Kenneth Anger
Avant-garde film-maker who influenced Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, and wrote the scandal-filled Hollywood Babylon books
KENNETH ANGER, who has died aged 96, was an American cult film director and the darling of the European avant-garde, but became best-known as a bestselling spreader of Hollywood scandal.
As the author of two Hollywood Babylon books, Anger invited readers to accompany him on “a walk on the Dead Side” – or Hollywood’s Walk of Infamy – through maverick movie history.
Although famous for books which lifted the lid on a sink of incendiary gossip about great Hollywood names, disdaining the fawning effusions normally heaped upon them, Anger was also acclaimed as a largely unsung maker of short art films, a pioneer of gay cinema, a leading light in the American underground, and the first to use pop songs for his films instead of a traditional score.
“Stylistically,” reported The Daily Telegraph in 2000, “Anger’s work spans the surreal, the gothic and the kitsch, often mixed with a generous dash of homo-eroticism and an over-the-top musical soundtrack.”
A major influence on the likes of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, Anger kept his work largely devoid of dialogue and made use of jump cuts and other filmic techniques that pre-empted modern music videos and commercials by decades.
“Kenneth crafts his films like an artisan, frame by frame,” recalled one admiring critic, “and there are so many flash images that appear for only two frames – when you think that film works at 24 frames per second, that’s almost subliminal.”
Anger’s most popular cinematic triumph was Lucifer Rising, a 29-minute apologia for the fallen angel, but Mick Jagger turned down the title role because it was too close to the anti-christ for comfort.
Instead the part was initially offered to a young Tyneside steelworker, Leslie Huggins, whom Anger had encountered on a visit to the North East. Anger took some delight in recalling how for some time after his association with the film, Jagger took to wearing a crucifix.
When the National Film Finance Corporation advanced Anger £13,000 towards the production costs, The Sunday Telegraph ran the news under the huffy headline “Devil Film to Get State Aid”.
Anger was also a practising magus, a disciple of Aleister Crowley, the British occultist once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, whose seal, “666”, the Number of the Beast, Anger wore tattooed on his forearm.
It was Anger who introduced Jagger to the book The Master and Margarita, a surrealistic fable by Mikhail Bulgakhov, about the Devil arriving in Moscow. Jagger used it as the basis of the song Sympathy for the Devil, a litany of the devil’s interventions, from Christ’s crucifixion to the Kennedy assassination.
By and large, Anger’s films were confined to art-house screens. In March 1972 a compilation of his work over 25 years, the Magick Lantern Cycle, was shown at the ICA Cinema in London. The Telegraph declared Anger – along with Andy Warhol – one of the two foremost underground directors.
“But whereas Warhol deals with the flat tensions of life as he sees it,” wrote the critic Tom Hutchinson, “Anger’s work bulges with invocations to magical ritual pertaining to sexual release from tension.” Hutchinson marvelled how Anger’s “stunningly professional use of colour and multiple images dazzle and flare in the imagination long after viewing”.
Anger’s abiding interest in Hollywood, and its less salubrious side, resulted in his two bestselling volumes of film scandal, Hollywood Babylon (1959, reissued 1975) and Hollywood Babylon II (1984).
They included photographs of a bloated, guzzling Elizabeth Taylor, the truth behind the Fatty Arbuckle orgy in 1921 – when an obscure starlet, Virginia Rappe, was found ravished and dying on his bed – and what James Dean was doing before he died at the wheel of his speeding Porsche (“He had attended a gay party at Malibu, which had ended in a screaming match with an ex-lover, a man who accused him of dating women just for the sake of publicity”).
Anger devoted three chapters to Charlie Chaplin, noting how one glamorous gold-digger introduced herself to the silent movie star with the words: “Is it true what all the girls say – that you’re hung like a horse?”
Just how much Anger’s stories could be relied on is debatable. As recently as July 2021, The New Yorker magazine commented that “Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, queer underground filmmaker, but in his muck-raking mode he could be casually vicious, and frequently mistaken.”
Quoting Karina Longworth, host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This, it seems that while the Mexican-american actress Lupe Vélez did fatally overdose while pregnant, possibly with Gary Cooper’s baby, she did not die, as Anger claimed, with her head in the lavatory bowl, vomiting up a Mexican dinner.
And while it was true that the former silent screen heartthrob Ramon Novarro was murdered in 1968 by two hustlers he took to his Laurel Canyon home, no Art Deco dildo was involved. Nor did Clara Bow, the original It Girl, have sex with the entire University of Southern California football team.
Of mixed German and British ancestry, Anger was born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer on February 3 1927 in Santa Monica, California, but preferred his grandmother to his parents and older siblings, and it was she, a costume mistress at United Artists, who introduced him to the cinema. At the Santa Monica Cotillon, where child stars were encouraged to mix with ordinary children to learn etiquette, he danced with Shirley Temple.
He claimed to have made his first screen appearance as the Changeling Prince in the 1935 Warner Brothers film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
although this was disputed and the film was a flop.
Between the ages of 11 and 16, while studying at Beverly Hills High School, Anger made seven short films, which have never been shown, having either been lost, or destroyed in 1967, when Anger publicly burned his work shortly before taking out a full-page advertisement in The Village Voice
announcing his own death.
Indeed, Anger possessed an enormous sense of self-publicity and camp outrage, which was reflected in his erratic yet dazzling debut proper, Fireworks (1947). In this 15-minute fantasy shot over a weekend using a borrowed camera, Anger plays a teenage boy who wanders into a dream where he is raped by a gang of American sailors, followed by scenes of crude erotic metaphor involving a Roman candle.
Although the film historian Leslie Halliwell described Anger’s early work as “undergraduatish… crammed with sexual symbolism and obscurity”, when the film was premiered at a French festival, a jury headed by the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau awarded it a prize.
Like Anger, openly gay, Cocteau wrote its 20-year-old director a fan letter, and Anger spent his next 10 years in Europe. He collaborated with Cocteau on two projects, Rabbit’s Moon, which failed through lack of funds, and a film of Lautréamont’s Maldoror, which stalled at the rehearsal stage. Anger’s version of the erotic French novel The Story of O
collapsed when one of the actors was involved in a kidnapping.
Only one film was completed in Europe, Eaux d’artifice (1953), a period piece shot in the Tivoli Gardens in Rome set to the music of Vivaldi, hailed by The Daily Telegraph as technically brilliant and rather beautiful.
But Anger only hit his stride with his cult classic Scorpio Rising, which he made on his return to the United States. Released in 1963, it is a fetishised paean to leather-clad Hells Angels, lovingly lingering over their motorbikes to a soundtrack of Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet.
Scorpio Rising earned the accolade of “the only rock and roll film”.
Anger followed this with Lucifer Rising, which he released in three different versions, between 1967 and 1970, and still considered unfinished. An exploration of the work of Aleister Crowley, the film featured Marianne Faithfull as Lilith and Donald Cammell, co-director of the film
Performance, as Osiris, the Egyptian god of death.
Although Anger was an acknowledged authority on Crowley’s life and times, his film was dogged by multiple misfortunes, some of which the director only half-jokingly attributed to other-worldly forces.
Anger persuaded Bobby Beausoleil, who was serving life for murder following his association with Charles Manson, to record the soundtrack with a band he had formed in prison.
Anger’s other projects seemed to be fatefully doomed. On one of his frequent visits to England, he and the artist Michael Wishart planned a “colour film poem” of the aesthete Stephen Tennant’s Garden of Pan at Tennant’s family pile, Wilsford Manor near Amesbury. More through the subject’s dilatoriness than any fault of the director’s, the project never reached fruition.
When he was living in Paris, Anger wrote his first book of scandal,
Hollywood Babylon, tracking Tinseltown from the silent-film era onwards. He recalled Rudolf Valentino’s taste for submissive sex, Charlie Chaplin’s misdemeanours with underage girls, and assorted starlet suicides. The New York Times called it “a delicious box of poisoned bonbons”. The second volume was less well received.
Notoriously reckless with money, and “never making enough to live the life” – he described himself as “a rather difficult person” – in 1976 he surprised dealers at an auction at Phillips in London by paying £10,000 for a wall mirror to use as a film prop. He said it was just what he needed for a film he was making.
In the early 2000s, when he was effectively homeless and broke, the San Francisco Film Arts Foundation awarded him a cheque for $7,000, which would have paid his rent for a year, only for Anger to blow it in a single night by throwing a lavish party, even tipping his taxi driver $100.
For years Anger lived in New York, where he kept a huge collection of Hollywood memorabilia, including the neon RKO sign from Radio City Music Hall, the original design for the Hollywood sign, and hundreds of autographed pin-ups and other ephemera.
In old age he lived alone in Los Angeles – “I’ve always been a loner” – and became a chronic insomniac. “I tune my radio to the BBC World Service,” he explained. “I can’t dream, but at least I can listen to the nightmares of the real world.”