According to Anger, Dean avoided the Korean War by informing his draft board back home in Indiana that he was homosexual. The further adventures of the Human Ashtray were featured in Babylon II. Anger was also the one to gossip in print about James Dean’s hush-hush nickname: the Human Ashtray. In Babylon, the original, he exposed the ostensible death-by-icicle (in her female parts) of Virginia Rappe at an Arbuckle party. He was the first writer daring enough to open the peephole onto the long-sequestered 1921 murder trial of film comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. I guess that’s me, because when Anger came once to speak in Boston, I was there to get both my books autographed.Īs Anger is still alive at age 93, also a legendary subterranean filmmaker, I want to give him some credit. The sequel, Babylon II, didn’t do quite as well, but both volumes were underground favorites among those with trashy minds and gutter sensibilities. How wrong! Anger’s outrageous compendium of sex and violence among the hallowed studio stars sold and sold.

Babylon wasn’t published in the US until 1975, considered too seedy for Americans. That one was printed first in France in 1960 with Jayne Mansfield as the bosomy cover girl falling out of her brief blouse. 26 years ago, Anger struck anew in 1984 with this sordid sequel to his original bad-taste, gross-out Hollywood Babylon. It’s a snapshot catching an Elizabeth Taylor so squat, so obese, so darned ugly that even Joan Rivers would have been struck speechless. The photo on the front cover of Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon II is, even for shameless paparazzi member Ron Galella, extremely unkind.

Hollywood Babylon II is almost as addictive, seductive, compulsively page-turning as its inglorious Hollywood Babylon predecessor.

Kenneth anger book