The Contents of Candy’s Tummy

by Seth Oelbaum

In my essay, I assess the eating habits of the drag queen and Warhol superstar, Candy Darling. To locate the source of Candy’s energy I pair her with the 20^th-century ascetic Simone Weil. I link Candy and Weil’s dislike of their flesh and ego. I connect Weil’s exacting belief in Christianity to Candy’s adoration of movie actresses from the 40s. I try to explain how Candy’s worship of her actress Gods mirrors Weil’s dedication to her Christian God. I argue that the need to eat is incompatible with both of their Gods. Alec Irwin, a contemporary Weil scholar, says, “Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life.”[i] For Irwin, eating is violent act: it requires “destruction and dismemberment.”[ii] When we eat, we tear, rip, and annihilate. I see if Candy and Weil’s devotion to Hollywood stars and the Christian God can deliver them from their flesh and the necessity of food.

In the 1969 Velvet Underground song “Candy Says,”  Lou Reed sings, “Candy says I’ve come to hate my body / and all that it requires in this world.” Darling dislikes her body. Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery. She was born a he. Francesca Passalacqua, the publisher of Candy’s diaries, states that Candy “was born in the wrong package.”[iii] Yet a female body isn’t the solution to Candy’s problem. The influential queer theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is a performance. For Butler, gender is a part that you play: it’s a role that you act. A woman isn’t determined by a vagina, but by dressing, speaking, and espousing the mannerisms that normative society equates with the feminine character. Candy’s dilemma isn’t that she was born with a penis: it’s that she was born with a corporeal body. The source of her disgust is her flesh. She would hate her body as much if she were assigned the female gender as the male one.

According to the French philosopher and movie scholar Edgar Morin, the star is “determined by her double on the screen. She is nothing since her image is everything. She is everything since she is the image too.”[iv] The star does not exist in the way that humans do. Stars are not fleshy creatures. Candy would have no knowledge of Joan Bennett (one of her actress Gods) if Bennett led a corporeal existence. Bennett is not an embodied entity. She is not a single, fleshy creature. Bennett’s disembodied status allows her to be on movies screens, televisions, and in periodicals across the world. Bennett is limitless since her body is devoid of matter. She’s in multiple places at once. She’s in Vincente Minnelli’s Father’s Little Dividend and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Bennett does not need food to survive. She has no flesh to nourish. Bennett is a projection: a Hollywood product.

Jeremiah Newton, one of Candy’s best friends, says that Candy frequently “played hooky” in order to stay home and watch the Million Dollar Movie — a program that broadcasted the same movie “three times a day, seven days week.”[v] Newton writes that Candy carefully studied the “fiber of [her] favorite performers”: their “makeup and costumes.”[vi] Newton calls Candy a “champion mimic” of the female leads, but Candy’s impersonations of Bennett and her sister Constance made her “a bizarre sort of local pariah.”[vii] In her diaries, Candy writes that she wants to be a “product.”[viii] She desires to be an object — a thing. Her performances conflicted with her human status. She wasn’t acting like a human, but a movie goddess. Her scholarship and espousal of actresses was greeted with contempt from people since Candy rejected the temporal human community for the infinite actress Gods.

Like Candy’s actress Gods, French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil’s Christian God is incorporeal. Weil describes her God as “hidden and formless.”[ix] He’s not empirical. He can’t be quantified or measured. Weil, though, is human. Her flesh distances her from God. God is boundless. Weil is not. Human desires, says Weil, “are carnal; that is why they are limited.”[x] The restrictedness of the human condition is evinced in their need to eat. Weil writes that a “child placed in front of cakes or sweets doesn’t know that their desire for them is limited.”[xi] The child has yet to learn that there’s a certain amount of food that its stomach can handle and hold. Yet the child must eat. His human condition requires it. Weil defines food as the “irreducible element.”[xii] Irwin, the Weil scholar, adds, “Hunger brings the daily demonstration that our will is not free, that our bodies are inhabited – constituted – by forces over which we can exert only the most limited and fleeting control.”[xiii] The “I” is subject to pressures that are irrelevant to God. God doesn’t need to eat. He has no appetite that requires satisfaction. God can’t be filled: he already is. Weil calls God “the author of all”; she says that God “is what we are not.”[xiv] God is disembodied: he’s infinite.

Weil’s goal, according to the contemporary critic and poet Anne Carson, is “to get herself out of the way so as to arrive at God.”[xv] Weil calls her human body “vile.”[xvi] Her flesh alienates her from God. Its needs and limits remind her that her body is not his. In order to abolish this disjunction, Weil calls for the destruction of the “I” and the body that it inhabits. Weil wants to be “nothing”: she believes that when are we are nothing we’ve found “the truth of the world.”[xvii] The nothing status is acquired through the disavowal of food. Irwin writes, “Eating is the mechanism of our enslavement and ultimate annihilation. It is also and for that very reason our source of hope.”[xviii] When we eat, we nourish our flesh: we continue its life. But when we don’t eat, we weaken our body, we deprive of what it needs to function. Hope, for Weil, is the dissolution of corporeality. Once her human body is destroyed, Weil is united with God. Her nothing matches his nothing. Though, this “nothing” isn’t nothing proper. For Weil, this “nothing” is everything: it’s God. But God is imperceptible: he defies observation. When Weil surrenders her “I,” she becomes invisible too. Her need to eat ends. Her single fleshly frame ceases to restrain her: she’s universal.

Candy, too, must give up her “I” in order to merge with her actress Gods. Warhol defines drag queens as “ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood.”[xix] The drag queen is not an “I.” She’s devoid of an ego. Her human existence is effaced by a receptacle in which all of Hollywood femininity is stored. A devout drag queen sheds her flesh. Her body joins the incorporeal bodies of the actress Gods. Like Bennett, like Kim

Novak and Lana Turner (two other actress Gods who Candy worships) the drag queen is everywhere. Mary Harron, the writer and director of the 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol, calls Candy “the greatest of all drag queen icons.”[xx] For Harron, Candy is a “synthesis of all movie blondes” who “studied the movies like a doctoral candidate, and crystallized all her favorite elements of traditional femme culture into a dream life of what it is to be a woman.”[xxi] Harron writes that Candy represents the “classic ‘female’ qualities of gentleness, sweetness, bitchiness, malice, passivity, vulnerability, masochism.”[xxii] Candy has shredded her flesh. Both her and her Gods are composed of the same traits. Candy doesn’t have a single body to feed. She has joined her actress Gods: she’s everywhere.

To ensure that their fleshy bodies stay dissolved, Candy and Weil practice servility. For Weil, “obedience is the only pure motive, the only one which does not in the slightest degree seek a reward for the action, but all care of reward to the Father.”[xxiii] Weil puts God ahead of herself. Her human needs are secondary to God’s incorporeal ones. He’s her priority. The ego is anathema to Weil. She labels it degrading and confining. The disavowal of food helps Weil escape her pride. Food gives us energy to work and accomplish things that’ll earn other human’s praise and esteem. Weil, though, has destroyed her body. She’s unconcerned about acquiring accolades from other people. Her body has dissolved into God’s. There is no single “I” for humans to judge. There’s no mass for them to measure. She’s hidden, formless, and everything.

Candy, too, maintains her fleshless body through obedience. Candy writes in her diaries, “A woman without a man is a slave without a master.”[xxiv] Candy’s goal is “to please a man.”[xxv] But the actress Gods’ submissiveness is superficial since they still reign supreme.  Their obedience reveals the male’s inability to escape the confines of his ego, not the actress Gods’ lack of power. In the 1940s Hollywood musical Meet Me In St. Louis, Judy Garland longs for Tom Drake, the boy next door. Garland is attracted to Drake because he is a single entity. Drake is defined by his body. There is matter for Garland to latch onto. Drake can’t long for Garland because Garland is not a single entity. There’s no piece of flesh for him to pursue. The actress Gods’ submissiveness allows them to show off. They surrender themselves to a man because they have no self to surrender. The man will never actually possess the actress God. The actress God has no body to hold.

The extremity of Candy’s devotion to her actress God can be further illustrated when we compare her to other followers of the actress Gods religion. Jackie Curtis, another drag queen and Warhol superstar, co-starred in the movie Women In Revolt with Candy. In the movie, Curtis snacks on chicken. Curtis wears the appropriate religious garments: she’s dressed like a female. But her consumption of food shows that her identity remains located in her flesh. Curtis has not surrendered her “I” to the actress Gods. She still has a body to nourish. Curtis deviates from the teachings of the actress Gods. In the film, Curtis is aggressive and bossy. She orders her houseboy to clean up the apartment. She threatens to slap him. “I oughta throw you out the window,” she tells him. Her violence connects her to the embodied male. She’s like Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. She’s a crass, bellicose leader: she’s in charge. Curtis is an “I.” She has an ego that needs to be fed.

There are quite a few other films that show drag queens who lack Candy’s passion. In Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about Harlem drag balls, one of the participants tells how she and her drag queen friends ate at Roy Rogers without paying. The queen tells the interviewer that she got “two double cheeseburgers, two fries, a Coke, a Sprite.” The drag queen relates her story in male garb. She’s not dressed as an actress God. For her, the actress God religion is not all consuming. It’s a religion that she practices some of the time. As with Curtis, the drag queen in Paris Is Burning does not surrender her human “I” to the actress Gods. She likes her flesh: she wants to keep it, which is why she nourishes it.

Michael Alig and James St. James, the 80s club kids at the center of the 2003 biopic, Party Monster, aren’t unyielding worshipers of the actress Gods either. They dress as women, but for them the actress Gods are not totalizing. Alig and St. James practice their religion only some of the time. In Party Monster, Alig and St. James drink. They are made of flesh. They purposely continue their corporeal existence.

Candy has been confronted with possible nourishment in the movies. In the opening scene in Women In Revolt, Candy holds a glass in her hand. She brings the glass to her lips. But she doesn’t drink it. She returns it to her sternum. Candy can’t drink. As she tells an acting agent in a later scene, “I’m everybody all the time.” Candy is disembodied. Her existence isn’t confined to a single mass of flesh. In her diaries, Candy writes, “I can survive without steak or even hamburger but not without love, integrity and idealism.”[xxvi] For Candy, love, integrity, and idealism are entwined with her actress Gods. She dedicated her life to them, she surrendered her “I” for them.

We see Candy’s incorporeal status most clearly when we compare her deathbed photo to a picture taken of the canonical feminist Betty Friedan six years before her death. For Candy, Friedan is heretic. She calls Friedan “hard all the way down [,] right to the bone marrow” and compares her to a “field marshal.”[xxvii] Friedan is leader, a warrior. The New York Times’s obituary described her as “one of the chief architects of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s.”[xxviii] She wanted to make the lives of woman better in the human world: she didn’t want to turn their bodies into actress Gods. For Friedan, existence took place in the flesh. Friedan was a person. She participated in the violent act of eating. The wear and tear of food has affected her body. Her face is wrinkled; her hair is grey; her skin is spotted. Friedan has met the limits of human existence. Candy, though, has not. There are no lines on her face, no signs of decay. Her deathbed photo is as beautiful as her others. Candy’s death isn’t an actual death: Candy is still here. She’s alive in Women In Revolt, Flesh, YouTube clips, and documentaries. Candy has no tummy to fill. She’s devoid of restraint since she gave up her confined matter to be infinite with her actress Gods.