Anger management, or the dream of a falsifiable film-historical past

by Mark Lynn Anderson

A few years ago while researching at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, I requested to view a large scrapbook on Wallace Reid that was assembled in 1923 by an ardent fan who had presented it to the movie star’s widow, Dorothy Davenport Reid, shortly after her husband’s death from heroin addiction. I had postponed looking at this scrapbook until the very last day of my research trip because I had already spent some time with it over a decade ago when I was researching the impact of Reid’s death on the evolving star system. This scrapbook and others like it helped me to think about how stars functioned as a means for the public to pose and respond to questions about health and development within mass society. While I continue to research the subsequent career of Davenport Reid as an important woman filmmaker in the 1920s and early 1930s, Wallace Reid is no longer a historical figure with whom my research is deeply concerned. Yet, for some reason I sought to return to the earlier encounter I had had in the archive; I felt compelled to repeat a particular feeling that I remembered subtending my first experience with this scrapbook, an artifact that is itself given over to an act of remembrance. My reencounter with this scrapbook that day was more or less satisfactory to the extent that I found myself unable to recreate the original experience I had imagined myself having all those years ago, a failure that was thereby a success, since it resonated with that very sense of irretrievable loss that only a material archive can provide and for which I was so desperately longing. After a week of ‘productive research’ at the Academy, I had finally gotten my fix of satisfying disappointment.

This peculiar melancholic euphoria was fated to be short lived, for just as I was closing the scrapbook I noticed that the large, sprawling man seated next to me at my table in the special collections reading area was eyeing me closely. When I had sat down twenty minutes earlier he had been reading typewritten correspondence, but I now had the distinct impression that he had been watching me for some time. As my glance finally met his, he asked, ‘What were you looking at?’ I had only to mention Reid’s name, and he immediately replied, ‘That slimeball Kenneth Anger sure did a number on Reid in the chapter devoted to him in Hollywood Babylon, didn’t he?’ While expressed animosity to both Hollywood Babylon and its author are hardly unfamiliar to me, I was somewhat taken aback by its sudden appearance in the context of an inquiry I had innocently assumed was merely a pretext to the ordinary exchange of archival pleasantries. I tried softening the criticism by pointing out how Anger had interestingly aligned Reid’s addition with several young film actresses whose lives were similarly troubled by illicit drug use in the 1920s. My interlocutor would have none of this, and, with increasing vociferousness, he continued his attack by charging that Anger was principally responsible for spreading sensational, unsubstantiated rumors about F. W. Murnau, lies that had besmirched the director’s good name and ruined his film-historical legacy. He then informed me that he had conclusively proven Anger’s scandalous version of Murnau’s death to be false, had recently published these research findings in monograph form, and had confronted Anger in public, commanding him to rescind what he had written over fifty years earlier about the renowned German director. While I was both astonished and intrigued by all of this, my immediate plan was to extricate myself as soon as possible from what was quickly becoming a historiographical sermon about the redemption of truth and accuracy from the cowardly perpetrators of specious gossip and vicious innuendo. So, with the simple phase, ‘I have a plane to catch’, I was on my way to return the Wallace Reid scrapbook to the special collections desk.

Still, I could not stop thinking about this rather bizarre encounter. I even tried to determine the identity of this passionate defender of Murnau by surreptitiously scanning the list of that day’s researchers at the entrance of the Fairbanks building as I signed out, but there were just too many names to make any positive identification. However, fifteen minutes of searching the Internet while waiting for my plane at LAX revealed him to be Les Hammer, author of F.W. Murnau: For the Record, published in 2010 by Bookstand Publishing. I placed my order with Amazon immediately. While I have never considered myself a champion of Kenneth Anger’s work, both his films and his Hollywood histories have had a significantly productive influence on my own work as a film historian and in my thinking about questions of film historiography more generally.

Thus, whenever Anger and Hollywood Babylon are mentioned as occasioning a particular historical project of correction, I am all ears, since so many of these endeavors reveal a great deal about the disciplinary policing of historical speech in which methodological questions of historical evidence are inextricably bound to issues of shame, humiliation, and damage. These are typically, though not always, normalising projects in which the identities of both the historical subject and the present-day researcher are rescued from the perverse and perverting influence of gossip. Hollywood Babylon remains the central catalyst for these reaction formations where the guardians of responsible film history can construct their own authority by describing a pressing need to shore up the differences between knowledge of the past and fanciful imagination, between genuine research and morbid curiosity, between truth and desire. Often, the stated aim of these projects is the final silencing of the voices of historical error or at least an effective demotion and quarantining of them to the status of being little more than unproductive and possibly dangerous diversions. This need for more disciplinary vigilance can come from almost any quarter, as when one of my undergraduate students in a course on the Hollywood star system soberly suggested on the course evaluation that I reconsider how I position and deploy Anger’s work in the classroom. ‘While I don’t object to the use of Hollywood Babylon, I do object to using it as a more or less reliable source as he matter-of-factly states things that, from previous research, are factually untrue or at least [such research] places doubt on his assumptions.’ Of course, no student has ever made a similar suggestion about how I position and teach Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Film History: An Introduction as the latter is presumably above historiographical reproach.

In one of the few serious treatments of Anger’s Hollywood Babylon as legitimate film history, Mathew Tinkcom points out how it is 

[w]orth remembering that Anger situates his materials in the context of an important argument about the role of Hollywood cinema in contemporary American life. Further, the antagonistic stance toward Hollywood found in the Babylon books appears not from a left or Marxist interrogation of capitalist corporate production, the more customary venues for critique, but from Anger’s camp sensibilities and his intense fandom of Hollywood cinema which allows him to investigate the industry’s compulsively heteronormative representations.[1] 

Tinkcom sees Anger’s Babylon project as a counterhistory of Hollywood, positioned at the site of sexuality and participating in what are by now the widely known reception practices of dissonant sexual communities. Yet, this larger argument of Hollywood Babylon and the stakes of its legibility are almost never acknowledged in the repeated attempts by film historians to once and for all correct its many errors and to halt its corrosive effects on our appreciation and understanding of the American film industry. Predictably, attempts to deauthorise Hollywood Babylon as legitimate film history concentrate on exposing its many errors of facts and its lack of supporting documentation as proof not of its incompetence but of its malevolence and its pandering to a devious and misguided audience. Yet, one rarely encounters such animosity for or an urgency to discount the numerous popular histories of Hollywood that are riven with factual errors, such as, for example, journalist David Wallace’s gossipy 2001 history, Lost Hollywood, the first edition of which contained this production still with the caption [Fig. 1],’It’s 1917, and the legendary Mack Sennett is directing Zasu Pitts in her first movie, The Little Princess. Pitts, who began her career as a film heroine (she costarred in D.W. Griffith’s Greed of 1923), would become better known as a comedienne….’ 

In fact, the image is from 1923 and Sennett is on the set of The Extra Girl with F. Richard Jones directing Mabel Normand. It was Marshall Neilan who directed Pitts in The Little Princess, though Pitts did co-star in the 1923 production of Greed, a motion picture that was directed, of course, by Erich von Stroheim, not Griffith. Such a morass of factual errors would never be perceived as a threat to the practice of American film history in the way that Hollywood Babylon has been, nor would any evil intent be attributed to Wallace beyond his and his editor’s sheer laziness. The difference between Wallace’s Lost Hollywood and Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is more than just a result of the sustained purchase the latter has had on the public’s imagination over the last half century. Wallace’s history is presumed to be entirely conventional in that it might seem to stand or fall by the veracity of its claims, while Anger’s history is far less invested in truth-functionality than in providing an immanent and affective history of an industry, one that documents its exploitation of an enduring audience that neither the industry nor its conventional historians wish to acknowledge, an audience that we might now conveniently term ‘queer’. 

In his short, restorative history of Murnau’s death, Les Hammer acknowledges this audience for Hollywood Babylon only to cast it as aberrant and entirely incidental to the history of Hollywood even if it is a sizable audience which, by this point, has an appreciable lineage. ‘Prurient-minded readers reveled in [the book’s] arch, bitchy prose style, graphic photos culled from newspaper and police files [ . . . ], and sordid tales of adultery, drug-dealing, homosexuality, rape, murder, and suicide involving living [ . . . ] and dead celebrities…’[2] Hammer goes on to quote Anger’s description of the car wreck that ended Murnau life, describing the account as a ‘malicious act’ by which Anger sought to portray the great motion-picture director as ‘nothing more than a pervert’. Anger wrote, 

Murnau hired as a valet a handsome fourteen-year Filipino boy named Garcia Stevenson. The boy was at the wheel of the Packard when the fatal accident occurred. The Hollywood méchantes langues reported that Murnau was going down on Garcia when the car leaped off the road. Only eleven brave souls showed up for the funeral.[3] 

Hammer’s gloss of this paragraph is that its author here ‘branded F.W. Murnau a pedophile, engaged in an overt and predatory act of assaulting a minor when the car skidded off the road’.[4] He then goes on to claim that Anger’s committing to print what had until then only been a specious rumor circulating amongst select ‘cinéastes and historians’ has led to its wide acceptance as truth, its continued repetition in various print forms, and its spawning of a series of equally questionable imaginings such as Barry Paris’ claim in his biography of Garbo that Murnau and Swedish director Maurice Stiller were regular cruising buddies in the late 1920s. Hammer cautions, 

But the allegations of sex-for-hire begged the question of why cultivated Europeans and potential rivals like Murnau, who was directing Sunrise at Fox, and Stiller, who was preoccupied with his protégée Greta Garbo and his own faltering career, would risk arrest and exposure by trolling Santa Monica Boulevard (in 1927?). Like other writers before him, Barry Paris fell into the trap laid by Kenneth Anger.[5] 

Hammer then seeks to halt the pernicious effects of Anger’s account by conclusively proving that specific details of the account are untrue. By consulting legal, financial, and government documents such as the coroner’s inquest, census records, social security documents, and Murnau’s probate records, Hammer is able to conclude that the valet who was at the wheel of the rented Packard that fateful day was not a fourteen-year-old Filipino boy named Garcia Stevenson, but a thirty-something, Mexican-American man named Eliazar Stevenson who Murnau had employed less than a month before at two-dollars-a-day. Hammer, who denies claims that Murnau was ‘a closeted and frustrated homosexual’, and maintains instead that the émigré director was quite ‘open about his sexuality in the relatively tolerant climate of 1920s Hollywood’,[6] seeks to provide a homonormative account of Murnau that reestablishes his respectability by dissociating his sexuality from what he presumes is one of the most universally despicable forms of erotic attachment and desire imaginable: man/boy love. By disproving Anger’s purported claim that Murnau was a pederast in this instance, Hammer is able to restore a proper and unexceptional homosexuality to the celebrated director, effectively making that sexuality of no real historical interest at all. It is this de-queering of the film historical past that I see widely indulged by various projects of film history that seek to set the record straight through appeals to archival research and factual rigor.

Thus, Les Hammer has now twice ruined my precious experience of the past – that is, the past as an unfathomable encounter with an almost undecipherable and therefore unrecoverable scene of perdition: once in person in the Herrick Library as I contemplated an unknown and unimportant fan’s devotion to a dead Hollywood star and his persevering widow, and once again as I read his damning correction of the various compelling but apparently fictitious accounts of the death of a famous film director whose public vulnerability at the scene of the crash had far exceeded the violence done to his body. Since the 1910s, motion-picture celebrities’ consumption of expensive cars and their daring, sometimes lethal violations of traffic regulations have provided occasions for various and enduring scenarios of illicit and damaging exposure, as can be easily observed in the spectacular crashes in which the star destinies of James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Jayne Mansfield were secured. In her monograph on Murnau, Lotte Eisner mentions in relation to the famous director’s death the ‘[v]enemous tongues [that] did not fail to set to work in the great Babel of Hollywood’, and she facetiously credits Anger with committing these specious and potentially libelous rumors to print.[7] Hammer’s own correction of the historical record works as a final silencing reduction in the service of homosexual truth, annihilating queer feeling by denying queer meaning’s relevance to historical understanding. So, now I can see what anybody with eyes in her head might see, but I no longer know how to feel about Murnau. As Heather Love observes, 

It is in large part because we recognize figures, emotions, and images from the past as like ourselves that we feel their effects so powerfully. Rather than attempt to ‘overcome’ identity, I want to suggest a mode of historiography that recognizes the inevitability of a ‘play of recognitions,’ but that also sees these recognitions not as consoling but shattering. What has been most problematic about gay and lesbian historiography to date is not […] its attachment to identity but rather its consistently affirmative basis.[8] 

Hammer’s fixing the identity of the valet fixes the ruined legacy of Murnau and thereby disavows or discounts other recognitions as well as the histories of those recognitions. The loss of our loss turns out to be no real loss at all, now that everything is made right in the light of day.

When programmers Bill Pence and Tom Luddy invited Anger to participate in the 1975 Telluride Film Festival, on the occasion of the highly-publicised publication of the first authorised English-language edition of Hollywood Babylon, James Card, who had with Pence and Luddy co-founded the festival the previous year, objected to Anger’s inclusion. Card wrote to Pence in July, just seven weeks before the festival’s scheduled opening.

I know that ‘Babylon’ is a runaway best seller with lots of great publicity. […] But the blunt fact remains that the book is a dirty gossip muck heap that injures a lot of people still alive in the film world (the Ince family, for example) [.]

Whatever lip-smacking the outside world does over this kind of thing, film people, every one of whom is vulnerable and most of whom have been victimized by this sort of thing, cannot possibly be friendly to it. We are asking them to take us seriously as a group genuinely devoted to film [,] not to scandalous gossip. By setting this up as a special, we are in a sense associating ourselves with the kind of thing that can only jeopardize our support.[9]

Card was then the motion-picture curator of George Eastman House, one of several US archives that would soon supply prints for Anger’s ‘special’ Babylon program, a midnight-to-dawn performance that included Anger lecturing, presenting clips, screening complete feature films, and projecting photographic slides, as well as playing vintage recordings of popular songs such as ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ on the sound system of the Sheridan Opera House.[10] Card’s caution about including Anger may have been related, in part, to his earlier lack of concern during the previous year when he invited Leni Riefenstahl to attend the inaugural Telluride Film Festival as a special honoree for whom he prepared an extensive tribute with screenings of her Bergfilme, as well as a midnight showing of her notorious documentary of the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress of 1934, Triumph des Willens, in the ballroom of the Telluride Lodge. Curiously, Anger had also participated in the first Telluride Film Festival, though not as a historian but as an invited filmmaker whose works were screened at midnight along with those of Stan Brakhage, another invited guest of the festival directors.

While perhaps obvious, it is worth pointing out that Card’s repeated negative characterisation of Hollywood Babylon and Anger’s brand of film history as ‘that kind of thing’, by which the ‘vulnerable’ suffered ‘victimization’, did not seem to have applied to the kind of thing promulgated by Riefenstahl’s films. Be that as it may, Card would eventually rescind his objections to Anger’s presence, provided that his ‘presentation would not be “distasteful”’.[11] The only apparent instance of scandal occasioned by the Babylon program at Telluride was a petition circulated by representatives of a local Baptist church objecting to the display of Jayne Mansfield’s breasts on the covers of Anger’s book, numerous copies of which were then gracing the window of a nearby bookshop.[12] According to Pence, Anger’s presentation already had ‘a cloak of respectability’ since he had been invited to travel with some version of his Babylon program at Telluride to both the American Film Institute and the Pacific Film Archives.[13]

During the first year of the festival, Card had, in addition to the Riefenstahl programs, arranged for a tribute to silent-era Hollywood star Gloria Swanson, who objected to all the fuss being made about Riefenstahl, reportedly exclaiming, 

How long ago was that? Is she still carrying a flag around for Hitler? I don’t want to discuss that. I know nothing about it. Many, many, many untrue things have been said about me. I’ll talk about that if you want.[14] 

If the Hollywood star had felt upstaged by a Nazi propagandist at Telluride to the point of being willing to address false rumors about her own career, two years later she was more reticent to discuss what she believed were libelous attacks on her by Anger in Hollywood Babylon where he, according to her complaint, falsely claimed that she had begun her movie career as a Sennett bathing beauty and that she had, in correspondence with Walter Winchell, called Lana Turner a ‘trollop’. After privately threatening legal action against the publisher, Swanson finally brought suit against Dell, Doubleday, Straight Arrow Books, and Anger himself in 1977 for libelous damage to her brand. Film historian Anne Helen Petersen has described how Swanson never publicly addressed these claims of Anger, nor did she ever reveal how, both at the conclusion of and following her failed lawsuit, Anger had been regularly sending her what Petersen describes as ‘hate mail’, even at the moment when Swanson was then writing her relatively revealing autobiography and was presumably setting the record straight on many controversies in her career.[15]

Petersen ponders Swanson’s silence on Anger’s ‘communications’ in light of the fact that the star preserved these items as part of her personal papers and other artifacts accumulated from her long career, a collection which she sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas after the completion of the autobiography. The fact that no correspondence related to the then newly-acknowledged and discussed affair she had with Joseph Kennedy in the late 1920s were included in the materials indicates to Petersen that the collection was consciously curated for donation by Swanson, and her essay thinks deeply about questions of collecting, seeing Swanson’s preservation of the Anger materials as a strategic instance of self-fashioning by a successful professional woman who places these items in the archive for future historians to encounter and draw their own conclusions about Anger and about her own restraint – a forensic time capsule as it were. Petersen is not so much interested in making any firm conclusions about Anger or his motivations as she is in probing the complexities of collections and collecting as a means for women in the film industry to shape historical memory, as has been so importantly theorised by Amelie Hastie. Indeed, Petersen takes some pains to describe the strangeness of Anger’s mail, especially the oversized objects that constitute part of the Anger materials in the Swanson Collection at the Harry Ransom Center.

These items invoked Swanson’s history in Hollywood, her various marriages and affairs, and centered on the theme that she was turning into her most famous role: the washed-up, delusional silent star Norma Desmond. Anger signed the majority of the works with ‘Uncle Sugar’ or ‘Uncle C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁’, invoking health-food advocate Swanson’s well-known antipathy toward sugar. There were Latin inscriptions, ceremonial magic incantations, photos of Swanson and fellow silent film star Rudolph Valentino pierced through with metal objects, a large plastic bag containing lightbulbs and sugar, and most dramatically, a foot-and-a-half-long wooden coffin, painted green and filled with sugar, on the lid of which had been hand-painted “Hic Jacet Gloria Swanson.” While Anger never explicitly stated his motivation for targeting Swanson, I would argue that this was not evidence of some long-standing grudge. Despite the detailed attention to various events in her career, Anger seems simply to have been attempting to infuriate, humiliate, and otherwise disturb Swanson – not for being Swanson per se but rather for daring to sue him.[16]

Petersen soberly seeks to diminish the intensity of any passions that might be expected to have either motivated or been awakened by these bizarre ‘gifts’, faulting Anger only for an immaturely obsessional albeit hurtful response to the star’s libel suit. She rightly questions whether such deeply (inter-)personal objects in the archive, despite their details and uniqueness, might ever give us any intimate access to the meanings they held for their creator or their intended recipient, instead pondering how to understand Swanson’s custodianship and interest in their historical preservation.

Yet, Petersen’s descriptions of these artifacts suggest more than churlish whimsy, and without denying how traumatic their receipt may have been for Swanson, it is also possible to see these dark and taunting communications as freighted with the queer affection of a fan.[17] Sugar and death were undeniably the magick vocabulary of Hollywood Babylon, Anger’s poisoned valentine to the film industry. Even if occasioned by Swanson’s libel suit, the target of Anger’s puckish gibes seems more likely not the litigious star but her pretense to health, integrity, and self-actualisation, a betrayal of her legacy in Anger’s universe where Swanson’s turn as Norma Desmond had been the brilliant apotheosis of a stellar career. More intriguing and instructive than the sugar-filled coffin are, perhaps, the images of Swanson and Rudolph Valentino ‘pierced through with metal objects’ that Petersen also refers to as ‘makeshift voodoo dolls’. Perhaps no Hollywood star holds a greater place in Anger’s esteem than Valentino, whose exotic life and tragic death produced an enduring cult of morbid dedication among whose numbers Anger surely counts himself. Had these Valentino ‘dolls’ been presented as experiencing a fate similar to those of Swanson, as suggested by Petersen’s initial descriptions, Swanson’s former co-star in Paramount’s 1922 adaption of Elinor Glyn’s Beyond the Rocks would have been posthumously reunited with her by Anger through the material iconography of the ecstatic suffering endured by Saint Sabastian. Yet, the bodily piercings in question have only been administered to images of Swanson, with Valentino’s eyelines and close proximity – through a sort of telepathic historical ventriloquism – communicating a sadistic relishing of her imagined suffering and death. Such assemblages raise the issue of the forensic, indeed, while they also serve as an undeniable index of Anger’s misogyny.[18]  

Sado-masochistic encounters and imagery have been recurring elements of Anger’s works from his earliest films such as Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1950) to Scorpio Rising (1963) and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). While the infantile aggressivity of these particular assemblages surely express a sexist hatred that sought to dislocate Swanson as effectively as the esoteric black-magic curses that accompanied some of Anger’s other ‘gifts’, these works – and given the maniacal care with which the metal objects have been inserted into the mounted images, they rise to the level of works – also enact a more profound violence in which the film-historical past becomes the terrain for an intervention in which the agitated artist-historian takes revenge on a movie star who sought to challenge his claim to speak both for and from the cinematic past, a provocative demonstration of his powers to ‘secure’ the reputations of idolised Hollywood celebrities because of his deep and abiding investments in their legacies. 

Earlier in 1977 and just prior to the commencement of his presumed one-way correspondence with Swanson, Anger had been traveling and lecturing on Valentino, perhaps capitalising on the anticipated release of Ken Russell’s biopic of the silent star featuring ballet dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev in the title role and folk-rock singer-songwriter cum movie actress Michelle Phillips as Valentino’s second wife Natacha Rambova. In July of that year, Anger had loaned portions of his own extensive Valentino collection for display at the Chicago Institute of Art during a week-long Valentino retrospective at the Film Center, a series inaugurated by Anger’s twice-delivered presentation that sought to further the cult of the star a half century after his death,[19] a presentation he also intended to give at the University of California, Berkeley, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.[20] Posing the Anger collection that resides within the Swanson Collection as a planting of evidence by Swanson with the confidence that future researchers would correct the record in her favor by appreciating her tact and decorum effectively pushes queer historical affect to the margins once again, making it difficult to imagine Swanson acknowledging her place and significance in queer historical reception with a concomitant appreciation of how collecting is a labour of devotion, or even recognising these objects as historically important cultural works despite their initial status as private messages that likely inflicted harm.[21] 

You Must Remember This, film journalist Karina Longworth’s popular podcast devoted to Hollywood history, relied on Anger’s history of scandals to structure the nineteen episodes of its 2018-2019 season in a series titled ‘Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon’. This rather craftily produced podcast trades on hip nostalgia while maintaining the mantle of reliable if not critically sophisticated film history. The former is secured largely through its soundscape of current and period popular music, atmospheric interludes, and Longworth’s languorous enunciation that moves between SoCal slackness and ponderous rigor. Each episode uses a chapter from Hollywood Babylon as a springboard to provide both a larger cultural context of the scandals that Anger chose to portray and more details about the personal and professional biographies of the personalities involved, a sort of ‘bigger picture’ approach to correcting the record. Episodes typically begin with a male guest actor reading portions from Anger’s text, most often his reports of prevalent rumors that are subsequently enumerated into a series of claims about the film-historical past that Longworth then investigates to determine whether they can be proven true, false, or lacking sufficient historical evidence to make a determination. Gossip itself is never acknowledged by Longworth as a complex and legitimate means of engaging with and describing the world by those whose interests have already been pronounced deviant and dangerous by the reigning standards of decency, taste, and health.[22]

During the first episode from July of 2018, ‘D. W. Griffith, the Gish Sisters, and the Origin of Hollywood Babylon’, Longworth suggests that Anger’s historical work might best be appreciated as a compendium of conspiracy theories, and the season’s use of the title ‘Fake News’ works to suggest that Anger’s history of Hollywood creates a dangerous alternate reality akin to the manner in which right-wing media spreads disinformation in order to damage governmental and civil institutions, thereby positioning the podcast’s project of correction as a commendable public service. Longworth explains how Hollywood Babylon came about in Paris during the late 1950s when the down-and-out experimental filmmaker was persuaded by staff at Cahiers du Cinéma to write about the scandals of early Hollywood and the star system, a history by then already deeply informed by gossip and rumor that Longworth characterises as a ‘game of telephone’ where veracity is diminished with each rehearsal of these stories.[23] Yet, Longworth credits Anger’s written history as the source for many of the enduring and sensational legends about various celebrity scandals, and she characterises the period from which Anger published Hollywood Babylon in 1959 in France to its authorised American publication in English in 1975 and beyond as 

a perfect time for Anger’s exaggerations and potentially libelous statements and insinuations to be accepted as the long-hidden truth. One of the reason why such misinformation still circulates about classic Hollywood, other than that the studios put so much of it out there, is that books by self-proclaimed experts such as Anger were not fact-checked before publishing, and could not be fact checked in real time by their readers because not only was there no Internet but there were few reliable texts of any kind covering the stories he wrote about. Over forty years later it’s much easier to spot the things Anger got wrong, whether it’s honest and basically meaningless mistakes that having access to Wikipedia or IMDB would have cleared up, or more serious instances of rumors and urban legends clouding the truth. It also becomes apparent that in some cases Anger has a tendency to skew the truth according to his own biases and interests, and then there are other stories that Anger gets incredibly right, or even stops short of exaggerating or eviscerating a subject when he easily could have.[24]

Once more, there is the recurring gesture of constructing a responsible film history against the sordidness of Anger whose audience in Longworth’s account are not so much deviant as bereft of reliable sources and thus vulnerable to his seductions. While Longworth never names Anger’s ‘own biases and interests’ as queer, on rare occasions she acknowledges how his work has been appreciated as a ‘bitchy tome’ of ‘camp trolling’, though nowhere does she take seriously how camp might have a critical historiographical possibility for rethinking Hollywood history or how Anger’s gayness might provide a political rationale for conducting history as exposé. Steven Cohan has provided an extensive account of how the gay specificity of camp in a pre-Stonewall era has been more or less liquidated by a mass audience who have appropriated camp to ends radically divorced from the interest of dissident sexualities. He further notes that camp’s critically queer potentials ‘can only be seen by historicizing it as a cultural practice, not by valorizing it as a utopian or revolutionary theory’, an exercise seemingly suited to if not expected of the cultural historian.[25] Such an important component of Anger’s historical project is the graphic design, layout, and selection of images for the various versions of Hollywood Babylon – important formal and stylistic considerations in the telling of film history that no critics of the work ever take seriously beyond noting general themes or commenting on the luridness of particular images. Longworth is no exception to this privileging of word over image, and thus much of the historicity of the work’s affective charge is ignored in favor of fact checking.

But like most other detractors of Anger’s historical practice, Longworth does not simply pronounce him unreliable by refusing to acknowledge the queer labour of Anger’s project; she also seeks to portray Anger as a socially damaged and damaging individual whose ‘own biases and interests’ continually reproduce the racism and misogyny that more conscientious film historians have worked so hard to overcome. In the first introductory episode on Griffith, for example, she notes how Anger mobilises as the book’s point of departure the grandiose Babylon set from Intolerance that remained standing in a state of increasing dilapidation for several years in the midst of Hollywood, the abandoned set serving as a sort of marquee for the book’s investments in the facades, waste, and rot of Hollywood celebrity culture. After having that week’s guest voice actor read from the opening of Hollywood Babylon, Longworth uses the exegetical moment to remark that there was no significant elisions made in the reading of the text and that if there is one thing people should know about Griffith it is the notoriety of his racist retelling of American history in his commercially successful and controversial film of 1915, The Birth of a Nation, made just prior to Intolerance. Here, Longworth is able to provide the larger and more properly anti-racist history of Griffith before proceeding to investigate the claims she purports Anger to be making in his opening chapter, including accusations that Griffith was a pedophile and that Lillian and Dorothy Gish maintained an incestuous relationship.[26] She chides Anger’s seeming indifference to social justice. ‘Instead of grappling with the ideology of Griffith’s movies, Anger focused on the idea that in the wake of Birth of a Nation’s massive success, Griffith became a full-blown megalomanic.’[27] Here the heroic liberal film historian fulfills her duty to acknowledge the real scandal of Griffith’s career as the sneering, self-possessed historian shirks his, calling into question not only his reliability as a historian but his very commitment to social progress. Yet, as Lee Edelman has repeatedly pointed out, 

the antisocial is never, of course, distinct from the social itself. The ideological delimitation of an antisocial agency, one that refuses the normalizing protocols that legislate social viability, conditions the social order that variously reifies and disavows it, condemning that localised agency as the cause of the suffering for which the social order disclaims its responsibility.[28] 

In other words, straight Hollywood history continually seeks to invoke its demon brother, to conjure Anger as the arch obstacle to be overcome, thereby justifying the utility of prophylactic research as a genuine contribution to historical practice while absolving proper film historians of their own complicity with industrial exploitation.

In the sixth episode of the series, Longworth more or less offers as reliable the film industry’s final sanctioned version of the etiology of matinée idol Wallace Reid’s narcotic addiction, an evolving story that would eventually attribute his drug use to medical treatment for an injury he sustained in a train wreck while traveling to a film location in 1919. Casting Anger’s rendition of Reid’s drug use as riddled with errors, she makes much of the fact that Anger claims Reid to have first used morphine in 1920 while working on Forever, Paramount’s adaptation of George du Maurier’s novel Peter Ibbetson. 

This is the film which Anger claims was made in 1920 and on the set of which Wally first took morphine. Forever was actually shot in mid-1921, and we know that he had already been using the drug prior to this shoot. But his addiction certainly worsened that summer. 

In fact, the first person to publicly claim that Reid’s addiction began in 1921 was his wife and former film star Dorothy Davenport Reid who became the public face for narrating and explaining her husband’s affliction and eventual death in January 1923. At the end of 1922, Davenport Reid had claimed to the Los Angeles Evening Herald that her husband began using narcotics in New York the previous year. In fact, it is quite possible that Reid switched from morphine to heroin in 1921 working in New York, where he may have also begun mainlining the drug.[29] In any event, Longworth’s privileging of the version of his addiction most aligned with the major studios’ interests is telling since that version has left a historical record of its multiple public re-constructions through the continually evolving statements of Reid’s spouse and eventual widow who would become the principal interpreter of her husband’s life, work, and legacy. Longworth ends her episode by discussing Davenport Reid’s subsequent career as a filmmaker, locating her as one of the last in a line of important women filmmakers in Hollywood during the silent era, noting how the films of important directors such as Lois Weber have been long marginalised or forgotten in standard histories of the American cinema. Longworth ends the episode by once again casting Anger’s project as damagingly retrograde and all too familiar.

The Hollywood Babylon version of Wally and Dorothy’s story never mentions the railroad accident or many of the other fascinating aspects of Reid’s life and career. It mainly focuses on the idea that Reid’s wife got rid of him and then capitalised on his death. What is interesting about this version of the story is not the inaccuracies so much as the knee-jerk sexism. Hollywood Babylon and the gossip lineage it anchors is [sic] supposed to be about speaking truth to power or revealing the subversive truth that the dominant culture does not want us to know. But what could be more in keeping with the dominant culture than shaming a self-sufficient, creative woman, as a professional widow, enshrining her as the ur-Yoko Ono or Courtney Love? Again and again, Hollywood Babylon teaches us that women who show any sort of independence are not to be trusted. In that sense, it is much mustier than the scandals it is dredging up.[30] 

Rather than pursue the many ‘fascinating aspects’ of Hollywood history to tell a more complete human story, Anger instead evidences a morbid, non-productive obsession with the fatality of stardom and the profit motive that subtends its cult of death, a masculinist and infantile perspective that aligns itself with society’s most oppressive histories of social control from which Hollywood’s legacy can be both distinguished and somehow saved. 

In a well-reviewed 2012 monograph on Thomas Ince – upon which Longworth relies heavily for the ninth episode of ‘Fake News’ that investigates Anger’s treatment of the famous producer’s mysterious death – the late film historian and archivist Brain Taves sought to dispel longstanding rumors about Ince being murdered by William Randolph Hearst whilst sailing aboard the latter’s yacht in late 1924, a well-known rumor that James Card had disapprovingly mentioned in his 1975 letter to Pence asking that Anger be disinvited from participating in Telluride that year. One prevalent version of this story has Hearst shooting Ince after mistaking him in the dark for Charles Chaplin who Hearst believed was his rival for the romantic attention of Marion Davies. Taves devotes almost the entire first portion of his study to the would-be scandal, as if the final truth of Ince’s death had to be settled before the proper work of studio history could legitimately begin. By demonstrating how the repeated details of the scandal cannot be sustained by the historical record, a record about which Taves is the indisputable authority given the depth of his research, the historian proves false all those repeated but colourful stories that the producer’s death was a covered-up crime of passion. The rigor of the historian in proving such rumors groundless – so that film history might proceed free of gossip – illustrates well how much current film historiography on early Hollywood is effectively homophobic if not intentionally so, participating in projects to discipline both deviance and deviants. 

While rumors around Ince’s death have little to do with nonnormative sexuality outside scenarios of heterosexual promiscuity and jealous rivalries, the troublesomeness of such rumors about Ince is not so much their content as the types of people who might continue to find them useful, insightful, or even pleasurable. Most film historians utterly reject Mark Garrett Cooper’s insistence that archives exist ‘not to “save” the past, but to pervert the present’.[31] As Taves himself remarks, 

Sadly, possible Hollywood scandals always evoke a prurient interest, and legends are immortalised and retold in any number of turn-a-fast-buck gossip books. Looking beyond the façade of Hollywood Babylon and the like to the contemporary sources reveals little conflict as to the actual events that occurred around Ince’s death.[32] 

What historians such as Taves find lamentable is the interference in the proper conduct of historical research caused by wagging tongues susceptible to ‘prurient interest’ who unfortunately consult different archives, and consult those archives differently.

I consider myself a historian susceptible to such sordidness and, by charting a logic of hetero- and homonormative salvation underwriting the current historiography of early Hollywood, I have sought here to give an account of the anger still being directed against Kenneth Anger ‘and his like’. This logic is evidenced in a recurring need to demarcate legitimate academic and responsible popular inquiries from those unauthenticated, subcultural histories made for commercial exploitation. While the imperatives of the historical turn in film studies in the 1980s and their endurance have been routinely re-examined, little attention has been paid to the implications of positivism’s legacies for queers and queer-loving people. By looking at recent historical work on early cinema such as Taves’ monograph on Ince and Longworth’s podcast, I have endeavored to alert us to how the incessant demand for a rumor-free historical past seeks to deny the troubling presence and persistence of queers in history and in our contemporary discipline. 

Author

Mark Lynn Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh where he is the current Director of Graduate Studies for the Interdepartmental Film and Media Studies Program. An historian of early Hollywood, he is currently working on a monograph about the place of public scandal for feminist politics during the 1920s. He is the author of Twilight of the idols: Hollywood and the human sciences in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2011).

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Laura Horak who provided the initial opportunity to think through the place of Kenneth Anger in contemporary film historiography. He is also grateful for the generous comments and insightful suggestions of Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, and the two anonymous reviewers of this essay.

References

Anderson, M. Twilight of the idols: Hollywood and the human sciences in 1920s America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Anger, K. Hollywood babylone. Paris: J.J. Pauvert, 1959.

_____. Hollywood babylon. Phoenix: Associate Professional Services, 1965.

_____.  Hollywood babylon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975.

Cohan, S. Incongruous entertainment: Camp, cultural value, and the MGM musical. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Cooper, M. ‘Archive, Theater, Ship: The Phelps Sisters Film the World’ in Researching women in silent cinema: New findings and perspectives, edited by M. Dall’Asta, V. Duckett, and L. Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013: 120-129.

Dyer, R. Heavenly bodies: Film stars and society, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Edelman, L. ‘Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 3, July 2007: 469-476.

Eisner, L. Murnau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Gallo, W. ‘Films in a Rarefied Atmosphere’, Los Angeles Times, 11 September 1975: sec. 4, p. 17.

Gerstner, D. ‘Queer Angels of History Take It and Leave It from Behind’, Stanford Humanities Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1999: 150-165.

Hammer, L. F.W. Murnau for the record. Morgan Hill: Bookstand Publishing, 2010.

Hastie, A. Cupboards of curiosity: Women, recollection, and film history. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Hutchison, A. Kenneth Anger: A demonic visionary. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011.

Landis, B. Anger: The unauthorized biography of Kenneth Anger. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,1995.

Longworth, K. ‘Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon’, 19 episodes of You Must Remember This, 2 July 2018 – 28 January 2019, Podcast, MP3: https://karina-longworth-o90x.squarespace.com/episodes/2019/1/29/hollywoodbabylon.

Love, H. Feeling backwards: Loss and the politics of queer history. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Marcus, G. ‘”Hollywood Babylon” Goes on the Road’, The Village Voice, Vol. 20, No. 41, 13 October 1975: 130.

Petersen, A. ‘What to do with a Coffin Full of Sugar: Gloria Swanson, Kenneth Anger, and Self-Authorship in the Star Collection’, The Moving Image, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2013: 81-98.

Ruoff, J. Telluride in the festival galaxy. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2016.

Sedgwick, E. The epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Siskel, G. ‘The Valentino legend stirs a revival’, Chicago Tribune, 28 June 1977: sec. 2, 1-2.

Sontag, S. ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Partisan Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, Fall 1964: 515-530.

Spacks, P. Gossip. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Swanson, G. Swanson on Swanson. New York: Random House, 1980.

Taves, B. Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s independent pioneer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.

Telluride film festival collection. File 19, 2nd Festival. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA.

Tinkcom, M. ‘Scandalous!: Kenneth Anger and the Prohibitions of Hollywood History’ in Out takes: Essays on queer theory and film, edited by E. Hanson. New York: Duke University Press, 1999: 271-287.

Utley, B. ‘’20s “dream lover” setting new style trends’, Dubuque Telegraph Herald, 16 August 1977: 9.

Wallace, D. Lost Hollywood. Los Angeles: LA Weekly Books, 2001.

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[1] Tinkcom 1999, pp. 271-272.

[2] Hammer 2010, p. 2.

[3] Anger 1975, p. 172.

[4] Hammer 2010, pp. 2-4.

[5]  Ibid., pp. 5-6.

[6] Hammer 2010. p. 7.

[7] Eisner 1973, p. 222, n. 2.

[8]  Love 2007, p. 45.

[9]  Letter from James Card to Bill Pence, 11 July 1975. Telluride film festival collection.

[10] Ruoff 2016, p. 32.; letter from Anger to Pence, 13 August 1975, p. 2, Telluride film festival collection.

[11] Letter from Bill Pence to James Card, 16 July 1975, Telluride film festival collection.

[12] Gallo 1975, p. 17.

[13] Letter to Card from Pence, 16 July 1975, Telluride film festival collection. In reviewing Anger’s Hollywood Babylon performance and screening at Pacific Film Archive that October, Greil Marcus noted how ‘the show is of a piece with his own films – cracked down the middle, forcing an audience from one side to the other, mixing voyeurism with a fervor that can only be called religious’. Marcus 1975, p. 130.

[14] Quoted in Rouff 2016, p. 21, from Deep Creek Review [Telluride, CO] ‘”The Empty Chair”: Leni’s Seminar’, 9 September 1974, p. 8.

[15] Petersen 2013, p. 85. Petersen points out that Swanson describes her rumored affair with producer Joseph Kennedy in the autobiography though she had never before publicly acknowledged their romantic relationship.

[16] Petersen 2013, pp. 83-84.

[17] David Anthony Gerstner has proposed that Anger’s interests in assemblage is commensurate with the life and artwork of Joseph Cornell whose ‘constructions were often miniature shrines to the likes of Greta Garbo, Hedy LaMarr, and Lauren Bacall, or to famous yet forgotten ballerinas, or to the birds he so tenderly admired. […] Both Cornell and Anger literally lived through the re-produced material of the twentieth century. Pieces of starlet’s clothing, biographies, tabloid newspapers, comic books from used books stores, and scraps of celluloid filled not only the artist’s [sic] works of art, but the places in which they lived.’ Gerstner 1999, p. 161.

[18] When I recently asked Petersen if she could provide more details about these particular objects before I had access to them myself, she replied that her research was conducted well over a decade ago and she could not recall these particular objects but believed she was working from the Harry Ransom Center’s own written description of them.

[19] Siskel 1977, p. 2.

[20]  Utley 1977, p. 9.

[21] For an example of an extended analysis of how a Hollywood celebrity both courted and acknowledged her gay male audience, see Richard Dyer’s chapter on Judy Garland, Dyer 2004, pp. 137-191.

[22]  See Sedgwick 1990, p. 23 on the importance of gossip to the knowledge systems of historically marginalised individuals and groups, and Spacks 1985, pp. 5-6 for a discussion of ‘serious gossip’.

[23]  It has been commonplace to extol the cultural importance of Anger’s filmmaking while seeing the Hollywood Babylon books as merely embarrassing economic necessities to support the filmmaker’s more serious endeavors. Indeed, biographer Bill Landis even suggests that Hollywood Babylon, ‘[u]nlike Anger’s movies, which are always masterful, […] tries hard to be art but only occasionally succeeds. It is valuable primarily as an abstraction of hate’, Landis 1995, p. 200. Alice Hutchison has made the most sustained attempt to discover meaningful continuities between Anger’s film history and his films, but she concludes that the only significant relation is Anger’s various engagements with Hollywood forms, style, and glamor as means for countercultural and industrial critique, and she does discuss the Babylon books as camp, but only through Susan Sontag’s radically de-gayified consideration of the ‘sensibility’ in her oft-quoted ‘Notes on “Camp”’. See Hutchison 2011, pp. 190-203.      

[24] Longworth, episode 1, ‘D.W. Griffith, the Gish Sisters and the Origin of Hollywood Babylon’, 3 July 2018. http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2018/6/26/dw-griffith-the-gish-sisters-and-the-origin-of-hollywood-babylon-fake-news-fact-checking-hollywood-babylon-episode-1.

[25]  Cohan 2005, p. 9.

[26] Longworth’s protracted consideration of Griffith’s preference for and attachments to extremely young actresses as well as the Gish sister’s documented devotion to one another allows her to both soften the pointed claims she attributes to Anger while entertaining their possibility for a listening audience who are then treated to a musical closeout of the song ‘A Sister Like You’ by 1990s British alt-rock group The Auteurs with the lyrics, ‘Two sisters sighed/Said we might as well be lovers/We’re so close/Just like blood brothers.’

[27] Longworth 2018, episode 1.

[28] Edelman 2007, p. 470.

[29] See Anderson 2011, pp. 34-38 and p. 181, n. 47.

[30]  Longworth, episode 6, ‘Wallace Reid’, 7 August 2018: http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2018/7/26/wallace-reid-fake-news-fact-checking-hollywood-babylon-episode-6.

[31] Cooper 2013, p. 126.

[32] Taves 2012, p. 5.