Faint, daydreamy pencil doodles of poised women with 1940’s-style wasp waists, their faces simple with cupid-bow lips and angled Barbie cat eyes, cover a ragged piece of three-hole-punched lined paper yanked from a drug store notebook. Beside and below these figures are mannequin-like heads with less defined faces. What they lose in facial features, they gain in a fixation with some experimental scarf architecture. Alongside these scarf sketches sits a hollow-cheeked face, attempting those much-sought-after cheekbones before the advent of buccal fat removal. On the top of this yellowing paper, a young Candy Darling wrote in looped script: “I’m a thousand different people—Every one is real.” A perfectly precise one-liner manifesto that feels as if it could also have come from her buddy Andy Warhol alongside his now-tiresome chestnut about fifteen minutes of fame. And like Warhol’s tagline prowess, Darling’s phrase begs to be slapped in bold graphic letters on a tote bag—and was, in a small merch display in the lobby of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, part of a Pride collection offered alongside the new acquisition exhibition that showcased Darling’s scrap paper with the seriousness of an illuminated manuscript. As it should be. Branding opportunities aside, the line reveals a righteous goal: to be undefinable, ever-evolving, with no fixed personality yet always real, important for a trans woman like Candy whose identity was (and to some, still is) continually considered not real.
But, was Candy really a thousand different people? In some ways, yes. Before reading Cynthia Carr’s phenomenal new biography of the actress, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, I mostly knew—or really, saw—Candy through the eyes of other artists. She was the stunning blonde that strolled out of the Golden Age of Hollywood and into the Factory-world chaos of Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films like Flesh and Women in Revolt. She was the clubbing hippie in a flowered scarf and giant sunglasses greeting Jane Fonda’s Bree in Klute. She was the fearless trans woman defiantly standing in the nude, glaring down the camera in nothing but a full bouncy wig, alongside other clothed and unclothed Factory members in Richard Avedon’s monumental Andy Warhol and the Members of The Factory, New York City. Most famously, of course, she was “Candy…from out on the Island” in fellow Long Islander Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” as well as the foil for Lou and co’s own bodily self-loathing in The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says.” Even Candy’s death at 29 is mediated by another: Peter Hujar’s Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, which depicts Darling surrounded by flowers in a hospital bed like a radiant saint or a highly stylized dying actress in a particularly dramatic theatrical production.
Candy Darling’s drawings at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (photo by author)
Part of this is my own damn fault. I never read Darling’s published journals nor did I watch the 2010 documentary Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar, mostly because my tolerance for documentaries is quite low (no more talking heads, please!). Thankfully, Carr’s Candy Darling builds on both of these earlier archives to bring together a comprehensive account of Darling’s life—or as comprehensive as possible. Carr draws on Darling’s own writings, taped interviews conducted by Darling’s close friend and Beautiful Darling producer Jeremiah Newton, who intended to write a bio on Candy but never did, and her own research, completed with a similar monomaniacal depth as Carr’s previous definitive bio of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in The Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz.
Unlike that brick of a bio, Carr’s Candy Darling is less intimidatingly unwieldy, documenting “the beauty queen who didn’t belong and never had, never would.” The book begins with Darling’s childhood as an alienated and bullied trans kid in the—I know this will shock you—not exactly progressive town of Massapequa Park, Long Island, a place where all outsiders regardless of sexuality or gender were labeled as “fags,” let alone a femme like Candy. Home life wasn’t any better with an abusive dad, though Candy rarely spoke about the details of the abuse, and mom, Terry, who was more accepting but wracked by fear of judgment. Terry’s support only went as far as the door to their house, outside her M.O. was: “Don’t let anyone see you.” Even as an adult, Candy had to shamefully shuffle into her childhood home from a taxi late at night in case any nebby neighbors might spot her and judge. Both Candy’s school and home life are so grim and isolated that you want to fall to your knees with relief when she finds kindness whether from her Connecticut cousin Kathy, her DeVern School of Cosmetology classmate’s kooky mother Lorraine, or even just glimpsing the prospect of living as a trans woman, reflected in the iconic figure of Christine Jorgensen. Interestingly, Jorgenson lived just a half-hour away from Darling and, as Carr recounts, “Candy would make her way over there, then walk back and forth in front of the house, hoping to see Jorgensen appear. But she never did.”
It would be all too easy to construct a fantasy that this noxious phobe behavior was left back on conservative suburban Long Island, that everything changed once Darling reached Manhattan. But, Carr shows, no matter how tempting to believe in the metro myth, this was certainly not the case. Even in New York City, even in some of the most, one would presume, liberal spaces like theater and gay bars (ok, that one is less surprising), Darling was still cast out. The incidents range from being denied entry to Stonewall (“’If I let you in,’ said the doorman, ‘pretty soon I’ll have to let you all in and what d’ya think will happen?'” Candy’s response? “What do you think this dump is anyway? The Côte Basque?”) and tossed out of Julius’ to just people on the street being assholes (“I didn’t think a person like you could love children,” sneered a mom after Candy asked to see her cute baby). Perhaps one of the most enraging incidents occurred backstage with a proto-TERF costar and other gender pearl-clutchers during Candy’s performance in Tennessee Williams’s late-stage Small Craft Warnings:
“On July 12, Candy arrived at the New Theatre with Cindy Doll, who watched Candy walk into the women’s dressing room and put her bag down as Helena Carroll began to scream to the stage manager: ‘Get it out of here! GET! IT! OUT OF HERE! This room says ‘Women’ on it!’ According to Cindy, Candy laughed at this. And left the room. She never showed her vulnerability to anyone.
Seven men were in the cast. Tennessee Williams himself went to their dressing room and asked the one actor already there if he thought Candy could share the space. The actor thought not. The other actors wouldn’t like it. And their room was small.
Candy was assigned the prop room/broom closet and given a dressing table. She affixed a star to the door.”
As seen in this incident, Candy dealt with the continual hate, insults, and indignities—indignities that would not even end with her death with the family’s battle over the funeral home and being misgendered by her own eulogist R. Couri Hay for some galaxy-brained “artistic” reason—with a stiff upper lip and a mercifully self-protective sense of humor. Carr is quick to note that Darling never responded with capital-A activism. She didn’t march or riot. In fact, had she been able to vote (her voter registration would have been in her dead name), she likely would have voted Republican. “Yet,” as Carr writes, “her very existence was radical,” echoing Juliana Huxtable’s response to the question, “What’s the nastiest shade you’ve ever thrown?”: “Existing in the world.” Candy’s existence in the world included perfectly fashioning herself into the elegant woman she wanted to be (even with the enduring struggle with her continually referenced bad teeth). Candy herself says, “My business is not acting. My business is the Candy Darling business. This I built myself.”
She built herself both onstage and on screen, and off. On, though, is where Carr excels, drawing on her former gig as a Village Voice arts critic, mainly focusing on experimental performance as seen in her essay collection, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Carr focuses a significant amount of attention on Candy’s Off-Off (and sometimes Off-) Broadway career, from her debut in Jackie Curtis’s Glamour, Glory, and Gold: The Life of Nola Noonan to working with theatrical legends like Charles Ludlam and Tennessee Williams. From the madcap creation and performance of Jackie Curtis’s legendarily batshit Vain Victory to Darling’s hysterical reaction to forgetting her lines in Tom Eyen’s Give My Regards to Off-Off Broadway (“O Lana, Great Goddess of Rough Times, what do I do now?” which is my new daily prayer), Carr’s biography traces a history of the Downtown theatrical scene in the 1960s and early 1970s at venues like Caffe Cino and La MaMa, as well as Candy’s place within it. This to me was much more exciting than the same rehashed Warhol tidbits, which you can discover in stacks upon stacks of books on Warhol from both Factory insiders and stiff art historians, most of which I’ve read before. That being said, the catty behavior and hilarious infighting between the trio of trans women surrounding Warhol—Candy, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis—are always good for a laugh like Jackie nastily smearing off the “to the beautiful” from Darling’s birthday cake.
Much of Darling’s unique acting talent seemed to come from her expert knowledge of Old Hollywood, in addition to her early observations of her beauty school friends and the promenading street queens in the Village. As theatrical director Ron Link says, “…you’d say to Candy—here I want you to be like Lana in The Postman Always Rings Twice, and then, maybe the next scene, if she didn’t understand it, you’d say, I want you to do what Joan Bennett did in Scarlet Street and then she’d get it immediately.” More than just thespian inspiration, Darling’s fixation with Hollywood actresses, particularly her idol Kim Novak, was a method of survival offstage too, like her go-to quip, creating her own dialogue for Novak’s performance in Jeanne Eagels: “I don’t need you! I don’t need anyone! I’m Jeanne Eagels!” What was it about Novak that Candy identified with? Carr poignantly quotes Julie Baumgold’s short story “Belle in the Bed,” a semi-fictionalized account of visiting Darling in the hospital when she was dying from cancer:
“There was always something frozen about her…She had to squeeeeeeeze it all out. She was so scared and that’s the way I was all my life. Everyone always told me I was beautiful but I felt frozen, just like Kim. There was always something wrong with her, something…slightly…unacceptable.”
It’s these rarely-seen glimpses of Candy’s vulnerability and pain that Carr sympathetically and viscerally depicts—her lifelong struggles with depression and crushing loneliness that were often only jotted down in her journals. Carr succeeds at juxtaposing the glamour that Darling projected in public with her lived reality, crashing in others’ apartments, never having a stable home or relationship. This could very easily have turned into a, as McKenzie Wark says in her critical review of the book, one of the only I could find, “‘tragic’ trans narrative,” but it doesn’t come off that way to me. Much of this has to do with Candy’s continual spirit as a “dreamer” as the title of the book suggests. Though she deserved much more, Candy found what success and community she could at that time, even if it wasn’t in the cinematic version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, a role she desperately wanted BEFORE the camp mess of the sans-Vidal Raquel Welch version, or in her suburban fantasy of domestic bliss with a husband and family. She was also a searcher, particularly spiritually. One of the most surprising details in the biography for me was Darling’s frequent devouring of religious texts from Mary Baker Eddy to Scientology to “the Daily Word, an inspirational publication put out by the Unity Church.” Of course, religiosity was not that unusual in the Catholic-heavy Factory crowd; Christian Science, though, much more so.
Beyond just balancing Candy’s self-projected image and private experiences, the most skillful part of Carr’s biography is how she seamlessly navigates a litany of sources that are, to be kind, yarn tellers, and, to be unkind, well, just maybe pathological liars. This is not to denigrate the storytellers like Holly Woodlawn or Jackie Curtis who tended to rewrite history for the best entertainment value for their audience at hand. And Carr doesn’t dismiss them either, frequently pointing out the presence of “several unreliable narrators who will have a part in this story” with a loving “all of them so delightful!” Even so, she maintains a healthy dose of skepticism while also conveying what may never be able to be fully fact-checked. This displays a healthy comfort with the unknowable and a blueprint for dealing with biographies of those who are surrounded by a bunch of kooks and cranks (all of them so delightful!) and with scattershot archives, a much better strategy than continually envisioning what a subject may have done as in Will Hermes’s annoyingly imaginative Lou Reed: The King of New York.
And because of this, Carr’s biography also maintains some of Candy’s beguiling mystery. Why did Candy and her friend Taffy show up in The Rolling Stones’ song “Citadel” on Their Satanic Majesties Request? Why did Candy strip naked for Richard Avedon despite being, Carr emphasizes, “rarely naked in front of anyone, and highly self-conscious of what she referred to as her ‘flaw'”? Perhaps the most mysterious of all, why was Julie Newmar one of the two speakers at Candy’s funeral despite having seemingly minimal interaction with her in life? We may never know. Just faint traces of those thousand different people—every one of them real.