JOEL SCHUMACHER: “The wild stuff began coming out of the woodwork. People showing off. ‘Look at me! I’ve got something to say! I am something!’ And the more freakish you could be about it, so much the better. Look at Tiger Morse, who was a society girl from a good family wearing very straight clothes, and all of a sudden the next day she was a speed freak with her hair wired, wearing electric dresses and green glasses. And then dead. These insane people wallowed in self-destruction… almost as if they were trying to punish their parents and the world of rigid systems that had been so painful to them in their formative years.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Ultra Violet was sitting next to Dali and she did something great – she wore the exact same outfit as the day we met her – a pink Chanel miniskirt suit with the same boots and her hair the same way. And she had a bracelet that was a Brillo pad, she said that after she was done using it as jewelry she would clean her pot with it. And she had another bracelet made out of eight inches of the corrugated cardboard that they wrap bottles in, sprayed gold, and glued together. It looked great. I guess Ultra is creative in a way.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “As we leave the restaurant, Dali signs the tablecloth instead of the check. He says, ‘Let’s have lunch tomorrow and every day.’ Paparazzi photograph us again. I realize how famous Dali is. I am dazzled by the elegance of Dali’s suits, the drama of his cape, the symbolism of his Faberge gold-knobbed cane, which he holds up in a pontifical gesture. When Dali enters a room, every head turns to take in his famed moustache and his luxuriant dark hair, falling to a tie patterned in gold brocade. His tawny leashed ocelot prances ahead of him. He travels with a bizarre entourage of dwarf hermaphrodites, cross-eyed models, twins, nymphets, incredible beauties, always offset by a single creature of surpassing ugliness.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Dali drops me at Roger Vivier, the custom shoe and boot maker. I order the most expensive silver leather boots, with square toes and two seams running from tip to tip. The boots resemble the foreleg of a horse’s suit of armor. They turn out to be so excruciatingly painful that I only wear them about three times. The boots are bought to go with my silver outfit – silver metal miniskirt, silver blazer, silver stockings, silver boots. Sometimes I paint my front teeth silver, streak my hair with silver spray, and wear silver eye shadow. I carry a sterling-silver attaché case. I also have a silver evening coat with a silver-fox collar, silver underwear, handkerchief, nightgown. Make no mistake about it: I will be noticed. I crave recognition. Recognition is as necessary to me as oxygen. Without it, I will wither and die.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “In ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Viva is cast as Gretel, Taylor Mead as Peter Pan, Amanda Tree and Paul Jabarra as party guests, and I am a Superstar. When we report for the first day’s shooting, on June 28, 1968, at the Filmways Studio in East Harlem in Manhattan, Andy is not with us. He is in intensive care at Columbus Hospital after the attempt on his life by the crazed Valerie Solanas.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Ultra finally told me how she got sick. It was all over the artist Ed Ruscha. She had fallen madly in love with him and he had a wife and he just couldn’t handle it, and she just went too crazy because she was too in love with him, she let her whole nervous system fall apart. And that’s when she was eating a piece of gold every day – somebody told her that Indian people eat gold or something like that, and it ate a hole in her stomach.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “My debut in the New York theater produces much excitement. I love the discipline of reporting every night to the Ridiculous Theater on the Bowery, where I play Natolia, a queen from Saturn who speaks Middle English, and Ondine plays Zabina, a queen from Mars, in Charles Ludlam’s play ‘Conquest of the Universe.’ The curtain does not go up until Ondine, in full view of the actors, inserts a needle into his arm, pulls it out, and gives the actor’s blessing, ‘Break a leg.’ I respond, ‘Break an arm.’ Then we go on. I invite Marcel Duchamp to watch my performance. The box office attendant runs back to tell the cast, ‘Duchamp is here.’ Ondine screams, ‘Who the fuck is Duchamp?’”
MARY WORONOV: “In New York, no one had a place to sleep. We were too high on speed to sleep, and crashing, shoplifting, and mooching were much more chic than getting a job or having your own place.”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “In those days Brigid was evil. Her mouth, her look. I think it was that paranoia from that speed, and basically being unhappy. She always scared the hell out of me.”
JIM CARROLL: “Brigid was a speed freak, in the truest sense of the word. She had been on a virtual nonstop run of speed, in one form or another, for the last ten years. You’d think she’d have wasted into one of those arcane, babbling exclamation points with shoes by this time. The fact was she had to be, let’s not mince words, the fattest speed junkie in the history of pharmaceuticals.”
JIM CARROLL: “The telephone conversation was Brigid’s art form. She taped every telephone conversation in and out of her room at the Washington Hotel. Her room was like the brain of a perverse child. There were little furry things everywhere. She covered every inch of every wall with some kind of art or curio. Some of the works were fantastic… all the biggies – Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, were represented. But it was all so crammed together that it just melted into one abstraction with a feeling of vertigo. Especially with speed: it was like standing out on a ledge twenty-three flights up, alone with the attraction of the zenith.”
VIVA: “Brigid’s an artist now, and she went into this gallery… She cut out these little photographs of cocks, dropped them in the northwest corner of every art gallery in New York. Then she dropped the leftovers on the northwest corner of 57th and 5th, and an art critic picked them up out of the gutter and wrote a whole article about Brigid’s ‘art.’"
TOM O’DONNELL: “Brigid was the best person I met at Max’s Kansas City. Of all the people I met there, she was the funniest, most intelligent. I never had a bad moment with Brigid. I used to hang on every word she said. She would play me these tapes of her mother and father eating dinner. She had all these incredible tapes. One of Viva’s sisters was going out with Kissinger and she put a tape recorder in her bag, and had her tape their conversation.”
BRIGID: “I went to the Colony for lunch the other day with one tit hanging out."
WILLOW: “Did you really do that?”
BRIGID: “Of course!”
WILLOW: “And what happened when you did it?”
BRIGID: “They said I could have a table but Viva had to leave because she was in pants!”
DANNY FIELDS: “Brigid Polk would be running around the room with a towel around her waist, a big needle in one hand, sticking people in the butt with a methamphetamine concoction she’d made up. Then I started to see real amphetamine people who would cover the walls of the house with postage stamps one at a time.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Brigid was going through her old files, she has the whole decade documented. She has what she did every minute written down and then on tapes. She did so much. If people found out all you could do on amphetamine, it would really get popular again.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Brigid and I talked about old times. She was on amphetamines for twenty-three years. Isn’t that something? I mean think of it, twenty-three years!”
PENNY ARCADE: “I remember when Brigid was doing all the cock prints and asshole prints of the boys in the back room, and here it is two or three years ago and I’m reading in the society column of the newspaper and it says, ‘Brigid Berlin, the daughter of Honey and Richard Berlin, is exciting everyone with her needlework.’ I couldn’t believe it. This woman was always shooting up, and now she was exciting everyone with her ‘needlework,’ and matrons are forming lines around the block at Martha’s on Park Avenue to buy up her one-of-a-kind sweaters.”
THOMAS KIEDROWSKI: “Originally, Tiger Morse sold jewelry and elegant hand-stitched dresses to a wealthy Upper East Side clientele from her shop at 780 Madison Avenue. This building was divided into separate fashion houses. A La Carte sold gorgeous custom-designed clothes, while The Gilded Lily specialized in European ready-to-wear. At Kaleidoscope, one could find vintage fashion along with a variety of antiques including Victorian figurines, old vending machines, and silver hairpin boxes in what Morse called ‘a country store.’ Morse’s nickname and boutique derived from the poem by William Blake; Warhol and his colleagues often referred to her as the Gilded Lily Lady.”
ANNIE FLANDERS: “People were doing incredible things in their lofts or in their apartments in the East Village. Plus there were masses of people in the country working with leather and beads, and expressing themselves through clothes rather than mass-marketing clothes. Tiger Morse was the most incredible of all the designers and one of the first major influences on fashion in America. She did the first American flag shirts. She had her store up on Madison Avenue covered in tinfoil. She had a painting of a farm that was covered in plastic and in the back when you sat down there was one of those cow toys; when you sat on it, it made the sound like a barnyard. She had trucks of antique clothes that she collected. She was originally one of the high-fashion ladies of America. Tiger would travel all around the world and buy all of these unique pieces, tapestries, jewels, and unique articles from strange countries, and incorporate them into the most elegant clothes. She designed clothes for Jackie Kennedy and all the leading society women in New York. And then she just completely went berserk. She left all her alligator handbags and fantastic thousand-dollar gowns when she got into speed and pills.”
J.P. RADLEY: “Tiger Morse, who I was seeing at the time, told me she learned how to shoot speed from Max Jacobson. Max was the original dealer of speed in this town. The original Dr. Feelgood. My mother, Pauline Trigere, went to him for a while. He was one of the big quacks. He put more people on speed. Tiger used to tell me that her family was somehow instrumental in saving Max from the Nazis. He was Jewish and being persecuted and they helped get him over to America in the 30s. Tiger went to work for him as an assistant at a fairly young age.”
ANDY WARHOL: "Tiger Morse opened her tiny new boutique called Teeny Weeny on upper Madison Avenue at the end of August, 1966. Her policy there was man-made materials only - vinyl, Mylar, sequins. There were mirror bricks all over the walls. Wherever I saw fragmented mirrors like that around a place, I'd take the hint that there was amphetamine not too far away - every A-head's apartment always had broken mirrors, smoky, chipped, fractured, whatever - just like the Factory did. And Tiger did take a lot of amphetamine. She always boasted, 'I am living proof that speed does not kill.'"
JOHN VACCARO: “Tiger had this fire and energy. She was one of the greats. She had those go-go dancers in the front window of her boutique. It was like tripping to go in there.”
CATHY DREW: “Tiger would come into Max’s on her roller skates and designer sunglasses, with her lunchbox filled with drugs. She would wear all these different outfits.”
DAVID JOHANSEN: “Tiger had these fur coats that she dyed Day-Glo colors.”
GERALDINE SMITH: “We never had any money. We never worked but we all wore the best clothes. We wore the most expensive Paraphernalia clothes. Plus, we would steal clothes. One time I stole a dress in Countdown, right off the dummy. Everything was a trip. We were on acid a lot. A friend of ours, Roberta, who had an apartment on Park Avenue and Thirtieth, took us under her wing. Her husband paid for it. He was very rich and she had divorced him, but he still paid for everything. So we started living there. Roberta introduced us to Tiger Morse, the hip fashion designer. She designed clothes for the Kennedys. Roberta would take us into Tiger’s store on Madison Avenue and Tiger would dress us and take us into Max’s. Tiger was so ahead of her time. She made those silver short, tiny dresses. No one could touch her. She was always on speed. She and Brigid would get on the phone and they’d never stop talking.”
TIGER MORSE: “I’m a swan in a world of ducks.”
THOMAS KIEDROWSKI: “At Kaleidoscope, Tiger acquired a small army of seamstresses all ready to apply beads and brocade onto dazzling silk, gold-strewn paisley and flowered prints, embodying the sixties fashion revolution. Morse, a modern day explorer, boasted of thirteen round-the-world tours to find exotic silks and other fabrics for her shop. She often encouraged Warhol and his entourage to come up to her shop for impromptu parties where films were screened and reflected off the mirrored tiles lining the walls – much like an actual kaleidoscope.”
RONNIE LANDFIELD: “Tiger showed up at the Pace Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street when I was working there part-time, helping out with installations. She was wearing this short white fur coat and electric miniclothes made out of what looked like colored cellophane. She talked a mile a minute, and she was very loud. She was always moving around and taking everything in. I thought she was totally incredible. I ran into her again at a Psychedelic Convention in Toronto. It was instant attraction, powerful and immediate, but not sexual, and we hung out for three days. We shared pizza with Allen Ginsberg, talked to Richard Alpert, hung out with the Fugs, and by the time we got back to New York we were pretty good friends. Then in the seventies I had this disturbing dream that the phone rang and it was Tiger. She told me to come see her right away – she insisted. I told her no, and then she said, ‘Good, you stay home.’ We found out later that day that Tiger had died that night.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Andrea was rich already – born rich. Unfortunately, she was also born crazy. Her real name was Andrea Feldman, and she lived alone in a huge, luxurious apartment on upper Park Avenue, complete with terraces, statuary, and even a waterfall. Her parents set Andrea up in the penthouse, provided her bank account with a gigantic monthly deposit, and sent a doctor around every few months to see if Andrea was any crazier. If the doctor decided she was, they would put her away in a ‘rest home’ for a while, after which she would return to Park Avenue.”
JIM CARROLL: “Andrea was the newest of Andy’s stable of whacked-out superstars, a Jewish princess from Queens who had adopted the name of her mentor, i.e. Andrea Warhol. She was amazingly sexy, with a body that would fit balanced in your hands like a boxed edition of Proust.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Andrea entertained often, and Wayne County and I became frequent guests. Once, when we arrived she had completely taken apart the air-conditioning system and had the parts scattered all over her living-room floor. She explained that she was looking for microphones planted there by the nuns from the Catholic school across the street, who she believed were watching her. She went to Max’s back room nearly every night with Geraldine Smith, her best friend and star of ‘Flesh.’ One year she had her sixteenth birthday party at Max’s and arrived wearing the stunning black-and-white dress Cecil Beaton had designed for Julie Andrews for ‘My Fair Lady.’ In no time at all, she had taken it and everything else off and was standing on a table shoving the necks of champagne bottles up her vagina and then serving giggling guests from them. She worshiped Andy Warhol and even changed her name to Andrea Warhola for a time.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Andy is always cool. Only once do I see him lose his temper. Little Andrea Whips wants to be in a particular movie, and he does not include her. She is on drugs and she is furious. She screeches, ‘You fag, you asshole, you Warhole, asshole, Warhole…’ ‘Get her out of her, out, out – and never come back!’ Andy screams.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Andrea and I were engaged at the time and we were going to get married. It was sort of a play at first but it started to get serious. Her parents would commit her to Bellevue now and then to keep her under their thumb. Things seemed a little strange between us when I got back from doing ‘Pork,’ a play we were performing in England. It was real wild for a while there, and Andrea was acting very strange toward me, like she didn’t trust me. All of a sudden in the middle of all the mayhem, Andrea stood up on a chair and held a picture of Marilyn Monroe over her head, and she just stood there. And a couple of people at other tables said, ‘Oh, it’s Showtime!’ After a long time of just standing there, she said, ‘Marilyn died; love me while you can!’ The next day, she jumped from the fourteenth-floor window of her uncle’s Fifth Avenue apartment. That was her farewell to the back room.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “She had been showing signs of being disturbed throughout the summer, calling herself ‘Andrea Warhola,’ apparently in the hope that Andy would marry her. One day she had come to the Factory, her face covered with scabs and small sores. Someone said to Andy, ‘She’s very sick. Andrea should go to a hospital. Did you see her face?’ Andy replied matter-of-factly: ‘Well, she’s putting cigarettes out on her face. She always does that.’ One night in September, after writing letters to people with whom she had been fighting, she made a date with several friends, including the poet Jim Carroll, to whom she promised: ‘You’ll see something special.’ By the time Carroll arrived to meet her at her apartment on Fifth Avenue at Twelfth Street, police cars and an ambulance had already converged: Andrea had jumped out of a top-story window, clutching a can of Coca-Cola and a rosary.”
LARISSA: “There were so many people OD’ing at the Chelsea or dying in a fire or jumping off the roof that it was like an endless stream of loss, and so they all blend into one feeling of, ‘What is going on here? Why are all those people ending like that?’ Drugs were a big part. They were basically the biggest part of it. I remember Andrea Whips, and she was there every night at the big round table at the back of Max’s, and I remember her once saying to me, ‘you’re lucky you were never in an Andy movie.’ Well, I was never in an Andy movie because I was too shy to appear in front of a camera. But she said it in a strange way, and a few days later she jumped off a balcony of her mother’s apartment on Park Avenue. So it was a mixture of, you know, exposing yourself and taking drugs and wanting to be loved by Warhol, be the only one, you know, or by Jimi Hendrix, like this young woman who overdosed at the Chelsea. I was told to take care of her, but, you know, who can take care of people who are in that situation?”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Andy and his pudgy superstar Brigid Polk used to tape-record all of their phone conversations, which were mostly Andy saying, ‘And then what?’ while Brigid, high on speed, incessantly yapped on about the private lives of her Manhattan socialite family. Pat Hackett, Andy’s secretary at the Factory, transcribed the tapes onto hundreds of typewritten pages, which Andy then turned over to Tony Ingrassia to make into a play. Tony edited them into what became ‘Pork,’ a unique blend of Theatre of the Ridiculous and a pop-art sitcom, complete with toothpaste commercials. I played Amanda Pork, the character based on Brigid, Tony Zanetta was B. Marlowe (Andy Warhol), Jamie Andrews was Pall (Paul Morrissey), Wayne County was Vulva (Viva), Cyrinda Foxe was See Jane Run and Via Valentina was Miss Hell (composite characters), and a just-out-of-high-school Harvey Fierstein made his acting debut as Amelia (Pork’s mother’s maid). Leee Black Childers was, as always, Ingrassia’s stage manager.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Life at our Earl’s Court Square flat during the London run of ‘Pork’ was mostly a wonderful circus. Zanetta, Leee, and Jamie were bringing home boys of all kinds. One of them, Clive (with blue hair), became our maid. Wayne was transitioning more and more publicly each day into Jayne. Via was falling down constantly from taking too many Mandie (Mandrax). I had a country-rock band named Bronco living in my bedroom whenever they were in town. Friends from New York would come and stay with us. Rod Stewart would raid our closets, and journalists would turn up to do stories. The UK’s trashiest newspaper, ‘The News of the World,’ labeled us as ‘shocking’ and christened our apartment ‘Pig Mansion.’ Except for Via, with her constant pilfering of my liquid cocaine throat spray and the vicious tricks she sometimes played – like giving Jayne LSD and telling her it was a Mandie and giving Leee a Mandie and telling him it was penicillin – we all got along great at Pig Mansion.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “The night I saw the Jimi Hendrix Experience perform live at Salvation sticks in my mind like no other. I remember exactly what I was wearing – a white silk-crepe sleeveless turtleneck minidress (originally long, with an accompanying white ostrich-feather coat), chartreuse Day-Glo tights, clear plastic Queen Ann heels, a mango-colored Afro wig, and big, round, clear plastic sunglasses with orange lenses. And I wasn’t even on acid when I put that look together!”
CHERRY VANILLA: “I didn’t want to miss a trick in the sixties, a trick being what we called a sexual liaison or a guy with whom we would have a sexual liaison. So I went to Tiffany & Co. and had some elegant little cards printed that said, ‘You are beautiful, so am I,’ with my name and phone number at the bottom. Then, whenever I spotted a really cute guy on the subway, the street, or wherever, instead of letting him disappear from my life, I simply handed him a card. Nine out of ten called me and we took it from there. It was one of my most brilliant ideas ever and it paid off in spades as far as getting laid.”
DAVE THOMPSON: “The Warholian drag queens formed the core of another exclusive group, Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous, nominally based at the Sewer, a gay club on West Eighteenth. It was for this company that Curtis, in particular, would fashion bizarre little plays around the mores and immoralities of her own lifestyle. A tangled masterpiece of improvisation, ‘Femme Fatale: The Three Faces of Gloria’ developed out of Curtis’ relationship with the underground actors John Christian and Penny Arcade, both of whom were originally scheduled to appear in the play. Christian, however, was forced to drop out after he was afflicted, he claimed, with such severe agoraphobia that he could no longer leave his apartment. Curtis shrugged and offered the role to a young scenester and poetess named Patti Smith.”
PENNY ARCADE: “I was heavily involved with the downtown drug scene, with the quintessential non-hippie, black, gay, criminal, junkie culture of downtown New York. I was shooting speed. And I was whacked. I was a force of nature, let us say.”
PENNY ARCADE: “Our world, the Lower East Side downtown art scene, was filled with wildly talented people. There was an awareness of sadness. There was never any question that there were enormous wounds. But it was like, let’s put on a show to cover up all of this despair and misery. Our lives were bleak, so we filled them with glitter.”
PENNY ARCADE: “One day, while I was speeding my brains out at a coffee shop in Greenwich Avenue, somebody passed me a note that said, ‘To the girl in the green dress, what time do you get off work?’ I looked at it and said, ‘What’s this?’ The note was from Jackie Curtis, who was sitting at another table with a shopping bag filled with his plays and press clippings and God knows what.”
PENNY ARCADE: “What drag queens and fag hags had in common was a great love for 1930s dresses. That’s how we dressed. Jackie Curtis and I were always looking for clothes at thrift stores. And Jackie started dressing like I did – in old lady lace-up shoes that had the big thick Cuban heel, thirties dresses, and black tights. The tights were always shredded ‘cause we couldn’t afford to buy them all the time, and we just didn’t give a shit. And I always wore glitter at night, off stage.”
JIM CARROLL: “Jackie Curtis was underrated at everything she did. I suppose she’s best known as an actress and playwright, but she had endless talents in other areas as well. Some people had this bias against her, thinking everything she did was based on a gimmick, just because Jackie was actually a man in drag. I don’t call that a bias, I call it outright bigotry. I spent many wonderful nights with her at Max’s, as she talked of her dreams of Scandinavia and a sex change.”
JACKIE CURTIS: “I thought MGM, Paramount and 20th Century Fox and RKO, all those studios, were taking too long to get in touch with me. I just went over to the Factory and decided to get myself in film before it was too late… because that seemed to be the thing to do. If you were a Warhol Superstar, you had it made, it seemed. I was right in the neighborhood.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Our rent was $70 a month, and in it lived me, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, occasionally Candy Darling, Rita Red, Rio Grande, all in a one bedroom apartment. And it’s not like we interfered with each other’s sleeping arrangements, since no one slept. Everyone was just on speed all the time. Jackie would get up and you’d see her putting the speed in her coffee and she’d say, stirring her coffee frantically, ‘I don’t really take drugs, I just put a little something in my coffee in the morning, just to get me going.’”
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DAVE THOMPSON: “Unfortunately, it was not a happy family. They argued constantly, usually over money and whose turn it was to make sure the bills were paid. On one occasion, Jayne County recalled, it was Holly’s turn. Her welfare check had just arrived; she was off to cash it, she said, and then she would pay the utilities…”
JAYNE COUNTY: “So what does she do? She went off and bought a fucking feather boa. Came home and said, ‘Oh darling, isn’t it glamorous?’ Yes, but our electricity’s going to be cut off in two days!”
GRETCHEN BERG: “Jackie Curtis was like some flowers – they’re bright and happy during the day, but at dusk he started to get more and more melancholy. Some people are like that; they take on the coloring, the mood of the night. Jackie seemed to be more of a night creature in many ways. There was something tragic and very sad in his eyes, even when he smiled. He had the same sadness that you see in some gypsy children – mirth without happiness.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Once Jackie was confronted at a party by one of those intense revolutionaries that were so numerous and vociferous in the late sixties. Wild-eyed, frizzy-haired, and with little droplets of California hearty burgundy spraying as she talked, he pulled at her dress, pointed at the glitter on her eyelids and lips, and shouted, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Do you realize there’s a revolution on?’ Jackie looked at him and replied, ‘I do more for the revolution just walking down the street every day than you do with all your leaflets and pamphlets and crap.’”
PATTI SMITH: “Even here, in the land of the so-called drag queens, Wayne County, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis were not to be categorized so lightly. They were performance artists, actresses, and comediennes. Wayne was witty, Candy was pretty, and Holly had drama, but I put my money on Jackie Curtis. In my mind, she had the most potential. She would successfully manipulate a whole conversation just to deliver one of Bette Davis’ killer lines. And she knew how to wear a housedress. With all her makeup she was a seventies version of a thirties starlet. Glitter on her eyelids. Glitter in the hair. Glitter face powder. I hated glitter and sitting with Jackie meant going home speckled all over.”
CHERRY VANILLA: “Nudity and glitter were huge components of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. And since our audiences were made up largely of gay artistic stoners and proponents of fantasy and glamour, I could understand why both elements had such a big appeal.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “One morning, I had been out until 5 AM at a club called The Sewer with a creature called International Crisis, who was a drag queen, and Judy Garland, who wished that she was a drag queen. And I walk in and there’s Jackie, and she’s in her old lady dress, her black stockings with runs all up and down them. She’d been on speed, slapping glitter on everything, teasing her hair, going crazy, and then I walk in the door and I was the willing victim, and she whirls around and screams, ‘Ha ha someday everyone will look like me!’ And you know what? It came true. You can wear rags pinned together and glitter and smell and still be everyone’s idol.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “I ask Jackie about her childhood. She was raised by her mother and two aunts; the three sisters were completely in love with the movies. She shows me a dog-eared album filled with stills of Mae West, Joan Crawford, Garbo, and dozens of others. ‘This was my education,’ she says. I see a photo of Mae West cut from a magazine. The head has been amputated and replaced with a cut-out of Jackie’s face. ‘How strange.’ Jackie turns the page and points to a similarly decapitated Joan Crawford with Jackie’s face. ‘My mother and Aunt Josie did that. We worshiped the stars. It was not a dream. We entered the silver screen.”
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Jackie studied what’d gone before, in the way of who got away with what. Jackie’s particular case was hopeless, because she was a man in a dress who would never, ever look like a woman. Still, she studied it and she worked it and she passed it on, and what she passed on, among many things, was the concept of the Outrageous Lie. If the lie is so outrageous, not only can you get away with it, but it creates a center of glamour around you.”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “I had started going toward the Jackie Curtis look, that strange look with my hair all frizzed out. I wore even more eye makeup and plucked my eyebrows more. Plus I was doing a lot of speed, so I was so skinny. I stopped wearing bras… because the Twiggy look was in. And of course the thrift store look was in.”
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LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “While Jackie Curtis was in rehearsals for ‘Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit,’ a play she had written and was starring in, and which was being directed by John Vaccaro, things got a little out of hand. She and John fought constantly, and he eventually took all her clothes and ripped them to shreds, threw her shoes at her, fired her, and kicked her down the stairs. A few days after the fight, Jackie Curtis showed up at my door and said she had the ultimate showdown with John Vaccaro, that she left the play, and that she wanted everyone in New York to think that she had committed suicide. The next day, Holly Woodlawn showed up, dressed entirely in black cut velvet, with black ostrich feathers in her hair, saying ‘I’m in mourning.’”
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LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Holly just wore anything. She’d just wrap a sheet around her. In fact, Holly got in trouble with the welfare people. She was on welfare, everyone was. She would show up at the welfare office to her welfare check in ostrich feathers and false eyelashes. One day they took her into an office and said, ‘Sir, this is the welfare office. You’re showing up in evening gowns and ostrich feathers. The other welfare recipients are getting very upset about this.’ Holly said, ‘Buy me some jeans, I’ll wear them, otherwise I’ll spend my money as I please, and I please to spend it on ostrich feathers.’”
MARY WORONOV: “Pretty soon I was a drag queen junkie. Finally someone angrier than I was, and with a sense of humor about the whole thing. Most of the people at the Factory found it amusing that I’d rather hang with queens than suck up to the stars. Everyone else assumed it was drug-induced insanity, except for Lou Reed – he had the same bad taste for sleazy street scenes and tacky drag queens. When the queens weren’t around he would imitate them and make me laugh. That’s the thing I loved about drag queens: life was a constant movie; no matter how ridiculously things didn’t match they would sacrifice everything for the pose, and I was definitely into the pose.”
CANDY DARLING: "I was stage struck when I was around 4. When I was a child, the kids always called me Marilyn or Greta. Recently when I was at Merv Griffin's party a dyke came over to me and said, 'Is your name Greta? You used to go to the Hayloft a few years ago and they used to call you 'the actress.'' So everybody knew even then."
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “Candy was the most beautiful of all the Warhol drag queens, with her blonde hair, snow white skin and ruby red lips. She and Jackie Curtis would panhandle the money to go and sit in darkened movie theatres for hours and hours until they knew the pictures by heart – every move, affectation and line of dialogue. She was envied by all the other Village queens, but she’d just say, ‘Why must they envy me? I can’t help it if I was born beautiful and they weren’t.’”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “One night I saw this vision, like nothing I had ever seen before. And it was a creature underneath a lamppost, and she had on bangs. It was her Audrey Hepburn look, with these glasses on top of her head, and a big fluffy sweater. I really thought it was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life. I wasn’t sure if it was a man or a woman, I was pretty sure it was a guy, but it looked so beautiful. And she was having a fight with some street hustler, and he threw an ice cream cone in her face, and I remember feeling so bad, but she was kind of snippy and snotty. She had an attitude problem. So we became friends.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Jackie explains that Candy always carries a Tampax, letting it fall on the table so that men can be reassured of her femininity. Candy retrieves her fake eyelash, which has dropped onto a customer’s plate. As Candy picks up her lash in front of the traumatized customer, she says, ‘Even Garbo had her girdle.’”
PATTI SMITH: “There was something especially poignant about Jackie and Candy as they embraced the imagined life of the actress. They both had aspects of Mildred Rogers, the coarse illiterate waitress in ‘Of Human Bondage.’ Candy had Kim Novak’s looks and Jackie had the delivery. Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of. ‘Pioneers without a frontier,’ as Andy Warhol would say.”
CANDY DARLING: “As a child I learned to don the mask when the occasion called for it. Later I learned to don the wig.”
CYRINDA FOXE: “Oh, Candy. She was the greatest and always the most beautiful. At first she didn’t like me being around. Here’s this young blond girl with platinum hair and black lipstick, and I was sort of copying her look. Once I was at a party with these two guys, waiting for the elevator, and Candy got off and looked me up and down, and one of these wise-ass guys smirked and said, ‘I wonder which one is the real Candy Darling.’ And I shot back, ‘The one with the cock between his legs.’ After that, Candy and I became really good friends, like sisters. I loved Candy until the day she died. She was the closest thing to the grooviest woman I’ve ever known.”
TRUMAN CAPOTE: “She has a certain vulnerability about her that doesn’t have anything to do with whether she’s pretty or not pretty. She has an aura. We could line up 300 girls who are prettier than Candy in every way, but they just don’t have any aura.”
FRANCESCA PASSALACQUA: "Candy was stunningly beautiful with an ethereal quality. She had suitcases full of gowns and cosmetics. My only interest in how I looked was what I had to wear in order to keep a good-paying job. I called it putting on the disguise, feeling that anything other than natural was a lie. When I was off work, I'd wear what my other friends wore - jeans and t-shirts, and no makeup. But when I went out with Candy, even just to the market, she'd insist that I dress up, often in one of her gowns. She'd do my makeup and hair; and I indulged her. It was yet another disguise to add to the mix. But no matter what type gown she dressed me in or how she did my makeup or hair, I still felt dowdy and butch next to her."
CANDY DARLING: "I am a star because I have always felt so alienated and I project this feeling on to others."
CANDY DARLING: “I have been here before. My spirit was once a movie star’s. I believe it was once Jean Harlow’s… Long before the Harlow revival, I had my hair dyed platinum and my eyebrows plucked and penciled.”
DONALD LYONS: “When they talk of the revival of elegance of the seventies, I think it really began with people like Candy Darling, who, in the middle of a very mannerly decade, really stood in a certain sense for very high manners and for the high social comedy which could be associated with, say, Carole Lombard. She had a raucous sense of fun, if you look at Andy Warhol’s ‘Women in Revolt.’ This was a film originally called ‘Pigs.’ Candy’s sense of life was that it should perpetually be beautiful and elegant, but it so often wasn’t. It was because of this great tension with Candy that she carried it off with an almost religious conviction and really intense devotion to art.”
CANDY DARLING: "I am a thousand different people. Every one is real."
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: “On New Year’s day John Vaccaro, director of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, kicked Candy down the stairs, right down two flights. It was so cold and it was really snowing – the snow was about three feet thick and there was a blizzard, and he kicked her right out into the snow in her evening gown. The next day I’m sure she went back as if nothing had happened. She just lived for drama. I loved her.”
CANDY DARLING: “I hate that word fantasy. It’s like a dirty word to me. All my life people have said to me, “You’re living in a fantasy.” But you can make your fantasy come true sometimes. Some people can.”
HOLLY WOODLAWN: “Our friendships were up and down so many times it was like riding a carousel. Sometimes we loathed one another and sometimes we loved one another. We shared laughs, tears, makeup, and drugs. But when it came to sharing the spotlight, it was every broad for herself!”
CANDY DARLING: "I have always been the goddess above it all, untouchable. I explain my influence as simply this. I represent to many a goddess who is untouchable, and yet a goddess who needs others to make her happy. I was born to be a queen and every time I come down from the throne I am humiliated for it and suffer many indignities."
JEREMIAH NEWTON: “In 1974, when Candy Darling was dying of cancer in the hospital, Geraldine Smith, Tinkerbelle, and I were there with her constantly. We were Candy’s support system. Candy was in that private hospital room like a queen. Candy had all these photographs of herself pinned up everywhere. Lots of people would send her flowers; instead of throwing them out when they died, Candy insisted we keep them all there. It was an amazing sight, all of these rows of vases filled with wilted roses and bouquets, with the live ones in the foreground. It was like a memorial display of death in life... She would never have imagined how many people would miss her. At the scene of her funeral, with hundreds of mourners present, a stretch limousine pulled up to Frank E. Campbell's just as her flower bedecked casket was being carried out, and a tinted window rolled down. Its passenger, Gloria Swanson, saluted the coffin with a gloved hand."
