The Warhol “Superstar” Candy Darling and the Fight to Be Seen

Candy Darling died, of cancer, in 1974, when she was just twenty-nine, a full decade before I moved to Manhattan, but so great was her legend that there was still much to remember her by. Theatre folks recalled her inspired performances in works by playwrights ranging from Jackie Curtis to Tennessee Williams, while others had never missed a chance to see her in art-house movies by Warhol, Werner Schroeter, and Mario Monicelli, among others. Then, there were the still images. Like Marilyn Monroe—another brilliantly constructed persona—Darling was a master at projecting energy in a two-dimensional medium, by which I don’t mean that Candy, who grew up in Massapequa Park, on Long Island, radiated physical joy, like Marilyn cavorting in the California surf. If anything, her energy was of a blondness turned inside out: no matter how much she smiled or gave come-hither looks, she was a melancholy urban creature, protected by a sense of irony that sometimes lit her from within or lit up the crummy hotel rooms and park benches where she posed. (In Laura Rubin’s shots of Candy in Brighton Beach in 1971, she looks not windswept but uncomfortable.)