20 saturday review Saturday May 28 2022 | the timesRereading Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger
The movie moguls, “former junk dealers
and glove salesmen”, were always paying
hush money to the district attorney when
the police discovered pornographic pho-
tos or were handed revealing diaries — it
was better that the public never knew how
Mary Astor, Marmee in Little Women,
recorded in her journals that she and the
playwright George S Kaufman “shared our
fourth climax at dawn”.
It was Anger who first told in full the
story about the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. In
1921 a party hosted by the oversize comic
actor got out of control and “sharp screamsrang out in the adjoining bedroom”. A
guest, Virginia Rappe, “a lovely brunette
from Chicago”, was found dead, her blad-
der having been ruptured by “some form of
violence”. Did Fatty take a flying leap on
top of her? Was he “exceptionally well-
endowed”? Was there some impropriety
with a bottle? Arbuckle was acquitted after
three trials of her rape and manslaughter,
but his career as a star was over.
Another of Anger’s revelations was
Charlie Chaplin’s paedophilia, his fond-
ness for any “flimsily dressed little nuggins
with bold eyes”. One of these barely legalteenagers gave birth to “a deformed mon-
ster who lived only three days”. Another
took Chaplin to court because of his insist-
ence on a practice so “abnormal, against
nature, perverted, degenerate
and indecent” that she received a
settlement in 1927 of $625,000 —
a high price for fellatio in any era.
To Anger, Hollywood is “the
pasteboard Babylon” or “make-
believe mirage of Mesopotamia”,
built beside the “dusty
tin-lizzie trail called Sunset Bou-
levard”. The whole place is fake.
People are disposable in Holly-
wood — when the silent stars
were made redundant by the
talkies there were lots of sui-
cides. Anger relishes catalogu-
ing the starlets found clutching
a bottle of toxic bichloride of
mercury granules. He tells us
about revolvers at the temple,
gas pipes, drowning.
Just about everybody was a
heroin or morphine addict,
dope fiend or devotee of “joy
powder”, as cocaine was called.
Cocaine, I was fascinated to
learn, was responsible for the manic, jerky
comic movements of the Keystone Kops
and everything directed by Mack Sennett.
I was sickened reading about Marie
Prevost, a star of 121 silents, who was found
dead in 1937, her corpse half eaten by her
dog. “Her dachshund had survived byK
enneth Anger, still with us at 95,
was the Changeling Prince in
the 1935 film of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream in which Mickey
Rooney was Puck and James
Cagney gave us his Bottom. Anger went on
to make lots of “underground” flicks with
rock musicians that had a hallucinogenic
tone. He is best known, however, for Holly-
wood Babylon, his muck-raking book about
the scandals of Tinseltown. He went be-
hind the scenes to show the effects of (his
capitals) Drink, Dope, Debauchery, Insan-
ity, Suicide and Murder in Hollywood. An-
ger was the first commentator to reveal
and wallow in cinematic sleaze and writes
in a baroque style that positively pants and
throbs with glorious overstatement.
Hollywood Babylon came out in 1959 and
became a cult classic. In 1984 he published
Hollywood Babylon II with its infamous
cover portrait of an obese Elizabeth Tay-
lor. There was to have been a Hollywood
Babylon III, although this was abandoned
in fear of an eternity of litigation by Tom
Cruise and the Scientologists.
For decades the studios had been careful
to manicure the public image of their stars.This cult classic about
Hollywood’s secrets is
lurid — Roger Lewis
can’t look away
making mincemeat of his mistress.” Johnny
Weissmuller’s ex-wife Lupe Vélez, we learn,
died head first down an Egyptian
Chartreuse Onyx Hush-Flush Model
Deluxe loo.
The rumours about Ramon
Novarro, a star of the 1925 Ben-
Hur, being bludgeoned, then
choked to death on a dildo he had
been given by Rudolph Valentino
are right up Anger’s alley, as is the
Lana Turner scandal: her mob-
ster lover, Johnny Stompanato,
was stabbed to death with a
butcher’s knife by her daughter.
Anger also relishes discussing all
the actors and actresses who were
carted off to insane asylums. The
actress Frances Farmer, who had
been lashing out at policemen,
gave her occupation, on the ad-
mission form, as “cocksucker”.
Anger’s book has a Jacobean
animus — the grim fascination of
the skull beneath the skin. There
are lots of ghoulish photographs, of
bodies in mangled cars, prone
overdose victims, cadavers in open
caskets and bodies in bags. We are
shown not only Jayne Mansfield in the
bloodied wreckage, but also her dead dog.
One final thing: it’s probably worth noting
that his childhood claim to fame about ap-
pearing in A Midsummer’s Night Dream
may not be true, unless he was once a little
girl called Sheila Brown.N H c b a L s w b A t c a b g m a t a b o cshownJust about everybody
was a heroin addict,
dope fiend or devotee
of ‘joy powder’
scandalous Fatty
Arbuckle was accused of
rape and manslaughterLion by Conn Iggulden
Michael Joseph, 432pp; £20
In the 5th century BC a young Athenian is
learning the art of war from an older
master. The young man is Pericles, who
will go on to lead Athens into war with
Sparta; his mentor is Cimon, a hero of the
Persian Wars. The Persians are repulsed
for now, but the alliance the Greeks
formed to defeat their great enemy is
crumbling, as Sparta and Athens compete
to be the dominant power. As the novel
opens, Cimon is leading three triremes in
a quest to find the bones of the mythical
King Theseus, the original hero of Athens.
The prolific author Conn Iggulden draws
the Greek world convincingly and he is
strongest writing battle scenes. However,
his characters in Lion are a little flat. Peri-
cles will become one of the greatest men of
history — perhaps in the second book in
the series this spark will be more apparent.Privilege by Guinevere Glasfurd
Two Roads, 352pp; £18.99
It is 1749 in Rouen. When young Del-
phine’s father is imprisoned and ruined for
possessing contraband books, she is forcedThe Island of Forgetting
by Jasmine Sealy
Borough, 336pp; £14.99
There is a trend for retelling
Greek myths, but this invent-
ive debut does something different. Jas-
mine Sealy takes the origin story of the
Greek gods and recasts it as a family saga
set in Barbados. Iapetus is haunted by the
death of his father and overshadowed by
his bully brother, Cronus. Atlas’s plans to
leave the island come to nothing. He has to
shoulder the family hotel business, while
his glamorous cousin Z comes to dominate
Bajan society. Calypso, Atlas’s daughter,
works in the hotel and sleeps with the
guests. Calypso’s son, Nautilus, struggles
in a society intolerant of homosexuality.
Sealy makes her protagonists feel real
and rounded while fitting them in the
mythic structure. Atlas is particularly
good — as a young man he feels claustro-
phobic at the smallness of the island. In
later years, through Calypso’s sometimes
pitiless eyes, we see him bent over from a
lifetime of keeping the hotel going, dimin-
ished by the small humiliations heaped onbooks
Greek Gods in
the Caribbean
Plus a dancing plague
and an American
Revolutionary duo.
By Antonia Senior
him by thoughtless tourists. The Island of
Forgetting works on many levels: as a
family saga, as Greek myth retold and as a
portrait of Barbados through the 20th
century.The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood
Hargrave Picador, 304pp; £14.99
In 1518 a plague of dancing erupted in
Strasbourg. To the despair of the author-
ities, local women began to dance mania-
cally for days on end. Were they possessed
by the Devil or the Holy Spirit? Kiran Mill-
wood Hargrave uses this extraordinary
historical mania as the backdrop for her
second novel for adults. In the foreground
is a more conventional story of love and
loss. After multiple miscarriages, Lisbet is
finally pregnant. She lives with her distant
husband and overbearing mother-in-law.
Her life changes when her prickly sister-
in-law returns from banishment in a
mountain abbey. No one will speak of why
Agnethe was sent there to do penance.
The authorities hire musicians to play to
the dancing women, hoping to tire them
out. Two of the musicians are billeted with
Lisbet, and she becomes close to the kinder
of the two, Turkish Eren. Lisbet’s quiet life
begins to unravel as the dancing intensi-
fies. What was Agnethe’s crime? And how
far will Lisbet’s attraction to Eren go? The
Dance Tree is unusual and beautifully writ-
ten, and the questions it raises about faith
and love linger.to flee to Paris and ends up in the
employ of Denis Diderot, the French phi-
losopher. In London some years later,
Chancery Smith, a clerk, is given a mission
by the boss he is trying to impress: to estab-
lish the authorship of some papers, which
are initialled D. Does D stand for Diderot?
Does D even exist? The papers are unpub-
lishable in France, which is more heavily
censored than England. Smith travels to
Paris and teams up with Delphine.
The odd couple’s quest to find D is
dogged by a sinister French censor, Henri
Gilbert. The title of the novel refers to the
necessity in prerevolutionary France of
obtaining “royal privilege” before publish-
ing anything. Guinevere Glasfurd is con-
cerned with the power of words and the
dangers of censorship, made literal in the
person of Gilbert. This is a quirky and well-
written novel of ideas.The Ballad of Lord Edward and
Citizen Small by Neil Jordan
Head of Zeus, 352pp; £18.99
Citizen Small is a runaway slave. In the
aftermath of a battle in the American
Revolutionary War he finds an injured
soldier, Lord Edward, an Anglo-Irish aris-
tocrat. Small nurses him back to health in
the forest, and the two form an unlikely
bond. Their adventures are narrated by
Small as if in ballad form. Small, whose
Irish father is known as “Skinner Mayo”
due to his enthusiasm for scalps, regards
Edward as his saviour. The pair sail back to
the old world with Small taking his place
by Edward’s side as a servant. Small is
instructed to call his master “My Lord” in
public and “Ned” in private. Based on his-
torical events, Small will follow his friend
and master as he turns his back on the
English establishment and embraces the
cause of Irish independence. By the film
director Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Cry-
ing Game), this is an atmospheric take on a
fascinating friendship.historical
fiction
Women began
to dance
maniacally
for days on
end. Are they
possessed by
the Devil?
Book
of the
month