Having sex and playing college football are two pursuits a lot of folks consider it immoral to get paid for. In a proper world, to their minds, such things should be done only for free, within the bounds of an institutionally sanctioned relationship. At the same time, the occasional intrusion of commerce can be overlooked for the sake of reinforcing the social order. That’s the kind of hypocrisy highlighted in the classic musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which brought together college football and the world’s oldest profession in “The Aggie Song.”
Texas A&M football and musical theater might seem like they go together like restraint and Buc-ee’s. But once upon a time, in a less moralizing state, the A&M administration let a movie crew use the official image of the Texas Aggie football team and its actual locker room to film a scene of dancing, with bare-assed Aggie football players singing excitedly about visiting a brothel. Naturally, “The Aggie Song” takes place after the second-most-exciting event in a young Aggie’s life: beating Texas on Thanksgiving weekend.
In the movie, the scene begins with Aggie players heading into the locker room after the big win; their state senator proclaims that the trip to La Grange is on him. They break into song and dance as they strip out of their uniforms and change into their going-out jeans. The lyrics start full of bravado about how the athletes are going to show those gals a time and experience delights “better than an Aggie football game” before the number takes a yearning tone about the delights they’ll experience “where history and Aggie boys get made.” Near–Bob Fosse levels of raunch ensue as the camera glides across the wet, bare backsides of the actors in the shower, closing in on well-timed spurts of water from the showerheads. These victorious Aggies, portrayed as young, dumb, and full of fun, bear no small resemblance to the group numbers in Magic Mike XXL; it seems impossible that dancers at Dallas’s pioneering male strip club LaBare have never performed a tribute to the number.
The rivalry with Texas is just a small part of the scene, but the way that the schools’ shared animus inspired so much fuss shows how embedded the UT–A&M game is in Texas culture. In the movie’s plot, the Aggies are exempt from a temporary closure of the Ranch, intended to let a wave of political pressure pass. Obviously, state legislators on either side of the rivalry would be at the game, and obviously, they’d reward their winning players however they could. If someone made up a story about a Texas cathouse and hypocritical politicians, the inclusion of college football would fit right in. But this story wasn’t invented—it was inspired by years of Aggie lore.
Whorehouse began as a Playboy article by Larry L. King about the closure of the Chicken Ranch, an event that requires no further explanation for Texans of a certain age. For those unfamiliar with the story, the Chicken Ranch was a brothel in La Grange, where authorities allowed full-service sex work to proceed long after most of the state’s other such houses had been closed. It was an open secret in La Grange and around the state, as well as a beloved haunt for many legislators, truckers, and Aggies, as Al Reinert wrote in TM in 1973. The Ranch was shuttered after Marvin Zindler, a crusading and flamboyant television journalist in Houston, publicly went after it in the early seventies. When the film was made in-state the following decade, long before Austin was crawling with movie stars, people were falling over themselves to be a part of it. Locals clamored to be extras, the Capitol welcomed filming in the rotunda, and A&M threw open its doors to the cameras, happy to be a part of the Hollywood production.
The legend of the winning team’s visit was already something of a relic by the sixties. In 1968 the Texas Observer reported it as a bygone tradition from days when dating was more chaste: “And each year, after the traditional Thanksgiving Day game between the University of Texas and Texas A&M, alumni of the winning school would treat the whole team to a night at the Chicken Ranch—after turkey dinner, of course. That’s not done anymore; no need to leave the campus; no need to pay.” King’s Playboy story also referred to it: “In a more primitive time, when there were fewer squirming concerns with g—damned imagery, the winning squad of the Texas–Texas A&M football game got invited by joyous alumni to the Chicken Farm on Thanksgiving night.” It’s funny that those two stories, written seven years apart, attribute the end of the tradition to opposing causes: one points to the sexual revolution and social liberalism, the other to growing concerns about propriety.
Legend or fact, a scene set after the big game was part of the stage play from the start. The Whorehouse Papers, King’s memoir about the creation of the show, spends quite a few paragraphs on the vexations of getting it into shape. In an early version, dancers portrayed Aggie players at the Chicken Ranch running routes in the yard while chanting, “P—y, p—y, p—y,” which, as King describes it, was too much even for an audience that had come to see a show with “whorehouse” in its title. He wrote that Ellen Burstyn stood up and walked out of the theater in disgust, and the audience was silenced.
Left with a flop of a scene to fix, composer Carol Hall replaced “P—y” with “The Aggie Song.” The action shifted from the Ranch to the locker room, and Tommy Tune choreographed a delightful group dance with lots of cowboy boot stomping and pearl-snap-shirt donning. The scene turned into a rousing and popular number, and the show became a Broadway hit nominated for multiple Tonys (most of which it lost to Sweeney Todd). When it came time for the awards show, “The Aggie Song” was picked for the broadcast over “A Lil’ Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place” and “Hard Candy Christmas.” Thus did the Aggies enter Broadway history, represented onstage alongside performances by Angela Lansbury and Gregory Hines.
Whorehouse took dramatic license with the written accounts of the Chicken Ranch and its relationship with A&M, but author (and class of 1992 A&M journalism grad) Jayme Lynn Blaschke devoted an entire chapter of his book Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch: The Definitive Account of the Best Little Whorehouse to the real story. His research turned up plenty of sources willing to discuss how well-known the association was in the fifties and sixties, when A&M students on a still all-male campus were pressed for company. In interviews with old Aggies and Miss Edna (Milton Chadwell, the last madam of the Ranch), Blaschke turned up lots of stories about Aggie visits. But was a Thanksgiving Day stopover by the whole winning team an actual tradition? More like an embellishment, Blaschke told Texas Monthly.
“Everyone has their vision of what happened back in the day, set by the movie. All the Aggies are riding in the bus and they’re singing their songs. Edna was not impressed by that sequence in the movie. It sounds like she had gotten a lot of questions about that, and [she said] that never, ever, happened the way it was depicted in there,” Blaschke says. “Now, she said, students went and football players went, and coaches and alumni took football players, but mostly, in the era that she owned it, you were most likely to get football players there when they were being recruited.”
Blaschke dug deep to find a specific win over Texas that might have produced a group trip anything like the one portrayed, and because Aggie wins over the Longhorns were few and far between until the mid-seventies, he didn’t have many to choose from. The 1956 win under Bear Bryant seemed the likeliest one.
“A&M didn’t win very often, but students I talked to who graduated in the early 1960s said that the game was known as the P—y Bowl,” Blaschke says. “If any member of the winning 1956 A&M football team wanted to go to the Chicken Ranch, there would be someone there who would have paid their way. You know, alumni taking them in private cars or something like that, just as a celebratory gesture, but it certainly didn’t include the entire team.”
The historical liberties are no barrier to his enjoyment of “The Aggie Song,” especially the stage version. “It’s a hilarious song. I laugh so hard whenever I see it. It’s glorious. It’s filled with euphemisms and double entendres. It’s gloriously juvenile,” he says.
Although, he adds, the song could have been a little more detailed about the rivalry. “There’s all the farm boys getting excited about going to a brothel, but there’s not a whole lot of specific satire about A&M that comes through,” he says.
Attitudes have changed a lot since A&M allowed its campus and uniforms to be used in the movie. “Everyone in the state wanted to be a part of [the movie],” Blaschke said. “Fast-forward almost forty years, I was shopping my book to various publishers. University of Texas Press said outright, ‘There is no market for this book. We’re offended that you even approached us.’ Texas A&M University Press was intrigued by it, but ultimately they were concerned that publication of a book on the history of the Chicken Ranch would indicate that the university was endorsing sex work. So A&M doesn’t have much interest in embracing the Chicken Ranch connection or even acknowledging it at this point in time.”
At least both schools are re-embracing the rivalry, which hasn’t been gone quite as long as the Chicken Ranch. Blaschke sounds like most other Texas and A&M alums when he says it was “incredibly stupid” to discontinue the annual game in the first place. And he predicts the Aggies will be dancing off the field after this year’s game: “Texas A&M 32, t.u. 24.”
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