Whorehouse goes Hollywood

By RICHARD CORLISS

Got a postal card last week from some %-- folks I know out in Hollywood, California. Seems they went there to make a motion picture and wound up gettin' their grits fried by a Florida boy name of Burt Reynolds and that lil ole big ole gal from Tennessee Dolly Parton. Leastways that's how they tell it. I figger it another way: If you plan to go to Hollywood you better be ready to Go Hollywood. But you decide for yer own self.

It all started with this whorehouse over by La Grange--lil town, sleepy as a ole hound in the August sun, 'bout halfway 'tween Austin and Houston. The place was listed in the tax books as Edna's Ranch Boarding House, but everybody called it the Chicken Ranch. Well sir for sump'n like 80 years the Chicken Ranch was a place a man could call home whenever he needed to get outta his own house. Cowboys, cotton pickers, state senators, the Texas A&M football team, your more adventurous visiting clergy--they all come to Edna's place, and damn if she didn't make 'em feel right welcome. The girls were plenny good-lookin' and didn't misbehave unless you paid 'em extra. And if you misbehaved, there was old TJ Hournoy--the town's lean, mean sheriff-- to set you straight or th'ow you out. Why, 'most everybody in La Grange thought Edna's was a real community asset. Put that town on the map.

Then this reformer, name of Marvin Zindler--a real pain in the hind cheeks-he started a crusade to close down the Chicken Ranch. And you know, he did. So the girls lit out for towns a little more hospitable to the good life--Austin Galveston, Tijuana. But that wasn't the end of the best little whorehouse in Texas. No sir. It was jes' the beginnin'.

In 1974 Playboy magazine--and course they know all 'bout bein' clean and dirty at the same time--they ran a story on Edna's Ranch by a fat, bearded journalist called Larry L. King. Larry's a good ole Texas boy, and he was none too happy seein' one of the state's noblest traditions tore down, like they'd turned the Alamo into a soccer stadium. So he visited La Grange and wrote it all up. Called it "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."

Then, 'fore you knowed it, some other Texas boys and girls took Larry's story and made it into a genuine Broadway show. They had singin' and jokin' and jes' enough carryin' on to keep the folks comm in and the vice squad out. They had bad ole Marvin Zindler high-steppin' through his favorite den of iniquity like a virgin bride navigatin' a field of cow chips. They had Sheriff T.J.--they called him Ed Earl--and Miss Edna--they ailed her Mona--lookin' longingly at each other from th' opposite sides of middle age. Best of all, they had a county fair's worth of good dancin'. Cheerleaders shook their pompoms, Aggies stomped around the locker room, Edna's girls sashayed up and down the big staircase, and the Governor did what politicians do best-tap dance. That show opened in 1978 and they tell me it's still goin' strong.

The folks that put up the money for this I show was Universal Pictures, out in Hollywood. Pretty soon, they determined to make a movie outta The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas--and from here on this story gets slipp'rier than a pig in warm spit. Universal hired ole Larry and Director Peter Masterson, and Tommy Tune, who got all the boys and girls to dance so good. Now, none of them'd did anything like this in a movie before but they figgered they knew what kinda movie this show should be. Larry says he wanted Rip Torn and Jill Clayburgh to play Ed Earl and Mona. But Stevie Phillips, she'd produced the show, she wanted your major motion-picture stars. So she says, "I camped out on the doorsteps of Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton." Now you can't get much more major than that-Smokey and the Bombshell. And would you believe it, she got 'em.

They got a sayin' out there in Hollywood: Big stars mean a big movie With Burt and Dolly in it, this lil ole bitty pissant country show growed bigger than Bob Lilly. And what with the moneymen at Universal reelin' from outsize flops like 1941 and Xanadu, they wasn't in no mind to turn 20, 25 million dollars over to people who might not know their klieg light from their keester. Larry and Tommy and Peter was out of the picture before you knowed it. Before they knowed it anyway The way Peter tells it, '"My wife read about our firing in a gossip column" Larry got the news watching Miss Rona Barrett. "Everybody had been saying my rewrites were the best things since the Bible," he says. "Then suddenly we were fired. If Burt wants to make Smokey and the Bandit Goes to the Whorehouse he will. Whatever he wants, he gets We exchanged a couple of ugly letters He^mvited me to California to fight. We acted like seventh-grade bullies."

Burt sounds like the happiest kid in the schoolyard. He's happy to talk about Dolly: "Everyone wants to see us together. The chemistry between us is special: one and one makes three. We both have the naive feeling that if you love people, they'll love you back." Universal is lovin' Burt and Dolly to the tune of 'bout a million an' a half each, plus a share of the profits. To get them, Universal hired Colin Higgins--who come from out near Australia, Lord a'mighty--to rewrite Larry's script and direct the thing. With Burt and Dolly onboard, there had to be a few changes. Like, ten of Carol Hall's songs from the show went back in her trunk, and Dolly wrote four of her own. Then, says Higgins, "I reduced their ages, and shot Burt's and Dolly's personalities into the characters." Higgins directed Dolly in her first movie, Nine to Five, where she played a sexy secretary. In that one, I hear, Dolly didn't know you shoot scenes from a movie one at a time and in funny order, so she came to the set with the whole script memorized.

This time Dolly's actin' like a happy pro--though things were rough at the start, what with all those changes. "In the beginning there was a lot of blood on the project" is how she tells it. Now it's all greasepaint. "Since I was 14 I've worn enough makeup to sink the Mayflower," she says. "Here I wear six wigs, 17 different costumes. The whole thing is sexy fun. I make a better whore than a secretary anyway. And Burt, he's so wonderful and I love him so good." One day Dolly and Burt were shootin' a number called I Will Always Love You, and Burt's parents came in to see it. After the take, Dolly jumped up and shouted to them, "I'm kissin' your boy and I ain't gonna stop just 'cause you're here!"

Ever' time Dolly walks onto the set in some wild new outfit, the boys in the crew start howlin' like prairie wolves. Dolly, though, she takes it in stride. In the movie she looks down at her front porch and says, "I can't balance these things, let alone get up on my toes. If I fell down, they'd have to milk me to get me up." As for her own overripe body, Dolly repeats Joan Rivers' joke about her "Orson Welles designer jeans" and shrugs and smiles and says, "My fat never made me no less money."

But what about the folks that started the whole thing? "A year ago I was sick about it," says Peter Masterson. "Now I think it was the best deal I ever made. They paid me to direct it and then I didn't have to." And Stevie Phillips, she says, "It's a brainchild I didn't want to see changed. Now it has adoptive parents."

Well, folks, that's about it. The big new Best Little Whorehouse will appear in picture houses next summer. That's when Larry and you and me'll see whether the folks at Universal did what they set out to do: make chicken salad out of the Chicken Ranch.

--By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

With reporting by Martha Smilgis

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