Babylon Burning (Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger)

Member Name: edie

Product:	Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger
Date:	09/04/01 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gleeful romp through Hollywood's dark side

Disadvantages: too much scandal is bad for your health

There’s always something about the scandals of the past. Somehow whatever emerges from today's blaze, celeb-saturated media is never quite as fascinating as the half-remembered, half-covered up affairs of yesteryear- horrors that seem all the more shocking today for the utter innocence that surrounded them. In recent years there's been a glut of posthumous exposes but still the grand-daddy of them all remains Hollywood Babylon. Written by Kenneth Anger, former child actor and notable underground filmmaker, this no holds barred account of Hollywood scandals was originally published in Paris before cult success meant it eventually worked its way (in a reprinted form) back across the Atlantic.

Anger seemed determined to blow the roof off Hollywood's bland self image and so HB is a high spirited whirl through incidents such as Fatty Arbuckle's murder trial, Charlie Chaplin's procession of pregnant underage brides, Frances Farmer's crack-up, the on-set orgies of Erich Von Stroheim, Valentino's "pink powder puff" rumours, and endless anonymous drug over-doses and pathetically grandiose suicides. The only thing that might deaden the impact is it's focus on stars of the silent era, many of whom are familiar only to dedicated cineastes these days- their falls from grace are less dramatic as reader is unaware of their previously exalted status. For this reason I found the sequel Hollywood Babylon 2 more interesting as it covers recognisable subjects from the 40s, 50s and 60s. (Anger is currently trying to publish a third volume.)

Holly Baby (as Anger calls it) is an easy to read book and his gleeful, wicked prose renders each expose strangely compelling. While its short chapters and episodic nature means it often resembles the scandal rags where much of its material was derived. HB is a good book to dip into rather then read in one go -indeed too much exposure to it's human frailties is bit like watching
Channel 5 24 hours a day. Its also amply illustrated with absurd and repulsive photographs, either candid studio stills or police shots of famous death scenes: Bugsy Seigel, decapitated Jayne Mansfield and her dead dog, Sharon Tates' house etc. Though their impact is somewhat limited by publisher Dell's most recent edition of the book in tiny pocket size.

Much has been written about HB's non-truthful nature and its worth taking a lot of it with a pinch of salt- although many stories have been verified by time (like Marlene Dietrich's "sewing circle" of lesbian girlfriends and Errol Flynn's sexploits.) But it doesn’t matter much if its long dormant scandals are true as this a book about gossip as much as it documents it. Anger writes potted histories of entertainment columnists like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper and the grubby reign of Confidential magazine which (with its wide-scale employment of prostitutes as "researchers") was more like a blackmail operation than journalism- offering victims the opportunity to "buy back" exposes for a large fee. While the reprints of articles and headlines from contemporary newspapers shows that the scandal press has always existed, an inevitable spin-off alongside the studios' sanitised publicity departments.

In many ways Holly Baby resembles an collection of modern folklore or Hollywood urban myth. (The likes of Lupe Velez's toilet suicide has been cherished by kitsch merchants for decades.) The book's blurb describes it as containing Hollywood's "best kept secrets" but essentially the contents of HB were always the worst kept secrets. Anger has compiled the unsubstantiated rumours that had long been repeated among the inhabitants of Tinsel Town and recorded them, creating an unlikely oral history of Los Angeles.

Much of the contents of Hollywood Babylon have already entered popular consciousness through one form or
another- Chaplin's 15 year old wife Lilita being the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's most famous novel. While HB has been influential in its own right, much of the material- the sordid, complex connections between stars, moguls, gangsters, hookers and politicians- now tend to be documented in serious novels like James Ellroy’s LA Confidential and John Gregory Dunne's Playland with their quasi fictional treatment of the same sources.

Like those books Hollywood Babylon also shares a commendable distaste for the hypocrisies of America's moral arbitrators and the likes of Louella and Hedda who tried to mask their muck raking with outrage or sentimentality. At least Anger's honest and he knows he's just dishing dirt. But despite the sometimes viciousness of HB, Anger often reveals a grudging affection for Hollywood's "Golden Age", especially compared to is lukewarm scandals of recent times. In its own cracked way Hollywood Babylon is a tribute to the dream factory's possibilities and only adds to rather than detracts from Tinsel Town's image

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