Customer Reviews

Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Kenneth Anger's trash classic is still worth a look after all these years. No, this is not the book for those tender and naive dears among us who still think "they wouldn't print it if it wasn't true." This is more along the lines of "they couldn't print it if they weren't dead!" Don't look here for an accurate history of Hollywood's Golden Age. What Anger serves up, in his own wasp-tongued way, is the true gossip of the day. True in the sense that it was actually circulated, not that it was accurate. That in itself gives the book its own kind of historical value: the tabloid trash a bygone era. If you've ever lingered over a particularly lurid headline in the supermarket check out line, this book may be for you. Go for it, nobody's looking!

Reading this book probably wasn't the best way to learn of Hollywood's sordid trash, when I bought this ages ago, but I didn't have a movie encyclopedia at the time, which would have been useful, and I would've learned of the many tragedies that befell certain Hollywood stars in a more scholarly way. However, I didn't know that Peg Enwistle was the one who started a trend by diving off the LAND of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, which now reads HOLLYWOOD.

The key scandals of the 1920's through 1950's are played out. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921, involving his alleged part in the death of starlet Virginia Rappe, was the O.J. Simpson of the 1920's is given a separate chapter. It took three trials to acquit him, but his career was finished. As Anger snidily writes, "The Prince of Whales had been harpooned." The others include Errol Flynn being accused of having sex with two underage girls, Mary Astor's diary, and the stabbing death of Lana Turner's lover John Stompanato by Cheryl Crane. Frances Farmer's nervous breakdown and collapse has some of snidiness in there, although he makes it clear that he does sympathize with her plight years before Nirvana did a song on her on their In Utero album.

Two mysterious and to this day still unsolved are probed, that of Thelma Todd, the Ice Cream Blonde, who may have been murdered by the mob instead of committing suicide, and the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and those aren't as treated sensationally as other material.

Suicides are written with some embellishment in this book, i.e. Paul Bern, Jean Harlow's second husband, Marie Prevost, whose starving dog ate parts of her body, Lupe Velez, a.k.a. the Mexican Spitfire, and Carole Landis. Separate sections are written for Velez and Landis.

However, not all events and people get Angers' chops and slices. The Red Scare that ruined the lives of actors such as Gale Sondergaard and John Garfield, and the Hollywood Ten is presented as the travesty it was: "What it did do was ruin many lives and careers and tarnish the glamor of Tinsel Town." And the blackmailing practices of the snoopy, Confidential magazine, forcing performers to cough up to prevent them from revealing sordid things about performers. Thankfully, this terror was stopped when the founder of the magazine committed suicide after being named as a communist by Joe McCarthy. He's also contemptuous of the two gossip columnist Gorgons, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

Towards the end, the decline of Hollywood in the 1960's is portrayed as one sordid death after another, ranging from La Monroe, Judy Garland, Ramon Novarro, and George Sanders. Somehow, I did not need to know that Garland died sitting on the toilet in her London flat.

Not a scholarly history of Hollywood's seamy side by any means. Rather, Kenneth Anger drags out Hollywood's dirty laundry and lays it out in a shamelessly sensationalistic and exploitational format, with catty sentences to boot, even including a few nude photos of starlets. Find a film encyclopedia instead. After reading this, I shudder to think what the movie was like.

Like any newspaper article, events are turned into "stories." These "stories", like any silver screen biography, tells the dramatic tale of a life in turmoil. Kenneth Anger's book, "Hollywood Babylon" takes the angle of a tabloid and digs up some old dirt of famous celebrity lives and puts it into a full collection of grime, grease and oil. This collection takes a chronological look at Hollywood's finest at the time beginning in the early twenties with such big names as Fatty Arbuckle whose drinking problem got out of hand at one of his big parties after signing a lucrative deal. Moving through time to the 30's, 40's, right up to the Sharon Tate murder, which Anger recognized it was no longer "Old Hollywood."

The book reads like a gossip column mixed with sleazy tabloid journalism, yet with the wit and humor of a prankster. It's an exploitation of exploited lives. To mimic tabloids further, the pages appear with large and sometimes disturbing photos of stars at their most inopportune moments.

While much of the material has already had its heyday in newspapers of the times, it has a new life today where many of these actors and actresses are virtually unheard of by the general public and rekindled new interest in their films. Just as watching and old O. J. Simpson football game may have the same appeal as watching Lana Turner in her debut "They Won't Forget."

The title to me is entirely fitting, as Hollywood is the "Babylon" of our society, one in which everyone has all their wants at their disposal. A place where hedonism is the religion and tragedy is only the end of a scene, for we know by the end of the movie everything will be all right. My only disappointment in the book is its cursory glance at such stars as Marylyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and many other stars that became almost a tally only to be put under a heading of how they died. "Hollywood Babylon" still fits the bill, however, as an enticing and racy read of the darker seedy side of that strange and secret society.

Anybody who is considering buying this book (and its sequel, if one can find it) should know that it has absolutely no pretensions of being fair or accurate. Despite the wild inaccuracies of now-deceased stars' exploits, the book is still like seeing a car wreck: you know it's awful, but you can't resist looking at it. It's a fun book in spite of itself.

The photos are often tasteless, the prose is often tacky and sleazy, the research is put together with two nails and a hammer, and overall the book reminds one of the old "Confidential" magazines (the magazine is actually profiled in one of the book's chapters). Yet sleaze and tackiness are what Hollywood was all about, so the book seems fitting.

If you want accuracy in a book, go elsewhere. If you like gossip in the most vicious and slimy way possible, then this is your book.

The first time I read this book I loved it. Unfortunately since then I have read the biographies of some of the people in this book and realized that this really is just gossip.
Clara Bow never took on the Trojans in her home, Jayne Mansfield wasn't really decapitated, that is a wig in the picture and Fatty Arbuckle wasn't a rapist, Virginia Rappe died from a botched abortion.
The bottom line is, you are better off reading the biographies that are just as sensational, but hopefully closer to the facts.
Also Crimelibrary.com has truer stories about these people and it is free.

This book is a phonomenon! I couldn't pry the thing out of my hands and must have torn through it in an hour or two. Keep in mind that this reviewer lives and works in Hollywood, and generally turns her nose up in distate at celebrity-worship. This book, however, is no People magazine. Written by a former child star, Hollywood Babylon upsets nearly every myth about the Golden Age of Hollywood we celebrate. The stories are sensationalist, lurid and totally defamatory- and thats why I loved them. Don't get too caught up on the over-the-top delivery, Mr. Anger is a little heavy handed in the metaphor department, but his stories are worth it. I couldn't get the images out of mind and retold half the chapters to my friends ghost-story style. Most fabulous of all are the photos. Alongside the glossy glamour P.R. shots are candid snapshots of the stars at their worst, or most private. How he got his hands on what must surely have been feverishly guarded secrets is a mystery. The book's only downfall is that Mr. Anger rushed much too quickly through the 1940's and 50's. Those two decades deserve a volume of their own. The best way to read this book is to draw yourself a starlet-worthy bubblebath and expect to come out a prune- you won't be able to put Hollywood Babylon down.

From some of the reviews I have read, it is either you'll love this book for its contents or hate it for its contents.

Well, infinitely sarcastic and tsk tsking in tone, Kenneth Anger compiled a fascinating, if not nauseating tome of Hollywood gossip, mysteries and scandals; accompanied by a generous helping of equally fascinating and nauseating photos.

Just when you think that people are so moral back in the good ole days...well, surprise surprised!!!! Here comes Hollywood, the "cemetery of virtue".

Hollywood Babylon "documented", with frenzied glee, the various scandals that rocked the film industry, and in turn the world. First we are introduced to the death of Olive Thomas, then the now infamous Fatty Arbuckle trial. These two stories basically set the tone for the rest of the book....rapes, sexual indiscretions, drug overdoses, nervous breakdowns, orgies, murders, creative suicides and so on and so forth.

The photos themselves are not for the faint of heart.... featuring death photos of extinguished luminaries such as Thelma Todd, Marie Prevost,Bugsy Siegel, Jayne Mansfield (and her dog!).

Overall, if you like gossip and scandal and loves laughing at the misfortunes of others and have a taste for the morbid, this book is a delight...a delectable "box of poisoned bon bons" through which you can choose and pick at your leisure...with every juicy morsel is as good as the next.

Otherwise....this book will probably make you nauseous.

A sequel, Hollywood Babylon II is not as good as THIS one. But the zinger in that tome is photos of the infamous Black Dahlia murder. But that is another poisoned bonbon for another day.

This book is wonderful -- I hadn't had this much fun since reading the roughie "Tales From the Crypt" comics of my childhood. Kenneth Anger was truly so far ahead of his time, not only inventing the independent film (MTV rips him off all of the time), and being a really angry child star, but also exploiting the mass-culture of fandom with high-end blood-and-guts effect. Anger takes the proletarian sensibility most people have about Hollywood and uses it not only to construct a cathartic masterpiece of dark humor, letting you in on all the sexual deviancy and glitter-fueled glamour-junkies, but also expressing a very obvious (and very humorous) resentment. If you can't enjoy the fun of reading about Golden Age Hollywood stars behaving badly (and who can't?), you can indulge in Anger's bitterness, and if not that, there are plenty of photos to scan in and print out and tack to the wall as conversation pieces. And if you can't enjoy any of that, I imagine you're probably the sort of person who also says such obviously absurd and mutually-contradictory statements as "I don't need drugs or alcohol to have a good party!"

Get the book if you have a creepy death fascination that makes you the life of the party but completely irritated your parents when you were younger. F'ing Brilliant!

Hollywood Babylon is like the movie, "Alive," in that it was great, but so sickening, you're not sure whether or not you want to recommend it to anyone. If you're of the faint of heart and want to hold onto cherished memories of the Golden Age of Hollywood, don't read it at all; you will be grossed out completely and may even lose your mind from the depravity. If you're of a stronger constitution, you may like it, but be prepared for grisly photos of dead people, revolting scandals and disgusting incidents. But if you're just a sick puppy, this book's for you! I, for one, am not one, so I gave it three stars. I would've given it four, but I had to deduct a point for the Tackyness Factor (c'mon--did we really need to see a picture of Jayne Mansfield's mangled dead dog after her fatal car crash? Yeeesh!). At any rate, buy this book if you like, but remember--you've been warned!

This book is an absolutely riveting and bizarre journey into the dark underworld of Hollywood, jam-packed with salacious gossip, startling stories, and incredible, often weird photographs. It is every bit as tawdry and interesting as the original "Hollywood Babylon," if not more so.

The sniffy reviewer who thinks it is "boring" is either jealous, or was in a particularly sour snit when he trashed this masterpiece. Do yourself a favor. Get this treasure and judge for yourself.

What makes Anger's volumes one-of-a-kind are that among the well-known scandals and horror stories, he draws you into the fringes and strange by-ways of old Hollywood, dredging up offbeat tales - big stories at the time, but now long-forgotten - of people you won't read about elsewhere; the suave character actor with a taste for orgies, the gay decorator and his pals who were beaten up on the beach by a mob of rednecks, the world-famous tennis player who lived in Hollywood and had a taste for young boys. This was perhaps the first book to have the actual, grisly crime-scene photos of the Black Dahlia. Many pages are devoted to detailed descriptions of suicides, many of them people you've never heard of, but won't forget.

Yes, there are indeed sad photos of movie people of the 20's through the 70's, drunk, grossly overweight, in the throes of drug addiction, in jail, in fights, being arrested,lying in coffins.

If you have an appreciation for the odd and unusual, and are interested in a very different look at the glory days of Hollywood, you simply must have this book.