Customer Reviews

Hollywood Babylon--It's Back

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I definitely enjoyed KENNETH ANGER's two books that this book is riding the coattails of. I also enjoy gossipy tell-alls, and have no problem with a tall tale. However, HOLLYWOOD BABYLON IT'S BACK is dubious trashy tidbits, obsessed with celebrity endowments, apparently written over many years, and poorly cobbled together with no real editor's discerning eye. Stars of yesteryear are "quoted" amusingly and then the same "quotes" are retooled with the essential tidbits changed to suit another chapter. NICK ADAMS' reputation is mercilessly trashed, and inaccurately (uhm... how could he have been servicing ELVIS when THE KING was watching the moon landing? ADAMS had been dead nearly a year and a half, as the book itself reports!!) Every stupid, groundless rumor you've ever heard about dead stars is offered as fact, though not a single principal is left to defend themselves. Over 350 pages, by page 126, I was appalled! Here's a quote: "In 1951 (HARRY) COHN offered (LUCILLE BALL) a trashy part in The Magic Carpet...With her commitments at Columbia finished, LUCILLE landed at RKO in 1935." So LUCILLE BALL finished up at Columbia in the early 1950s and "landed" at RKO in 1935...? Huh? This could have been better, but instead, HOLLYWOOD BABYLON IT'S BACK makes BOZE HADLEIGH appear reliable.

I found this book to be a disappointment. The layout of the pages is very amateurish and ugly. The information tries to sound scandalous but after a while becomes repetetive and even dull. I found myself skipping page after page just to look at the photographs, many of which are of poor quality and seem to have been lifted from the internet, without credit (one of them is mine, that I took of Lucille Ball a few weeks before her death). Some photographs look like they were printed from poor washd-out photocopies. (In their defense, perhaps all they could find of certain rare photos were photocopies, and so decided to print poor versions instead of none at all.) As with the original Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2 by Kenneth Anger, don't rely on these books for facts or truth. What's in them is embellished, at the very least, for titillation. Whatever truth may be contained in these books is basically lost in the stew of rumors, half-truths and outright fiction. A shame, since it doesn't even result in a very good read.

I enjoy trashy gossip more than most straight men, but Darwin Porter's shocking revelations are too outrageous to swallow. Disbelief is impossible for me to suspend.

Porter conjures gargantuan long-ago conversations that no living person could conceivably have witnessed, and only someone with a memory like Truman Capote could claim to remember in such detail even if the he or she had been on hand.

The stories have a suspicious sameness. Porter's standard scoops involve (a) everyone in the movies being gay, (b) endless slavering chitchat about the sizes of various famous men's equipment, and (c) allegations of numerous leading women having been prostitutes. There surely must be some fresher twists on these classic memes.

Finally, HB2 lacks the chain-saw wit that made Kanneth Anger's original Hollywood Babylon a classic. Porter's prose is just bitchy.

But should you buy it? If you treasure old-Hollywood gossip, sure. The only bad rumors are the boring ones. Triteness and repetition aside, the anecdotes are real page-burners. And maybe there is truth behind the legends.

This is a really bad book: badly organized, badly written, badly edited, badly proofread. If you can actually finish it, you will wonder how Hollywood ever got any movies made. Everyone named seems to be having serial sex with everyone else all the time. There are lots of old recycled stories here, but there are some new ones I had never encountered before: Lucille Ball's early days as a whore? James Dean raped a 13-yr-old boy? John Wayne or Elvis Presley might have ordered Nick Adams killed? Judy Garland's corpse was defiled? Jackie and Marilyn had a face-to-face showdown in Truman Capote's apartment a few weeks before Marilyn's death?

Since this is about Hollywood, I'm not sure why we got chapters on Pope Paul VI and Winston Churchill.

Someone should have proofread this book in order to avoid spelling Scorsese's name wrong. Same with Ann-Margret. Shelley Winters is called both a "confidant" and a "confidante." Something about Frank Sinatra (p.180) takes place in Beverly Hills, only to be repeated (p. 185) as having happened in Palm Springs. That is the problem with this book: the constant repetition. We'll read a few paragraphs on one page and on the same page we have pictures with long captions that repeat the same information although with different spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. I began to suspect that one author wrote the prose, while the other author write the captions, and they never bothered to compare or to agree on a writing style. They can't even agree on "premier" versus "premiere."

The grammar and punctuation errors are not to be believed. beserk? two wifes? 25,00 fans? God-give appendage? Speaking of which, the book starts out with a seemingly-endless discussion of who had the biggest appendage in Hollywood, and the usual suspects are named...over and over and over. The chapters all seem to have been written independently of each other and have been slapped together without editing, so that we get the same sentences over and over. I really got tired of being told who Henry Willson was and who the beefcake boys he discovered were. Tell me once. Don't tell me every other page.

It seems like this has been put together by a few internet kiddies and bitchy forum trolls in order to make ( surprise ) a quick buck.
Of course all their accusations run against people long dead but that's not the point - the artwork is pitiful, the photos of such pathetic quality that a 20 year old rolled up newspaper in the attic would give you better quality - the reliance of repeating age old stories and rumours we have all heard a 100 times before is unbelievable - as is the infantile language construction and abysmal editorial qualities used throughout.
I last saw a book as bad as this when in junior high working on a last minute class project after midnight.
save your money - spend ten minutes surfing through internet celebrity gossip sites like perezhilton etc - at least you won't have to part with your cash for the same tired old stories.
alternatively - camp out on a small mid west town street corner and listen to the interfering god fearing old biddies as they make their way to the Piggly Wiggly store - you'll have more fun and you'll hear the same old rubbish !

Every single dead celebrity that you can think of is gay in this book. I mean every SINGLE one! Let me summarize the entire book... "(insert famous name here) was gay and had a huge package/great tongue, he/her had sex with (insert another famous name here) and bragged about it to his/her cast mates the next day. (Insert name here) had orgies at their house and everyone there turned gay or was gay or decided to be gay just for the night. Oh and Lucy was a prostitute! The End." It is a wonder that, if all of these rumors are true, all of Hollywood didn't just die from a mixture of 17 STDS in one year.
I had to wonder about why reading this book made me feel so disgusting inside, then I had to wonder why the heck I cared enough to order it. The first book was just juicy scandals and this one is like a .5 cent peep show in the back of a crack house.

A book on scandals and bad? Boy, it must be really bad.This one is really bad!Do you want the whole scoop? All of it? You read only two books, and only these two books: "Hollywood Earth Shattering Scandals:The Infamous, Vilains, Nynphomaniacs and Shady Characters in Motion Pictures." and "Hollywood Babylon,"
The rest is simply rehashes and imitation.

Do not waste your time or money. The authors are obsessed throughout the book with the size of every male star long dead. The photos are very poor and it is difficult to recognize who some of them are. Every story which is supposed to be scandalous is in regard to a dead star. Tom Cruise and Tony Curtis are on the cover but don't expect to read anything "Hot, Unauthorized, and Unapologetic!" You won't and with regards to the stars that have died its all been said before and better.

Like the vast numbers of readers today, scandal regarding famous people in different walks of life seems interesting, however, this book contains too much information for one's mind to process. It's slapped together with side articles and photographs that could be better designed by the average scrapbooker. It is pure smut, bottle of the barrel gossip, with quotes of running conversations between various individuals that makes you wonder how they were obtained and if, in fact, they were obtained or just created for shock value. This book is a mockery of the original Hollywood Babylon and my suggestion would be not to waste your hard earned dollars on it. I read it and sold it immediately before my "investment" became a total loss.

I would like to apologize to the trees who gave their lives for this piece of trash. The pictures are either dark, blurry or worse, obviously photoshopped. There are items written as fact, which were proved to be false years before this piece of trash was thrown together. Some stories are so completely made up it's embarrassingly obvious no thought was given to making them even appear to be honest or true. This "book" is quite simply, nothing but trash. Save your money and buy Globe Magazine or the National Enquirer. You'll get alot more honesty in journalism from either of these supermarket rags. I was looking for reliable, well researched, entertainment history. Instead I received a book with obvious mistakes, pictures clearly "put together" and essenitally stories without any credible references at all. Hollywood Babylon -- It's Back is a long and nasty tabloid, in the worst sense of the word. What a waste of money!