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Amos Lassen wrote on 01/25/2012:

Many of you are too young to remember Candy Darling, the drag queen transsexual Andy Warhol superstar. In the 1970’s after she achieved fame was homeless and penniless. Here was a former underground movie star barely eking out an existence. We know that Warhol did not pay his actors very much and Darling was responsible for the success of two of Warhol’s films, “Flesh” and “Women in Revolt”. Darling became famous but she remained poor.

It seemed that when you saw Warhol back then he was with Darling and people lived to look at her. Lou Reed sang about her in “Candy Says” and she was the one person who opened the door for RuPaul and Divine to walk through. She was enslaved to fame before fame and money went hand in hand. Darling was a lost soul sailing on the ocean of life and we learn all about her in James Rasin’s documentary “Beautiful Darling”. We see interviews with John Waters, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz and Michael J. Pollard. We learn that she was a goddess who acquired a following and she could pass for a true woman.

Darling was born James L. Slattery in 1944 and she worshipped Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor. She sounded like Jackie Kennedy Onassis and she also threw in a little Marilyn Monroe. She looked pure woman with an angel face and men were fooled by her. She even appeared Off-Broadway in a play by Tennessee Williams.

She was the first to make drag commonplace and one of the first transsexuals to use hormones. She was a vamp who owned her femininity and she was sad. It was Warhol who built her up but who was also responsible for her downfall. But she got cancer, (some said as a result of the hormones she took), and she was gone soon. This film is what we have to remember her by.