Like her contemporary Edie Sedgwick, who also died too young, Candy Darling was one of Andy Warhol's superstars: attractive young people famed for their youth and attractiveness. They did a little acting, a little modeling, and a lot of showing up at the right places at the right times. As journalist Glenn O'Brien puts it, "Candy was an artist, and she was her own artwork." The proof lies in the many times she sat for major portrait artists, like Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon.
If she wasn’t the only transgender member of Warhol's Factory, she was certainly the most glamorous. Lou Reed's scene-snapshot song "Walk on the Wild Side" mentions both her and Holly Woodlawn, a speaker in the film, by name. As a suburban New York kid, she looked up to flaxen-haired goddesses such as Kim Novak, who once responded to a fan letter with an 8" X 10" glossy and words of encouragement. She longed to be that beautiful, that famous—that iconic. Though she speaks in a lower register, Chloë Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry) reads revealing diary passages that illustrate the fears and longings that drove her (Candy spoke in more of a breathy, Marilyn Monroe-like manner).
The non-chronological structure of James Rasin’s 2010 documentary also proves distancing at first, but he offers a well-rounded look at her life through interviews with Factory familiars like Fran Lebowitz, who wrote for Interview, and Paul Morrissey who directed her in 1971’s Women in Revolt. The range of voices recalls George Plimpton and Jean Stein’s 1982 Edie: American Girl, an oral history of Sedgwick. The primary speaker, producer Jeremiah Newton, knew Candy the best. During the film, he installs a headstone at her gravesite and shares audio interviews with associates, including a friend who found her transition discomforting, and home-movie footage in which she acts out scenes from classic films and cavorts with Factory habitués, like Dennis Hopper and Jane Fonda.
As a few speakers note, trans women couldn't wear feminine apparel in public in the 1960s or cops would throw them in jail. Morrissey remembers her living hand to mouth despite the stylish façade, and no one knows much about her love life, including Jeremiah, who served as more of an acolyte than a romantic partner. As he reminisces about Candy, there’s a sense that he never really moved on after her passing. Filmmaker John Waters, an admirer, recounts the way playwright Tennessee Williams championed her through his 1972 play Small Craft Warnings, helping her to establish a reputation beyond Warhol’s world. It could’ve marked a new chapter in her life, but then tragedy intervened, and she didn’t live to see her 30th birthday.
Though Lebowitz makes a few comments about trans women that seem insensitive in retrospect, Rasin has otherwise crafted a sympathetic portrait of an unhappy kid who grew up to become the glittering star of her childhood dreams, even if her time in the spotlight was relatively brief and not always as fulfilling as she had hoped. Recommended.