Hollywood Babylon

KENNETH ANGER: “When I was growing up, old enough to understand fairy tales – to listen to them, not read them – my grandmother, instead of telling me stories about Little Red Riding hood and Sleeping Beauty, would tell me bedtime stories of Fatty Arbuckle, what Clara Bow used to do with her football team, Rudy Valentino’s strange sort of dominant wives, and things like that. I didn’t quite understand everything she was talking about, but I was absolutely fascinated.”

BILL LANDIS: “Cast out of star heaven, Anger proved stars to be mortals. In ‘Hollywood Babylon’ the angels fell with a resounding thud. The stars themselves were all unhappy dysfunctionals. The book exposed hidden libidos such as that of Valentino, who had wielded enormous power over people’s fantasies and erotic imaginations but had a submissive love for dominant women. It also recognized little victims on the fringes, like Peg Entwistle, who threw herself off the HOLLYWOOD sign and died days later with cactus needles stuck all over her.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Valentino’s wives, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova, were both ‘protegees’ of the exotic lesbian actress Alla Nazimova – Hollywood’s most distinguished feminine import at that time – whose Bohemian gatherings at her famous Sunset Boulevard estate, The Garden of Allah, cause considerable comment. It was Natacha who designed the Beardsleyesque costumes for Alla’s production of ‘Salome,’ in which Nazimova starred herself, employed only homosexual actors as an ‘homage’ to Wilde, and lost her shirt.”

DAVID STENN: “The Garden of Allah: an eighty room, Spanish Colonial building at the foot of Laurel Canyon. Once the home of Alla Nazimova, Russian star of American films, the mansion was turned into a hotel on Jan. 9, 1927. Long-term residents would include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Andre Malraux, and Alexander Woollcott, who described the Garden as ‘the sort of place you’d expect to find down the rabbit hole.’ Nazimova, who kept one apartment on permanent reserve for herself, had built her pool in the shape of the Black Sea as a reminder of her native land.”

KIRK SILSBEE: “Greta Garbo lived there for quite a while and had so much privacy that she would start each day with a nude swim in the morning. Ernest Hemingway solicited funds for the Spanish Civil War at the Garden, and F. Scott Fitzgerald shut out the world and wrote ‘A Diamond Big as The Ritz’ in Bungalow One. When the Algonquin Roundtable wits came to Hollywood, they stayed at the Garden. Robert Benchley called it ‘Assignation Alley’ because of all the writers who used to crank there. Dorothy Parker attempted suicide there more than once.”

KIRK SILSBEE: “Trombonist Tommy Dorsey once stayed at the Garden of Allah and invited fellow bandleader Kay Kyser over. They got to talking and an argument ensued as to which one of them had the more loyal fans. TD settled it by summoning two lovely young women from the next room. They were naked as jaybirds and had their respective pubic regions shaved into a T and a D. Artie Shaw and Ava Gardner lived there for a while after they married.”

DON RANDI: “I would go to the Garden of Allah to listen to music. They had all kinds of bungalows. It was infamous. There was a line that went around about the Garden of Allah. ‘Enough cocaine was spilled at the Garden of Allah to feed a Third World country for about ten years.’”

JACK LARSON: “I went to the party for the closing night of Garden of Allah and the wife of a famous British actor was there. I remember her practically crying and saying this unforgettable thing, ‘Jack, they are closing the best whorehouse down the hill.’”

KENNETH ANGER: “Overnight the obscure and somewhat disreputable movie performers found themselves propelled to adulation, fame and fortune. They were the new royalty, the Golden People. A new art form was being forged from day to day; the Seventh Muse made herself up as she went along, making money and having fun. The Twenties is sometimes referred to as ‘Hollywood’s Golden Age,’ and golden it was, in sheer exuberant movie-making creativity as well as in financial returns. Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers. The legend overlooks one fact – fear. That ever-present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.”

GLORIA SWANSON: “Oh, the parties we used to have! In those days the public wanted us to live like kings and queens. So we did – and why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed and there was no reason to believe it would ever stop.”

KENNETH ANGER: “The New Gods were determined to live their own legends to the hilt. The excesses of the stars developed a cynicism and defiance characteristic of Jazz Age youth. While their foes fulminated, the Hollywood in-crowd whooped it up in an atmosphere of staggering luxury: Spanish-Moorish dream castles like Valentino’s hilltop Falcon Lair, with its black marble, black leather bedroom; Marion Davies’ hundred-room Ocean House at Santa Monica with its all-gold salon, two bars, private movie theatre, old masters and huge marble bridge-spanned swimming pool; Pola Negri’s Roman plunge in her living room and Barbara La Marr’s enormous sunken bath with its gold fixtures in her all-onyx bathroom; Harold Lloyd’s Greenacres, a forty-room fortress with fountains to rival Tivoli; Gloria Swanson’s golden bathtub in her black marble bathroom; Tom Mix’s rainbow-colored fountain in his dining room; John Gilbert’s schooner, The Temptress, his sailboat, The Harpie, his dingy, The Witch, and his Cossack servants and private balalaika orchestra; Clara Bow’s Chinese den and Charles Ray’s solid-gold doorknobs.”

KENNETH ANGER: "It was a time when Joseph Urban boudoirs were soaked in Shalimar, when $3,000 Parisian beaded gowns lasted the life of one party, when sex came served in Arabian Nights splendor, when money came in by the bushel and went out by the fistful, when liquor was clandestine but plentiful and any star could buy the key to an artificial paradise.”

KIM FOWLEY: “I was in a car with my dad and Errol Flynn and some other actors and their children, riding down Santa Monica Blvd., back to Malibu. There was a guy, all decked out, standing in front of Barney’s Beanery with an ascot, a monocle, and spats. And Errol Flynn said, ‘I want the kids to get a lesson. Pay attention.’ We walked up and Errol Flynn said to the guy, ‘Hello. I love your look. No! I use this look to get laid and get free food,’ Flynn continued, and then Errol knocked him into the window of Barney’s Beanery. Barney came out: ‘What’s wrong, Errol?’ ‘He’s giving actors a bad name. Here’s some money for your window. Come on kids. That guy was a Hollywood phony. He’s a type, not a talent.’”

KENNETH ANGER: “The silent period has a kind of extra magic. You don’t hear the people’s voices. A silent image is more like a ghost or a dream.”

MAE MURRAY: “We were like dragonflies. We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air, but in reality, our wings were beating very, very fast…”

CLARA BOW: “We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I used to whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel, with several red Chow dogs to match my hair. Today, they`re sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun.”

KENNETH ANGER: “Scandals exploded like time bombs throughout the delirious decade of ‘Wonderful Nonsense,’ as screen career after career was destroyed. Each star wondered if it was his turn to be the next scapegoat. For Hollywood the fabled ‘Golden Age’ was more like a lavish picnic on a shaky precipice; the road to glory was beset with booby traps.”

JOHN RECHY: “Southern California is a giant sanatorium with flowers, where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way… this is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean and night – usually starless here – comes down.”

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: “One thing I won’t forget – driving up to the top of the hills yesterday, after Marguerite’s party, and looking down over the city.  All the platforms cut out of the hillsides, ready for pretentious French chateau-style houses ‘worth’ eighty thousand maybe, but no more than slum dwellings because so crowded and viewless and altogether wretched.  And I had such a sense of something spawning itself to destruction, spreading and spreading out until its strength is exhausted and then shriveling up and dying, and then the rockets, or the new ice age, or the whole slab of coast cracking off along the earthquake fault and sliding into the sea; lost in any case.  And the quickie promoters and real estate agents hustling to make their dollars before it happens.  Such a sick sad knowledge that this is ‘Babylon the great city’ and it can’t end well – and was never and could never be great, anyway.”

KENNETH ANGER: “[Schadenfreude], that marvelous German word… that particular Hunnish pleasure in seeing your enemies fall to pieces in front of your eyes. All I’ve had to do is sit back and wait to see the whole empire of Hollywood Babylon crumble into dust.”

BILL LANDIS: “Anger tells stories with mostly terminal overtones. Lupe Velez, Hollywood’s ‘Mexican Spitfire,’ had a series of torrid affairs and wanted to leave a beautiful corpse behind for the photographers. An unpredictable reaction to a Seconal overdose thwarted her. She died with her head in the toilet, drowned by her own vomit. Anger is not ridiculing her toilet end; he identified with her desire to keep dignity in death and to leave a beautiful corpse.”

BARNEY HOSKYNS: “The apocalyptic mindset – reinforced by earthquakes, brush fires, mudslides and howling Santa Ana winds – finds its apogee in Nathanael West’s celebrated ‘Day of the Locust’ (1939), in which ‘the never-ending, enervating sunshine wasn’t enough’ for the ‘masqueraders’ who’d reached the promised land. Like many writers forced to make a living in the Hollywood studio system, West harboured a deep desire to destroy LA, and had Tod Hackett, his studio artist hero, paint an apocalyptic scene entitled ‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’ When, at the end of the novel, a hysterical flatland rabble rampages through the streets of Hollywood, it is as though Hackett’s painting has come to life. The crowd is made up of the bitter and the betrayed – the hordes for whom the glimpse of a movie star gliding into a premiere can’t compensate for the fact that the city has cheated them.”

KIM FOWLEY: “Satan has a coffin, and he has LA in the coffin, and he’s almost finished hammering it shut, and the coffin’s gonna go down the gutters of Hollywood like a glass-bottomed boat, and it’ll roll over the memories of Jimmy Cagney and Fatty Arbuckle, and Hollywood will finally end for the same reason that the Roman and British Empires ended – for the same reason that all movies and symphonies end. Because there has to be an end.”