Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets (Mass Market Paperback)

by Kenneth Anger (Author) "WHITE ELEPHANTS-the God of Hollywood wanted white elephants, and white elephants he got-eight of 'em, plaster mammoths perched on mega-mushroom pedestals, lording it over the..." (more)
Key Phrases: film colony, film folk, movie colony, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Originally published in Paris, this is a collection of Hollywood's darkest and best kept secrets from the pen of Kenneth Anger, a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of America's leading underground film-makers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Dell (November 15, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440153255
• ISBN-13: 978-0440153252
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #51,200 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stars Shimmer as they get Dimmer, December 5, 2002

By	rareoopdvds (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A full-sized load of Hollywood's dirty laundry, September 22, 2003

By	Daniel J. Hamlow (Narita, Japan) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious, malicious fun! (but don't believe a word of it), July 27, 2003

By A Customer

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!