Cynthia Carr’s compassionate biography chronicles the brief, poignant life of the transgender actress Candy Darling, whose “very existence was radical.”
March 31, 2024BUY BOOK ▾ (NYTimes.com)
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CANDY DARLING: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, by Cynthia Carr
Never mind soup-can paintings and portraits of the famous — what Andy Warhol keeps on giving is books. He’s like Mother Ginger in “The Nutcracker”: Smaller people keep running out from under his capacious skirts to bow or curtsy.
The latest is Candy Darling, the transgender actress who succumbed to cancer at 29 in 1974, after being immortalized in a famous photograph by Peter Hujar and in the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.” She had lived fast — indeed frequently on speed — died young, and left a mutable corpse, with considerable dissent among family and friends about whether she should be buried and eulogized as a man or a woman.
The first full-length biography of her, by Cynthia Carr, a longtime staff writer for The Village Voice — quite the Mother Ginger itself, of late — is compassionate and meticulous, reconstructing its brittle, gleaming subject as one might a broken Meissen figurine.
Born the day after Thanksgiving in 1944, Candy Darling was christened James Lawrence Slattery in Queens, soon moving to the ticky-tacky conformist hamlets of North Merrick and then Massapequa Park, Long Island, which she’d later euphemize as her “country home” but which was then an apparent cesspool of toxic masculinity.
Her father, John, was a cashier for the New York Racing Association who gambled, drank and was violent: the ultimate Daddy Dearest for a child with effeminate tendencies. Her mother, Terry, a receptionist and bank teller, was more supportive and loving — but still, hamstrung by shame. Candy’s half brother, Warren, babysat for her as a child but did not accept her as a woman.
As a child, “Jimmy,” as Candy was known then, was shunned socially and bullied terribly, once ushered onto a box and into a noose by two teenagers in a neighbor’s backyard. Understandably, she avoided regular school as much as possible; her education was in magazines, cosmetology and, of course, movies — she was a Kim Novak superfan, later emulating her.
She worked briefly at a beauty parlor, whose sympathetic owner she took on adventures like horseback riding. “We can always imagine we’re out in the wide-open spaces,” she said dreamily. “And if you imagine it strong enough, you will be.”
Like Ada Calhoun, the daughter of the art critic Peter Schjeldahl who took over his unfinished biography of the poet Frank O’Hara with sparkling results, Carr gets a boost from someone else’s abandoned legwork. Darling’s close friend Jeremiah Newton interviewed many of her intimates before they died — he features prominently in a 2011 documentary, “Beautiful Darling” — and shared copious photos, letters and the diaries that Darling began keeping at 13 (some previously published). One is titled “The Worst Years of My Life.”
Carr spares us the ponderous establishing shots that weigh down many books of this genre. Though “Worst Years” covers the early ’60s, for example, the only mention of John F. Kennedy in Carr’s book comes via a fan taking a picture of Marilyn Monroe the night she sang for his birthday. Candy Darling was apolitical, the author writes — she had a wistful incandescence more than a “fire in the belly” (as Carr titled a previous book about the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz) — “yet her very existence was radical.”
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She and the future Holly Woodlawn, another Warhol favorite, both toiled as file clerks and got out of the draft, Holly by showing up in hot pants and rouge; Candy by bursting into tears.
Stardom was Darling’s absolute raison d’être. You might argue that she was not only transgender but trans-era, longing to be a product and protectorate of the studio system. Alas, Warhol was no Louis B. Mayer, his films mostly art-house experiments — Carr is heroic at summarizing them — and when Darling finally gets to Los Angeles, for the premiere of his movie “Women in Revolt” (titled “Sex” at the time), the closest thing she gets to a break is broken promises from a drunk Ed McMahon needing roadside assistance. She does appear for about 15 seconds, uncredited, in the nightclub scene of “Klute,” and for a while dated Roger Vadim.
Starring in Tennessee Williams’s late-career work “Small Craft Warnings” off Broadway was another high point — though even then neither the male nor the female actors wanted her in their dressing room, and she was consigned to a broom closet. She appeared in a Warhol-staged fashion show for Halston, but was only allowed to wear a maid’s costume.
Darling kept her chin up despite these humiliations, but again and again the rest of her body betrayed her. (Poverty and drugs didn’t help.) By 18, she’d lost almost a third of her teeth. She agonized about what she called “my flaw” — the pesky penis — but vacillated on what the publicist R. Couri Hay, one of those who eulogized her using the masculine pronoun, termed “the final cut.”
The massive quantities of unregulated female hormones she took, doctors and others thought, probably killed her — and yet dying young was in keeping with her fantasy of kinship to platinum-haired idols like Jean Harlow. Sardonic to the end, she joked that the presumed tumor hardening her belly was some kind of immaculate conception.
In a society ill equipped to accept her, Candy Darling’s short life was one of couch-surfing and cadging, which can make for some weird and grotty pages — oh, there’s a desiccated chicken under the bed. Many of those who remember her are unreliable narrators. But, as Carr notes: “All of them so delightful!” Bob Colacello, the O.G. Warhol chronicler, wrote that news of her fatal illness led to the only time he’d seen the artist cry.
There wasn’t really vocabulary to describe the territory Darling was exploring back then — maybe there’s too much vocabulary now, but that’s a different conversation — and her biographer extends a sure hand across the breach. To push her from the Warhol wings to center stage, at a moment when transgender rights are in roiling flux, just makes sense.
And you have to cheer when Tennessee Williams is asked by some rude person whether his star is a transsexual or a transvestite, and he roars back: “What a question to ask a lady!”
CANDY DARLING: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar | By Cynthia Carr | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 432 pp. | $30
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)