Candy Darling

Last night I watched the movie Beautiful Darling on Netflix; how many of you know who know about Candy Darling?

If I give you a clue, will that help?

Lu Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”  “…Candy came from out on the island,”



She was an actress who stared in a number of Andy Warhol movies and hung out at Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54 restaurants. She crashed at friends apartments and lived off of handouts.

I think she was a woman ahead of her times; you have to remember this was during the era of the Stonewall revolution where it was still illegal for a man to be out in public wearing women’s clothes, and it was almost impossible for a trans-woman to have a job. It was the era of sex, drugs and rock & roll and Candy was at ground zero.

In the New York Times review of the movie, they said,

The movie’s matter-of-fact truth teller, the writer Fran Lebowitz, who spent time in the Warhol orbit, remembers the grim era when being a female impersonator on the streets of New York was against the law.

In the days when Slattery was growing up, Ms. Lebowitz recalls, wallowing in movie-magazine images of untouchable gods and goddesses was an irresistible escape from the rejection and scorn of straight society. Even after becoming a downtown celebutante, Candy Darling, who took female hormones, resisted having the surgery to complete gender reassignment. “I’m not a genuine woman,” she said. “But I’m not interested in genuineness. I’m interested in being the product of a woman.”

Candy Darling, who naïvely regarded Warhol as her Louis B. Mayer and protector, was bitterly disappointed when he lost interest in his triumvirate of cross-dressing “superstars,” which also included Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis.
[…]
The courage it took to be Candy Darling is illustrated by the following late diary entry read by Ms. Sevigny:

“I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.”

Besides the Andy Warhol movies she also was in a play with Robert De Niro and in a Tennessee Williams' play called Small Craft Warnings. She was also in the movies Klute with Jane Fonda and Lady Liberty with Sophia Loren.