Candy Darling

by Candy Darling

This is a highly significant little book. It hovers at a rather particular cultural fulcrum in the mid-’60s like a luminescent and highly exotic see-creature; inhabiting a thickly interwoven, deceptive, viscous, brutal, unrelentingly nihilistic, post-social-modernist, cultural coral reef. It is the posthumous autobiographical testament of Candy Darling in Manhattan, New York, USA. Significant in so many ways that belie its 143 petite pages. The lipstick-and-gold cover bears a melancholy photo of Candy’s face. Printed in the Hanuman style of slightly off-registered color, it both echoes the Warhol celebrity prints and proposes the equally off-register self-perception of Candy herself.

As a good friend of mine, Gladys, put it after reading this book and Nightmare of Ecstasy: “Ed Wood was a man wearing a woman’s sweater, Candy Darling was a woman wearing a woman’s sweater.” One would never really call Ed Wood “she.” One is compelled to refer to Candy as “she,” as a matter of respect, well-deserved honor and veracity. There is an incandescent otherness to this frail, self-descriptive text that really does demand numinous recognition and empathy and far more than a moment’s sentimental contemplation. I found myself thinking of words like sacred, catechism, rosary, litany, Hail Mary (though the obvious contemporary drag slang might subvert the sincerity of expression with that one!). We have become comfortable with the image of biological males living as, breathing as, and trying their courageous darnedest to think as women. Given the increased tolerance and awareness of transexuality and ambiguous gender today, it would be easy to forget the perilous consequences that faced a certain James Lawrence Slattery when he left Massapequa Park, Cape Cod, Long Island, armed with memorized Hollywood movies and glamorous actresses’ mannerisms and makeup styles to reinvent and become her self, Candy Darling, in Manhattan. A statement in itself so modern and audacious in its courage in that era and context that, as we probably all know, it was immortalized by Lou Reed more than once in song.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, though, and absolutely central to the message of this book, is that the burden of evidence quite clearly reveals to us that Candy was not a drag queen. She was, in fact, a woman. A woman sadly suffused with a romantic fervor of such an infinite and visionary grandeur that it could never be fulfilled. A composite woman distilled and compressed from so many cascading daydreams, and such trust in her belief that the overriding meaning of all life is being truly and totally in love with an idealized and faithful man, that she was, inevitably, a doomed woman. She dreamed of settling down in the suburbs with this abstraction of a man. Yet, tellingly, she does not once describe the physical or aesthetic aspects he would embody. They are of no concern; the only quality that mattered was that he would truly love Candy, and for that and that alone, all glamor, ambition, celebrity, immortality and, yes, even makeup, would be forgone without the tiniest bit of regret. These conspicuous qualities generated through irreducible suffering over years would be gladly sacrificed, one feels, almost executed, blissfully leaving a housewife Candy in her run-of-the-mill middle class house satiated with the ultimate chivalrous love at last. “Christ at the kitchen sink” as Gladys eulogized it.

A superficial reading could leave the uninitiated reader with an equally superficial comprehension of the story unfolding within these sanctified pages. Names and phone numbers; dates of electrolysis; taxi rides to clubs; details of appearances in the very fashion magazines and movie magazines that had once focused and fueled Jimmy’s transubstantiation; desperate thoughts about the ideal man; discouragement; vacuous friends; fair-weather luminaries; inevitable mentions of “Andy”; devotional lists of her current choice of cosmetics; rather silly bits of hokum philosophy probably culled from recently read articles; and clusters of “fresh and witty” dialogue noted down for potential future incorporation into plays or movies. In many ways, ordinary stuff.

What is extraordinary here is the luxuriant sense of a religious quest for love and an ideal relationship that reaches such a level of transfigured ecstasy. I can’t help but feel that Candy is quite literally alive in this book. That she demands at last to be accorded all appropriate respect and spiritual ritual. Which is why words like devotional, litany, and the image of a confessional, of churches, services and shadowy movements of candle flames still linger.

We do, of course, witness a deep melancholy here too. This modern, beautiful, vivacious, witty, romantic and tragic woman, Candy Darling, was, and even more so today, is, inspirational. I was compelled to go to my makeup box and assemble my own intimate litany of androgyny from my penetrated self to hers in collision.# And now let us all bow our heads in prayer . . .

Revlon Age Defying Makeup-Cool Beige Foundation Cream

Lanza Re-Balance Shine Silicon Gel for hair

Dark Skin Cover-Up stick

Revlon Love Pat-Cream Beige Face Powder

Chanel Aqua Crayon-Chocolate Lip Outline Color Stick

Revlon Fabuliner-Black Brown Liquid Eye Liner

Revlon Overtime Shadow-Vineyards Shimmer Eye Shadows# Chanel Quadra Eye Shadow-Earth/Gold/Steel/Pink/Copper

Revlon-Flesh Lipstick (original ‘60s in paisley tube)

Princess Marcella Borghese-Nuovo Rosa Lumina Lipstick

Salvador Dali-Parfum and Parfum de Toilette Spray

— Genesis P-Orridge