The year, 1973. The streets of New York City are even filthier than they are now, smog chokes the skyline, and in a hospital room at the Cabrini Medical Center languishes a beautiful, wan phantom.
Born James Slattery in 1944 and raised on Long Island, the self-created Candy Darling—a model, whispery chanteuse, transgender actress, Andy Warhol superstar (Flesh, Women in Revolt), and underground muse (immortalized by Lou Reed in “Walk on the Wild Side” and the wistful “Candy Says”)—had developed a stomach bump that she half-facetiously claimed was a miracle of birth. God, she joked, had answered her prayers. Initial X-rays indicated otherwise.
The day before her exploratory surgery, Candy wanted someone to take her picture, something suitably tasteful and glamorous. Calls went out to a handful of hotshot photographers who had snapped her before—including Francesco Scavullo, Richard Avedon, and Robert Mapplethorpe—but it was no’s all around. Only Peter Hujar, who had never photographed her, agreed to pop over.
“The picture he took of Candy that day is a masterpiece,” Cynthia Carr writes in her enveloping new biography, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. Hujar’s picture—Candy Darling on her Deathbed—is a movie-star portrait of a movie star who never was, a modern Pre-Raphaelite study in lyric repose where the white hospital bedsheets, white flower petals, and pristine chalk white of Candy’s makeup form an intimate constellation.
Candy put up a gallant front, wearing sunglasses and giving a royal wave as she was rolled into the operating room, but the surgery revealed a tumor wrapped around her spine, too embedded to be removed. When Bob Colacello, a friend of Candy’s and the editor of Interview, broke the bad news to Warhol about her cancer, it was “the first and only time in the seventeen years I knew him, I saw him cry.” Candy died a year later, at the age of 29.
In life and in the afterglow ever since, the name Candy Darling evokes pity, wonder, and admiration, not so much for her achievements onstage, on-screen, and in the treacherous clubhouse of Warhol’s Factory, which were spotty, but for her apparitional beauty and fragile aura—her signature presence.
Hers was not a case of talent unfulfilled and artistic promise unkept. Like so many slum gods and goddesses of lower Bohemia, Candy was evidence that a shortage of talent, training, and experience was no hindrance to a sporadic career in the arts, as long as one had attitude and aptitude to burn.
The late-60s and early-70s downtown arts scene that made a Candy Darling possible was amateur hour in the best sense—inclusive, diverse, and perverse, an extended urban-decay scavenger hunt.
Although Candy did a creditable job in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings, perhaps her signature moment onstage was in Jackie Curtis’s Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned, which contains the immortal line “A story so touching, it must be told with a whip.” During one performance the set caught fire but Candy refused to abandon the burning ship: “I’ve got to find my sable eyelashes. I’m not throwing eight dollars to the wind.”
The touching, picaresque story told by Carr in Candy Darling, not with a whip but with a delicate eyeliner, is how much effort it took for Candy to look effortlessly ineffable and hew to her vision of herself. Where the other Warhol blonde superstar, Edie Sedgwick, could roll off a mattress, light up a cigarette, and look charmingly, naturally gamine, like Jean Seberg in Breathless, Candy had to work hard to fashion her persona—constructing a female identity from scratch, taking the hormone pills that may have produced her tumor, and keeping her smiles to a Mona Lisa minimum due to loose and missing teeth.
A sense of exclusion was her lot in life: “I cannot go swimming, can’t visit relatives, can’t go out without make-up, can’t wear certain clothes, can’t have a boyfriend, can’t get a job. I see so much of life I cannot have.”
It was a sad, futile quest Candy was on, stuck in the silver-screen past and ahead of her time as a gender bender with few options for the then and there. The movie stars that Candy idolized and emulated—Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Joan Bennett, and Lana Turner (“O Lana, Great Goddess of Rough Times, what do I do now?”)—were the products of a Hollywood studio system that had long since gotten out of the glamour-puss business.
In gender politics, Darling was also out of sync. She was no feminist comrade, didn’t identify as gay, and spurned sexual liberation, desiring only a husband and mate to call her own, a Ken to her Barbie. But how to find old-fashioned romance in a swingers’ paradise? One summery day on Fire Island, Candy found herself at a house party that had escalated into an orgy and said to her escort, “I can’t get involved in this. I’m a lady.”
Candy’s ladylike airs belied the risk that she ran simply by being a trans woman in a society that liked its binaries neat and secure. It could turn into a tightrope walk whenever she ventured out. If Candy entered a room in knockout cocktail dress, a hush might fall and she might be an object of adoration and devotion; in different company, she might be mocked, insulted, rudely interrogated (Ethel Merman and Groucho Marx insisted on knowing what she had between her legs), treated as an aberration.
The loathing could strike from any direction. Candy once asked a mother pushing a pram if she could take a peek at the baby, only to have the mother wheel the carriage away, snapping, “I didn’t think a person like you could love children.”
Transphobia followed Candy Darling into the grave. Even her lifeless body became bones of contention. The designer Halston declined to donate a gown for the funeral viewing, not wanting to give anything “to a dead drag queen.” Candy’s mother inexplicably had a shrieking fit over a tribute to Candy from the journalist Danny Fields, vowing to beat him up, and Candy’s father, an old-school sorehead, made it clear that he didn’t want drag queens flocking in. He got his way.
Near the funeral home, one of the mourners departing the service spotted a group of street queens who had dressed in a manner they thought suitable for the occasion. “But they hadn’t come in,” Carr writes. “They didn’t think they’d be welcome.” Candy Darling honors and extends their vigil.
James Wolcott is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York