Candy Darling: Beautiful Comet
James Lawrence Slattery was born in New York in 1944. He grew up in
Long Island. There was no love lost between him and his violent, alcoholic
father, the very mention of whom would fill James with horror. Throughout his
childhood James was always mistaken for a girl. He was a stunning child with
ethereal pale skin and large brown eyes, fringed with long lashes. He once
won Gertz department stores Most Beautiful Baby Girl contest.
During the 1950s, Jimmy, who hated school, would often stay home to
watch Million Dollar Movie, which featured a weekly movie, played three
times a day, for seven days. Jimmy would learn each new dialogue off by
heart and loved to recite the female parts. The glamour and fantasy of
Hollywood made the life of this lonely little boy somehow bearable. A decade
earlier, in tough, industrial Pittsburgh, another lonely misfit child, Andy
Warhol, had also found escape, via Hollywood glamour magazines: a
connection that would later create a very close bond between the pair.
Jimmys neighbours ridiculed and shunned him. Other children were
ordered never to play with the delicate boy. Forced to spend most of his time
alone he developed a rich fantasy life based upon the movies he had been
devouring.
After his parents divorced, and his father moved out of the family house,
and his older brother went into the army, Jimmy was left at home on his own
a great deal. He luxuriated in bubble baths while listening to tango records
and acted out favourite scenes from movies, in which he relived the female
roles. He began to dress in his mothers clothes and he taught himself how to
apply her makeup.
When in his mid-teens he was initiated into sex by a childrens shoe
salesman. A few years later, when he was seventeen, somebody told his
mother that they had seen him going into The Hayloft, a local gay bar,
dressed as a girl. When she questioned him about it he asked her to sit at
the kitchen table and wait. He disappeared into his room and eventually
came back out metamorphosed into a beautiful young woman - Candy
Darling. His mother showed total support of this change in her son.
Candy always wove grandiose stories which disguised her origins. Only her
closest friends knew the truth about her humble background. Because of the
draconian laws of the period and rigid gender-boundaries it was dangerous
for any man to dress as a woman in public, so Candy would leave her house
only at night, dressed in unobtrusive dark clothing. On the evenings that she
went dancing at the club The Tenth of Always she would apply her makeup
on the hour-long train trip into Manhattan.
Candy quickly became a sensation on the underground scene. Jackie
Curtis, a young transgender woman wrote the play, Glamour, Glory and
Gold, in which the part of Nola Noonan was based upon Candy. In 1967 the
poet/actor Taylor Mead brought Warhol along to see Candy performing in the
role. Andy was struck by her fragile beauty and she soon became a fixture at
Warhols Factory. Here, she met the cultural stars of the day. Everybody
who met Candy fell in love with her.
By the mid-60s Candy had dyed her long hair platinum blonde and was
being prescribed female hormones. She appeared in two Warhol films: Flesh
(1968), in a short scene with Jackie Curtis, and Women in Revolt (1971),
where she plays a socialite who becomes involved with PIGS (Politically
Involved Girls). She also appeared in walk-on parts in a number of other
films, including a scene in Klute (1971), with Jane Fonda, and a scene in La
Mortadella (Lady Liberty) (1971), with Sophia Loren.
With no regular employment, Candys life was always financially
precarious; she fretted about the condition of her teeth, which were in bad
shape because of the sweets she loved. She was unable to find the man of
her dreams but she had a steady stream of loyal, protective friends. She was
greatly admired by Tennessee Williams, who wrote a part for her in his play,
Small Craft Warning (1972). Lou Reed wrote the song Candy Says about
her, and she has a verse to herself in his Walk on the Wild Side: Candy
came from out on the Island / in the back room she was everybodys darling.
Candy died of lymphoma, in 1974, aged just 29. A beautiful shooting star
