12/8/2022 0 Comments Hollywood babylon![]() No, it was the personalities, sort of larger-than-life personalities. ![]() I appreciated that as a historian, but we haven’t had any juicy scandals recently.ĭoes this have anything to do with the way the press covers celebrities? Are too many people famous nowadays? This is sort of a mellow period, but there were days in the 20s and the 30s when it was having a different scandal every week, practically. And it used to be a lot more colorful than it is now. And so whatever vices it has I appreciate it is colorful. Kenneth Anger: I have a certain amount of ambivalence about it, but basically I am fond of it. VICE: Would you say that you lean more toward loving or disdaining Hollywood? By the end, it was clear that he is truly a walking treasure trove of history he has lurked at the core of Hollywood longer-and knows her better-than anyone else. ![]() A few times he had something to add and would pick up again, but mostly he would just look at me in the eyes and say, “OK?” to signal that he was ready to move on. Kenneth was very polite if somewhat reserved, and throughout our chat, the only awkward moments were when he would pause after answering a question. Before he was ejected from the premises, Kenneth handed John a small plastic vampire figurine that contained mint candies inside, clarifying its original use by saying, “It’s actually a dispenser for tickle-ribbed rubbers.”īut in the end, our interview did go well, or at least I thought it did. His shirt was opened to his navel, revealing the giant lucifer tattoo emblazoned across his chest, and he was accompanied by a boyish photographer who took pictures as Kenneth kissed Curtis’s corpse before its cremation. John put it more eloquently than anyone when he said the director has been “the iconoclastic, ancient, experimental filmmaker and thorn in Hollywood’s groin since childhood, a self-proclaimed spiritual magician who predates the glamour days.” He went on to recount the time Kenneth showed up at fellow director and mutual friend Curtis Harrington’s funeral at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery wearing a black raincoat, eyeliner, and fingernail polish. The guide kept angrily referring to Kenneth, calling him a “tyrant” and a “liar.” He even accused him of fabricating the circumstances surrounding the death of 1920s starlet Marie Prevost.ĭuring a lunch meeting with author John Gilmore (see his piece, “This Is Hollywood, Isn’t It?” soon on ), Kenneth became a point of conversation yet again. He also continues to send them all sorts of mail on an almost daily basis-letters, notes, books, and other packages-apparently because he likes the post office and enjoys mailing things to people.Īnother strange occurrence happened during a free afternoon when I made the poor decision of taking the Dearly Departed Tour, a bus excursion to locations around LA where infamous celebrity scandals and deaths took place. When I visited the Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard and mentioned my upcoming interview to the nice couple who run the place, they told me they’d been friendly with “Ken” for years and that he had cursed them no fewer than three times (in one instance via their answering machine). A review in the New York Times famously stated: “If a book such as this can be said to have charm, it lies in the fact that here is a book without one single redeeming merit.” In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth.ĭuring my visit to LA to interview Kenneth, his name kept popping up seemingly at random. Within days it was banned and pulled from bookstores until a new edition was printed in 1975. Six years after its initial publication in France, the book was released in the US in 1965. And before the existence of societal scourges like People, TMZ, and Us Weekly, it was much easier for famous people to get away with sordid deeds. Some critics have cast doubt on claims made in the book, but who are they to say they know better? They weren’t there. ![]() Kenneth also wrote Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, books that detailed hushed celebrity scandals from the silent-film era through the late 60s.
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