Cartwright   

December 1976

The "Quintessence of Morality"

Juanita Dale Slusher encountered the joy of sex at age five with the aid and comfort of an eighteen-year-old neighbor named Ernest. She remembers that he was gentle, and not at all unpleasant. It wasn’t until she encountered the Dallas police force some years later that Juanita Dale associated sex with guilt.

When she was nine her mother died and her father remarried: Doc Slusher, brick mason and handyman, a whiskey-drinking harmonica player and all-around rowdy, already had five kids, and right away there were four more, then two more after that. With all those Slushers around, you’d think the work would get done, but it never seemed to…. 

At age thirteen and painfully confused, Juanita Dale took her baby-sitting money and grabbed a bus out of Edna, an independent decision that would become socially acceptable, even laudable, to future generations, but an act worse than rebellion in those days: it was the act of a bad girl. For a while she lived with an older sister in Oklahoma City, then a year or so later moved to live with another sister in Dallas. The Dallas sister soon hooked up with a man, and Juanita Dale was on her own…. 

To be technically correct, it was the old Liquor Control Board (LCB) that first discovered the girl who would become Candy Barr. They discovered her posing as an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress—the minimum legal age. She wouldn’t be eighteen for another four years, but girls from tough backgrounds develop early, or they don’t develop at all. She kept changing jobs, and the LCB kept discovering her. Once they sent her home to Edna, but she caught the next bus back to Dallas…. 

Candy’s first husband, Billy Debbs, was a graduate of Shorty’s academy. Billy was a good lover but a poor student. He went to the pen, got out, then got shot to death. Somewhere in there—she can’t fix the exact time—a pimp

spotted her jitterbugging in a joint called the Round-Up Club and launched Candy’s movie career. She must have been about fifteen when Smart Aleck was filmed. The thousands (perhaps millions) who have seen this American classic will recall that she was a brunette then.  

Smart Aleck was America’s first blue movie, the Deep Throat of its era, only infinitely more erotic and less pretentious. It was just straight old motel room sex; the audience supplied its own sounds….

One of the fringe benefits of being in films was that Candy got invited to all the best stag parties. Several prominent and wealthy Dallas business and professional men, on my oath that their names would not be revealed, recalled a Junior Chamber of Commerce stag where Candy was the star attraction. One auto dealer told me, “She went for two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred bucks. There was a banker who paid five hundred every time he put a hand on Candy.” … 

The Colony was the Stork Club of Dallas, the Cocoanut Grove, the butterfly of the Commerce Street neon patch where Jack Ruby ran the sleazy Carousel and conventioneers intermingled with cops and hustlers and drug merchants.

…Nobody in the Dallas Police Department wanted to talk about a marijuana case from twenty years ago, and Pat Gannaway, who retired a few years ago to join the Texas Criminal Justice Division, wasn’t available for an interview. But I know this: Pat Gannaway spent a lot of man-hours bringing one stripper to justice. The confluence of these two forces—Candy Barr, desecrater of all that is decent, and Pat Gannaway, the terrible swift sword—is surely the quintessence of a morality frozen in time. 

Captain Pat Gannaway was referred to in newspaper accounts of the time as “Mr. Narcotics.” As a lad he had been so eager to join the Dallas Police Department that he lied about his age. For twelve years, until he was kicked upstairs (he was put in charge of rearranging the Property Room) in the 1968 department shake-up, he ran the special services bureau as his private fiefdom. He reported only to the chief. “His passion,” reporter James Ewell wrote in the Dallas Morning News on the occasion of Gannaway’s retirement, “was police work, down on the streets with his men.” 

He loved the Army, too. He served in Army intelligence and was an expert wiretapper. When he wasn’t swooping down on the vermin that afflicted his city, Gannaway and his entire force were making speeches to civic clubs, warning of the peril. Those recent 1000-year sentences that made Dallas juries such a novelty may have been the direct result of Pat Gannaway’s tireless crusade. Gannaway told James Ewell: “It was always a good feeling to see someone on those juries you recalled being at one of those talks. We always told our audiences if you got rid of an addict or pusher, you were also getting rid of a burglar, a thief, or a robber.”

In the autumn of 1957 Gannaway assigned Red Souter (now an assistant chief) and another of his agents, Harvey Totten (now retired), to rent an apartment near Candy Barr’s apartment and establish surveillance. A telephone repairman would testify later that he discovered a “jumper tie-up” connecting Candy’s telephone to the telephone in the apartment occupied by Souter and Totten, but the jury either ignored this or didn’t believe it. A few days after the surveillance began, Candy received a visit from a friend, a stripper named Helen Kay Smith, who laid out a story about her mother coming to visit and asked Candy Barr to hide her stash — the Alka-Seltzer bottle of marijuana. Candy agreed and slipped the bottle inside her bra, next to her big heart. 

Two hours later, as Candy was talking on the telephone to a gentleman friend (and therefore obviously at home, in case anyone with a search warrant wanted to drop in), there was a knock at the door. Candy’s defense attorneys claimed the search warrant was a blank that Gannaway filled in after the arrest, but the court didn’t buy that either.

Candy’s gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified, told me what happened next:  “Candy said hold on, someone is knocking at the door. I heard some noises and someone hung up the phone. All I could think of was she’s in some kind of trouble. I got over to her place. When I walked in I saw Gannaway, Totten, Red Souter, Jack Revill, and I think one other narcotics officer.

 

Gannaway picked up a chair and said something like, ‘Well, well, that looks like a joint on the floor.’ I swear to you, it was the first marijuana cigarette I ever saw. That’s when Candy, God bless her, said to Gannaway, ‘He’s just a square john kid. He doesn’t know anything about this. If you let him go, I’ll give you what you came for.’ She reached in and pulled out the bottle. 

Gannaway decided he would take me in anyway, and that’s when Jack Revill said, ‘Captain, if you do that, I’m turning in my badge.’ So they took her away.”

So it appears from this article of Gary Cartright's that George W. Owen ("Candy's gentleman friend, who asked to not be identified") owed a big-time debt to both Revill and Gannaway--two vice detectives on the scene on November 22, 1963 in Dallas!

The Cartwright article continues:

Candy’s four-day trial the following February was a farce, which didn’t prevent it from also being a sensation. In its year-end review the Dallas Morning News headline read: Candy’s Trial Led ‘58 Scene. Judge Joe B. Brown, who would later make his mark as the buffoon judge in the Jack Ruby trial, borrowed a camera and during one of the recesses snapped pictures of “the shapely defendant.” Defense attorneys Bill Braecklein and Lester May realized from the beginning that their problem was much larger than a bottle of marijuana, although, as May explained, “In those days marijuana was worse than cancer.”

“It was a time when the pendulum had swung far to the right,” May told me. “If the police decided you were guilty of something, they made a case and you were found guilty. It was just that simple. Candy’s real crime was she wouldn’t cooperate with the vice squad.”

No, the real problem wasn’t the marijuana, it was Candy Barr herself. It wasn’t merely her reputation, though God knows that was strong enough to kill a rogue elephant, it was that combative stubbornness, that unwillingness to throw herself at the feet of the jury and beg forgiveness. Chief prosecutor James Allen offered her two years for a guilty plea, and if Les May hadn’t got her out of the room she would have spit in his eye, or worse.

They decided not to put her on the stand; without her testimony, of course, it would be almost impossible to challenge state witnesses: she was in possession of marijuana, regardless of Helen Kay Smith’s testimony. That mysterious cigarette on the floor, though, was something else entirely. The attorneys worked out a way to let Candy make a statement to the jury without actually testifying, which meant that she could not be cross-examined. No one remembers Candy’s exact words, but it must have been a stirring oration. When she had finished, the jury just retired and voted her fifteen years in the Big Rodeo. It was Valentine’s day 1958.

“She was a very naive young lady,” Braecklein recalled. “While we were waiting to come to trial, she was out in Las Vegas, doing her act. Just one week before we came to trial, I got word that she was going to be a bridesmaid in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s wedding [to a white actress]. Anyone who grew up in Texas knew …

Although they didn’t anticipate anything approaching fifteen years, the defense team had braced itself for a verdict of guilty. They had already drafted a list of reversible errors that would have choked the Star Chamber. The real shock came when they lost a 2—1 decision in the State Court of Criminal Appeals. In the eleven months that separated the trial from the appeals verdict, Candy had reinforced her public image by moving in with hoodlum Mickey Cohen: one assumes justice is blind, but just how blind is an open question.

Mobster Mickey Cohen

… I offered her one of my cigarettes and asked about Mickey Cohen. Cohen had personally guaranteed her $15,000 bond while the marijuana appeal ran its course. In a cruel way, those were the peak years for Candy Barr. She lived in a villa in the notorious Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and earned up to $2000 a week stripping there and in Vegas. Simultaneously, a pack of lawmen and profiteers howled like hungry dogs in her shadow—FBI agents, CIA agents, treasury agents, IRS agents, L.A. cops, Vegas cops, Dallas cops. The pressure was so enormous that the El Rancho Vegas had her replaced with Nelson Eddy. She was also in and out of the hospital with hepatitis. Candy recalled that the first time she ever heard of Mickey Cohen was when he sent an orchid in a champagne glass to her hospital room in L.A., along with this note: “Don’t worry, little girl, you got a friend.”

I had heard from good sources that the reason that Cohen got rid of Candy was she was giving him a bad press. The vast majority of those agents were interested in Mickey Cohen, not his girl friend. Word came down from “the Eastern organization” that if Cohen didn’t drop Candy, they would. Somewhere between Catalina Island and Hawaii….