Look Back on Anger

An appreciation of the late filmmaker Kenneth Anger makes the unlikely case that he was as influential as Orson Welles.

“Hollywood is a funny place where rivals who hate each other’s guts are forced to soul-kiss each other under slow-broil lights while a crowd of unsympathetic onlookers observes them with singular intensity.”

—Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon II

In the late ’60s, journeying through a not-so-marvelous, pre-VHS/DVD/streaming cinematic universe, with high school retreating in the rearview mirror, I had never heard of Kenneth Anger, not seen any of his films, nor read a single word of his salacious prose. All this was soon to change through an unlikely confluence of director Martin Scorsese, musician Jimmy Page, and Ian Ballantine, the man who put paperback originals on the map. There’d also be cameos by Mick Jagger, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mickey Rooney, and, since this is a California story, the Manson Family.

I mention my former ignorance of Anger because I was a film fanatic and hoped one day to direct: high school Thursday nights always involved grabbing a copy of the Village Voice, turning to the movie listings, and mapping out the most efficient NYC subway route I could take over the weekend to see the maximum number of films. By the time I showed up at the New York University School of the Arts—not yet Tisch—I had seen about a thousand, which I’d coolly calculated would advance me to the head of the class. Certainly in the viewing department, at the very least. This was possibly the first, but definitely not the last, of my serious professional errors of judgment, as you shall see amply demonstrated herein.

On the first day of class, our cinematography professor explained that there was only so much knowledge he and his colleagues could impart. “The way you learn about making movies is to see how other people made them,” he said. “You go to the movies!” At that moment, I was feeling incredibly positive about my prospects. And then: “I think I’ve seen about 10,000, and I’m only scratching the surface.” An order of magnitude! Utter deflation, degradation, and an immediate decision to abandon film school, directing, and anything thus associated at the close of the semester. The professor was Scorsese; he was teaching so he could use the school’s equipment to make movies. Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), produced by, among others, Haig Manoogian (who started and still ran the film department), had received some minor distribution. You know the rest of that story.

“The films of Kenneth Anger are as instructive as those of Orson Welles,” I recall Scorsese saying.

Despite severing my directorial legs, Scorsese instilled an even more profound love and deeper appreciation of cinema. He spent an hour one day brilliantly deconstructing Vertigo (1958), how it made no logical sense because it perfectly encapsulated the illogical infatuation of Jimmy Stewart’s character for Kim Novak’s. Didn’t this in turn speak volumes about how Alfred Hitchcock, the director, felt about his female actors? asked our teacher. (Anger would address this topic, as you shall soon see.) Film can be about feelings, Scorsese said, as much as it’s more commonly thought to be about action. And here was the big reveal: you can learn as much from totally obscure directors as from the biggest ones. “The films of Kenneth Anger are as instructive as those of Orson Welles,” I recall Scorsese saying. “His quick cuts and personal obsessions remind me of Cocteau”—Anger would meet him in Paris—“and in many ways are more revealing and impactful than Welles’s admittedly brilliant understanding of theatricality and dramatic form. Anger’s cutting and use of popular music will have a more lasting impact on the future of film than the deep focus of Citizen Kane.”

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David Lynch says he appropriated the song “Blue Velvet” and the spirit of Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) for his 1986 film titled for the song. And just listen to the soundtrack of any Scorsese film; it would not exist had Anger not been among the first directors to incorporate hit music into movies in a way that indirectly, even obliquely, comments on the underlying action: Donovan’s almost gospel “Atlantis” playing as Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci beat the living cazzo out of Frank Vincent at Neir’s Tavern in Goodfellas (1990). Unintentionally, Anger contributed to the framework used by MTV and every music video ever to come, although he qualified that, when speaking with the filmmaker Elio Gelmini in 2006, saying he looked for popular music to fit his visuals, whereas music videos generally do the opposite. “I work with visuals as a musician works with harmonies,” Anger said, talking about his layering of images atop one another.

Born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer in 1927 in Santa Monica, California, Anger died last May in Yucca Valley. His obsession with all things Hollywood started early: he claims to have danced with Shirley Temple at the Santa Monica Cotillion and played the Changeling Prince in the Warner Bros. production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), in which Mickey Rooney starred as Puck. Anger’s tales (in general but especially about himself) are often subject to revisionist history. Rooney has alternately confirmed and denied that Anger was in the film, once even saying that the prince had been played by a young girl, Sheila Brown. Not a problem, Anger said: the grandmother who raised him, a seamstress to the stars, had dressed him as a girl. Here’s Anger in his Hollywood Babylon II, one of the two books he wrote:

Anger certainly knew Hollywood and its lore, twisted tales he claimed his grandmother’s housemate Diggy—just Diggy—would tell him at night to put him to sleep. Clearly, this was before the creation of Child Protective Services.

“There’s a problem,” Scorsese told us. As with most obscure yet influential works of art, finding prints of Anger’s films wasn’t easy. “But I happen to know Fireworks is playing at the Eros Theatre in Times Square tomorrow night.” So off we shuttled, six or seven of us, male and female, to take a gander, only to discover that the girls—at least then and there—were not welcome: the Eros was a gay male theater. We straight guys were too inhibited to go in.

I didn’t see Fireworks, Anger’s first significant film, until many years later. It features a few sailors from a squadron in the United States Navy. He claimed to have been 17 when he made it in 1947, as if his initial torpedo across the broad bow of traditional cinema would have been any less startling at his real age of 20.

By today’s standards, it seems tame, slightly infamous for the Roman candle that erupts from one sailor’s fly near the climax of the film. The cutting is clever and assured. But the content was edgy for something shot then.

Ten years later, Raymond Rohauer, perhaps the most famous collector of rare films and, before his death, the owner of Los Angeles’s Coronet Theatre, screened Fireworks and was arrested. The case wended its way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled the film more art house than grind house. Anger told Gelmini that he blamed himself for the subsequent deluge of theatrical blue movies. “I don’t like pornography,” he said. “It’s like watching a sewing machine.”

Anger’s influence went far beyond the dozen or so films that ultimately cemented his reputation. Puce Moment (1949), five minutes of visuals of ball gowns, was to have been a longer Puce Women, in which aging actresses were to have worn the gowns. Like Welles, Anger often ran out of money and had to rethink the scope and scheduling of his productions. Puce, as in the color of one gown, was to have been “my love affair with mythological Hollywood… with all the great goddesses of the silver screen. They were to be filmed in their homes. I was, in effect, filming ghosts.” Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), essentially men buffing their custom cars, was financed by a Ford Foundation grant, with a print of Scorpio Rising submitted as part of his application; I would have paid serious money to have been a fly on the wall, watching the grant committee discuss that conflation of bikers, Nazis, biblical footage, and a jar of mustard. For Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Anger convinced Mick Jagger to create the soundtrack by playing a synthesizer in real time along with the film. Eaux d’artifice (1953) is a mesmerizing visual kaleidoscope of images filmed in the aquatic gardens at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, outside Rome, with a little person he met through Federico Fellini to make the waterfalls seem larger than life. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), an homage to Aleister Crowley’s polymorph perversity, a pagan revival of sorts, was Anger’s introduction to bickering among actors: the writer Anaïs Nin felt she was to be the star, only to be one-upped by Marjorie Cameron, another Crowley acolyte and the widow of Jack Parsons, cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former housemate of L. Ron Hubbard, who two years earlier had blown himself up in his home laboratory. The film is often considered the first public homage to psychedelic drugs, long before the words and deeds of Timothy Leary.

Calling himself a victim of the Bummer of Love, Anger announced that he was quitting the film world.

Anger drifted around, moving to Paris in 1950 and spending the following decade as an assistant to Henri Langlois, cofounder of the legendary Cinémathèque Française. There, Anger saw countless movies, even got to edit parts of the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s !Que Viva Mexico! (1932), an unfinished film whose footage had been stashed in Paris.

Anger then moved to San Francisco to begin work on Lucifer Rising (1980), which focused on the music scene in the city and starred Bobby Beausoleil, a musician in the Grass Roots along with Arthur Lee, who would soon form the seminal Los Angeles band Love. Anger and Beausoleil had increasingly disparate ideas about the film; in 1967, Anger claimed that all the footage he’d already shot had been stolen from the trunk of his car by Beausoleil. Calling himself a victim of the Bummer of Love, Anger announced that he was quitting the film world and moving to Manhattan; once there, he took out a full-page ad in the Village Voice:

The following year, Beausoleil began living in the Topanga Canyon house loosely organized by Charles Manson; in 1969, accompanied by Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner, he murdered musician Gary Hinman over what was later described as a drug deal gone south. The Tate-LaBianca murders would come two weeks later. In 1970, Beausoleil was convicted of first-degree murder. Two years later, California tossed the death penalty, and Beausoleil’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, whence he would ultimately be allowed to compose and record the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising after another musician we are about to meet didn’t deliver.

In 1972, I was dispatched by the Washington Post to spend two weeks on the road with Led Zeppelin. (I had abandoned film school, graduated from Georgetown with a degree in philosophy, and become the paper’s first rock critic, beating out Carl Bernstein for that position and thus setting up the downfall of Richard Nixon.) Chronicling the over-the-top touring life of a hugely popular rock band sells newspapers after all.

The band’s guitarist, Jimmy Page, talked little about music and nonstop about Anger: how Anger had filmed him, in pharaoh garb, holding a replica of an Egyptian stela, seated on a pharaoh’s throne built by Anger (and eventually acquired by Page) in Scotland at Boleskine House, 15 miles from Inverness, formerly owned by Crowley (now owned by Page), where Crowley had performed The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, summoning the 12 kings and dukes of hell.

According to Page, Anger was so fascinating, so interesting, such an incredible artist, that Page was actually thinking about creating the soundtrack for the movie Anger was shooting: Lucifer Rising. Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithful had a big part, and Keith Richards’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was financing it, along with Gordon Getty; they were shooting in Egypt and Germany, even at Stonehenge. All news to me, I said; I had heard Anger had abandoned the project.

He had abandoned only the portion he had shot in San Francisco, Page said. Too much death energy. I thought Anger liked death, I said. This is the new Kenneth Anger, Page said: it’s about rebirth. He went further: how Anger was the first person he, Page, had ever met who really understood the magick—magick with a k—that Crowley espoused. (Anger later included nine of his related films in the Magick Lantern Cycle [2009].) Frankly, by this point, it all sounded like a tremendous amount of drug-induced madness and drivel, very much in keeping with the tour and its concomitant excess, much of which has been reported ad nauseam.But do let me share what happened the morning after a performance in Seattle, a tale Anger would have loved but never heard. I’m in the lobby of the Edgewater Inn at 8 a.m., our theoretical call time. The only other person present is Peter Grant, the band’s burly and often confrontational manager, a man with no use for credit cards, who only dispenses cash, a touring ATM of sorts.

He’s standing at the front desk, going over the room charges for each band member and questioning the kid behind the desk—who looks to be maybe 14—about the $500 “miscellaneous” charges on each of the bandmates’ folios. The kid starts to giggle—he knows what those charges are—which is not amusing Grant.

“What’s so fucking funny?” Grant asks; personally, I’m getting worried the kid is about to have a close encounter with one of Grant’s fists. I’d previously seen Grant, a former bouncer and wrestler, do some serious damage.

The kid is stuttering, doesn’t quite know how to say this without laughing hysterically, but slowly, it comes out: each of the guys in the band had thrown the room’s TV set out the window and into Puget Sound the night before. “They’re still out there, sir,” the kid reports. “I can show them to you.”

Grant shakes his head, though not in so pronounced a way as to telegraph that he’s seen this ritual before. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a huge wad of cash, and counts out an additional 20 crisp hundred-dollar bills.

Now the kid can’t constrain himself, cracks up completely; he can’t believe this is happening with such alacrity.

Grant reiterates the question: What’s so fucking funny? And the kid says, “You deal with this so matter-of-factly.”

That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it: money for nothing! Even when you’ve got a brain completely addled by booze and blow, you can still occasionally recognize a teaching moment. And right now, Grant summons with his index finger: Come with me, kid.

The two of them, with yours truly pulling up the rear, head over to the elevator and up to Grant’s room. He opens the door, reaches into his pocket, and counts out five more Ben Franklins, which he lays on the desk. Then he opens the window and says to the kid, “Give it a heave, son.”

The kid picks up the TV, throws it through the window, and down it arcs into the sound, journey’s end signaled with a satisfying splash.

“Now get back to work,” says Grant.

A year later, I’m in London and call up Page. Thanks to our conversations about Anger on the tour, we’re now best friends forever. (Hah!) He’d been to Washington, DC, where he’d met the hard-to-find blues musician Bobby Parker, stayed at my house, admired the toast caddy I had randomly discovered in a thrift shop, etc.

“You’ll never guess who’s at my house right now,” says Page. “Kenneth Anger. Why don’t you come over and meet him?” So off I go to Holland Park and the Tower House, the castle Page had just bought from the actor Richard Harris, outbidding David Bowie in the process.

We have tea. Page’s toast caddy is actually much nicer than mine. Page and Anger are discussing the music for Lucifer Rising. I tell them about my trip to the Eros Theatre in Times Square a few years earlier. Anger is quite self-deprecating and says, “Aren’t you impressed to meet a director whose work you can only see in gay-porn theaters?” I tell him that Scorsese had said that he was as important as, maybe more so than, Orson Welles. Mean Streets (1973) had just some out, but Anger had yet to see it, and Scorsese’s praise seemed to have little impact.

“Hollywood Babylon” is a delicious cornucopia of tawdriness, as if Anger is getting revenge on the Hollywood that would never really accept him.

Several years later, Tom Wolfe published The Right Stuff (1979). It’s the story of the original seven Project Mercury astronauts, but it begins with a long portrait of Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier. The following year, I was introduced to Ian Ballantine, a widely renowned book editor who had begun publishing paperback originals under an imprint he’d named after himself, although he was now running Bantam.

Ballantine had sought me out after a friend had mentioned that I was an amateur pilot. He was looking for someone to ghostwrite Yeager’s autobiography. Yeager came to DC in an F-15EX Eagle, the two-seat trainer version of the F-15, and the two of us went flying together. It was a delightful day, any pilot’s dream. The next day, Ballantine called to ask if I’d accept the offer.

“I’d love to hang out with Chuck,” I said. “But I’m dubious that, after what Wolfe wrote, anyone would want to read another book about him.” Yeager’s autobiography sold over a million copies in hardback, more than The Right Stuff, and was rumored to have earned ghostwriter Leo Janos millions of dollars.

Ballentine, who died in 1995, never gave up. He wanted me to write a book, which I did not. But we talked often, and I once asked him what books he wished he had published. Hands down, he said, he had wanted to publish Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. “It was one of those legendary books every publisher lusts after, written in the late ’50s in France and in French, because that was the only place the author could find someone to put it out.”

Now out of print and described by Susan Sontag as “as legendary as its subject,” it’s a delicious cornucopia of tawdriness, as if Anger is getting revenge on the Hollywood that would never really accept him. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who also published the Marquis de Sade and Story of O, put it out. In 1975, Jann Wenner acquired the U.S. rights, and his Straight Arrow Books published it.

Anger delivers the dirt, lots of it. (Some of it may even be true.) He refers to James Dean as “the human ashtray” because he’d liked having cigarettes ground out on his chest. The 1921 rape of Virginia Rappe by Fatty Arbuckle in room 1219 at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The murder of William Desmond Taylor, who had collected a trove of nude pictures of well-known female actors, not to mention books of erotica by Crowley. Grace Kelly agreeing to strip for Alfred Hitchcock, but only if he observed remotely, viewing her through a telescope. And Charlie Chaplin, traveling back to L.A. from a Mexican shotgun wedding to 16-year-old Lillita MacMurray, telling several scribes on the train: “Well, boys, this is better than the penitentiary, but it won’t last.”

About 10 years ago, I was in Los Angeles and stopped by the Samuel French Film and Theatre Bookshop on Sunset Boulevard. Like Anger, it’s gone now, but for years it was one of only two places (the other, Larry Edmunds Bookshop, is still around) where you could find obscure books about film and theater. I was salivating over books on the shelf when…wait a minute…isn’t that…

I walked over to Anger, who was chatting with staffers at the store; clearly, as one might expect, he was a regular. I reintroduced myself. He didn’t have a clue, nor should he have. I explained that we had met briefly in London, at Page’s home.

“I hated Jimmy Page for a long time,” he said. “He did half the music for Lucifer Rising and then disappeared. But I’m getting old and trying not to hate anyone anymore.” And then: “Wait a minute. Aren’t you the guy who told me that Martin Scorsese thought I was as important as Orson Welles? Did he really say that, or were you trying to pump me up?”

Actually, I said, “He told us in our cinematography class, almost a half century ago, that you’d have a greater impact on the future of film than Welles would. And I think he was right.”•