Jackie Curtis meets Candy Darling

back to AUGUST 1967: ANDY MEETS CANDY AND JACKIE

Jackie Curtis to Andy Warhol:

“I met her [Candy Darling] in practically the same spot that we met you-right by Sutters’s ice cream parlor... Andy, she was a mess... Before she started taking care of herself a little, she looked like the maid in Dinner at Eight... Anyway,we went into Sutter’s and bought a Napoleon. She bit into it and her one good tooth fell out.... We stood there staring at it in the palm of her hand, laughing hysterically and going, ‘Oh, my god, oh, my God...’

I walked her back to where she was staying - the Hotel Seventeen on 17th Street between Third Avenue and Stuyvesant Park... I was so naive, I didn’t recognize all the classic signs that she was dodging her bill there - even when I saw that they were holding her stuff down in the lobby. When she saw that,she turned right around on her high heels and ran across the street.

When I caught up with her, she was peering into some guy’s ground-floor windows. A dog came out to the bars and she was going, ‘Isn’t that dog pret-ry? Pret-ty dog, pret-ty dog...’ And I thought to myself, ‘She’s trying to convince that dog that she’s a real woman!" (POP227)

Jackie had grown up on Second Avenue and 10th Street, living with his grandmother, Slugger Ann who owned a bar there. She had hired Candy as a barmaid.

Jackie Curtis:

“My grandmother... did not know that Candy was no genetic female. And she certainly did not know Candy would come to work in a slip! But having her there did draw in some new customers - a few fairies from the West Village who couldn’t believe she really had a job.” (ibid)

back to AUGUST 1967: ANDY MEETS CANDY AND JACKIE