While looking for information on the DeForest Phonofilms, and despite the advice of a certain member of this board not to read it, I decided to try to read Kenneth Anger’s notoriously inaccurate “Hollywood Babylon”, just to see how bad it was.
Right off the bat, I noticed a major error. Kenneth refers to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as having died “broke and broken”. The broke part might be accurate, but the “broken” part seems remarkable, seeing as he had just signed (unless this is an UL too) a feature-film contract for 3 films with (I believe) Fox.
I then decided to reshelve the book, thinking “this idiot will repeat any bit of gossip he ever heard”.
In short, how many errors did this :wally make?*
Don’t mention Lupe Velez. He actually got that half-right. What he forgot was that I was the one holding her down. (She knew too much about W.D. Taylor and Thelma Todd).
Nah, I agree with toque. The Babylon books are entertaining horseshit, and were written solely to earn Anger a few bucks. I only quote 'em once in a while (Lupe Velez, anyone?) to get a rise out of Eve, whose bread-and-butter is cinematic and theatrical historical accuracy.
The most egregious error I can recall without digging around to find the books is his claim that the Gish sisters never dated guys, preferring each others company in the sack. This image has been the basis of some pleasant daydreams, but I never took it as gospel.
And no, Kenneth Anger is not an idiot. He’s the creator of many fascinating avant-garde films, including Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1964), Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1973).
And he made an uncredited appearance as the Changeling Prince in the 1935 MGM film A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How cool is that?
I think they’re supposed to be an inextricable conflation of fact, fiction, and rumor, with an emphasis on the sex, violence, and obsession of Hollywood’s sordid underbelly, and by extension, the rest of American culture.
So, yeah, Ike nailed it with “entertaining horseshit.”
OK, so *Kenneth Anger wrote a lot of inaccuracies.
But Jeff Rovin picked up the tradition with “TV Babylon” and “Sports Babylon.” One of my favorite lines in “TV Babylon” was when he referred to Dick York, who had increasingly severe back problems during his tenure on “Bewitched.” His line was something like, “He was in great pain, which they were able to cover up on TV–the medium of lies.”
*Columnist Ed Anger (no relation), OTOH, pretty much nails situations perfectly.
I agree with both sentiments. Anger is clearly not reporting, but rather doing an almost Warhol-like art piece in the form of literary gossip. Appalling photos, lurid rumor, secrets whispered in Hollywood and beyond for years are laid bare. He presaged Reality TV by decades. I know plenty of people who curl their upper lip when confronted by that horrid Jayne Mansfield cover, but have read every word and even memorized parts of it.
I recall going to the LA Gay Film Festival at UCLA about 1982, where Fireworks was shown. Everyone applauded afterwards, but the moderator noted that when he showed this film to his circle of friends, who included Anais Nin, everyone in the room reacted very badly to it. It brought back Leo Steinberg’s essay Modern Art and the Plight of the Public where he discusses how even the most forward-thinking person can reject modern art. Now, techniques of his such as subject matter, homoeroticism, and the sexual symbolism are so commonplace that Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs regularly steal from him.
He also created a short promotional film for a car company (I can’t recally which one) called Kustom Kar Kommandos. I’m quoting this title and the details from memory, so forgive me if I’m mistaken. His film is one of the most subtly unusual promotional films I’ve ever seen. It’s an obvious masturbation metaphor, where a strapping young man holding a maribou puff lovingly polishes a sleek sportscar while the song “Dreamlover” plays in the background.
Oh, good lord, there are so many inaccuracies that my mind’s in a tizzy. I haven’t read the piece of crap in decades, though, so the only ones that come to mind (other than poor Lupe) are that the “nude photos of Jean Harlow and Peg Entiwstle” are no more of Jean Harlow and Peg Entiwistle than they are of me.
I think a little historical context might be in order here. Kenneth Anger was one of the few out gay people of the time–he’d just, you know, come right out and said it in “Scorpio Rising”, which for many years was listed in reference works as the first overtly gay movie anybody could think of. “Hollywood Babylon” I don’t see as an attempt to be historically accurate–it’s a piece of camp, this time repeating all the juicy gossip gay men had passed back and forth since Hollywood became a film town. At least he raised public consciousness to the all-but-forgotten muder of William Desmond Taylor, and I bet Sid Kirkpatrick is damn glad he did: without “Hollywood Babylon”, no one would have paid the slightest attention to “A Cast of Killers”. (By the way, that a gay man missed out on Taylor himself being part of the community is a good indicator to me that the “Hollywood Babylon” is purest cocktail-party gossip, the kind you engage in before the guys pair off.)
The book garnered the affectionate nickname “Holly Baby” among the gay men’s community after its publication. This was, of course, before the liberation movement, AIDS, and the long-overdue establishment of civil equality (we’re still working on that, of course). At its core, camp is fueled by rage at hypocrisy, and there’s so much less of that than there was in the time Anger was writing his gossipy tome that I think we don’t quite recognize classic camp any longer.
So was Anger reporting the truth about long-buried Tinseltown scandals, or did he put together a faithful parroting of the chatter he heard between acts from the matrons’ rent boys at the Opera? I think it’s the latter, and I have to say his ear is dead on. It’s not as though we were going to get the truth, anyway.
I’ve often wondered if Anger hated it that most people knew him only for “Holly Baby”. His chances of getting work in mainstream film were probably zip, though: he’d come out, and that wasn’t done.
Unfortunately, too many people believe everything they read, and much of the invention in HB has since become “truth” simply by being repeated over and over, and even used in other books as fact. It’s taken actual historians decades to try and undo the rumors that Keneth Anger started.
If he hates it that most people only know him for that book, good. Hoist with his own petard.
I just read a book called “Flicker” by Theodore Roszak which mentioned Kenneth Anger a few times in passing. There was also a character that made me wonder if it was supposed to be Anger himself.
Of course it made me recall those scandalesque “Hollywood Babylon” books and their lurid details. At least I seem to recall a second book. Was there such a thing?