Candy Darling: The Last Days of the Warhol Superstar and LGBTQ+ Icon

Captured in celluloid by Andy Warhol and immortalized by Lou Reed in two of his most enduring songs, Candy Darling accomplished a lot during her too-brief life.

In the 50 years since she died of lymphoma while still in her twenties, Darling's star has continued to ascend. More than a muse of the gritty-yet-glamorous New York avant-garde art scene of the 1970s, she's now hailed as a trailblazing transgender actress who lived — and died — before her time.

Darling is the subject of a new book by journalist Cynthia Carr, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, out March 19. Drawing from unprecedented access to her private diaries and personal papers, as well as interviews with close to a hundred friends and associates, it offers the most compelling and complete portrait of the late Warhol Superstar and LGBTQ+ pioneer to date.

Born on Nov 24, 1944, Darling was known as Jimmy Slattery throughout the Long Island suburb where she was raised. Her parents, Jim and Theresa, divorced when she was young, and her relationship with both would remain fractious. In later years, when Candy would come home to visit wearing her Manhattan finery, Theresa insisted she take the late train and arrive under cover of darkness — so the neighbors wouldn’t see. 

In her youth, Darling had been subjected to a mock lynching by a gang of local boys, until one of their parents broke it up. She endured a lonely and tumultuous adolescence by disappearing into the world of Hollywood fantasy, absorbing the mannerisms of silver screen sirens like Kim Novak and Lana Turner. As a teen, Darling would delight her friends with spot-on impressions of Marilyn Monroe’s smoldering stare, occasionally enhanced by a trip to her mother’s closet. A stint in cosmetology school allowed her to perfect the looks showcased in the Hollywood fan magazines she devoured.

“Her obsession with her appearance was not rooted in narcissism,” Carr writes. ”It was how she affirmed her female identity in a world where there was very little support for even the idea of gender fluidity.”

Upon graduation, she began to take regular trips into New York City, where she could live more openly as a self-styled starlet. Though she rechristened herself as the glittery “Candy Darling,” she was destitute, eking out a meager existence in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village. It was there that she first encountered Andy Warhol in 1967. To a man skilled at finding beauty in unexpected places, Darling was a diamond in the rough.

While she’d acted in several off-Broadway plays — including Jackie Curtis’ Glamour, Glory and Gold alongside a young Robert De Niro — Darling’s biggest breakthrough came with her appearances in a pair of Warhol’s art films: 1968’s Flesh and 1971’s Women in Revolt. While not exactly financial windfalls, the resulting notoriety as a bonafide Warhol Superstar earned her Richard Avedon photo spreads in Vogue and entry into the back room of Max’s Kansas City, the late-night eatery where the hippest downtown denizens congregated. 

Darling’s position at the center of the East Coast art world made her a witness to tectonic cultural shifts going on at the time. The legendary uprising at the Stonewall Inn took place mere blocks from her home in the summer of 1969. Though considered a haven for the LGBTQ community, she had been denied entry at Stonewall some months before. “But I’m a big star,” she protested to the doorman. “You’re just a man, despite the package,” came the reply. Darling had steered clear of the place ever since. The night the riots erupted, she was busy paying her respects to recently-departed Judy Garland uptown at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.

She crossed paths with everyone from Groucho Marx, Roger Vadim, Mick Jagger and Divine, but her most famous rendezvous was with Lou Reed, the leather-clad laureate of the Lower East Side. He would ultimately write two lyrical portraits of Darling. “Walk on the Wild Side,” his sketch of the Warhol scene, proved the most enduring, but “Candy Says,” a 1969 album track from the Velvet Underground, gave voice to her inner turmoil from the opening lines: Candy says, "I've come to hate my body / And all that it requires in this world.”

As Carr writes, “There’s recognition today that one’s gender identity or gender expression doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with genitalia. But in Candy’s day, binary ruled.” She hated being called a “drag queen” and hadn’t ruled out gender-confirmation surgery. But when a friend nearly bled to death during her recovery, Darling decided to wait on the costly procedure, instead relying on an early form of hormone replacement therapy. 

She lived the rest of her life believing that no one could truly accept her as she was. “I know I am cursed,” reads a 1973 entry in her diary. “Not by a witch but somehow it seems as though I am not meant to be loved. I know it sounds dramatic as it feels dramatic. It tears at my heart, this desire. I will pray to God to be taken out of this world. I will welcome death.”

The future she envisioned for herself — a husband and a family and a house with a white picket fence — seemed forever out of reach.

When friends began to notice a bulge in her petite abdomen, Darling was quick to joke that she was pregnant. Eventually she was persuaded to go to the doctor, where she was diagnosed with lymphoma — a result, he theorized, of her hormone pills. A close friend angrily poured the bottle of capsules into the toilet upon hearing the news. Darling was furious. “You want me to go back to being a man!?” she yelled.

She was taken to New York’s Cabrini Medical Center, just a short walk from Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s famous Factory. In her diary, she kept a log of her outfits, complete with sketches. She urged photographer Peter Hujar to come take her portrait reclined in a flower-strewn hospital bed, looking like a cross between a covergirl and a corpse. During surgery the following the day, the doctors found a tumor “like a tree root” growing around her spine. There was nothing they could do. 

When Warhol learned the news, he burst into tears. It was the only time that many associates ever saw him cry. He kept his distance, wary of hospitals since his recent stay following an assassination attempt, but Liza Minelli and her sister Lorna Luft paid Darling a visit. One of her last requests was to have her name legally changed. She wanted to ensure her tombstone read "Candy Darling."

Darling died on March 21, 1974, at the age of 29. She was alone. Her mother took the late train and didn’t make it in time. When she arrived, the hospital chaplain recommended a downtown funeral parlor — one who catered to “people of that kind of life.” But her parents insisted on Frank E. Campbell’s uptown, where Garland’s service had been held. Designer Giorgio di Sant' Angelo donated a gown. Stylist Vidal Sassoon sent a wig. 

The funeral was standing-room only, with her parents rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tennessee Williams and rock star John Phillips. “The parts of her life that she’s worked so hard to keep separate were all in one room,” Carr writes. “The conflicts over gender, over whether she was Candy or James, presented themselves now as unreleased and added elements of surrealism and tension to the proceedings.”

Her mother was uncomfortable that the obituary in her local paper used female pronouns. That was, after all, the paper the neighbors read. Darling’s estranged father was even more irate that the name “Candy Darling” appeared on the funeral cards.

“I have to see my son dressed up like that in the coffin,” he railed to the priest. “This Candy business has got to stop.” The clergyman attempted a compromise by referring to the deceased as “he or she” and “this person.”

As the crowd followed the pallbearers to the hearse waiting outside, they found Eighty-First Street lined with individuals who were then known as “street queens,” all decked out in the fabulous best. They hadn’t dared to enter the church. As Carr writes, “they didn’t think they’d be welcome."

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar is out March 19 from Macmillan. It's available for pre-orders now, wherever books are sold.