Candy Barr: America's First Porn Princess

The third act of Candy's life, as an aging sex symbol, was filled with those sorts of confusing contradictions.

Oui magazine cover featuring Candy Barr

In every interview she gave, she decried her notoriety as Candy Barr and the occupation that made her famous. Yet she returned to that name and that career when it suited her financially.

She was lured out of retirement from the skin trade by a $5,000 payday when she posed nude for Oui magazine in 1976, at age 41.

During the '80s, she made occasional appearances at strip clubs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas. She danced her final burlesque gig in 1998, at age 62, at the Ruby Room in Dallas.

By then, she had gone from a sex outlaw to a novel and revered Lone Star original — like a real-life Larry McMurtry character.

In 1999, she was named to Playboy's "Most Desirable" list, and she made Texas Monthly's list of "perfect Texans."

"Of all the small-town bad girls," the magazine said, Candy Barr "was the baddest."

But she had long since grown weary of the attention.

''Let the world find someone else to talk about,'' she told the Texas magazine.