Transgender pioneer Candy Darling (left) was part of Andy Warhol's circle in New York in the 1970s.
The teenage boy from Long Island knew what he wanted. It was to be a she -- and not just any woman but a movie star like his sultry idol, Kim Novak in "Picnic."
As a 14-year-old writing in his diary, Jimmy Slattery envisioned a future that was part dream, part payback: "Someday I'll be a movie star, that's it, and I'll be rich and famous and have all the friends I want." He even sketched a long-haired beauty in a slinky gown that would match the person and personality he created.
"Beautiful Darling" chronicles the life of Candy Darling, who became part of Andy Warhol's cinematic circle at the Factory in New York before dying in 1974 at age 29 of lymphoma.
- Rating: No MPAA rating but R in nature.
The transgender pioneer had a life celebratory -- watching herself on screen at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood -- and sad, crashing on friends' couches in New York, going to beauty-culture schools for perms and subsisting on day-old bread, bean soup and peanut butter.
The documentary dances around the suggestion that Candy was forced to be a hustler to survive. But since it counts devoted friend Jeremiah Newton as a producer, "Beautiful Darling" teeters on the brink of darkness but never dives in, preferring to only delicately dent the cocoon Candy had spun for herself.
She was a master of illusion, and actress Helen Hanft recalls Candy attending a reading along with Ms. Hanft's father and uncle. The men acted very courtly around her and stood up when she left.
Told that Candy had not been born a woman (she took hormone pills but never underwent sex-change surgery), Ms. Hanft's father said, "God bless her. She certainly pulled it off."
Director James Rasin uses excerpts from Candy's diaries read by actress Chloe Sevigny, archival photos and documents, and footage and interviews with such famous faces as filmmaker John Waters, writer Fran Lebowitz and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, who suggested Candy saw Warhol as her Louis B. Mayer.
The Pittsburgh native cast her in underground movies such as "Flesh" and "Women in Revolt" but he didn't have the mainstream audience or movie taste of the MGM mogul. But as writer Glenn O'Brien ventures, Warhol and Candy were two of a kind.
"I think a lot of artists, their greatest work is themselves. I think Andy is in that category as well, and Candy was an artist, and she was her own artwork."
After all, she was born in 1944, a long time before Chaz Bono wrote a book and revealed details of the transition from Chastity Bono to Chaz on TV talk shows. Cross-dressers ran the risk of arrest, for starters.
The movie includes only a single line about how abusive Candy's father reportedly was and skims the surface of her mother, who once was supportive but later made a fresh start that did not include mention or memory of her child. And how did Candy feel when, as the movie suggests, Warhol tired of her?
The Andy Warhol Museum screened this movie in September and launched a small Candy Darling installation that will be on view through Sept. 25.
Today, the film opens for a regular run at the Oaks Theater in Oakmont, and watching it is like peering into one of Warhol's famous cardboard storage boxes. It's part time capsule, part glimpse of the underground starmaking machinery and a brief walk on the wild side, as Lou Reed so famously sang.
Movie editor Barbara Vancheri: bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632. Read her Mad About the Movies blog at www.post-gazette.com/movies.First published on May 20, 2011 at 12:00 am
Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11140/1147797-120.stm?cmpid=movievideo.xml
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