Candy Clark came to Hollywood at the dawn of the seventies, a spunky twentysomething who’d fled her conservative Texas home town and taken up modelling in New York. Though she was indifferent to acting, she nabbed a part, as a boxer’s girlfriend, in the John Huston film “Fat City,” plus a movie-star beau—her co-star, Jeff Bridges. She settled into Bridges’s Malibu home but kept a bungalow off Fountain Avenue, close to auditions. She was cast in “American Graffiti,” George Lucas’s second film, about a group of sixties teens on the eve of adulthood, motoring around Modesto, California, on a late-summer night. Clark played Debbie Dunham, a bombshell in a platinum bouffant who hops in a Chevy with a dweeby admirer, looking for adventure. Her castmates included the young Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, and Ron Howard (billed as Ronny). Without knowing it—no one did, really—she’d landed square in the era that would become known, and much mythologized, as the New Hollywood. Wherever she went, she took her Polaroid camera.
Candy Clark photographed by Ed Ruscha in the desert, circa 1976.Photograph by Ed Ruscha / Courtesy the artist
Ed Ruscha.Photograph by Candy Clark
A lifetime later, Clark has released “Tight Heads,” a collection of her Polaroids from the seventies and early eighties. She’d dug them up in a spare bedroom at her house in Los Angeles, at the behest of the writer Sam Sweet, who was interviewing Angelenos for his project All Night Menu and who became the book’s editor and publisher. “Hollywood is a history of men looking at women through cameras,” Sweet writes in his introduction. “Never had the lens been turned on them by the ingénue. Under Candy’s gaze, the swashbuckling icons of Hollywood legend become innocent.” Clark’s closeups of familiar faces—Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie—have the tossed-off intimacy of a more freewheeling time, when the parties (and the drugs) were plentiful, and everyone was “just kids.”
Carrie Fisher.Photograph by Candy Clark
Richard Dreyfuss.Photograph by Candy Clark
“The floating party—you met everyone,” Clark said recently, when I met her for lunch at Smoke House, a Burbank restaurant that’s been around since the forties. We sat in a red-leather banquette, and Clark pulled out an old Polaroid SX-70 photo album. She opened it to a shot of young Candy, lying on a floor with a backgammon board and a bottle of Kahlúa. “Jeff Bridges brought that Kahlúa and milk into ‘The Big Lebowski,’ when he was the Dude,” she said. “He took a lot from our life together.” In “Tight Heads,” each portrait is accompanied by Clark’s breezy, half-remembered impressions of her subjects. Spielberg: “I had a little crush on him but he had no interest. Didn’t even make it to first base.” Dreyfuss: “He had just broken up with a girlfriend prior to doing the movie and spent a lot of time crying in his bed. Not real fun.” Anjelica Huston: “One of those people who are so elegant that you’re always a little intimidated even when they’re being friendly.”
Anjelica Huston (with unknown companion).Photograph by Candy Clark
