With this cast of characters in mind, it could be safely said that Jimmy’s family, and even himself, could have been created through the pen of her champion and mentor, Tennessee Williams; but instead, in the best American tradition, Candy Darling created herself with the help of television’s Million Dollar Movie.
During the 1950s, Million Dollar Movie, with its theme music borrowed from Gone With the Wind (the perfect dirge for a dying Hollywood) entertained little Jimmy, who often played hooky from the grim realities of school in order to watch the same movie aired three times a day, seven days a week. Hollywood and its mystique fascinated him and slowly transformed and transfigured the depressing reality of a lonely boy living a bleak existence in a small, Cape-Cod bungalow in Massapequa Park, Long Island. The frequency of a Million Dollar Movie film enabled Jimmy to carefully study the fiber of his favorite performers; makeup and costumes, the nuances and style of the actors, the contrived plots and dialogue. It wasn’t long before he became a champion mimic—only Jimmy wasn’t doing the male leads. His forte was the women, and he could and would perform for anyone who would listen.
But while most adults were amused by little Jimmy performing Constance or Joan Bennett impersonations, his contemporaries were not, and soon Jimmy was further looked upon as a bizarre sort of local pariah. Yet this wasn’t unusual for a child who had been judged as the Most Beautiful Baby Girl by Gertz Department Store. From the very beginning of his life, Jimmy Slattery was mistaken as a female. His skin, so milky white and smooth, his large, liquid brown eyes framed with thick eyelashes—there was just a way about Jimmy that could not be denied.
However, local parents did not want their children playing with him and, thus ostracized, this unusual child was left to his own means, content to live in a faux Technicolor Hollywood dream world writing letters to his cousin Kathy Michaud in which they discussed earth-shattering issues such as Kim Novak’s fan club and Lana Turner’s secret romance. Photoplay and Modern Screen were their favorites, along with the publication Vice Squad.
As time went by, with his now-divorced mother working at the local telephone company during the days and his brother ensconced in the service, Jimmy had ample time to begin experimenting with his mother’s makeup and clothing. He loved to draw luxurious colored bubble baths while playing tango and mambo music on the stereo and acting out scenes from the The Prodigal.
As a teenager, Jimmy, who wrote daily in his diary, learned about the mysteries of sex from a salesman in a local children’s shoe store. When Jimmy was 17, his mother, alerted by a local snoop, confronted Jimmy with the shattering news that he had been seen dressed “like a girl” entering a local gay bar called The Hayloft. Taking his mother gently by the hand, Jimmy asked her not to say a word, but to sit at the kitchen table and wait. Minutes passed. Terry later recalled that morning so many years ago when she waited, upset and full of questions, listening to the kitchen clock ticking so loudly. Finally, the door opened and her son came out transformed, as it were, into a beautiful young woman. Candy Darling was born. “I knew then,” her mother would later tell me, “that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”
A new name was needed and her first nom de plume would be Hope Slattery, but it was quickly cast aside for Candy because of her love of sweets. She told strangers that the name Darling came from her father, the “senator,” who lived on a plantation down South surrounded by loving “darkies” who crooned to her at night. She told Andy Warhol that “…the Darling fortune is made from a chain of dry cleaning stores and we’re just cleaning up!” But the truth of her humble beginnings were kept a secret to everyone save her closest friends. Because Candy lived nearly an hour away from Manhattan in her “country house,” she made use of the Long Island Railroad, leaving Massapequa Park late at night so nosy neighbors couldn’t spy and make her mother’s life more miserable than it already was. Because of harsh laws at the time, Candy still dressed like a male, wearing simple, dark clothing (a habit she kept for the rest of her life), but she eventually dyed her brown hair platinum blond. While the stations zipped by, she transformed herself using makeup. Occasionally she would notice another blond Long Island resident on the train, an up-and-coming actress by the name of Joey Heatherton; but they never spoke, preferring the anonymity of these encounters, both lost in their own worlds.
As time passed, Candy made friends through the “salon” of Seymour Levy on Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. At night, she danced at a nearby after-hours club, The Tenth of Always, where she first espied Andy Warhol with Lou Reed. For Candy, her direct route to “stardom” would be mapped out for her by Jackie Curtis, “the world’s youngest playwright,” who wrote the part of Nola Noonan for Candy. The comedy Glamour, Glory and Gold was written in one hour while 15-year-old Curtis rode the L.I.R.R.
More assistance would be through friend poet/actor/Superstar Taylor Meade, who brought the man who Candy considered her mentor until the end, Andy Warhol, to see her performance in Jackie’s play. Other friends of the mid-’60s include playwright Bob Heide, whose plays were performed at the now-legendary Café Cino, where unknown Harvey Keitel chewed the scenery. Clyde Meltzer, aka Taffy Terrific, aka Taffy Titz, was a performer who introduced her to the Brooklyn crowd. Soon things began moving fast, and she was swept up in the glamor of the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey Factory where, on any given day, one could find personalities such as Truman Capote, Judy Garland, Jim Morrison, and a host of handsome and beautiful unknowns recruited from the ranks of delivery boys, socialites, waitresses, and college students.
She managed to create an interesting life and she was loved by all, though Candy always had great concerns wondering where the next dollar was coming from and how to repair her teeth, which were in poor shape after years of eating sweets. Although Warhol doled out small sums of money to his performers, financially life was difficult and often depressing. But she had the safety and security of the back room of Max’s Kansas City and a wondrous assortment of loyal friends such as Sam Green, Lorraine Newman, Lauren Hutton, Julie Newmar, Sylvia Miles, Tinkerbelle, Francesca Passalacqua, Lennie Barrin, Pandora, Julie Baumgold, George Abagnalo, Cyrinda Foxe, Tom Eyen, Geraldine Smith, Francesco Scavullo, Tony Mansfield, Tula Inez Hanley, and yours truly. Lou Reed composed Candy Says for her (dedicated to her) along with a memorable section of Walk on the Wild Side. Still, true happiness remained distant; but she held onto her dreams of stardom, new teeth, a permanent place to live, and perhaps one day, a man to love her.
The earliest writings are excerpts from Jimmy Slattery’s diary beginning in 1958 (when he was 14 years old). Several years later, reborn as Candy Darling, his world had radically changed. From the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, Candy kept active doing Off-off Broadway and two films for Warhol/Morrissey: Flesh (1968) and Women In Revolt (1971), several independent films: Brand X and Silent Night/Bloody Night, a co-starring role as a gay-bashing victim in Some of my Best Friends Are …, a memorable scene in Klute with Jane Fonda, and Lady Liberty with Sophia Loren. A quote Candy used many times was “I’ve had small parts in big pictures and big parts in small pictures.” In 1971 she went to Vienna, where she did two films for director Werner Schroeter, the first entitled The Death of Maria Malibran. Unfortunately, the second film was never released.
Several years ago, director Mary Harron approached me in the preplanning stages of what was to be I Shot Andy Warhol. She had heard of my friendship with would-be-Warhol-assassin Valerie Solanas and later read my writing on this relationship and incorporated it into her film, along with some of Candy’s words. Through our conversations it didn’t take much persuasion to convince Mary of the importance of using Candy Darling as a character in her film. Although it is impossible to duplicate an individual, I personally felt that Stephen Dorff gave a haunting performance capturing Candy’s very essence. For me, Candy Darling lived again on screen. And I may add that actor Danny Morganstern portrayed a very credible Jeremiah! Mary created an er
a through her work and has emerged as an important new director.
Over two decades have passed since the death of my friend; and in those years, the world has indeed changed. Candy would have been severely distraught by the deaths of Andy Warhol, Tinkerbelle, Jackie Curtis, Tom Eyen, Charles Ludlum, Sharron Lyn Reed, Eugene Siefke, and so many others who made up the rich and varied weave of her world.
She would have been proud of the Harvey Milk School, an institution in Manhattan that educates and takes care of gay, lesbian and transgendered youth, something inconceivable in her lifetime. The onslaught of AIDS would have devastated her life as it has devastated ours.
Ms. Darling would never have imagined how many people would miss her. At the scene of her funeral, with hundreds of mourners present, a stretch limousine pulled up to Frank E. Campbell’s just as her flower bedecked casket was being carried out, and a tinted window rolled down. Its passenger, Gloria Swanson, saluted the coffin with a gloved hand.
Throughout the years I have attempted to keep my unforgettable friend alive. In life, many of her dreams eluded her, but she lives again through her words, drawings, and photographs.
Note: Amongst Candy’s writings are references to the following people: Sandy Amerling (her first manager); Kathy Michaud (her cousin, with whom she had many interests in common); Off-off Broadway’s legendary Jackie Curtis; Holly Woodlawn (co-star of Flesh and Women In Revolt with Jackie Curtis); Ron Link (the man who “discovered” Candy); playwright Bob Heide; Tony Mansfield (Jayne Mansfield’s “baby brother” and first disc jockey at many important New York clubs); Warren and Maryann (Candy’s half-brother and sister-in-law); Bill King (the late photographer), Pat Thorne (a Greenwich Village friend and companion of Valerie Solanas); Ron Delsener (producer); George Abagnalo (co-screenwriter of Warhol’s Bad); and friend Jim Hanafy.
Jeremiah Newton
Candy Remembered
LIKE CANDY, I, TOO, came from out on the Island. Like many other children of the ’40s and ’50s whose parents were from the city, we were taken from the place of our birth to a presumably safer and more child-friendly atmosphere. And like many of the teenagers of the ’50s and ’60s, we felt confined and restricted by such a place and could not wait to return to the city that our parents had struggled so hard to leave.
In the early ’70s I would travel around the country until my money ran out and then return to New York to earn more so that I could leave again. I met Candy during one of those work periods. I had met Jeremiah first; he was a friend of a one-time hitchhiking companion. Jeremiah and I were both living in less-than favorable conditions in different sections of Brooklyn, so we decided to pool our resources and get an apartment together in Manhattan. We found a one-bedroom apartment that we could afford on the Upper West Side. We flipped a coin for the bedroom, and Jeremiah got it. I got the convertible couch in the living room. This arrangement worked out fine while it was only the two of us. But before long Jeremiah started telling me about his friend Candy who was in Europe making films. She’d return to America soon, he said, and would need a place to stay. Would I object to her coming to live with us? He said she’d live in his room with him, so I agreed.
Candy arrived. She was stunningly beautiful with an ethereal quality. She had suitcases full of gowns and cosmetics. My only interest in how I looked was what I had to wear in order to keep a good-paying job. I called it putting on the disguise, feeling that anything other than natural was a lie. When I was off work, I’d wear what my other friends wore—jeans and t-shirts, and no makeup. But when I went out with Candy, even just to the market, she’d insist that I dress up, often in one of her gowns. She’d do my makeup and hair; and I indulged her. It was yet another disguise to add to the mix. But no matter what type gown she dressed me in or how she did my makeup or hair, I still felt dowdy and butch next to her. She was the tall and glamorous one; I felt short and dumpy.
This arrangement worked well for a short while, but before long, two more people were living in our small apartment. It became clear that we’d have to move, and there was no way we could afford to stay in Manhattan. We found a house in Brooklyn, in Flatbush, near Park Slope, on a block that was partly renovated. We were renting two floors of the house, the rest was still undergoing construction. There were five of us now—Jeremiah and his lover, Joseph Ratinski, Candy, me, and a new friend, Kathy. The unrenovated portion of the block consisted mainly of Puerto Rican immigrants who could not understand what type of a household this was—a gay couple, two young, single (or were they also a couple?) women, and this tall, beautiful blond. There were people coming and going from our place at all hours, and the neighbors made their disgust plainly evident. Kathy and I were the only ones who held straight, 9–5 jobs. We also had different standards of housekeeping from our other roommates. It was nearly impossible to get Candy to clean up after herself. She would finally relent only after being asked a number of times to do the chores, but she would turn it into a suffering heroine role. Quoting lines from her favorite melodramas, she’d turn the task into a performance.
Many times when getting ready for work I would discover that the dress I’d intended to wear had been torn. When I’d ask Candy if she knew what had happened to it, she would deny knowing anything at first; but eventually she’d admit that she had to borrow it since her appearance was surely more important than mine. I tried, in vain, to tell her that my clothes would not be able to stretch to accommodate her frame and to please leave them alone. I was working for a company that had connections with the garment
industry. Through these connections I had the opportunity to purchase 12 dozen pairs of stockings, which I naturally expected would last throughout this work period. I wrongly assumed that these would be safe from Candy since there was a greater disparity between our shoe sizes than our dress sizes. While I was at work, however, during one of her foraging trips to my closet, Candy discovered my cache. Within a few short weeks, the supply of stockings was completely depleted. Of course, I knew whom to question; and Candy finally admitted that she had had to use them since she had to look good when she went out and that I should be happy that I was able to contribute to the cause.
Candy never had any money and always had to beg Andy to help her. She’d usually get promises of money, or occasionally a token bit; but it was never enough to live on. She lived off other people, especially her good friend and supporter, Sam Green.
Most of my off-time was spent with other friends, but periodically I’d get caught up in what Candy and Jeremiah were doing, usually if an opening or party was involved. I’d get dressed in an outfit that met Candy’s approval, and we’d head for Manhattan. Men would be attracted to her, but I was fearful of what would happen if they found out that she was not exactly what she seemed. Often after a long night in Manhattan, Candy and I would share a cab home; and she would reveal to me her pain. She was not attracted to homosexual men since she was not psychologically a man. It was a heterosexual man that she wanted but felt that that would be impossible as she was.
Many weekends we would take the Long Island Railroad together to visit our families. She got off two stops before mine. I would read, but she was always writing. I never knew what the writings were until we began this project.
When I had saved enough money, I again left New York, but this time I never returned there to live. I never saw Candy again. My travels led me to San Diego where I met the man who would become my husband. The desktop publishing company that we eventually formed made this book possible.
Candy lived a full life of fantasy. She had an image of what she should be, what she was capable of being; but she was born in the wrong package. She had a skewed view of her importance, thinking that everyone knew who she was and how famous she was. The truth would have been too hard to face that she looked the part, almost perfectly. She wanted the transformation to be complete but had no way of achieving it.
The final ironic tragedy is that Candy, who did not do drugs or have wild sexual adventures
, died at such a young age, simply because she took hormones to make her more of what she knew she was.
Francesca Passalacqua
EDITOR’S NOTE
Material was excerpted from a number of diaries, all in the collection of Jeremiah Newton. Entries often spanned several years and are in no particular chronological order. The most dramatic is a spiral-bound notebook initially filled with young Jimmy’s notes from junior high school classes that segues in later pages to the razor-sharp wit and poignant observations of the mature Candy.
Handwriting styles vary widely in these journals as Candy “tried on” various psychological roles. Many of the entries are drafts of letters to friends and admired stars, and bits of dialogue from movies she loved, which mingle freely with her own witticisms. True to her essence, it is impossible to determine where actual events (“real life”) end and fantasy begins.
Spelling and punctuation have been corrected throughout.
January 6 Monday
Today was the first day of school. Oh how I hate school! I have to get up at 7:00 a.m. promptly instead of 11:00 or 10:00 during my beautiful vacation. I can’t wait until the next one. Sue & I are friends again. Went over Karen’s today; her mother is strict, and Momma wouldn’t let me eat, she says I’m getting too fat. I am!!! It’s 11:00 p.m., I better go to sleep now.
January 7 Tuesday
Got up late this morning. Got to school (prison) very late. I walked home with Ronald Esposito and it was snowing at 2:30 p.m. and until 11:30 p.m. It’s 11:30 now, and it’s still snowing. Made a soap carving today it came out awful. It was supposed to be a fish. I didn’t have Gym today. I lost my gym suit. Goodie Gumdrops. I HATE gym. Nobody likes it, you have to take showers & do exercises & all. Phooey. The snow is so deep there may not be school tomorrow. YIPPIE.
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