# Inaccuracies In "Hollywood Babylon"
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [July 27, 2003, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273 "2003-07-27T16:38:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Governor\_Quinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Governor_Quinn)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/1 "2003-07-27T16:38:37Z")
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).
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### Author:  [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/2 "2003-07-27T17:24:27Z")
Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Eve? Eve? Eve?
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/3 "2003-07-27T17:36:15Z")
I know his comment about it being Justine Bateman that got Roman Polanski busted for rape is wrong.
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### Author:  [@toque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/toque)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/4 "2003-07-27T18:00:16Z")
He’s not an idiot, and it’s not supposed to be a definitive desk reference. Appreciate it for what it is.
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### Author:  [@ruadh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ruadh)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/5 "2003-07-27T18:04:18Z")
Relative of yours, toque?
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### Author:  [@Ukulele\_Ike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ukulele_Ike)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/6 "2003-07-27T18:22:05Z")
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?
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### Author:  [@Mockingbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mockingbird)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/7 "2003-07-27T18:26:15Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Ukulele Ike \*
> \*\*
> 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).
> \*\*
Not to mention that he knew and worked with Anais Nin.
There’s something to be said for that, IMHO.
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### Author:  [@toque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/toque)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/8 "2003-07-27T19:27:41Z")
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.”
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### Author:  [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)
#### Post date: [July 27, 2003, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/9 "2003-07-27T19:31:15Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Kobaltblu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobaltblu)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/10 "2003-07-28T05:14:47Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Ukulele Ike \*
> \*\*Nah, I agree with **toque**. The Babylon books are entertaining horseshit, and were written solely to earn Anger a few bucks…
>
> 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).
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.
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### Author:  [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/11 "2003-07-28T13:07:09Z")
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_.
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### Author:  [@Wumpus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wumpus)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/12 "2003-07-28T14:40:03Z")
I’ll have to keep that in mind someone asks for a cite here … it’s not inaccurate, it’s _performance art._
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### Author:  [@toque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/toque)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/13 "2003-07-28T14:59:18Z")
I never knew **Kustom Kar Kommandos** was originally made as an advertisement! That’s fantastic!
I bought a Maria Montez poster from him at the SF Film Festival, but in my excitement, forgot to ask him to sign it. Damn!
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### Author:  [@McJohn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/McJohn)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/14 "2003-07-28T15:06:49Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/15 "2003-07-28T15:28:06Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@HelenGawn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HelenGawn)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/16 "2003-07-28T16:39:14Z")
So what about Rosebud?
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### Author:  [@Gulo\_gulo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gulo_gulo)
#### Post date: [July 28, 2003, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inaccuracies-in-hollywood-babylon/191273/17 "2003-07-28T17:02:42Z")
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?