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fame, create stars almost regardless of talent, like Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-made” artworks, stars made stars simply through being deemed stars by the artist. Candy was perhaps the most compelling member of Warhol’s entourage. Blessed with good looks and loads of acting talent, through force of will Candy Darling became the incarnation of the old-school Hollywood stars that both the young boys Jimmy Slattery and Andrew Warhola had adored. Although one of Candy’s most prominent characteristics, besides her beauty, was her sharp wit and comedic skill as an actress, this, unlike so many drag acts, was no send-up of femininity, not even an act, beyond the sense in which each of us, in constructing a persona, puts on an act. This probably accounts for Candy’s enduring mystique and appeal. The fact of being a male impersonating a woman, a movie star, was audacious (even illegal) in itself, yet Candy’s own behavior, unlike that of so many members of Warhol’s troupe, was not flamboyant, but rather demure and ladylike, ultimately increasing her magnetism. |
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Dreadfully self-conscious about his looks, once Andy became a successful commercial illustrator in New York in the Fifties, he bought himself a nose job, which somewhat reduced the nose but did little to reduce the insecurity. As Warhol made the switch from commercial art to Pop Art and began to attract intense media attention, he cultivated his famous “blank” public persona as an unjudging observer or passive reflector of society. His own opinions were suppressed, or at least deeply encoded within the ambiguous images of his art. He also surrounded himself with an entourage of flamboyant characters who drew press attention with their antics and appearance, while in interviews Warhol himself often offered little more than “gee”, “wow”, or “yeah”. Andy’s entourage of performers and glamorous or outre personalities represented a symbiotic relationship, in that these people brought an air of notoriety, sexuality, street credibility, and cool to the inarticulate former illustrator and his art. Meanwhile fame-seekers stepped all over each other in order to get to Warhol, because he had demonstrated that, through his movies and the general media fascination with his scene, he could virtually arbitrarily endow people with |
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