William M. Hoffman

William M. Hoffman born 12 April 1939.

William M. Hoffman is an American playwright, editor and teacher.

New York City native Hoffman's earliest works either were mounted in small, experimental off-off-Broadway theatres or remained unproduced. It was not until 1985 that he achieved critical acclaim and public recognition when As Is, one of the first plays to focus on the AIDS epidemic, opened in New York City at the Lyceum Theatre, where it ran for 285 performances. Hoffman won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play and a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. The following year, he adapted the work for a television production directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

In 1991, Hoffman was commissioned to write the libretto for the Metropolitan Opera's The Ghosts of Versailles in celebration of the company's centennial. A 1993 televised production earned him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Classical Music/Dance Programming.

As an editor at Hill and Wang, Hoffman promoted the careers of Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, and Joe Orton, among others, by including their plays in either his New American Plays series or his anthology, Gay Plays: A First Collection.

Hoffman currently is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Lehman College at The City University of New York.

Jackie Curtis

Jackie Curtis born 19 February 1947 (d. 1985)

John Holder Jr, better known as Jackie Curtis, was a famous transgendered film star, poet and playwright.

Curtis was born in New York City, and later died there of a drug overdose. He spent part of his life living and performing as a man (sometimes adopting a James Dean persona) and sometimes as a woman.

While living and performing in drag, she would typically wear lipstick, glitter around the eyes and in her frizzed-out red hair, and a dress, frequently ripped and torn, as were her stockings. This unique style, a combination of trash and glamour which Curtis pioneered in the late 1960s when frequenting such high profile nightclubs as Max's Kansas City, has prompted assertions that Jackie inspired the Glam Rock persona of the 1970s.

'Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier,' Andy Warhol said of his associate. Primarily a stage actor, Curtis debuted at the age of 17 in Tom Eyen's play Miss Neferititi Regrets. Curtis began to write his own plays immediately after this experience, often featuring famous transsexuals, such as his friend Candy Darling and, later, Holly Woodlawn, both of whom appeared in his productions which enjoyed successful runs Off-Off-Broadway and were well-reviewed in New York. Curtis's work is representative of the Theatre of the Ridiculous.

As writer and lead actress some of her plays include: Glamour, Glory and Gold, which also starred Candy Darling and Melba LaRose Jr; Amerika Cleopatra which featured Harvey Fierstein; Femme Fatale, with Patti Smith, Jayne County (at that time billed as Wayne County) and Penny Arcade; and Heaven Grand In Amber Orbit with Holly Woodlawn, produced by John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1970.

These plays caught the attention of Andy Warhol and his director Paul Morrissey, who cast Jackie and Candy in Flesh (1968) and, with the addition of Holly Woodlawn, in Women in Revolt (1971); a hilarious spoof of the women's liberation movement in which all the female leads are played by transsexuals and transvestites. Warhol films directed by Morrissey were made in a completely improvised. Morrissey gave the actors the basic idea of the scene and line suggestions and then simply let the camera roll.



Apart from acting, Curtis also showed talent in poetry and singing. In 1974 Curtis and Woodlawn appeared in the successful and critically acclaimed Cabaret in the Sky at the New York Cultural Center. A CD of songs by Paul Serrato from the Curtis musicals Lucky Wonderful and Vain Victory, including the love ballad Who Are You which Curtis sang (as a man) to Candy Darling, was released in 2004.

Curtis was also the 'Jackie' in Lou Reed's song Walk On The Wild Side, which was about the 'superstars' Reed knew from Andy Warhol's studio The Factory. The verse speaks of his drug addiction and fascination with James Dean: '...Jackie is just speeding away - Thought she was James Dean for a day... then she just had to crash, valium would have helped that bash...'

Jackie Curtis made two more movies during the 1980s. Drug addiction, however, had taken control of Curtis's life, eventually leading to his death.

In 2004, a film based on Curtis's life, Superstar in a Housedress, brought Jackie Curtis back to the limelight, exposing some little known facts about the performer to the public.

Curtis's influence on a number of people, friends and associates such as Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro and Penny Arcade, and observers such as David Bowie, is noted in the film. As well, Jayne County writes of Jackie as being '...the biggest influence on me at this time.' Whether her influence was in the realm of style, with her use of glitter that predated the glam rockers, or her ripped and torn dresses and stockings that predated punk, employing the use of performance both on and off stage and screen; or in the more traditional arts of playwriting and poetry, both attest to her critique of glamour, fame and pop culture in America that she explored in several mediums. However, it was perhaps her bravery in gender transgressions that is Jackie Curtis's legacy.

Tom Eyen

Tom Eyen born 14 August 1940 (d. 1991)

Tom Eyen was a Tony Award and Grammy Award winning American playwright, lyricist, television writer, and theatre director.

Born in Cambridge, Ohio, Eyen is best known for works at opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. Mainstream theatregoers became acquainted with him in 1981 when he partnered with composer Henry Krieger and director Michael Bennett to write the book and lyrics for Dreamgirls, the hit Broadway musical about a Supremes-style singing trio.

Eyen's career started, however, with avant garde plays and musicals that he wrote and directed off-off Broadway in the early 1960s, which eventually led to off-Broadway success in the 1970s with the controversial nudity-filled performance-art play The Dirtiest Show in Town and Women Behind Bars, a camp parody of women's prison exploitation films.

[Pictured below: Tom Eyen with Warhol Superstar Candy Darling, who appeared in a 1973 off-Broadway revival of Eyen's 1964 play The White Whore and the Bit Player]


Eyen also worked in television and contributed scripts to the 1976-78 ground-breaking evening soap opera parody, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. In 1978, he earned an Emmy Award nomination for writing Midler's television special Ol' Red Hair is Back.

Eyen and Krieger first worked together on the 1975 musical version of Eyen's revue The Dirtiest Show in Town, called The Dirtiest Musical in Town. Nell Carter's performance in that musical inspired Eyen and Krieger to craft a musical about black back-up singers, which they workshopped for Joe Papp but shelved when Carter dropped out in 1978. A year later, the project caught the interest of Broadway director-producer-choreographer Michael Bennett, who asked Eyen to direct a workshop production of Big Dreams, as the musical was then known, with Divine and gospel singer Jennifer Holliday as Carter's replacement. However, Holliday left the project, unhappy that her character died at the conclusion of the first act. After several workshops and numerous rewrites, Bennett decided that he needed Holliday, and the team rewrote act two to build up Holliday's character.

Produced on Broadway in 1981, Dreamgirls was the biggest success of Eyen's career. It was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards, including two for Eyen: Best Book and, as lyricist, Best Original Score. The show won six Tonys, including Best Book. It also earned Eyen a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Lyrics. The original cast album won Eyen a Grammy Award as lyricist, and one of the show's songs, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, sung by Holliday, became a top hit and is now a standard.

When a film adaptation of Dreamgirls by writer/director Bill Condon was released in 2006 by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures, the soundtrack became a number one hit, and two of Eyen's songs from the soundtrack, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, sung by Jennifer Hudson, and One Night Only, sung by Beyoncé Knowles (credited as Deena Jones & The Dreams), became hits again.

Eyen's 1984 attempt to duplicate his Dreamgirls success with Kicks: The Showgirl Musical, a collaboration with composer Alan Menken about members of the Rockettes during World War II, never made it past the workshop stages, though individual numbers from the show are sometimes performed in concert.

Eyen died of AIDS-related complications in Palm Beach, Florida at the age of 50. In 1993, he posthumously received the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E Lee Theatre Research Institute Award at The Ohio State University, where his papers are archived.

Candy Darling

Candy Darling born 24 November 1944* (d. 1974)

Candy Darling was a pre-op transsexual Warhol superstar who starred in Andy Warhol's films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971).

Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery in Forest Hills, New York, son of a bookkeeper at Manhattan's Jockey Club and a father who was described as a violent alcoholic. There is some conjecture around Candy's year of birth. According to former Warhol associate, Bob Colacello, Candy was born in 1946, while IMDb has listed her year of birth as 1948. Her friend, roommate, and posthumous editor, Jeremiah Newton, states that she was born in 1944.

Early years - as a male - were spent in Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York where he and his mother had moved after his parents divorced. His half-brother Warren, from his mother's first marriage, left home for the US military, leaving Jimmy as the only child; Warren later denied his connection to Candy/Jimmy.

Jimmy spent much of his childhood absorbing the influences of US television and old Hollywood movies, from which he learned to impersonate his favourite actors and actresses - his favorite being Joan Bennett and Kim Novak. He claimed to have 'learned about the mysteries of sex from a salesman in a local children's shoe store' and finally revealed an inclination towards cross-dressing when his mother confronted him about local rumours which described him dressed as a girl frequenting a local gay bar called The Hayloft. In response Jimmy left the room and reappeared in full drag. His mother later said that, 'I knew then... that I couldn't stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.'

Late at night Candy would often take a cab (thereby avoiding the attention of neighbours she would receive if she walked) a short distance to the Long Island Rail Road station for the train to Manhattan. Once there, she referred to her modest home in Massepequa Park as her 'country house' and hung out in Greenwich Village, meeting people through the circle of Seymour Levy on Bleecker Street.

Her first assumed name was Hope Slattery. Candy adopted this name sometime in 1963/1964 after she started going to gay bars in Manhattan and making visits to a doctor on Fifth Avenue for hormone injections. Jackie Curtis claimed that Candy adopted the name from a well-known Off-Off Broadway actress named Hope Stansbury, with whom she lived with for a few months in an apartment behind the Caffe Cino so he could study her. Holly Woodlawn remembers that Candy's name evolved from Hope Dahl to Candy Dahl and then to Candy Cane. In her autobiography, Woodlawn recalled that Candy had adopted the last name of Darling because a friend of hers affectionately called 'Candy, darling' so often that it finally stuck.

Before they actually met in 1967, Candy saw Andy Warhol at the after-hours club called The Tenth of Always. Candy was with Jackie Curtis, who invited Warhol to the play she had written and directed called Glamour, Glory and Gold.

It wasn't long before Warhol invited Candy to appear in one of his movies. She was given a short comedic scene in Flesh (1968) with Jackie Curtis and Joe Dallesandro. After Flesh, Candy was cast in a central role in Women In Revolt (1971). She played a Long Island socialite drawn into a woman's liberation group called PIGS (Politically Involved Girls) by a character played by Jackie Curtis.

Women in Revolt was first shown at the first Los Angeles Filmex as Sex. Later it was shown as Andy Warhol's Women, an homage to George Cukor. Unable to get a distributor for the film, Warhol rented out a small cinema in New York and launched the film with a celebrity preview on February 16, 1972. After the screening there was a dinner in Candy's honor at the restaurant, Le Parc Perigord on Park Avenue at 63rd Street, followed by a party at Francesco Scavullo's townhouse round the corner, where they watched disastrous TV reviews of the movie.

Candy Darling went on to appear in other independent films. She also appeared in Klute (as an extra in the disco scene) with Jane Fonda and Lady Liberty with Sophia Loren. Her attempt at cracking the mainstream movie circuit - by campaigning for the leading role in Myra Breckinridge (1970) - led to rejection and bitterness.

Theatre credits include two Jackie Curtis plays - Glamour, Glory and Gold (1967) and Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971) and Tennessee Williams' play, Small Craft Warnings, at the invitation of Williams himself. She also starred in the 1973 Off-Broadway revival of The White Whore and the Bit Player, a 1964 play by Tom Eyen. Darling's character, a Hollywood actress known only as 'the Whore', was based on Marilyn Monroe [pictured].

Candy succumbed to leukemia and pneumonia on 21 March 1974, aged about 29. She allegedly developed leukemia as a result of the hormones she had been taking, the long-term results of which had not been sufficiently studied. In a letter written on her deathbed and intended for Andy Warhol and his followers, Darling said, 'Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life ... I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. (D)id you know I couldn't last. I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again.'

Her funeral was attended by huge crowds; Gloria Swanson was remembered for saluting Darling's coffin. The New York Times honoured her request that her obituary should appear on the front page of that newspaper.


She is the subject of The Velvet Underground's song Candy Says and was one of several Warhol associates mentioned in Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side.

Peter Hujar's photo, 'Candy Darling on her Deathbed' was used by Antony and the Johnsons for the cover of their 2005 Mercury Music Prize winning album I Am a Bird Now. [pictured above]

An image of her, taken from Women In Revolt, was also featured on the front cover of the 1989 single Sheila Take a Bow by The Smiths. This was in keeping with lead singer Morrissey's penchant for using photographs of sometimes obscure cultural icons on the band's record sleeves.

Holly Woodlawn

Holly Woodlawn born 26 October 1946

Holly Woodlawn (born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl) is a transvestite and former Warhol superstar, who appeared in his movies Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1972).

Born in Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico, she adopted the name Holly as an homage to the heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany's and in 1969 added the surname from a sign she saw on an episode of I Love Lucy.

She met Andy Warhol in the Factory at a screening of Flesh. Through him she met Jackie Curtis, who cast Woodlawn in her play Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit in the autumn of 1969. In October she was assigned a bit role in Trash, but so impressed director Paul Morrissey that she was given a larger role.

In May 1971, Woodlawn replaced Candy Darling at the La Mama Theatre, New York in a production of Vain Victory written and directed by Jackie Curtis. She was arrested and briefly incarcerated in Puerto Rico after being caught shoplifting.

By 1976 the work had dried up, and Woodlawn moved to San Francisco. She returned to New York later in the year and had a brief revival after appearing on Geraldo Rivera's talk show before being jailed again in 1977 for not fulfilling a previous probation obligation. She was released on the appeal of politician Ethan Geto, who helped organise a benefit for her.

Woodlawn continued to make cameo appearances in plays and films such as Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss throughout the 1980s and 1990s. After Warhol's death, she was a frequently requested commentator on his life and influence. She currently resides in West Hollywood.

Woodlawn began performing in cabaret shows in sold-out New York and Los Angeles performances in the early 2000s.

Like so many of Warhol's Factory, she is mentioned in Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side: 'Holly came from Miami FLA, / hitch-hiked her way across the USA, / plucked her eyebrows on the way, / shaved her legs, and then he was a she...'

Robert Patrick

Robert Patrick born 27 September 1937

Robert Patrick is a playwright, poet, lyricist, and short story writer and novelist. He was born Robert Patrick O'Connor in Kilgore, Texas.

Robert Patrick is the author of over 60 plays. The first of these, The Haunted Host, was produced in 1964 and Patrick was actually forced to appear in the play himself with fellow playwright William M. Hoffman because he could find no actors willing to appear in a gay-themed drama.

During the 1960s Patrick was a pioneer in the Off-Off Broadway movement and gay theatre, with over 300 productions of his plays being held during this decade in Manhattan alone. He won the 'Show Business' Award in 1969 for Joyce Dynel, Salvation Army, and Fog. That same year his play, Camera Obscura was produced on PBS. A 1974 production of Haunted Host marked the debut of Harvey Fierstein.

Years later, Fierstein included a recording of Patrick's monologue, Pouf Positive on his CD, This Isn't Going to Be Pretty. Positive was also filmed by Dov Hechtman in 1989. The year 1974 also saw international success for the play Kennedy's Children, earning actress Shirley Knight a Tony award, and also the first season of gay theatre in the UK, to which Mr Patrick contributed three plays. My Cup Ranneth Over (1976) was commissioned by Marlo Thomas, who co-starred in the play with Lily Tomlin. It became the most produced of his plays.

Other works by Robert Patrick include Untold Decades (1988), a history of gay male life in the US told in a humorous vein, and Temple Slave, about the early days of Off-Off Broadway and gay theatre. He has also ghostwritten several screen- and television plays, contributed poems and reviews to various magazines, and had his short stories included in numerous anthologies. He has also appeared in the documentary Resident Alien with Quentin Crisp.

He has most recently written his memoirs, Film Moi. Robert Patrick currently lives and works in Los Angeles, where he has lived since 1993.

Click here for Caffe Cino Picture Pages - hundreds of images from the early days of off-off-Broadway and gay theatre.

Robert Patrick website