Candy Darling (6 page)

If your so god damned smart did you know that your good friend that blonde German made 13 television shows over in Germany and I'm in practically every one of them. And Flesh is the biggest movie going over there and they (the Germans) asked for the stars to come over and Paul took Joe, Geraldine, and Jane Forth on a tour with “Flesh.” Jane didn't have to go. Why should Jane go. Paul doesn't even like her he calls her that dumb thing, misery and Baby Biafra. but she's so co-operative and does whatever they tell her. Why didn't you get in touch with Bert? Now they're going to promote Holly. Can you believe that? They're sending Holly to all the photographers. She went to this big party with George Plimpton and Tammy Grimes. She's in the Times and I'm just the forgotten woman. George asked why I wasn't being taken to Europe and Paul said “too much trouble, too too much trouble.”Sandy'll be up here and she'll want to go and then they'll be another fight. She has bad vibrations. Don't ever think you're going to work for Tom Ward Agency because you never will. That's when you started treating me like a piece of shit. You thought you were going to have a big important job.

Surrounded by hates riots burning buildings

you take a look

around this city and everything is either

vulgar dirty disgusting

rotten or falling apart.

Life is only what you make it.

Sing-a-long and show that you can take it.

Get in the swing and sing darn ya sing.

My Face for the World to See

CANDY SAYS

CANDY SAYS

I've come to hate my body

and all that it requires in this world

Candy says

I'd like to know completely

what others so discreetly talk about

I'm gonna watch the bluebirds fly

over my shoulder

I'm gonna watch them pass me by

maybe when I'm older

What do you think I'd see

if I could walk away from me?

Candy says

I hate quiet places

that cause the smallest taste of what will be

Candy says

I hate big decisions

that causes endless revisions in my mind

I'm gonna watch the bluebirds fly

over my shoulder

I'm gonna watch them pass me by

maybe when I'm older

What do you think I'd see

if I could walk away from me?

—Lou Reed, 1969

Foreword

CANDY DARLING WAS BORN
ahead of her time, which was both her tragedy and the source of what is most unique, heroic and touching about her. To be a drag queen in the '90s is a career, but in the '60s it was a desperate calling, pursued only by those willing to risk a pariah existence. As Candy says in these diaries, “I am a star because I have always felt so alienated and I project this feeling to others.”

When writing
I Shot Andy Warhol
, my co-writer Daniel Minahan and I somewhat exaggerated the extent of Candy's friendship with Valerie Solanas, the revolutionary feminist who was Warhol's would-be assassin. She and Valerie were friends, but not as close as the film suggests. When writing the script we found ourselves adding more and more Candy, because we found the symbolic contrast between the two irresistible: the boy who dressed like a girl and girl who dressed like a boy. Both were social outlaws, rejected and dispossessed, but where Valerie was an outlaw because she rejected traditional femininity, Candy yearned for it. She wanted nothing more than to be a '50s housewife (or a debutante or a waitress or a showgirl), and became an outlaw because she refused to live as a prisoner of his/her biology.

With her humor and vulnerability, Candy could be described as the Marilyn Monroe of drag queens (anyone who has had the chance to see Candy in Warhol's
Women In Revolt
knows that she was a superb light comedienne) but her persona was a synthesis of all movie blondes. Andy Warhol once described drag queens as “ambulatory archives of movie star womanhood.” Candy studied the movies like a doctoral candidate, and crystallised all her favorite elements of traditional femme culture into a dream life of what it is to be a woman. These diaries, with their mixture of heartfelt prayers, soul searching, sharp social analysis, recipes and makeup hints, display all the classic “female” qualities: gentleness, sweetness, bitchiness, malice, passivity, vulnerability, masochism. (And a hilarious section on Women's Liberation, which she bitterly opposed.) There is also a sensitive intelligence at work, and a brutal honesty: “I don't mind that little smile around a person's face when they talk about me.” As the greatest of all drag queen icons, Candy is beyond camp: you can always hear the heart beating beneath the artifice.

Mary Harron

Introduction

This book is dedicated to Lorraine Newman

Brooks, who taught Candy about the beauty of

being an individual, Samuel Adams Green, who

helped Candy to survive in NYC, and to Sean

Duncan Cripps … I remember
.

THIS IS THE VOICE
of Candy Darling speaking, alive once again through her words, over twenty years since her death on March 21, 1974. As her friend, Candy often confided in me that her writings were an integral part of her creative process, so during the course of the day, she committed her thoughts to inexpensive soft-covered notebooks, the type used by school children, writing about such things as recipes (she was an awful, but nevertheless, hopeful cook), drafts of letters or ones she had completed but decided for one reason or another not to send, makeup tips, addresses and telephone numbers of the famous and unknown, lists of her favorite performers such as Joan Bennett, Kim Novak, Yvonne DeCarlo, and, of course, Lana Turner.

Then there are pages of speculation, words meant to be used as a rebuke or compliment, dialogue to be stored away for future use, perhaps for a play she was writing. She collected lists of one-liners and clever quips that she could trade with her friends Jackie Curtis or Holly Woodlawn. Candy's journal recorded her thoughts of the moment on that given day.

Candy liked to think of herself as an artist and would draw page after page of designs of dresses, eye makeup, and funny faces. She also liked doing cartoons and would send drawings to her cousin Kathy Michaud or her Uncle Donald, who in return sent illustrated letters back. Drawings were done throughout her writings as a counterpoint to her mood at the time and to illustrate an important or salient fact.

She was born a he: James Lawrence Slattery, on November 24, 1944, to Theresa Phelan, who worked as a bookkeeper at Manhattan's glamorous Jockey Club, and Jim Slattery, an often violent alcoholic who squandered family finances at the racetrack. His very name inspired fear and hatred throughout Candy's short life.

There was a slightly older half-brother, Warren, by his mother's first marriage who would later, as an adult, deny Candy's existence to his own children; a grandfather once billed in vaudeville as “the strongest man in Boston,” and Candy's Uncle Donald, who sent “campy” cards encouraging his nephew's sense of comic timing.

With this cast of characters in mind, it could be safely said that Jimmy's family, and even himself, could have been created through the pen of her champion and mentor, Tennessee Williams; but instead, in the best American tradition, Candy Darling created herself with the help of television's
Million Dollar Movie
.

During the 1950s,
Million Dollar Movie
, with its theme music borrowed from
Gone With the Wind
(the perfect dirge for a dying Hollywood) entertained little Jimmy, who often played hooky from the grim realities of school in order to watch the same movie aired three times a day, seven days a week. Hollywood and its mystique fascinated him and slowly transformed and transfigured the depressing reality of a lonely boy living a bleak existence in a small, Cape-Cod bungalow in Massapequa Park, Long Island. The frequency of a
Million Dollar Movie
film enabled Jimmy to carefully study the fiber of his favorite performers; makeup and costumes, the nuances and style of the actors, the contrived plots and dialogue. It wasn't long before he became a champion mimic—only Jimmy wasn't doing the male leads. His forte was the women, and he could and would perform for anyone who would listen.

But while most adults were amused by little Jimmy performing Constance or Joan Bennett impersonations, his contemporaries were not, and soon Jimmy was further looked upon as a bizarre sort of local pariah. Yet this wasn't unusual for a child who had been judged as the Most Beautiful Baby Girl by Gertz Department Store. From the very beginning of his life, Jimmy Slattery was mistaken as a female. His skin, so milky white and smooth, his large, liquid brown eyes framed with thick eyelashes—there was just a way about Jimmy that could not be denied.

However, local parents did not want their children playing with him and, thus ostracized, this unusual child was left to his own means, content to live in a faux Technicolor Hollywood dream world writing letters to his cousin Kathy Michaud in which they discussed earth-shattering issues such as Kim Novak's fan club and Lana Turner's secret romance.
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
were their favorites, along with the publication
Vice Squad
.

As time went by, with his now-divorced mother working at the local telephone company during the days and his brother ensconced in the service, Jimmy had ample time to begin experimenting with his mother's makeup and clothing. He loved to draw luxurious colored bubble baths while playing tango and mambo music on the stereo and acting out scenes from the
The Prodigal
.

As a teenager, Jimmy, who wrote daily in his diary, learned about the mysteries of sex from a salesman in a local children's shoe store. When Jimmy was 17, his mother, alerted by a local snoop, confronted Jimmy with the shattering news that he had been seen dressed “like a girl” entering a local gay bar called
The Hayloft
. Taking his mother gently by the hand, Jimmy asked her not to say a word, but to sit at the kitchen table and wait. Minutes passed. Terry later recalled that morning so many years ago when she waited, upset and full of questions, listening to the kitchen clock ticking so loudly. Finally, the door opened and her son came out transformed, as it were, into a beautiful young woman. Candy Darling was born. “I knew then,” her mother would later tell me, “that I couldn't stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

A new name was needed and her first
nom de plume
would be Hope Slattery, but it was quickly cast aside for Candy because of her love of sweets. She told strangers that the name Darling came from her father, the “senator,” who lived on a plantation down South surrounded by loving “darkies” who crooned to her at night. She told Andy Warhol that “…the Darling fortune is made from a chain of dry cleaning stores and we're just cleaning up!” But the truth of her humble beginnings were kept a secret to everyone save her closest friends. Because Candy lived nearly an hour away from Manhattan in her “country house,” she made use of the Long Island Railroad, leaving Massapequa Park late at night so nosy neighbors couldn't spy and make her mother's life more miserable than it already was. Because of harsh laws at the time, Candy still dressed like a male, wearing simple, dark clothing (a habit she kept for the rest of her life), but she eventually dyed her brown hair platinum blond. While the stations zipped by, she transformed herself using makeup. Occasionally she would notice another blond Long Island resident on the train, an up-and-coming actress by the name of Joey Heatherton; but they never spoke, preferring the anonymity of these encounters, both lost in their own worlds.

As time passed, Candy made friends through the “salon” of Seymour Levy on Bleecker Street in New York's Greenwich Village. At night, she danced at a nearby after-hours club,
The Tenth of Always
, where she first espied Andy Warhol with Lou Reed. For Candy, her direct route to “stardom” would be mapped out for her by Jackie Curtis, “the world's youngest playwright,” who wrote the part of Nola Noonan for Candy. The comedy
Glamour, Glory and Gold
was written in one hour while 15-year-old Curtis rode the L.I.R.R.

More assistance would be through friend poet/actor/Superstar Taylor Meade, who brought the man who Candy considered her mentor until the end, Andy Warhol, to see her performance in Jackie's play. Other friends of the mid-'60s include playwright Bob Heide, whose plays were performed at the now-legendary Café Cino, where unknown Harvey Keitel chewed the scenery. Clyde Meltzer, aka Taffy Terrific, aka Taffy Titz, was a performer who introduced her to the Brooklyn crowd. Soon things began moving fast, and she was swept up in the glamor of the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey Factory where, on any given day, one could find personalities such as Truman Capote, Judy Garland, Jim Morrison, and a host of handsome and beautiful unknowns recruited from the ranks of delivery boys, socialites, waitresses, and college students.

She managed to create an interesting life and she was loved by all, though Candy always had great concerns wondering where the next dollar was coming from and how to repair her teeth, which were in poor shape after years of eating sweets. Although Warhol doled out small sums of money to his performers, financially life was difficult and often depressing. But she had the safety and security of the back room of
Max's Kansas City
and a wondrous assortment of loyal friends such as Sam Green, Lorraine Newman, Lauren Hutton, Julie Newmar, Sylvia Miles, Tinkerbelle, Francesca Passalacqua, Lennie Barrin, Pandora, Julie Baumgold, George Abagnalo, Cyrinda Foxe, Tom Eyen, Geraldine Smith, Francesco Scavullo, Tony Mansfield, Tula Inez Hanley, and yours truly. Lou Reed composed
Candy Says
for her (dedicated to her) along with a memorable section of
Walk on the Wild Side
. Still, true happiness remained distant; but she held onto her dreams of stardom, new teeth, a permanent place to live, and perhaps one day, a man to love her.