The Man With Candy (26 page)

The Wests moved to the northern outskirts of Houston to be closer to the growing market for “Pecan Prince” candies, the family’s new trademark, and Dean made up his high school failure by correspondence. He also began to clash with Jake West, who by now had quit Westclox altogether and was devoting himself exclusively to the family’s thriving business in pralines, pecan chewies, and divinity. Mrs. West described a typical scene disdainfully: “Jake’d order Dean to do things, and one day he said, ‘Dean, take the car and go into town and get some milk.’ Dean came back with the wrong kind, and Mr. West said, ‘Well, he never does
anything
right!’ Dean told me later, ‘I’m not gonna go in and get him anything else! I’m not gettin’ paid for it anyway.’”

A few days later, Jake West had another errand for his stepson, and he told his wife to pass the order along.
“You
tell him!” Mrs. West said. “You’re the one that fussed at him the other day.” West ran the errand himself.

“He knew he was wrong,” Mrs. West said, “but he just wouldn’t bow down and say, ‘Well, Dean, I’m sorry.’ I was the peacemaker
between the kids and Mr. West the whole time. The kids’d bring me their problems with Mr. West, and I would try to explain his point of view to them, but finally it got to the place where I would say, ‘Look, we’re not doing things for
him,
we’re doing things for
ourselves.
If we want things done, we’ll do ’em ’cause
we
want ’em done.’ That worked fine, and we got along as good as any split family could.”

When Dean was nineteen years old and still working as an unsalaried candymaker and wrapper and handyman, the family moved to The Heights and set up a new shop, and the boy was packed off to Indiana to live on the farm where his mother had been brought up. “I thought it was time he got away from home,” Mary West explained. “My dad had just died, and Mom needed somebody for the adjustment. And I felt like Dean had it coming, to get away. He’d been working for nothing for us.”

The rural sabbatical stretched into two years, and Mrs. West’s recollections are in a minor key. “Dean worked in a coil factory up there, and he had a Simca, two or three cylinders, like a li’l cartoon thing. Nowadays when I ask Mom about it, she remembers things that aggravated her. Like Dean wouldn’t cut off the limb of a tree the minute she’d ask him. She’d get mad and cut the limb off and he’d take her picture, just to tease her, or take her picture when she was climbing over a fence or somethin’ like that. Well, my mother is not the type to brag about any of her children. When Mom has anything to say, it’s usually critical—something they did that they shouldn’t have done. Like she’d tell Dean to pick up the cobs in the barnyard and he didn’t do it. Little things. He wrote and told me not to tell my folks in Indiana what I was up to in Houston because they’d say something about it. ‘That’s another scatterbrain idea that’s gonna fail.’ This is the attitude my family has had about me.
Always.
Things are gonna be bad, I’m gonna fail. But Dean was loyal to me, and he said, ‘Mother, write to ’em
but don’t tell ’em what you’re doing, ’cause they’re gonna make something out of it.’ It really hurt him to think that they would do that to me.

“What did he do for fun? Well, he kept his moon charts and star charts up in the barn. He was interested in astronomy for a while, but he never really did stick with anything for long. He liked fads. He was a gadget man. He had a great big tape recorder that we made payments on. He had a six-hundred-power telescope in Indiana, and he liked to watch the neighbors with it. One day he invited Mom to take a peek, and she looked in and saw them feeding their stock. Dean said, ‘What do you think of that?’ and Mom said, ‘Be quiet! They’ll hear us!’

“He got a movie camera and made movies with all the kids that lived around the farm. There were two sisters about a half a mile down the way that played with him all the time, and they’d take a movie of one of ’em laying on a table, pretending they were making a doctor movie. They put a sheet over her, and then they got chicken livers and stuff like that, and they’d take kitchen tongs and pretend to be pulling these organs out of her, while Dean handled the camera. Wanda was the nurse and her sister was the patient. It was supposed to be a comedy film. I know my mother thought it was funny.”

At Mary West’s request, the twenty-year-old man returned to his family in Houston in 1960. “I called for him because I needed him,” the mother explained. “Our candy business was growing and we needed his help. We started paying him this time.”

For several months, tape-recorded letters and candy and cakes flew back and forth in the mails between Dean Corll and the Indiana girl named Wanda. One day the telephone rang in the candy factory and Wanda was on the line. Mrs. West recreated the leap-year conversation:

“Dean, are you sitting down?”

“No.”

“Well, go ahead and sit down.”

“Okay, I’m sitting down now.”

“Dean, I’m getting married!”

“Who to?”

“You!”

That ended the romance. “He never even called her back!” Mrs. West said emphatically. “He didn’t want to become emotionally involved with any person or any thing.
Never!”
The young man had seen his mother’s two marriages to Arnold Corll fall apart, and now the marriage to Jake West was crumbling. “Dean knew how hard it was to be married,” Mrs. West said. “He didn’t want it for himself. You can’t blame him. A kid only knows what he sees.”

One day West lost his temper and ordered his wife to go home and stay home; “I don’t ever want to see you in this candy shop again!”

Mary West was not one to suffer despotism gladly. “I said, ‘Okay,’” the redoubtable woman recalled, “and I started a candy company of my own in a garage behind our house. It may seem odd, two candy companies in the same family, but that’s the way it was. It was time to get something started for my children. The idea was maybe we could be successful and we’d wind up with a different shop for every one of us. Well, Mr. West couldn’t stand that I was doing this for my children and not for him. Made him jealous. Well, he’s the one threw me out of the shop. He thought it was on its feet, so he could get all the credit.”

From the beginning, young Dean became absorbed in the new plant, and Mrs. West worked twelve-hour days developing recipes and getting the business off the ground. She named herself president, Dean vice-president, and Stanley, serving a hitch in the marines, secretary-treasurer
in absentia.
“I incorporated right away so Mr. West and I wouldn’t be responsible for each other’s debts, even though we were still living in the same house,” the mother
said. “I had a feeling like he’d go broke. He was a very poor businessman. So I was protecting him at the same time I was protecting myself. He said it was okay, but deep down it wasn’t, especially when we started making money at the Corll Candy Company. He spread the word that somebody had stolen his recipes and somebody was packaging candies just like his. We were still married, and he was trying to break me! He’d give away free candy, things like that, but that only put him deeper in the red. One night Dean and I went over to Pecan Prince and found all these nasty letters that Mr. West was sending out about us. Dean dictated them into his tape recorder. Then we found out that he was following my candy broker around, and all this while we’re still married! Dean stayed loyal to me. Dean was
always
loyal to me.”

The savage intrafamily competition brought down the marriage in 1963. “This was about the time the Pressure Cooker Club came up in Houston,” Mrs. West said, smiling at the memory. “The newspapers found out that all these frustrated wives were going to a joint out on Telephone Road when their husbands were working, and they’d put their dinner in the pressure cooker when they got home, and the men wouldn’t know what was going on. When Mr. West and I got the divorce, I said, ‘Shoot! If I’d have known it was gonna turn out like this, I might as well have gone into the Pressure Cooker Club!’ But I didn’t. I just worked. That’s all I’ve ever done.”

Dean moved into his first apartment, above the garage that had been converted into the Corll Candy Company. In his mother’s view, the young man’s life was idyllic. “He had every gadget there was in that place,” she said. “He had a tape recorder. He had Spanish sieep-learnin’ tapes that he listened to under his pillow. He bought a Honda and carried the kids on it, and later on he had a Dodge van with a television. He didn’t drink or run around, and if he needed something like a truck or a car, we bought it for him. He had absolutely no sales resistance. If he wanted something,
he wanted it
right now.
Household Finance helped him. Like he’d buy a Honda and then winter’d come and he’d say, ‘I don’t need a Honda anymore,’ and he’d sell it for what’s due, pay off Household Finance, and the next thing he’d buy a bigger one, and do the same thing over. I used to tell him that he needed more sales resistance. He’d kid me. He’d say, ‘Mother, I sure used my sales resistance tonight. I went shopping when the stores were closed!’”

She summoned up a single sour note from those earliest days of the Corll Candy Company. “We had this boy helping out, and I noticed Dean didn’t speak to him for two, three days. I asked one of the girls what happened, the fat girl, and she said the boy told Dean what he could do for Dean, or what they could do for each other, or somethin’. So I just paid the boy off. Dean was really upset with him, and he didn’t mind when I let him go.”

Then the family’s cottage industry suffered a heavy setback; the vice-president and chief candyman was drafted. Corll had first been ordered for a physical in 1962, but his mother had waged a two-year delaying action on the grounds that he was indispensable. But on August 10, 1964, at the age of twenty-four, the young man was assigned to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for basic training. Later he went to Army radio repair school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and then to permanent assignment as a radio repairman at Fort Hood, Texas. Ten months after his induction, he was honorably discharged. “Dean wasn’t a fighter anyhow,” his mother said. “He hated the service. And I needed him real bad. I’m the one got him out. I went through the Red Cross and the governor to do it. Dean was always happy to do anything I asked him. Wherever I wanted him, that’s where he’d be.”

Years later, a close friend theorized that the Army damaged Dean Corll: “He told me that’s where it started, when, you know, the first time he ever—turned to a fag, really, I guess that’s the only
way I can say it. And ever since then I guess it just got worse and worse and worse.”

With the return of its star executive, the Corll Candy Company moved into a large prefabricated shed across Twenty-second Street from the Helms Elementary School, and the competition with Jake West’s nearby Pecan Prince company intensified. West had a new label put on his candies:
“The original Texas pecan chewie, created by J. J. West.”
His ex-wife countered by using the same typeface and colors and the inscription:
“Corll candy, new, improved, but with the woman’s touch.”
“Mr. West didn’t dare say a thing about it,” she said. “That was just our way of getting back at him.”

Every day, Jake would cruise along Twenty-second Street two or three times in his gray Lincoln Continental, checking the activity at the rival factory. “It was strictly business,” Mrs. West said. “He tried to break us, but we weren’t enemies. I didn’t hold it against him. He was jealous of the fact that we were gonna make it.”

An employee had a different interpretation: “Dean was there day and night; he lived right alongside, in a little house trailer. His mother hated Jake West, and she was deliberately trying to put him out of business, and so was Dean. Mary was always telling Dean how much she hated West, all this stuff. The atmosphere was
very
intense.”

Other employees had similar memories of the Corll Candy Company. Mrs. West seemed to turn more and more toward her outside life, while Dean took over the commercial operation. He had no objections. As his mother was proud of saying, “Dean did whatever I asked of him. And never a complaint.”

Mrs. West was described by another employee as “not really young in those years—she must’ve been nearly fifty—but she was a nice-looking lady, very attractive. She was lonely, she had a good figure, and she wanted to get married. Who can blame her? She
went out a lot, wore a lot of make-up, sweaters and slacks, fur coats, things like that. She drove around in a new station wagon. I got the impression that she was trying to hang on to her youth. She depended on palmists and readers. She’d have a favorite seer and she wouldn’t do a thing unless it was planned out and read first. The seer would say, ‘Mary, I see a certain time and a certain place, and if you go there you’re gonna meet a man that’s gonna be very influential,’ and she’d go.”

Workers remembered a striking aspect of the mother-son relationship. “They were both super-protective of each other,” a parttime wrapper recalled. “Sometimes it was like she was the daughter and he was the father. Sometimes he’d even scold her, right in front of us. She’d be telling about one of her dates, and Dean’d get angry, and he’d say, ‘Oh, Mother,
don’t!’
and he’d shake his head like he was annoyed, you know? He was like a lot of boys with divorced parents—they take over as head of the house, and they feel that they’re protecting their mothers.”

An early friend of the family saw the mutual protectiveness as a problem for both. “They say Dean thought a lot of his father, but he
lived
with his mother,” the man said. “When he was twentyeight he bought a motorcycle and his mother was always getting down on him about it. She was so afraid he was gonna hurt himself or somethin’…. She was really protective. Dean had to hide his new Honda in the candy shop so she wouldn’t see it. He’d lock it in the little storeroom. It really bent my head that he was that afraid of her.”

Another friend recalled: “Mrs. West was about like the mother of a fifteen- or a sixteen-year-old boy, and she—you know how Houston is—she was just afraid of what her boy could get into. Even though Dean was grown, she still treated him that way. The things he bought and everything else, she was always questioning him. ‘Why’d you do this, why’d you do that?’”