Ulysses and 100 Years of Solitude were killing me, so I just needed some well-written trash; something that I could actually FINISH.So, yeah I'd known about this book for 30 years and ran across it many times with mild curiosity, but a couple years ago a slightly musty first edition hardcover availed itself for $1 at Half Price Books - kind of a no-brainer, whereupon it sat in the basement till now...It begins in 1915, a convenient place to begin a history of the scandals of Hollywood, though the film business had already been around for almost a generation, and scandals and censorship battles had already become a part of it, as does anything touched by humans... Hollywood itself officially started in 1912 - the evolution is more complex than that, but no matter.Anger begins here to establish his theme, that of a phony Babylon, sex and violence amid plaster and Potemkin villages. Flush with cash and power and bloated ego from his monster hit "Birth of a Nation," the film industry's first official artiste, D.W. Griffith, staged his filmic "Sun Play of the Ages," aka "Intolerance," the epic to end all epics, though what it most famously ended was his career - not instantly but put it into a death spiral as Griffith struggled to pay off the debts and restore his damaged reputation as a master of the universe. The most famous images from "Intolerance" involve the massive set of Babylon, with giant columns topped by white elephants - every bit of that being perfect ironic, thematic fodder for Anger's book.The "Intolerance" set sat weedy and decaying for years over the growing new Babylon, an eyesore and reminder of the quickly forgotten past in a place where you're only as good as our next picture. As soon as the star system got rolling in the World War I era, and cash-heavy Hollywood began doling out massive star contracts, the sin had the fertilizer it needed to grow to scandalous proportions. And hereafter, Anger's book becomes a litany of the notorious: the drug death of Wallace Reid, the rape and manslaughter trial of Fatty Arbuckle and so forth. But interwoven into all the irresponsible rumor-mongering (Anger throws in every speculation about who was fucking whom and probably makes up a few of his own) is also a very perceptive history of Hollywood. Anger was part of the scene, as a boy actor in the '40s, and he knows his shit. There's the touch of queenly snarkyness, but also -- as it was in Anger's homoerotic underground home movies -- a great affection and homage to the sad glamor of it all. It probably helps to know the broader history of Hollywood to better appreciate some of the references made in this book. But no matter, Anger's book is breezily written; the book is a model of informational compression -- much crammed into nicely phrased sentences. And of course it is effulgent of imagery, much of it disturbing and capturing the banal reality of death in a land of happy dreams.The book's famous cover perfectly captures its attitude: the Hollywood glamor image self destructing before our eyes in Jayne Mansfield's overpainted face and saggy tits.------Also: A good companion piece to this is Otto Friedrich's excellent overview of noirish behind-the-scenes LA of the '40s: "City of Nets." And Nathanael West's novel "Day of the Locust" also is essential.
I read the first edition copy from 1965 that was on shelves for 10 days only to be banned due to "libel" and "copyright issues" from those subjects portrayed in the book. There's a difference: the 1965 version is packaged like that of a sleaze-gossip rag in 95 cent paperback form, versus the 1975 edition, which was published again after the ban was lifted, Anger having cleaned up some of his facts, embellished some of the fluidity and structure of the book, and laid out higher quality images into a "coffee table" hardcover format. . I will read the "coffee table" edition someday, but for the time being this is satisfying enough, and truer to its form. This book about tabloid and scandal, cracking open old Hollywood's best kept sex/murder/ and more than occasionally, occultist-related secrets, also ensued a lot of scandal and tabloid in itself. So it is only fair that I read this book as the unorganized, skeletal tabloid-based work than it is (at the time written to save a bankrupt Kenneth Anger and quench the thirst of sleaze and pulp readers) rather than in the coffee-table edition, meant for the collection of film-buffs of avant-garde interest, who bought the book because of its long-term underground appeal and transgressive, uncensored and unapologetic depiction of the machine that is Hollywood. This is TRULY FUCKING AMAZING and naturally being prone to interest in scandal and hearsay, I was salivating over how these long dead, "America's sweetheart" "deus ex machina" stars of the old Hollywood had such fucked up, mysterious and Lynchian lives, both in front of and behind the curtains of the film industry.
What do You think about Hollywood Babylon (1987)?
This is all about whose pretty little C list head was found in a locker at Grand central Station, which no longer famous former star was eaten by her own pet poodles (they might look chic, dear, but they have no taste at all), who put this there and that there and had to be revived by medics who could not believe what they were seeing, who couldn't do it without various types of rigs and harnesses, who did it an extraordinary number of times in one weekend and was filmed the whole time, and so on, and so forth. It was good honest sleazy fun when it was published and stuff like being gay and doing drugs was rather scandalous, but I think the powder has worn right off its puff now. A relic of more innocent times.
—Paul Bryant
Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon is a boiling cesspool of lies! Practically none of this shit happened. The ratio of truth to lies is like 10 to 1. I have it on the highest authority those girls looked thirty under the bad set lighting. My great-great-great aunt was there for that underage (by trickery! It was set up!) sleepover-cum-orgy and Lillian Gish had no idea that Dorothy Gish was the other girl in the bed with Griffiths. This Kenneth Angers person is blowing it all out of proportion just to sell a few measely books. And Charlie Chaplin's mustache supplementing his income by performing mustache stand-in duties for Hitler? Preposterous! My cousin's roomate knows this guy and he says it was accidental mustache standing in! Hitler told him he was going to be back after a toilet break. The same thing happened to George Harrison's beard. Charles Manson took too long in the bathroom, is all. I mean, really. Where is he getting all of these facts? There is no way that Fatty Arbuckle forced a genie to live in a coke bottle. How does a big man fit into that tiny hole? He would kill them! I heard something different than the sordid tale of Stroheim's monocle blinding ladies on beaches into dropping their bikini tops. Joan Crawford was the economist for the George W. Bush administration? Failed Hollywood starlets mounted the Hollywoodland sign in hopes that King Kong would either kill them or cast them as his next leading lady? This book has more namedropping than Madonna's Vogue rap and is more apocolyptic than Deborah Harry's Rapture rap from her Blondie days. My niece's great-great-great-great-great cousin twice removed married into a family that employed as a garderner the direct descendent of Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies did not sell his family jewels to pay off his debts after the stock market crash. She merely sold some jewelry he gave her that didn't go with any of her furs. Who actually believes this shit? I heard that all of the stars from the silent era didn't sound like Danny Kaye before his voice broke, not this shit about the kissing disease and they all lost their voice en masse. Pfffffft. Don't believe everything you read. Trust my hairdresser that Kenneth Angers is laughing all the way to the bank as he'd believe these nice immigrant boys who harmlessly ran movie studios to bring joy to the public and employ Jayne Mansfield's prehistoric boob job. Think of the trouble they'd get up to on their own!
—Mariel
"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." Marilyn MonroeIf you are a film buff of any type and haven't read this, it is most highly recommended, an encyclopedic exposé of the tarnish on the tinsel. Hard to think of a more High End Brand, with it's U.S. state-department-approved soft-culture trademark, gee-whiz practical sense and enchanting, casual glamour -- that had a more unsavory backstory, a seamier underbelly, than what's included here. Lots of Weegee-style flash photos of those brittle, hangovery moments when the limosine went off the cliff with the superstar in it ... or what the superstar looked like, momentarily, without quite enough pills in her, or the makeup-disguise on ... and lots of the facts that went into the Hush Machine, just before that cold morning light. The photo of Jayne Mansfield's little lapdog, deceased & bloody beside the smashed bottles in the flashbulb's glare ... finishes a sordid little epic. It's Not Really A Wonderful Life. Nothing to dwell on here but should be seen once. Makes you wonder what after-midnite mysteries were covered up successfully ....
—J.
