Pampa's a long way from La Grange

In our current popular culture, driven by 24-hour media and populated by "celebutantes" who are famous only for being famous, it's easy to lose track of the fact there are often real people behind the persona. Take the Chicken Ranch for instance. The first thing that comes to mind is Dolly Parton as the madam, Miss Mona Stangley, and Burt Reynolds as the sheriff, Ed Earl Dodd. They're both larger-than-life characters from the movie version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a hyped-up, unsubtle adaptation of the original Broadway musical, which itself is a very loose interpretation of what really happened in La Grange way back in 1973.

But Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd is not the same person as Sheriff Jim Flournoy, who the character is based on. And Miss Mona Stangley is not Miss Edna Milton, the last madam at the Chicken Ranch. I can't count how many times people have asked me if Miss Edna looked like Dolly Parton, as if Hollywood producers cast famed country singer Parton solely on a coincidental resemblance to a madam few people had ever heard of. For the record, I can't imagine anyone who looked less like Dolly Parton than Edna Milton. That Miss Edna is defined in the public consciousness (when she's noted at all) by Dolly Parton and her operation of a brothel is one-dimensional at best. Miss Edna, after all, didn't aspire to prostitution. As I've researched this book, I've learned a great deal. It's easy to overlook, or ignore, that Miss Edna, as a 16-year-old girl in Pampa, Texas, dreamed of an entirely different future:

I wanted a good education, but I knew I would have to work like hell to get that, too. It wouldn’t be just a gift to me, you know. I knew I wanted it. I wanted to be a straight-A student. You know, if I had been, if I’d finished high school, I might’ve gotten a small scholarship or something. That’s what I really wanted to do. I never knew what I wanted to do with it after I got the education, though. I thought, well, you can make up your mind—-you’ll have more knowledge about what in the hell’s going on in the world, then you might know.

Coming from a poor family, this sort of dreaming isn't surprising. It's worth noting that she didn't long for an education and a chance to go to college instead of a life of prostitution and brothels. At the time she had not the faintest notion where her life would take her. But manipulation by people she trusted and her own naïveté soon ended those ideas for good and put her on a slippery slope that led her, eventually, to the ownership of Texas oldest continually operating brothel in La Grange. Even so, she was quick-witted enough to make friends with some of the most powerful politicians in Texas history, performed on Broadway and toured England as a celebrity. Once all is said and done, I suspect Miss Edna made out all right.

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