Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire

10-01-14 10:49 Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire
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Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire
Photo by Brian Butler
On a recent warm afternoon in Los Angeles, Kenneth Anger was taking a walk in the Hollywood
Forever Cemetery. Anger, 86, is the USs most celebrated underground film-maker, named as a
major influence by directors as disparate as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and John Waters. He is
also the elemental spirit whose life draws a connecting line between some of the most intriguing
figures of 20th century arts and Bohemia: the occultist Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, the
sexologist Alfred Kinsey, Anas Nin, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Anger has always liked visiting cemeteries. Theyre peaceful, he says. Theyd better be... And
Hollywood Forever, formerly the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, has a personal significance.
It is the resting place of a number of famous Hollywood stars and stands behind the original
Paramount lot; in fact, the studios were built on a part of the old cemetery.
Anger is an authority on old Hollywood. He is the author of two volumes of Hollywood Babylon,
the classic account of Tinseltowns most infamous scandals, from the silent era up to the Fifties.
A number of the cast are buried here. Rudolph Valentino, whom Anger considers the quintessential
Hollywood star (he had a short, tragic life [dead at 31] and left a big legend) is interred in a crypt
in the Cathedral Mausoleum. And there, beside the path where we are walking, lies Virginia Rappe,
the young starlet who died in the riotous orgy of drink and debauchery that led to the comedian
Fatty Arbuckle standing trial for rape and murder.
Poor girl...
Nearby is the vacant patch of ground that the actor Vincent Gallo, a friend, has told Anger he has
purchased for Angers own grave. It is next to the grave of Johnny Ramone, which is marked by a
spectacularly ugly bust of The Ramones guitarist, truncated just above the knee. Contemplating the
prospect of an eternity spent in immediate proximity to one of the musical architects of Sheena is a
Punk Rocker, Anger looks nonplussed. He is open-minded about the prospect of an afterlife, but
dubious about the Christian view of heaven, or whether thats where he will be going.
Well, that would be nice. Good for them. But I am a bit sceptical about harps and so forth...
Earlier that day, Anger and I had taken lunch at the Chateau Marmont. It is a venerable old
Hollywood establishment that exudes a discreet sense of wealth and celebrity, which has served
successive generations of movie and music stars. It is where John Belushi died of a drugs overdose
at 33. A notice on the table in the restaurant requests you not to smoke or take photographs.
Anger is a stockily-built man of medium height, with ink-black hair and a pale and remarkably
unlined face. He is wearing a smart tan suit, a striped shirt and an improbably jaunty tartan trilby,
of the kind Bob Hope might have worn at a celebrity golf tournament (jaunty is not an adjective one
would immediately associate with Kenneth Anger). Angers reputation as a film-maker rests mostly
on a body of work made in a 30-year period between the Forties and the Seventies: films that have
the feverish, hallucinatory quality of dreams or acid trips, about death, beauty, sex and magic. Many
of them reflect Angers lifelong immersion in the occult as a student and disciple of Aleister
Crowley, the English ritual magician and mischief-maker who revelled in the name of The Beast.
I first met Kenneth Anger in London in the mid-Seventies, at the time of the official publication of
Hollywood Babylon. Wed arranged an interview but, when I arrived at his modest hotel, that idea
was quickly abandoned, Anger insisting instead that we adjourn to the NFT to watch a rather
amusing British Thirties musical, Chu Chin Chow. It was a rare showing, he explained, and he
didnt want to miss it. This was Anger the avid cineaste, with a taste for camp.
A few days later, we met for dinner. Anger was dressed in a smart corduroy suit, the model of
decorum. It was a warm evening and at one point he removed his jacket and rolled up his shirt
sleeves to reveal a tattoo of the Seal of Crowley on his arm. The effect was strangely shocking.
A larger tattoo emblazoned across his chest simply reads Lucifer.
Anger is a fastidiously polite but reticent man. Anas Nin, the diarist and lover of Henry Miller, was
a close friend of Angers in the Fifties. Nin once described Anger as living entirely in a world of his
own; a world he resists being scrutinised too closely. Some questions he greets with a silence so
pronounced you wonder if he is going to answer at all, inviting you to suggest an answer to which he
may, or may not respond.
So, your films are to do with the subconscious?
True enough.
Silence. Would you describe them as magical spells?
Hmm.
Anger was born and raised in Los Angeles. His father Wilbur Anglemyer (Kenneth truncated the
surname to Anger when he started making films), was an engineer at the Douglas Aircraft
Company. He and Anger never got on.
Angers closest family relationship was with his grandmother Bertha, who encouraged his artistic
interests, and whose gossipy stories of Hollywood stars he would remember as his Grimms Fairy
Tales.
As a child, he danced on stage with Shirley Temple, and at five he appeared in Max Reinhardts film
version of A Midsummer Nights Dream (1935) as The Changeling Prince, scampering in spangles
and plumes through the enchanted forest thrown up on the backlot of Warners studios. The smell
of the shellac, he recalls, was almost like getting high.
He knew that acting wasnt his calling, but film had cast its spell. As a teenager, he began making
his own films using the familys movie camera, inspired less by commercial Hollywood than the
European art cinema of Eisentein and Bunuel.
He made his first exhibited film, the 14-minute Fireworks, in 1947. Its a dream-like, homoerotic,
masochistic fantasy in which a young man (Anger) is brutally beaten by a group of sailors. At one
point, a man unzips his trousers and reaches inside to pull out what appears to be a giant phallus
but is in fact a lighted Roman candle. Anger described the film as all I have to say about being 17,
the United States Navy, American Christmas and the Fourth of July.
Fireworks was seen by Jean Cocteau, who wrote to Anger expressing his admiration. In 1950,
Anger left the US for Paris and took a job at the Cinmathque Franaise as the assistant to Henri
Langlois. Hed spend much of the next 10 years between Europe and the US.
Anger refined his approach as a film-maker, developing his leitmotif: non-narrative films, with a
dazzling use of editing and montage, invoking the silent era in their use of music as a symbolic, and
often ironic, counterpoint. In Eaux dartifice (1953), a circus midget in an 18th-century evening
gown darts, like a figure from a hallucination, among the fountains of the Villa dEste in Tivoli to
music by Vivaldi.
In Scorpio Rising (1963), Anger filmed the rituals of a Brooklyn motorcycle gang, juxtaposing the
fetishism of chrome, leather and the holy icons of James Dean and Marlon Brando with images
from a Fifties Sunday school TV series, The Living Bible. It is set to a soundtrack of pop songs
such as The Angels My Boyfriends Back, Ricky Nelsons Fools Rush In (Where Angels Fear to
Tread) and The Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack. Martin Scorsese later cited Scorpio Rising as
the major influence on the use of music in his films.
***
Anger
in the Fifties, around the time he lived in Aleister Crowley's home on Loch Ness, Scotland. Photo
was taken in Paris, June 2013
Photographer: Brian Butler.
Two men proved a powerful influence on Angers life. The first was Alfred Kinsey, the university
professor who, in the Forties and Fifties, conducted groundbreaking surveys into sexual behaviour
published as The Kinsey Report. Kinsey and his team interviewed more than 18,000 everyday
Americans as well as authors Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the worlds first sex-change
Christine Jorgensen, and Marlon Brando on their sexual behaviour.
Anger met Kinsey when the sexologist attended a screening of Fireworks in Los Angeles and bought
a copy of it for his archives (Angers first film sale) for $100. It was the beginning of a lifelong
friendship. Anger became Virgil to Kinseys Dante, introducing him to LAs gay underworld, while
Anger and numerous friends, among them the playwright Tennessee Williams, contributed to
Kinseys survey.
As well as interviewing subjects, Kinsey filmed various sexual activities in the attic room of his
home in Bloomington, Indiana (with Mrs Kinsey downstairs, preparing iced tea and persimmon
pudding for the volunteers). Anger was filmed there, he is quick to point out, alone.
Masturbating? Well, thats what they call it. I believed in what they were doing and I wasnt going
to refuse. It was over in exactly 10 minutes.
Filming was somewhat problematic as Kinseys cameraman Bill Dellenback had only one arm. He
was trimming a hedge at home, Anger says, and the hedge-trimmer flipped out of his hand and
cut off an arm. It was such a stupid, horrible accident, and for a photographer only to have one arm
is kind of unfortunate.
Anger toys with his food. But why bother to trim a hedge? I mean, forget about the extra leaves,
theyre not hurting anything.
The second abiding influence on Angers life was Aleister Crowley. One of the most extraordinary
Englishmen of the Edwardian or indeed any other age, Crowley was a poet, mountaineer, ritual
magician and libertine who in 1904 claimed to have channelled from his guardian angel Aiwass a
set of instructions and principles he called The Book of the Law, to form the basis of his own
religion Thelema. Its key teaching was Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. (Thelema
is Greek for will and Crowley gave a succinct definition of magick, his preferred spelling, as the
art of causing change to occur in accordance with will.)
Crowley gained public notoriety in the Twenties when, with a small coterie of disciples, he
established the Abbey of Thelema in a farmhouse in Cefalu, Sicily, energetically practicing ritual
and sex magick, until deported by Mussolini. The British yellow press condemned him as the
wickedest man in the world. Anger would have it he was one of the most misunderstood.
Thats part of his aura, his halo, Anger laughs. His attitude towards sex being sacred and having
mystic qualities, its not surprising he should have been controversial. Crowley, he says
approvingly, was really like a diabolical little boy.
Angers family were Presbyterian, but he rejected Christianity at the age of eight, when his parents
tried to make him go to Sunday school. It was not an ideological position: I just told them I wanted
to read the Sunday funny papers.
As a teenager, he had become interested in the occult through books such as Sir James George
Frazers The Golden Bough. He was introduced to Crowleys teachings by one Marjorie Cameron,
the only woman hes ever known he says was without any doubt a genuine witch: In a good
sense. She had what youd call powers. Cameron was the widow of Jack Parsons, a pioneer in
developing the rocket fuel that would take man to the Moon (he has a crater there named after him
in recognition). He was also an occultist and leader of the US lodge of Crowleys magical order Ordo
Templi Orientis (OTO).
In 1946, Parsons and Cameron practiced a magic ritual known as the Babalon Working
to conceive a moonchild as the Thelemic messiah.
The scribe for this ceremony was a man Parsons had met only a few months earlier, but who so
Parsons told Crowley displayed distinctly promising occult possibilities. He was a science-fiction
writer named L Ron Hubbard. The Babalon Working failed: Cameron did not conceive. Hubbard
ran off with Parsons former mistress, a substantial amount of Parsons money and a yacht both
men owned in a business arrangement.
The official Scientology version of Hubbards occult activities is he was working undercover to
expose and destroy a black magic cult. But Hubbard, Anger says, was a pathological liar, you
cant believe anything he said. What Hubbard took from meeting Parsons, Anger says, was the
blueprint of a hermetic brotherhood in which the acquisition of one layer of knowledge leads to the
next. The difference is, Scientology makes everybody pay. Hubbard told Parsons that inventing a
religion was a good way to make money. But Scientology is a cult. The whole thing is what I call a
racket.
In 1952, Parsons was killed when fulminate of mercury exploded in his home laboratory. There are
various theories about whether he was responsible, or someone else did it, Anger says. Howard
Hughes wanted Jack to go and work for him but Jack refused. And Howard Hughes was the kind of
man you didnt say no to, or if you did, there would be consequences.
Following Parsons death, Anger lived with Cameron for two years, intensifying his study of
Crowleyian magick. Anger describes his beliefs as paganism which, he says, is just an
appreciation of nature. It has nothing to do with so-called black magic. For many years he has
been a member of the OTO, but is reticent about his own magickal practices: the OTO, he points
out, is after all a secret society. He is not, he says, doing magic circles all the time, although I have
done it on occasion. But he follows Crowleys practice of Liber Resh, a ritual meditation for
greeting the sunrise. He affects a cheery wave: Hello sun!
For a while in the Fifties, Anger lived in Crowleys former home Boleskine on the shores of Loch
Ness. (When Crowley first moved there, he complained to the local council about the prostitute
problem in the area.
A mystified official was dispatched to investigate and reported there were no prostitutes. That,
Crowley replied, is the problem...)
In 1955, Anger and Alfred Kinsey visited Crowleys Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. In the years since
Crowleys eviction, the farmhouse had fallen into a state of near dereliction. It was owned by two
brothers who hated each other. One was a communist and one was a fascist, so I had to pay an
exorbitant amount of money to each to get access to the place.
Local peasants, fearing a revival of Crowleyism, greeted them with a traditional curse a mutilated
cat on the doorstep. Anger spent a summer removing the whitewash that had been slapped over the
erotic images Crowley painted on the walls, filming and photographing them. There was a door to
the kitchen, about 8ft tall, and on that hed painted the image of the Scarlet Woman, nude, rather
outrageously holding a golden phallus, and a cake the Cake of Light which was like his
Eucharist. I photographed that. Anger sighs.
I wish Id taken it [away] but it was just too complicated.
There was, he says, a distinct presence about the place. There were unexplained rattlings on the
tiled roof as if someone was running back and forth on it. And on one occasion, my light just turned
over and crashed. Just little things. I dont need to be convinced, because I saw them. These things
happen.
The ruined abbey is still there, but the spectre of Crowley has been diminished by a new sports
stadium that has been constructed behind it. Anger sighs, It ruins the whole atmosphere.
***
Convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, sometime guitarist in love, on the steps of the San
Francisco house known as "The Russian Embassy" where he and Anger lived from 1966 - '68
Cowleys Thelemite teachings have been a major influence on Angers films, most notably in what is
generally considered to be his magnum opus, Lucifer Rising. Ten years in the making, in it Anger
intended to elevate Lucifer from his place in Christian belief as the fallen angel, to his pantheistic
role as the bringer of light, or the original rebel, as Anger has it.
Anger began the film in the mid-Sixties. The first person cast as Lucifer was a five-year-old boy
called Godot the golden-haired son of Vito Paulekas and his wife Szou, two original LA hippy
freak-scenesters who died tragically after tumbling through a skylight.
Lucifer Two was a guitarist named Bobby Beausoleil, who had briefly played with the seminal rock
group Love. Anger shot 30 minutes of footage before the pair fell out. He was behaving like
demons in people do, Anger would later recall. Beausoleil vanished but reappeared with Charles
Manson, and in 1970 was convicted of the murder of a music teacher named Gary Hinman, for
which he is still serving a life sentence in jail.
In the late Sixties, Anger moved to London, bringing the troubled project with him. Through his
friend the art dealer Robert Fraser, he was introduced to the Swinging London circle that included
The Beatles, Rolling Stones and film director Donald Cammell, whose 1970 film Performance,
about a spent rock star (played by Jagger) in search of his demon stands as the defining record of
the darkening spirit of the times. Cammell, whose father had been a close friend of Aleister Crowley
and written a biography of him, enjoyed telling friends how The Beast had bounced him as a child
on his knee.
Cultured, erudite, exotic, mysterious Anger became something of the presiding magus among
Frasers gilded circle. He was a house guest at Redlands, Keith Richards house in Sussex, where
Anita Pallenberg (a very amusing girl) would recall waking one morning and looking out of the
window onto the lawn to see Anger furiously pacing a magical circle. Keith and Anita were said to
be contemplating a pagan wedding ceremony with Anger officiating, but had a change of heart.
It was Anger who introduced Marianne Faithfull to Mikhail Bulgakovs novel, The Master and
Margarita, a surrealist satire about the Devil wreaking havoc in post-revolutionary Moscow.
(Written between 1928 and 1940, the book was not published until 1967). Faithfull, in turn gave it
to Jagger, inspiring The Rolling Stones 1968 song Sympathy for the Devil.
Anger wanted Jagger to take on the mantle of Lucifer for his film but Jagger demurred, apparently
happy to sing about Lucifer, but squeamish about the prospect of playing him. I think he was just
busy with other things, Anger says diplomatically. Faithfull would later describe Jagger making a
funeral pyre of all their occult reading in the fireplace of their Cheyne Walk mansion, and the singer
was said to have taken to wearing a wooden crucifix for some time afterwards. Faithfull did
appear in the film, as the demon Lilith, rising from a sarcophagus. Donald Cammell played Osiris,
the Egyptian god of the underworld.
Jagger contributed a short piece of synthesiser music that Anger used on Invocation of My Demon
Brother (1969). But the principle candidate for the soundtrack for Lucifer Rising became Led
Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
Anger had first met Page in 1973 at a Sothebys auction, where both were bidding for a manuscript
by Aleister Crowley: He, of course, had more money than I did. Page was able to indulge his
interest in Crowley to the point of buying Boleskine and accumulating an extensive collection of his
artworks.
Page provided some music for Lucifer Rising, although it was not used in the final version. His
interest in Crowley has reportedly cooled and he now keeps Crowleys paintings, Anger says, in the
closet, which is strange... Jimmy is very skilled on the guitar, but I have no idea what somebody like
him does with his life when not working. I hope hes having a good time. But he has an unfortunate
complex for someone whos so rich and hes earned a hell of a lot of money and that is hes
a miser. And I find that a very unfortunate trait.
Ive met a couple of rich misers, including the senior John Paul Getty [named in the 1966 Guinness
Book of Records as the worlds richest private citizen]. He got so annoyed at his freeloading Surrey
house guests calling New York and talking for hours that he installed a pay-phone. Anger laughs.
Well, who could blame him?
The soundtrack for Lucifer Rising was eventually created by Bobby Beausoleil, from inside the
Oregon prison where he is incarcerated.
***
Film-
makers Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Anger, London, 1971
The following day, I meet Anger again, this time at Hollywoods oldest restaurant, The Musso and
Frank Grill, which has occupied the same spot on Hollywood Boulevard since 1919. Anger seems
more at ease here, seated in the twilit leather booth, with waiters in red and black uniforms, Duke
Ellington percolating quietly in the background and the ghosts of old Hollywood crowding around.
Anger developed an interest in Hollywood macabre at an early age. The actress Thelma Todd lived
just a couple of blocks from Angers family home, and when, in 1935, she was found dead in her
garage of apparent asphyxiation (nobody could explain the blood on her face...), he went over to
watch them take out the body: I was always doing things like that.
An unusual hobby.
Well, other boys collected stamps The fact was, I was in Hollywood and all these things were
happening. I thought they were bizarre and interesting.
He began to assemble an unrivalled collection of newspaper reports and photographs gossip sheet
tittle-tattle, police blotter notes, publicity stills, morgue shots, etc.
In 1959, living in Paris and in need of film-making funds, Anger dove into his collection, shaping
the hair-raising catalogue of drug abuse, debauchery and premature death that became Hollywood
Babylon.
The book begins with DW Griffiths recreation of ancient Babylon for his silent 1915 epic
Intolerance: Loves Struggle Throughout the Ages. Built on the dirt road that Sunset Boulevard
then was, the mile-long set was the biggest yet seen in Hollywood, a phantasmagoria of palaces,
hanging gardens and soaring columns surmounted by sky-high elephants. Its streets were thronged
with thousands of extras (paid $2 a day plus lunchbox) playing warriors, priests, handmaidens and
harlots: a metaphor of Hollywoods flagrant excess, hubris and artistic license. I assure you, Anger
says drily, ancient Babylon never had elephants sitting on top of columns. I dont think they even
knew what an elephant was.
This is Hollywood as the city of sin, an early laboratory in the corrosive effects of common fame.
Here is John Wayne lining up as the 11th man when the actress Clara Bow (the hottest jazz baby in
films) entertained the entire University of Southern California football team with a gang bang; the
MGM producer Paul Bern blowing his brains out with a .38 revolver after trying to solve his
impotence by introducing an artificial penis into the bed he shared with Jean Harlow; and Lou
Tellegen, a leading man in the Twenties but by 1935 a has-been, committing suicide by ritually
disembowelling himself with the personally monogrammed gold scissors hed once used to cut out
his press notices.
There is a sense, Anger says, in which he considers the movies evil. Although, of course, my
definition of evil is not everybody elses. Evil is being involved in the glamour and charm of material
existence, glamour in its old Gaelic sense meaning enchantment with the look of things, rather than
the soul of things.
The books epigraph is a quotation from Crowley: Every man and woman is a star. Well, he
meant that every individual has the potential to be a blazing star, but not in the Hollywood sense. I
twisted it around so it was ironic. (Crowley himself visited Hollywood in 1916 taking note of its
denizens as the cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed sexual lunatics. He was one to talk)
The base metal of gossip is malice, however, the prevailing tone of Hollywood Babylon is a kind of
rueful affection. The malice is reserved for the studio bosses philistines, slave masters and
desecrators of talent the censors and the gossip mavens like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons,
the Paganini of piffle.
Anger likens his role to Seutonius, the Roman historian who chronicled the doings of the Caesars
with unflinching candour. The moral is the oldest of all: Hubris and Nemesis; fame as a Faustian
bargain, in which the price of worldly success, of living like gods, is shame, horror and degradation.
No story is more tragic and in its way more emblematic, than that of Lupe Velez, The Mexican
Spitfire. The wife of Johnny Tarzan Weissmuller and lover of Gary Cooper and sundry cowboys,
stuntmen and gigolos, Lupe was a va-va-voom girl whose career had hit the skids by 1944. She
planned a Snow White suicide, to be found by grieving friends and admirers, lying on her bed in a
satin robe, surrounded by gardenias, tuberoses and altar candles, borne heavenward on an
overdose of sleeping pills.
Alas, at the last moment, the pills reacted with the Mexican meal she had eaten earlier. Rushing to
the bathroom, she slipped in her own vomit and smashed her head on the toilet bowl an
Egyptian Charteuse Onyx Hush-Flush Model DeLuxe (Anger is ever the stickler for detail).
Poor old Lupe... I just see it as a bizarre, colourful, funny and tragic at the same time story. Thats
why it interests me, because it has all these elements. He pauses. Also over the top, which, of
course, I like.
Originally published in French as Hollywood Babylone, Angers book became an immediate succs
de scandale. In 1965, a pirated version was published in the US by a huckster named Marvin Miller.
Sold in a plain brown wrapper, it shifted thousands of copies. Anger was obliged to bring a
lawsuit to halt the publication, and was never paid any royalties. Then, fortunately, Marvin Miller
died. I wont say that I cursed him and then he died but he didnt live more than a few years
beyond that.
It was not until 1975 that the book was published legitimately in English. A sequel followed in 1985
with pictorial proof of what Carmen Miranda wore under her frocks nothing and a colourful
litany of Hollywood deaths, written in Angers crisp authorial style: His body rotted in Chihuahua
before his family turned up to claim it He died after four days of agony as the chemical gnawed
through his guts).
Anger has a third volume in his bottom drawer, but has no plans to publish it. A number of the
stories involve Tom Cruise and his association with Scientology, and the Scientologists, Anger
says, will sue you at the drop of a hat. If he dies, Ill publish it.
Modern celebrity holds little fascination for Anger. The currency of Hollywood gossip has been
debased by its ubiquity who cares about Lindsey Lohans season ticket to rehab? and the
cinema has lost its magic.
Im sure there are talented people working now, but I cant get excited about any of the current
crop of actors or directors. I prefer to honour my past geniuses. The past is very living to me.
During the Eighties, Anger lived on New Yorks Upper East Side in a four-room, walk-through
apartment. I visited him there once. The rooms were painted in alternate red and blue, the colours
reflected in the walls, ceilings, furnishings, the blinds that shut out the slightest glimmer of
daylight. One room was devoted to Valentino memorabilia including posters, dolls and a drug-store
display box of Sheik contraceptives (unopened). In the corner, electric candles twinkling, sat a
shrine to the dead actor that had once belonged to Ditra Flam, the mysterious Lady in Black,
whod leave roses at Valentinos LA crypt each year on the anniversary of his death. (Valentino
begot shrines. According to Anger, the actor Ramon Navarro kept one in his bedroom, containing a
black, lead dildo embellished in silver with Valentinos autograph, A present from Rudy.)
Another room was a shrine to another of Angers heroes, the German actor/writer/director Erich
Von Stroheim, whose orgy scenes in films like Merry-Go-Round and The Merry Widow were the
talk of Hollywood, with the extras emerging from the studio as if having spent a weekend in
Sodom, girls bearing the evidence of whip marks or bites.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator was covered in a black shroud. Anger would not allow food and
drink in the apartment. He was the curator, he explained, of his own museum and much of his
memorabilia now comprises a touring exhibition. But much too has been lost in break-ins and
burglaries in the numerous places where Anger has lived.
He is a man who seems to magnetise the volatile; by his own admission, he can be a rather difficult
person. Beneath the courteous, gentlemanly demeanour, lurks a particularly dark sense of
humour. On one occasion, after a spat with Robert Fraser (a difficult man himself, with whom
people were forever falling out then falling back in again), Anger sent his friend a razor blade with
the note: The final solution to your stuttering.
He can be unpredictable. Six years ago, at the open-casket memorial service of long-time friend and
fellow film-maker Curtis Harrington, he disconcerted fellow mourners by providing an alternative
running commentary during the eulogy and then planting a kiss on the lips of the corpse.
When I suggest to Anger that his reputation encourages people to treat him with a certain caution,
he shakes his head.
Ive never had any indication of that.
Does he think hes a good person?
Not always. I have a few dark marks about cruelty to people that maybe didnt really deserve it.
He pauses. I had a couple of friends who committed suicide. I had a feeling it was coming but
didnt do much to influence them one way or the other. Perhaps I could have done more to
encourage them to go on with life.
One was the singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who committed suicide in 2003 aged 34. Anger sighs,
It was over a fight with his girlfriend, which is ridiculous. Anger made a film in tribute to him
which is his most stylistically conventional, and emotionally touching, work.
The other was Donald Cammell. After Performance, Cammell moved to Hollywood and made a
series of similarly extreme films, but with diminishing critical and commercial returns. In 1996,
after his last film Wild Side had been taken off him by producers and released in a cannibalised
version, Cammell took his own life by replicating the climactic scene in Performance where the rock
star (Jagger) is killed by a single gunshot to the forehead. It reportedly took him 45 minutes to die.
It was kind of pathetic in a sense, Anger says. Grotesque. But I warned him. Get out of
Hollywood; this place is not working out for you. Go back to England.
Death by Hollywood.
***
Lucifer Rising (1972). British singer Marianne Faitfull, under the veil, plays Lilith. Donald
Cammell, to her right, plays Osiris. Kenneth Anger is on the far right
Anger has proved immune to the temptations and betrayals of Hollywood. Commercial success, and
the fame that comes with it, was never in the picture. If it had been, I would have gone
into commercial films. I always considered myself an artist.
Angers work is in museums, institutions and private collections around the world. But financing
was ever a problem. The Hollywood Babylon books have helped, and the support of interested
patrons. Jean Paul Getty, the scion of the oil family, and a generous patron of the arts, was a close
friend.
Like Anger, he was a Mickey Mouse fan and financed Mouse Heaven (2004), Angers tribute to the
cartoon character, featuring vintage wind-up Mickey Mouse toys. The film manages to be
whimsical, amusing and, in characteristic Anger fashion, sinister at the same time. Getty died in
2011.
Unfortunately for me, and about a dozen other people, he didnt leave a will, says Anger. His
widow Victoria was a nice lady, but she didnt go along with spending money on the arts.
Anger has also been supported in his work by the French fashion designer, Agns Troubl, better
known as Agns B, who first met Anger in 1959 in the Cafe de Flore in Paris. He was like an
apparition, she remembers. He had this very short hair, black, like a priest, and he was dressed all
in black leather like
a biker. He was very beautiful.
Over the years, she has exhibited his work in her Galerie du Jour in Paris, and featured a Kenneth
Anger T-shirt in her last Agns B collection.
Hes like a myth for young people, she says. His work has stayed so strong and contemporary.
His films have not dated, because they are so unique.
A couple of months before my LA meeting with Anger, the ICA in London staged a weekend
screening of his works. Anger was there (dressed, he pointed out, in an Agns B suit). The audience
was predominantly young, in many cases young enough to be Angers grandchildren, the mood
adoring.
Among the titles was one of his most recent films Ich Will! (2009). For this, Anger assembled
propaganda footage of the Hitler Youth in the Thirties, perfect Aryan specimens engaged in
character-building outdoor pursuits, then assembling in one of the displays of carefully
orchestrated mass hysteria at which the Nazis were so balefully accomplished. The film bears
familiar Anger hallmarks, a mirror of his obsessions about male beauty, violence, the roiling depths
of the unconscious. It is deeply, hypnotically, disturbing. You leave it feeling you have peered over
the abyss into something evil.
Anger prefaces the film with a quotation from Shakespeares The Tempest: Oh God, that men
should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy,
pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts.
But one thinks of another quotation, from A Midsummer Nights Dream, the film of which Anger
appeared in more than 80 years ago: What fools these mortals be...
Afterwards, I fell into conversation with a young girl. Didnt I think it was shocking? she asked.
What Anger had clearly intended as indictment, she took as approval.
Sitting in Musso and Frank, I tell Anger this. Im surprised someone can be that naive to take it
that way. He raises a mocking eyebrow, then says, After all, we do know a lot about our defeated
enemy.
Duke Ellington is still playing in the background. The waiter is hovering with the bill. And another,
more disturbing set of ghosts seem to be present.
But I dont mind stirring up a little controversy, he says.
***
MORE LONG READS:
Giles Coren Gives Up Booze
Behind The Scenes At Babestation
Will Self: I Love Germany
***

Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire

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