Cynthia Carr’s ‘Candy Darling’ Maps the Creation of a Legend

Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer Icon Superstar maps the life of Greenwich Village starlet Candy Darling as she built her own legend. It’s a thoroughly researched biography cobbling together Darling and Warhol’s archives, unreliable and sometimes petty narrators, and quality journalism to create a full portrait of Darling. Carr shows us the edges of Darling, not just her moments in the sun with Warhol and friends, but the making of herself and surviving that took place during her short life.

Darling’s rise wasn’t necessarily meteoric; she became a legend in the Warhol scene but struggled to connect occasional starring roles into a reliable acting career. She would be sung about by The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed, model for famous photographers, and act in a Tennessee Williams play, but she spent almost her whole life without a stable home. Carr gives us a full portrait of Darling, not as a legend, but as a woman craning her neck against a very specific glass ceiling.

Darling was scraping by in the village during Valarie Solanas’ writing of the SCUM Manifesto, The Stonewall Riots, and the early women’s liberation movement and remain nearly apolitical. By 1962, she would be working in a beauty parlor on Long Island doing impressions of starlets while hairdressing. When asked why she didn’t take acting classes, she responded that she was already ready. In the words of a close friend who took care of Darling in her teens, she “wanted to be a star, not an actor.” There would always be something a little ethereal about Darling.

Carr records how Darling’s career blossomed in the weirdness of the off-off Broadway scene, though Darling always had her sight set on Hollywood. When she was hanging around on Greenwich with other “street queens” (though it’s unlikely she would have seen herself this way) she was often singled out as particularly glamorous. She would meet Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis who would eventually give her her first role, Glamour, Glory and Gold, a play riffing on the Hollywood the off-off Broadway crowd idolized. Darling would later meet Andy Warhol and become a “Warhol superstar.” As her career ramped up, her glamour, beauty, and poise made her into a sort of star, someone who people wanted to photograph or have make appearances in their movies. However, that beauty was coupled with the subversive reality of her transness. Even as she unironically projected blonde starlet, she could only attract the gaze of the counterculture.

Carr’s book doesn’t buff up the Darling legend. It becomes a story about the Warhol era and a world where the mainstream began to feel that transexuals were uncomfortably close to making it. Carr finds many testimonials that Darling was a good actress, albeit one that could never get over “playing herself” in productions. Yet, near the end of the book, Carr gives countless examples of publications that would lift her up in the chaotic off-off Broadway shows of her early years, and painfully put her down when she got to close to the sun. Even when critic Mel Gussow was praising her, he could only see her as a “female impersonator.”

Carr gives us ample evidence that in the way Darling talked about herself, and in the way she was received, she was never fully human. Darling was either seen as an ethereal starlet or derided for being trans. Carr’s research also gives us glimpses into where Darling contradicted herself, such as doing a bizarre photo shoot for artist Richard Bernstein’s Newspaper, and to the ways producers intentionally blocked her from roles because they were afraid to have “drag queens” in their productions. The portrait we get of Darling is full and honest. Though its hard not to root for Darling, Carr’s portrait of her doesn’t even make her seem very likable. Its refreshing to see a trans superstar with so much baggage from the zeitgeist portrayed so fully.

If you are a fan of the Warhol scene, or interested in how a trans woman like Darling formed her identity in the 60s and 70s, this book is for you. The stories are delightful, as are the in-depth looks at the bizarre people who populated the Village at the time. For its size, the book is surprisingly bingeable, and Carr’s depth of research and writing make it possible to fall deeply into Darling’s world.

Image courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux