Candy Darling: The Real Story Behind Two Lou Reed Songs
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Candy Darling died at 29, broke and largely uninsured, having spent most of her adult life unable to walk into certain bars without risking arrest for the dress she was wearing. She also spent those same years being photographed by Richard Avedon, cast by Tennessee Williams and mourned, when the end came, by Andy Warhol crying for the only time anyone ever saw. Two of Lou Reed's most enduring songs trace back to her specifically, and most people who know one have never heard of the other.
Quick Answers
Is Walk on the Wild Side about Candy Darling? One full verse of Lou Reed's 1972 solo hit is about her specifically, alongside separate verses about Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro and Jackie Curtis.
Is Candy Says about Candy Darling? Yes, the whole song. It's a Velvet Underground track from 1969, written entirely in her voice, and it's about her alone rather than shared with anyone else.
The Boy Who Took the Train Into the City
Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery on November 24, 1944, in Queens, and grew up in Massapequa Park on Long Island. Her father, Jim Slattery, was a violent alcoholic who spent most of his time at the racetrack, and her parents split when she was young. Her mother, Theresa Phelan, worked as a bookkeeper at the Jockey Club in Manhattan and did her best to hold things together while raising James alone.
James grew up obsessed with old Hollywood, skipping school to watch classic films and idolising Kim Novak specifically, to the point of running his own small Kim Novak fan club as a teenager. In 1961 he enrolled in a cosmetology course at the DeVern School in Baldwin, Long Island, learning hair and makeup skills he'd later use to build the Candy Darling look from scratch. At seventeen, his mother confronted him after hearing rumours he'd been seen in a local gay bar dressed as a woman. He left the room without answering and came back dressed en femme, which settled the question without a single word.
There's a surviving pair of photos, taken in the family's Massapequa Park living room, showing James at twenty dressed as a man in one and as a woman in the other. She'd take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan, spend the evening in the downtown club scene, then quietly become James again before heading home. Her mother's rule was blunt: don't come back until after dark, and don't let the neighbours see. Candy herself got around the awkwardness by calling the Massapequa Park house her country house whenever she mentioned it to friends in the city.
From Hope Slattery to Candy Darling
The name took years to settle. She first tried on Hope Slattery around 1963, after she'd started visiting Manhattan gay bars and seeing a doctor on Fifth Avenue for hormone injections. According to Holly Woodlawn's own memoir, Hope Slattery drifted into Hope Dahl, then Candy Dahl, then briefly Candy Cane, before Darling stuck for good. Woodlawn's account credits a friend nicknamed Taffy Tits Sarcastic, who called her darling so often on their nights out that it simply became her name. Jackie Curtis told a different version, that the name Hope came from an off-Broadway actress named Hope Stansbury she'd briefly lived with behind Caffe Cino, and that Candy came from nothing more complicated than a love of sweets.
During this same stretch she worked for a while as a barmaid at Slugger Ann's, an East Village bar owned by Ann Uglialoro, better known as Slugger Ann, who happened to be Jackie Curtis's grandmother. Slugger Ann had earned her nickname decades earlier as a taxi dancer, decking men who got too handsy on the dance floor, and by the time Candy pulled pints there the bar had become a regular hangout for the same circle of downtown performers who'd soon end up in Warhol's films.
A Stage Debut Shared With Robert De Niro
Before Warhol ever entered the picture, Jackie Curtis had already written Candy a starring role in her 1967 play Glamour, Glory and Gold, a send-up of old Hollywood melodrama staged off-off-Broadway. The same production happened to be the stage debut of a then completely unknown Robert De Niro, who played every male role in the show. It's a strange footnote that rarely makes it into shorter accounts of Candy's career, that years before either of them were famous, she was sharing a stage with a future two-time Oscar winner in a play about a fading movie star.
Finding the Factory
Candy met writer and producer Jeremiah Newton on a train from his home in Flushing, Queens, in the summer of 1966, and the two stayed close friends and off-and-on roommates for the rest of her life. She first spotted Andy Warhol in person at a gay after-hours club called The Tenth of Always, where he and Lou Reed regularly drank between 1968 and 1972. She was there with Jackie Curtis, who ended up inviting Warhol to see one of her plays, and Candy's own path into the Factory's orbit followed soon after.
By most accounts, Warhol adored her more than almost any other superstar on his roster. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol's Interview editor at the time, when Candy's diagnosis reached Warhol years later, it was the only time in seventeen years that Colacello ever saw him cry. It's a detail that sits oddly against Warhol's famously flat public persona, and it says something about how much she meant to him personally rather than just as a face for his films. If you're curious what else was happening in Warhol's orbit around this time, there's a genuinely strange footnote involving one of his drawings and the moon.
Flesh, Women in Revolt and a Tennessee Williams Play
Candy's film career runs through two Warhol productions specifically. She appeared in Flesh in 1968, and then took a lead role in 1971's Women in Revolt, a satire of the women's liberation movement shot in the direct aftermath of Valerie Solanas shooting Warhol in 1968. She shared the screen in both films with Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, and the three of them became inseparable in the public imagination as Warhol's core trio of trans superstars, even though their personalities and relationships with each other were far more complicated than that packaging suggested.
She was photographed by Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon, both of whom treated her the way they'd treat any working actress rather than a novelty, and in 1972 Tennessee Williams personally cast her in his play Small Craft Warnings. That role moved her from off-off-Broadway obscurity into a genuine Off-Broadway run, and it's one of the clearest signs that people who worked with her took her seriously as a performer rather than as a Warhol curiosity.
One Velvet Underground Song, One Lou Reed Solo Hit
These two songs get mixed up constantly, and they're actually quite different beasts. Candy Says came first. It's a genuine Velvet Underground song, the opening track on the band's self-titled third album, recorded in late 1968 and released in March 1969 while the group was still together. Reed wrote it entirely in Candy's voice, working through her private discomfort with her own body and her frustration at not knowing what other people quietly understood about themselves that she was still trying to figure out for herself. He felt too close to the material to sing it himself, so he handed lead vocals to bassist Doug Yule instead, whose voice he thought suited the song's gentleness better than his own.
Walk on the Wild Side is a different animal entirely. By the time it came out in 1972, the Velvet Underground had broken up and Reed was recording as a solo artist, working through a rough patch that had him briefly back at his parents' house on Long Island typing invoices for his father's accounting firm. David Bowie, fresh off his own Ziggy Stardust breakthrough, brought Reed to Trident Studios in London that August and produced the song alongside guitarist Mick Ronson for Reed's second solo album, Transformer. Reed borrowed the title from Nelson Algren's 1956 novel of the same name, and built the song from four short character verses about people from the Factory scene, Candy among them, plus Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro and Jackie Curtis. Her verse touches on giving up masculinity to become the woman she wanted to be, and the kind of attention that drew from men who didn't always treat it with much respect.
Reed later said he worried the real people the song was about would be angry when he got back to New York. Instead, Candy told him she'd memorised every line and wanted to record her own album called Candy Darling Sings Lou Reed. It never happened, but it's a good measure of how she actually felt about being immortalised rather than mocked. Walk on the Wild Side went on to become Reed's only US top twenty hit and his signature song, while Candy Says quietly remains the more personal, more sympathetic of the two, and the one written when nobody involved had any idea either of them would still be discussed half a century later.
Fame Without Money or Safety
None of this fame translated into financial security. Candy spent most of her adult life broke, sometimes without a fixed place to live, and getting by on the generosity of friends like Newton. She could technically be arrested in New York City simply for wearing a dress in public during this period, which meant a level of fame most people would assume came with basic legal protection actually came with none at all.
Her biographer Cynthia Carr has pointed out that even the two Lou Reed songs, treated today as loving tributes, were written with a mocking edge that fit the casual cruelty typical of how trans women were discussed at the time, warmth and derision tangled up together in the same three minutes. It's a useful corrective to the version of this story that treats 1970s downtown New York as some kind of uncomplicated safe haven for her, when the reality was closer to grudging, conditional acceptance dressed up as glamour.
The Photograph on Her Deathbed
Candy was diagnosed with lymphoma, treated at the same small Catholic hospital, Columbus-Mother Cabrini, where Warhol himself had been rushed after Solanas shot him. Photographer Peter Hujar visited her there in 1973 and made what became his most famous image, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, showing her carefully made up, surrounded by flowers, with a single black rose on the pillow beside her. In a note she sent Hujar afterward, she said she wanted the pictures published because her fans would feel cheated if they didn't get to see her in her hospital bed.
She wrote a farewell letter around the same time, admitting that despite her friends and a career finally on the upswing, she'd lost any real desire to keep going. She died on March 21, 1974, at just 29 years old. Newton later produced the 2010 documentary Beautiful Darling, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and arranged for her ashes to be interred at Cherry Valley Cemetery in upstate New York.
What Outlasted Her
Hujar's photograph found a second life decades later as the cover art for Antony and the Johnsons' Mercury Prize winning album I Am a Bird Now in 2005, introducing Candy's image to an entire generation that had never heard of the Factory. Cynthia Carr's biography, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, took ten years to write and finally arrived in 2024, built partly on interview tapes Newton recorded with roughly fifty people back in the 1970s, material that sat untouched for decades after he abandoned his own attempt at the book. It's a scene worth picturing against the wider backdrop of the city she was moving through at the time, and this look at 1970s New York through Camilo José Vergara's photographs gives a good sense of just how rough and unglamorous the city actually was underneath all that Factory shine.
One Velvet Underground song and one Lou Reed solo hit, written three years apart on either side of a band breaking up, both trace back to the same person, and most people who can hum one have no idea the other one exists too. Candy Darling built herself into a movie star out of a Long Island bedroom and a stolen train ride into Manhattan, and by the time she died at 29 she'd already become one of the most quietly influential figures New York's underground ever produced.
