Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side: what became of Candy, Little Joe and co?

Holly, who came from Miami, FLA – hitchhiked her way across the USA – died this weekend, aged 69, suffering from brain and liver cancer. Holly Woodlawn had been one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars”, one of the first transgender celebrities, and a character who was – literally – straight out of a Lou Reed song. Alongside Candy, Little Joe, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie, she was one of the principals of Walk on the Wild Side, Reed’s hymn to New York and the Warhol underground. In her later years, Woodlawn had undergone something of a revival, appearing on screen again and performing on stage. But what happened to the others?

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.

Sugar Plum Fairy

Joe Campbell – who “came and hit the streets. Lookin’ for soul food and a place to eat” – has the oddest story, albeit by association, of any of the song’s characters. The name comes from the role he played in Warhol’s 1965 film My Hustler, but his strange associations have nothing to do with Warhol. In 1955, he entered into a love affair with an older man, with whom he lived for seven years – that older man, Harvey Milk, would later find fame as the highest profile gay politician in the US. His late 60s boyfriend, Billy Sipple, became famous in September 1975, when he thwarted Sara Jane Moore’s attempt to shoot Gerald Ford. Campbell himself died at home in California in 2005, after 29 years of a relationship with Stanley Jensen.

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.