In January 1956 Candy was arrested for shooting her estranged second husband, Dallas man-about-town Troy Phillips, after he drunkenly barged through the front door of their apartment, looking for her. She wasn’t remotely apologetic. She said she was aiming for his groin and missed, wounding him in the stomach. As newspaper photographers surrounded her at the police station, the irrepressible Candy, who never missed a chance to get off a good line, said, “Make it sexy, boys.” When she told a grand jury stories about her husband’s abusive behavior, the charges against her were dropped—a rare victory in those days for a woman who had taken the law into her own hands. 

Excerpt from “Candy Barr“, by Skip Hollandsworth, September 2001, Texas Monthly