Candy
Candy Darling “never lost her head even when she was giving head”, Reed sang. He’d sung about her before – she was the Candy who said “I’ve come to hate my body / And all that it requires in this life” on the third Velvet Underground album in 1968. Reed had feared the reaction of his characters to Walk on the Wild Side, but, he later recalled: “Candy Darling told me he’d memorised all the songs and wanted to make a ‘Candy Darling Sings Lou Reed’ album. It probably wouldn’t sell more than a hundred copies!” Darling, too, was a transgender Warhol superstar, appearing in Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971). There were other films, too – but it was a brief career. Darling died of lymphoma, aged 29, in 1974.
Little Joe
Joe Dallesandro “never once gave it away / Everyone had to pay and pay” – perhaps because he was famed as the great sex symbol of American underground film and gay culture (he is actually bisexual, and has been married three times, fathering three children). A teenage delinquent, he ran away from a rehabilitation centre and found his way to the Warhol set via nude modelling and homoerotic short films. Unlike Reed’s other characters, he crossed over to the mainstream, becoming a magazine cover star and acting in the kind of films that get shown in multiplexes. His greatest presence in popular culture these days comes from two photos – his crotch on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, and his head and torso on the cover of the Smiths’ first album. Dallesandro, now 66, lives in Los Angeles.
Jackie
Jackie Curtis was the one “just speeding away / Thought she was James Dean for a day”. She sometimes performed as a woman, sometimes as a man, and her glitter-and-lipstick style was claimed to have been an inspiration to the glam-rock look. She wrote musicals and poetry, and sang – and her 1967 play Glory, Glamour and Gold gave Robert de Niro his first stage role. Craig Highberger, who made the documentary Superstar in a Housedress about her, recalled Curtis bringing home a sailor one night. “His lipstick was smeared all over the sailor’s mouth and neck. We deposited him on the sofa and Curtis came to the kitchen with me to get some beers and whispered, ‘Craig, he thinks I’m a real girl, what am I going to do when he finds out I’m not?’” Curtis died of a heroin overdose in 1985, aged 38.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2015/dec/07/holly-woodlawn-walk-on-the-wild-side-lou-reed-candy-little-joe
