THE GOOD OLD DAYS

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Creemedia

Hollywood Babylon II by Kenneth Anger (Dutton)

Richard C. Walls

Scandals just aren’t what they used to be. Not that there aren’t millions (thousands, anyway) of bucks to be made in the field, but the cutting edge has been blunted, the bloom is off the rose. To wit: when Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger’s original collection of scandalous outrages, tragedies, and oddities was published 20-some years ago it was considered a too-hot-to-handle, under-the-counter piece of ultra-sleaze—a bit of a scandal itself. But Babylon II, in some ways more scurrilous than its predecessor, is a coffee table chuckle, a non-event. The problem isn’t just the changing times. Anger, once a leading avant-garde film maker and offender of a wide range of sensibilities (after his classic film Scorpio Rising was released in ’66, the American Nazi Party sued him for desecrating a swastika) is a moralist of an oldfashioned stripe, and, just as the satanism shtick of certain heavy metalists depends for its effectiveness on vestigial puritan gullibility, so do Anger’s delineaions of tinsel town sin depend for heir frissons on at least an appreciation of, if not a total belief in, wickedness—which is something that people who are drawn to this sort of book are less and less likely to have. To make it even quainter, mixed with this traditional morality is a pining for the past that is equal parts nostalgia and rebellion, often intertwined since Anger, who was raised in lotus land (his grandmother was a costume mistress and as a child he made a brief but memorable appearance as the princeling in the 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream), believes in the gods and goddesses of old even as he debunks their myths. Like many people who have made their most pleasurable discoveries early in life, he feels condemned to living in a reduced present (at one point he even complains that in the old days, by gad sir, the showbiz cokeheads had style, not like these young slobs today, tootin’ their way to eternity in unkempt casual wear) and, as a true believer, he remembers longingly the days when a movie star’s fall from the Pantheon had the sweep of tragedy ...even though they probably had it coming.

Which may be a lotta hooey to you (it is to me) but that doesn’t make the book any less interesting. For one thing, there’s a ton of pictures. Many of them are surprisingly restrained, though a few are lascivious, like Carmen Miranda unintentionally exposing herself, and some nude shots— supposedly—of the young Joan Crawford, whoop-de-doo. There’s also a few on the grisly side like the shot of the Black Dahlia murder victim (Fangoria, only not in color) which commemorate the sort of freakish slaughter that’s just as likely to happen in Kansas as in Hollywood. Elsewhere, grotesque pictures of W. C. Fields disfigured by "gin blossoms” and an obscenely obese Elizabeth Taylor deliver the intended jolts.

As for the text, purple sarcasm and snippish wit are the order of the day, though sometimes Anger is almost kindly toward his, uh, subjects, especially the lesser lights. Some of these tales are familiar bits from the scandal repertory (James Dean’s faggotry, Lionel Atwill’s orgies, Liz’s thighs), some of them less often told (Paul Kelly in San Quentin, the Pantages scandal). There’s also a long section on suicides, detailing some 70 successful attempts but here, as elsewhere in the book, the relationship between the tragedies and Hollywood often seems only incidental. Still, Anger’s impersonation of Norma Desmond on a particularly nasty day keeps the morbid inventory moving along nicely, even if one suspects that you could investigate the past 80 years of the copper tubing industry and come up with a similar list of lost souls (it’s the human condition, folks, and it’s everywhere).