Candy does not seem to have had the head for business that Warhol famously did, but her attitude was professional and hardworking, and she, like Warhol himself, was not plagued by the addictions that harmed so many others in their milieu.

Candy’s sincere goal was to become a successful actress, and she took this as far as nature, and the mores of the time and place, would permit. Friends report she was deeply disappointed when she failed to land the title role in the Hollywood production of Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal's raunchy satire about a gorgeous she-male who wreaks havoc. As usual, Candy handled this with a quip, saying “They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite."

Association with the Factory brought little money but much fame. Bob Colacello writes that when he was introduced to Candy in the early Seventies, as an impressionable young man, it was as exciting as it would have been to meet Carole Lombard in 1930’s Hollywood. She was in great demand to attend the most glittering of parties. However, in her farewell note to her friends, written shortly before her death from cancer at the age of twenty-nine, Candy wrote

that she “felt too empty to go on in this unreal existence. I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death.” Candy had previously confided to her diary doubts over continuing to live as a woman, musing over moving to another city and living as “something else”: “I don’t have to act like a woman or a man, just be myself.” We will have to wonder where this strong-willed and imaginative person’s evolution would have led next, as illness and death intervened.

Warhol was notorious for failing to cope with mortality, sometimes seeming remarkably cruel in his avoidance of these events. For example, he had been exceptionally close to his own mother and yet reputedly never visited her after she went into a nursing home, did not attend her funeral, and did not even inform his close friends that she had died. He would continually shock people with his unemotional response to the deaths of those whom he had known well. True to form, though he sent little gifts through mutual friends, he did not visit Candy in the hospital during her grueling illness, nor did he attend her funeral.

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