Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

"When I spoke to the critic Mary Ann Gwinn about the biography shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle awards, she described Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar as “a compassionate portrait” of the Warhol ‘superstar’ who was cast by Tennessee Williams and inspired several Lou Reed lyrics. Despite her fame in the New York underground scene, the trans icon never found the mainstream acclaim she dreamed of, and she died tragically young. “I simultaneously felt so much sympathy for her and aggravation at the people who had a lot more resources than her and didn’t really help her,” explained Gwinn. Carr’s biography benefits from a series of interviews recorded by a friend of Candy Darling shortly after her death, lending “a real immediacy” to the writing. This book was also the joint winner of the Plutarch Award, see below."

"I don’t know about ‘muse.’ She was definitely part of Warhol’s pack. This is a compassionate portrait of Candy Darling, who lived a pretty tough life. She started life in a New York borough. She was born James Lawrence Slattery, but from the beginning it was very apparent that she wanted to become a woman, a very glamorous woman. She studied cosmetology, and worshipped iconic movie stars like Kim Novak and Jean Harlow. She wanted nothing to do with feminism, which I found kind of interesting. She really wanted to be a woman , in the way people thought about women in those days. So she left Queens and wound up in this group of people that flocked around Andy Warhol . At this point, she looked really good—beautiful in a very willowy, blonde, movie-star kind of way. Andy ended up using her in his films, and she became a movie star of sorts, although not the kind of movie star she really wanted to be. An Andy Warhol version of a movie star. Yes. And she really did walk on the wild side. The hard part is that nobody really took care of her, including Warhol. She had to turn to sex work to survive. She was often homeless. To aid her transition, she took a lot of untested hormones. I’ll get back to that in a minute. But she did achieve the fame she was looking for, in a way. She was in a lot of Warhol’s films, she was in plays, and she was looking to break out more generally in conventional movies. But that’s where she hit a wall. Conventional movies didn’t want somebody with her background, and she ended up dying very young at 29, also of cancer, perhaps brought on by these hormonal drugs. I simultaneously felt so much sympathy for her and aggravation at the people who had a lot more resources than her and didn’t really help her. But she also had some really good friends. One, Jeremiah Newton, helped her a lot while she was living. Shortly after she died, he started interviewing all her closest companions and friends. But he never ended up writing a book himself. When Cynthia Carr started working on this book, Newton turned all that over to her. Those interviews lend the book a real immediacy. It’s a very interesting read."