Feisty Altadena woman was showgirl, writer, activist
Howard Breuer, Staff Writer
Monday, December 31, 2001 - ALTADENA -- "You can call me a two-dollar whore, but don't call me a racist," says Dixie Granat, 80, who recently served time for trying to run over an African-American teen-ager with her Suzuki Samurai.
Among her anti-racist credentials, she said, was work with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union.
The feisty Kentucky native says the neighbor played "chicken" with her during the Aug. 18 incident then fabricated complaints that she uttered racial epithets and had previously chased him with a machete.
"I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy," she cackled.
Under a plea bargain, Granat was sentenced to six months in jail, her Samurai was impounded ("It wasn't pink, it was maroon," she says in reaction to previous stories), and she was ordered to stay off the road and to attend Alcoholics Anonymous sessions.
"I gotta go hear those whiny broads. I don't need it," Granat says.
"I called my parole officer yesterday -- I said he should send me to Gamblers Anonymous instead. I'll bet $1,000 whether the sun is coming up in Arcadia."
Granat was a paradox to the criminal justice system, which volleyed her between mental health workers, hate crime prosecutors, public defenders, hospitals and jail.
At the time of her arrest, she was on probation for almost hitting another neighbor with her car earlier this year, and was not supposed to be driving.
"She might be 80," quipped one prosecutor who argued for jail time, "but she's an extremely spry 80."
A probation officer blamed Granat's problems on alcohol, and wrote a report saying Granat started drinking tequila a year ago and was hitting the bottle heavily two to three times a week.
Granat's behavior around the neighborhood became erratic. One neighbor said Granat threatened to cut his head off. Another saw Granat swing a bag of cheeseburgers so hard at a man that her skirt fell off.
"Tequila: It'll make you mean," Granat told the probation officer.
But Granat also sometimes pulled over to offer backup to sheriff's deputies at traffic stops, said a sheriff's detective who investigated her.
Her neighbors also knew her as a packrat, and came to court seeking permission to clean her front yard. On one September morning, the yard was cluttered with boxes of trash, a milk crate with a woman's size-10 boots, empty beer cases, a shopping cart and a rooster.
In a recent interview at her West Mendocino Street home, the yard was much neater. Granat didn't seem drunk or crazy, just high on life -- although she laments losing her driving privileges.
Her stories were funny, romantic, perhaps unbelievable. Granat, likely the town's oldest party girl, will cop to being pretty much anything but your typical little old lady from Pasadena.
Sitting on a front porch cluttered with tattered furniture, empty beer cans and a black-velvet painting of a bullfighter (she says her son died bullfighting), Granat sifted through black-and-white photos and a kaleidoscope of memories of a life so diverse Forrest Gump would envy her.
Dixie Bailey, she says, was born the daughter of a Scottsville, Ky., oil wildcatter, and as a kid hot-walked horses and dropped out of school in the eighth grade. Her charming, adventurous spirit endeared her to celebrities of a different generation.
She says she was a Vegas showgirl in 1940, was shot in the leg in El Salvador while writing for the Associated Press and was an activist known as "La Gringa Loca" under labor organizer Cesar Chavez.
"I had a special pair of boots made, and I kicked (rear) on those farmers," says Granat, who on this day wore a black dress, oversized amber sunglasses over a badly blackened left eye (she said she tripped in her living room) and two different shoes -- a black shoe on her right foot and a brown shoe with her big left toe poking out from a hole.
She was a publicist, she said, for Big Band legends including Tommy Dorsey and Woody Herman, a photographer's assistant and sometimes an actress and songwriter.
Photos show her with Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, WWII-era starlet Paulette Goddard and in a Greenwich Village bar with Errol Flynn in 1949.
"I'm going to write about Rex Harrison and everyone I slept with," she suggests. "I need some money."
One of her five husbands was Swing-era jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden, whom she claims was drinking buddies with Bing Crosby. Her last husband, Al Granat -- the love of her life, she says -- died 19 years ago.
She says that in 1964 she was called onto the Mexican set of "The Night of the Iguana," which starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, "just to get everybody to work on time and sobered up once in a while.
"I don't know how that movie got made," she says, adding she out-drank the two stars.
She recalls that she liked working with Chavez but quit when he protested through fasting.
"I said, 'Get up and eat,' " she recalled.
These days, Granat ushers at the Pasadena Playhouse and says she spends time with a lover half her age. She knows every bar near Santa Anita Park and many of the jockeys, but still loses money like the rest of us.
She claims she also recently co-starred in "My Grandmother Lover," a movie filmed in Barcelona about a grandmother who falls in love with a young man. You can guess what part she played.
There are still other things she'd like to do with her life, like parachute from an airplane.
"When I'm 103 and languishing on a beach in Mexico, I just want to know I tasted every thing and did everything in this world," she says.
But right now, she says, she's overdue for a nap.
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