In the Shambles of Hollywood: The Decadent Trans Feminine Allegory in Myra Breckinridge

Abstract

When Twentieth Century Fox announced there would be a 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s controversial novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), Candy Darling considered it her prime opportunity to break into mainstream cinema. The novel follows its titular character, an addled trans woman obsessed with the films of the 1940s, as she seeks to claim her inheritance from an uncle who runs an acting academy in Hollywood. Darling, a trans woman herself, had begun her acting career in Andy Warhol’s movies, where she formed an important part of the Factory set along with other trans feminine people such as Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. But these underground films had a limited circulation, and it was Darling’s deepest-held ambition to become a legitimate starlet. When she applied for the role, she was rejected in favour of the cisgender actress Raquel Welch [fig. 1]. ‘They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite’, she recounted. While Welch obviously lent the production some star power at the time, Darling’s exclusion seems counterintuitive: she was about the same age as Myra in the novel and was also obsessed with vintage Hollywood, modelling herself after peroxide blonde actresses such as Lana Turner, Kim Novak, and Jean Harlow. She could recite whole passages from films such as Picnic (1955), demonstrating something of Myra’s encyclopaedic film knowledge; in fact, Warhol thought ‘she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did’. In the novel there are several references to Myra’s career as an underground film star prior to her transition that may well allude to films such as Warhol’s Flesh (1968), a film that Darling had actually been in. She was, in other words, already engaged in the sexual avant-gardism Myra Breckinridge apparently represented, as well as what in the novel becomes a tragi-comic obsession with the Golden Age of Hollywood.