Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon"

Has "anyone" ever read it? How old you are, OP? 16?

Some of us GREW UP on "Hollywood Babylon."

Amateur

And all this time I really did think Jayne Mansfield's head got cut off in that car accident. Kenneth Anger LIED to me!

The short film "Fireworks" that's referenced in the article is on YouTube.

Angers was twisted as fuck, but what I wanna know is where did he find all those hot sailors to be in his movie?

I remember buying my copy at "Blue Door Bookstore" in San Diego, in 1987.

Anger lied, excuse me - embellished many facts about his life as well as the lives of the Stars. He claimed he made Fireworks when he was 16, one weekend while his parents were away. I call BS, it’s a more complicated shoot than 2 days, but he was quite young - maybe 20, so in any event it is an extremely accomplished piece of filmmaking - in many ways it’s his best.

He sounds like a good biopic. But maybe partially fictionalized, since there are so many gaps in his history. For instance, how did he support himself by just making some esoteric, arthouse film movie every ten years?

R7 His parents weren't wealthy, but lived comfortably, and they helped him financially as he was starting out. And as the article says, Anger also supported himself by selling celebrity gossip - most of it false - to French tabloids. He later compiled many of those items into the first edition of Hollywood Babylon, which was a huge bestseller.

That book was essentially his means of financial support for most of his life.

I'm 50 and this book was my celeb death bible. I loved this one and the second one. I used to also hang out on Find-a-death a lot, back when there weren't a million websites talking about death and celebs. Find a death also had the Wonderland murders video of the cop's walk through, they were called the 4 on the floor murders. And Scott always posts a pic of the mailbox. HB and find-a-death go hand in hand for me, reminding me of a better time.

He seemed to be steeped in bitterness, and the tone of his books is sneering. Perhaps being ostracized as a gay man- always on the outside looking in- fueled his... anger:

"In 1944, the Anglemyers moved to Hollywood to move in with family, and Kenneth began attending Beverly Hills High School.

Anger discovered his homosexuality at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in the United States, and he began associating with the underground gay scene. At some point in the mid-1940s, he was arrested by police in a "homosexual entrapment", after which he decided to move out of his parents' home, gaining his own apartment largely financed by his grandmother, and abandoning the name Anglemyer in favor of Anger. He started attending the University of Southern California (USC), where he studied cinema, and also began experimenting with the use of mind-altering drugs like cannabis and peyote."

There is a good biography about him. ANGER is the title.

I remember how shocked we were to find out after our grandmother died she had volumes I and II -- she was a nice respectable wealthy Midwestern matron, and to see she had a book with photos of Carmen Miranda flashing her snatch was pretty bizarre.

I went to USC Cinema -- he was never mentioned as an alum! 🤣🤣

R13 Anger was quite the embellisher and outright liar. OP's article talks about how Anger claimed to have been a child actor who was in the 1930s film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he's not listed in the credits.

R9, FindADeath.com was SO much fun in the early days. Scott was briefly Graham Norton’s lover, of all people. He was just so snarky about dead celebrities, he would enrage readers who would send nasty emails, and Scott would post them. Good times.

I remember my mom checking the book out of the library in the 70’s or so.

R12 I remember that picture. It traumatized me.

R2 I couldn't get through Scotty Bowers' book. It was so poorly written, and the fact that he didn't have a single photograph in it with any of the celebrities he claimed to have been so chummy with made me doubt his credibility.

Yes, I didn't understand until recently that it was all made up

What made him write the book aside from money? Wasn’t he a director? How come he turned to book writing and chose such a niche subject? Was he a big fan of Old Hollywood?

R19 I imagine the money he made from the book financed his independent films.

I remember The Simpsons episode with John Waters that referenced Hollywood Babylon. Waters took them on a tour of Springfield and drove by the toilet that Lupe Velez drowned herself in.

Are you all trying to tell me that Lewis Stone *didn't* drop dead of a heart attack while chasing those pesky kids out of his yard?

Was the Carole Landis dead photo in the papers at the time she died or was it a private police photo Kenny accessed?

R23 I'm sure it wasn't published in the papers. No doubt Kenny got it from one of his connections.

It's a shame that Lupe Velez's life and career has been reduced to a sordid Hollywood footnote based on an outlandish fabrication. Lupe did indeed ingest a bunch of sleeping pills, but why sully a sad story with a ridiculous lie?

"Clinton H. Anderson, a chief of the Beverly Hills Police Department, wrote in his memoirs Beverly Hills is My Beat, about the crime scene:

"'I have always felt that Lupe Vélez never really intended to kill herself…We found her dead in bed in her home, with a suicide note beside her addressed to her lover…I believe she thought her act would bring her faithless lover back, but she miscalculated the amount of sleeping pills.'"

Most of it is false but that didn’t stop Anger.

R26 That's what OP's article is all about.

He must have had some good connections to get police crime photos. Or lotsa money to offer.