Oh, My Pearl

Candy Darling​ , the transgender actress and Warhol superstar, was born in Queens in 1944 and grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island. She was raised as Jimmy Slattery – named after her father, a gambler and alcoholic who worked as a cashier for the New York Racing Association. As Cynthia Carr writes in her biography, Darling broke with her Jimmy identity early: ‘She was always she.’ She declared herself a recluse from the age of seven. Home was unbearable and school was ‘the snake pit’. But her diaries show that she didn’t experience her gender as problematic or painful. Take her description of an encounter with a psychiatrist when she was fifteen: ‘Today Dr Oakes tried to tell me I’ve got a problem and I’m queer! Tomorrow I’m going to try to cut out in the morning and finish my [book] report in the candy store.’

What’s a glamorous girl stuck in the suburbs to do? Go to the movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in another room. Carr describes a favourite childhood game:

Cousin Diane would play a famous star while Candy acted as her agent. They would pretend to be in some fancy restaurant surrounded by deferential waiters. ‘All the waiters knew who we were,’ Diane recalled … ‘[Candy] would say: “I need you to shove those people right out the door to make way for us.”’ Diane’s brother played the evil Mr Simms who would sit at another table, plotting to get the rich beautiful starlet to marry him.

In 1961, she dropped out of high school and enrolled at the nearby DeVern School of Cosmetology. Her impressions of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe had the other girls in ‘hysterics’. She got a part-time job as a hairdresser and specialised in extreme makeovers, warning one customer that ‘your husband is bound to leave you for a gorgeous creature if you don’t do something.’ When the clients complained, Darling responded with indifference: ‘If they want to look like common, ordinary, everyday housewives – no skin off of my teeth.’

By the early 1960s Darling had begun her forays into downtown Manhattan. She turned tricks and occasionally picked pockets. ‘She was always the most glamorous queen on the street,’ the performance artist Agosto Machado said. ‘Whatever stoop she sat on was like the throne area and you could approach.’ She set her sights on acting. When a friend suggested she take lessons, Darling replied: ‘Oh I don’t need those. I’m ready.’ In 1967 she appeared in Jackie Curtis’s play Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star. She wasn’t the lead, but that would change. Warhol was in the audience one evening and offered extravagant praise: ‘For the first time, I wasn’t bored.’ The playwright Tom Eyen recalled that Warhol left that night with Darling on his arm. As she exited the building, Darling told him that Andy was going to make her a star. ‘Really? Good luck, dear,’ Eyen shot back.

But Darling, unlike many of her contemporaries, managed to escape what was known as ‘Factory treatment’ – a sort of freezing out, a reminder that Warhol could give and take away – perhaps because he genuinely liked her. He took her to openings. ‘She was beautiful, polite, witty, poised,’ Carr writes, ‘the perfect date.’ In 1968 she appeared in Warhol’s hustler film Flesh, then in his unfinished movie Brass Bed. Soon she was bragging: ‘I call myself Candy Warhol now.’ She campaigned to get the lead in the film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s horror show of a trans novel, Myra Breckinridge. The material was demeaning, but Darling never thought of herself as a cause: she was only ever an exception. She didn’t get an audition, however, and Hollywood would prove consistently hostile to her. (The role eventually went to Raquel Welch; the film was a flop.)

In 1970 Darling appeared in Warhol’s satire of women’s lib, Women in Revolt (sample dialogue from a sex scene: ‘Are you going to come?’ a character asks. ‘I think I’m going to go,’ another replies). Vincent Canby wrote in his review that Darling ‘comes very close to being a real actress’. In the same year, she appeared in the background of Jane Fonda’s Klute. According to the theatre director Ron Link, ‘You didn’t direct her like a normal actress. In other words you’d say to Darling – 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.’

European arthouse credentials came with a role in Werner Schroeter’s 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran (Warhol encouraged her to take the part). Then came the full Elizabeth Taylor treatment, furs, premieres, restaurants (Darling was a traditionalist: ‘Restaurants should have carpets on the floor, upholstered seats and be dark’). She wasn’t interested in miniskirts: her idea of womanhood was embodied by Veronica Lake, Lana Turner and Novak, who was ‘frozen’ in a way that appealed to Darling. In 1972 Vogue ran a full-page portrait of Darling, Curtis and Holly Woodlawn by Richard Avedon. Darling held a heart-shaped lollipop emblazoned with the words LOVE ME. The high point of her career came when she was cast in Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings. Williams thought Darling was ‘marvellous to work with … a disciplined performer and very funny and touching’. They became friends, confiding to each other their problems with men.

Darling was the inspiration for Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, the Velvet Underground’s ‘Candy Says’ and ‘Citadel’ by the Rolling Stones. (‘I can’t tell those Stones apart. Which one is Mick?’) If only life stopped at photographs and movies and song lyrics. Darling had problems with housing, with intimacy, with money. She also had problems with her teeth. ‘All I have is fifteen teeth left,’ she wrote in a diary entry from March 1963. Judging by Carr’s account, almost everyone on the downtown scene was distressed by this. ‘Her teeth … Her teeth,’ Curtis wailed to Warhol. ‘Everything was missing on one side,’ the actor Paul Ambrose remembered; the director Paul Morrissey, who worked with her on Flesh, found the situation ‘really embarrassing’ and ensured that her teeth weren’t visible on screen. Warhol paid to have them fixed, but even this didn’t solve the problem. The caps had a habit of coming off. Newton recalled walking with Darling in the Village one day ‘when one of her front teeth fell out into the snow in front of a firehouse. A fireman came out and said, “Lady can I help you?” “Oh, my pearl,” she said. “I dropped my pearl.”’

Throughout her brief, blazing career, Darling worked hard to appear superficial. Her topics of conversation were lipstick, hair, clothes, stockings, stars, men: light, breezy salon talk. Only in her diaries did she disclose the extent of her loneliness. One entry from 1973 reads: ‘I have lived most of my life starving for affection. Spiritually and emotionally hungry. I lived my life through movie stars.’ According to her friend Helen Hanft, the whole Hollywood dream was part of Darling’s ‘protective fantasy’:

From this being her life and her father hitting her – she went into a fantasy world. I think it was her defence. Here she made this great stride to be a woman. That was a pretty courageous thing to do. I mean she probably would have ended up in a mental institution if she didn’t, or on drugs, or a stoned alcoholic. I mean she would have been a real mess if she didn’t … I think ‘covering’ [with her superficial preoccupations] is what saved her.

Darling showed no vulnerability, even as people tried to humiliate her. When Helena Carroll, her co-star in Small Craft Warnings, refused to share a dressing room with her, insisting that ‘this room says “women” on it,’ she just laughed. The men wouldn’t share a space with her either, so she took to the broom closet and fixed a star to the door.

Carr’s biography is generous but refuses to make its subject a saint, and it’s in her bad behaviour that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time at the library researching Jean Harlow didn’t know how to use her allure. Carr relates a date with the curator Sam Green:

The moment [Green] remembered most came near the end of the evening, when Phebe’s had emptied and waiters were upending chairs onto tables. Candy reached over to Green and, in his words, ‘put those long thin fingers on top of my hand, rested them there for quite a long moment, and then said, “You know, I really am a businessman.”’ And that, she explained, was the Candy Darling business. ‘Then she slipped right back into the role of Marilyn Monroe.’

Darling was a canny social climber (so what, as Warhol might say). Although her existence was radical, her politics weren’t. She didn’t care about the Stonewall riots. She bristled against feminism and described Betty Friedan as ‘hard’. She could be outrageously (and amusingly) self-interested. At the funeral of Andrea Feldman (a Factory acolyte who had killed herself), she asked for Feldman’s fur coat and received a reprimand from Newton. ‘But she doesn’t need it where she is,’ Darling protested.

Her relationship to home was unusual. She kept returning to Massapequa Park throughout her life: to see her mother, Terry; to do laundry; to borrow money and occasionally to lend it. Newton described her childhood home as ‘a haunted house. The interior was a jumble and there was very little food … Very lonely out there. You couldn’t go outside during the day. Terry didn’t want people to see her walking around.’ Although Terry grew more accommodating of her daughter, she always harboured a sense of shame.

On New Year’s Eve 1972 Darling did something uncharacteristic and stayed in. She wasn’t feeling well. By the end of the following summer, she was receiving treatment for cancer. She refused to stop taking the female hormones prescribed to her by several disreputable doctors, even though they were thought to be carcinogenic. When Bob Colacello, Warhol’s biographer, told him that Darling had leukaemia, he reported: ‘For the first and only time in the seventeen years I knew him, I saw him cry.’ Warhol didn’t visit Darling on her deathbed (he didn’t do hospitals or funerals) but he sent her toothpaste and other useful items, as well as a portable black-and-white television. Darling, testing the limits of Daddy’s love, demanded a colour set. Warhol sent one.

When Darling was first hospitalised and put on a men’s ward, Lauren Hutton insisted she be moved. After the women’s ward became a problem too, Hutton offered to pay for a private room. Darling had the best one in the house. Her old collaborators Curtis and Woodlawn turned up with flowers and vodka. According to Woodlawn, they got so drunk ‘I’m surprised we weren’t hauled out of there on a gurney.’ Darling enjoyed playing the beautiful, dying woman, reclining among the flowers and receiving visitors. Her father, who had re-entered her life, wanted her buried in a suit. ‘Over my dead body,’ her friend Jacquie said. She was buried as Candy Darling. One last feat of self-invention: all the obituaries said she was 26 when, in fact, she was 29.

In 1982 Terry invited Newton to her new home. She had remarried and her second husband, as she put it, ‘hated homosexuals’. She no longer wanted evidence of Darling in the house and gave Newton her daughter’s ashes and whatever belongings he could carry on the bus. ‘There’s no place for Candy,’ Terry told him. ‘She’s better off with you.’ A couple of weeks later Newton wrote to Terry asking if she would be sending him the rest of Darling’s belongings. Terry replied claiming she had burned them. This was untrue, and many of Darling’s personal effects can now be seen at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Why did Terry lie? Perhaps she had a change of heart, one she couldn’t quite admit to. She could have learned something from her daughter. In a letter to her cousin Kathy, Darling wrote: ‘You must always be yourself no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.’