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

By Kenneth Anger

Book Overview

"Picking through the slag heap of the Hollywood dream factory, Kenneth] Anger has put together a truly prodigious anthology of star-studded scandal."--The New York Times

Welcome to Hollywood. Take a walk down "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams," where starlets, sex goddesses, matinee idols, American aristocracy, and Mafia moguls meet. It's a town made manic in its heyday by "joy powder" and cocaine-crazed comedies, seduced by vamping heroin heroines, shaken by Fatty Arbuckle's orgiastic excesses and Errol Flynn's amoral extravagances, stunned by Marilyn Monroe's tragic suicide and Sharon Tate's brutal murder.

Here, as never revealed before, is the scalding reality behind the glittering fa ade: the true stories and darkest secrets behind the lurid headlines that have titillated the world and electrified the nation for decades.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B001UPBP4O
• ISBN13: 9780440153252
• Release Date: November 1975
• Publisher: Dell
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Nice

Nice

VERY ENTERTAINING

I love reading the trash & gossip about the stars and this book provided it all. It was hard to put down and I was sorry when I finished it. Great reading!

Delicious, malicious fun! (but don't believe a word of it)

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!

Macabre, campy fun for your inner-child

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!