GLR September-October 2024

pio, but he may just be too guarded to make himself that vul nerable. Writing about the time that AIDS first reared its ugly head, he notes that “my fears of sex ran deeper than that. It was a fear of what would happen if I really let myself go and al lowed myself to be submerged into the realm of total abandon.” But does he let himself go? Not in these pages! Although he preaches the importance of being “loose and spontaneous,” his approach here is rigid and controlled. He seems to have forgot

ten the sage advice of his high school drama teacher: “don’t take life too fucking seriously.” RuPaul gives you details but not much depth. For all his talk about self-discovery, he’s unwilling or unable to challenge ideas he’s previously asserted about himself. This book is long on self-mythologizing and short on true self-reflection. Rather than uncovering something new, The House of Hidden Meanings pays homage to the legend he created long ago.

On Her Way to Warhol

L ITTLE JIMMY SLATTERY was too pretty to be a boy. Born James Lawrence Slattery in 1944 to James and Theresa (“Terry”) Slattery, in Queens, New York, Jimmy was preternaturally beautiful even as an infant. When his mother entered him in the Gertz department store beautiful baby contest, he won the title “Most Beautiful Baby Girl.” Throughout his youth, Jimmy suffered the

acting … [she would] stop in the middle of doing someone’s hair and do imitations at the drop of a hat.” She began to reinvent herself, dressing and presenting as a fe male. She assumed the name Candy and, with friends from the salon, started ventur ing into the City. These friends were quick with advice about make-up, clothes, flirt ing, and other aspects of behaving “like a woman.” After leaving DeVern’s salon, she remained unemployed and began discreetly turning tricks on her forays into the City. Candy dreamed of being an even bigger star than her idol Kim Novak. And although she never quite acquired that level of fame, she quickly made a name for herself, acting in friends’ Off-Off-Broadway plays and starring in productions at La Mama E.T.C. She became friends and collaborators with avant garde theater folk like Charles Ludlam, Jeremiah Newton, and Jackie Curtis. She acted in Glamour, Glory and Gold opposite a young Robert DeNiro. She made films in Munich with Ger man director Werner Schroeter. Due to her uncanny beauty, she was photographed by heavyweights like Francesco Scavullo and Richard Avedon. She was close friends with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, and she met and befriended Christine Jor gensen, the first celebrated gender reassignment surgery patient.

H ANK T ROUT

CANDY DARLING Dreamer, Icon, Superstar by Cynthia Carr Farrar, Straus and Giroux 364 pages, $30.

emotional and physical abuse of classmates and others, partic ularly from his drunken, gambling-addicted father, who was fre quently violent with Terry when on one of his drinking binges. Jimmy’s older half-brother (from Terry’s first marriage) War ren later stated: “I cannot remember a time in our childhood of being happy and at peace when my stepfather was around.” As he got older, Jimmy’s estrangement from his father also grew. James Slattery seems to have despised his “pretty” son early on, and the feeling was mutual. To escape the torments of home and school, Jimmy retreated into a fantasy world populated by the most glamourous movie stars of the 1930s and ‘40s, with a special affinity for Kim Novak (in Picnic ) and other “blond bombshells.” As the taunt ing escalated in high school, now in Massapequa (north of NYC), Jimmy’s sense of isolation deepened. He created excuse after excuse to stay home from school and immersed himself in every B or C movie he found on daytime TV’s Million Dollar Movie . He gravitated toward the girls in the neighborhood, eat ing lunch with them and joining them for jump rope while the other boys played stickball in the street. He quit school as soon as he turned sixteen and went looking for work and a place to fit in. Cynthia Carr’s new, rigorously researched biography Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar traces the short, difficult, and remarkable life of Candy Darling from her early school years through her painful death from leukemia and lymphoma in 1974 at age 29. Delving into Candy’s and others’ extensive archives, Carr gives us Candy in all her tortured, driven, some what delusional, supremely fabulous life. After leaving high school, Candy entered the DeVern School of Cosmetology and then began working in DeVern’s salon, where, according to a coworker, Lorraine, Candy was “[a]lways Hank Trout, a frequent contributor to these pages, is the former editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. 30

TheG & LR Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, 1972. Richard Avedon.