The 1959 release of Hollywood Babylon offered audiences a sinful peek behind the velvet curtain of the movie business. Presented as a hard-boiled tell-all book – “the truth the studios never wanted you to know” – by outré filmmaker Kenneth Anger, it promised an underworld of scandal. Beneath its titillating headlines, lurid accusations, and gruesome tales, however, was something altogether more surreal. Hollywood Babylon, it turned out, was far from reliable history. It was a nightmare: a melting pot of hearsay, gossip, fabrication, and possibly some misremembered tabloid headlines as well.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Kenneth Anger in 1979. Fairfax Media via Getty Images
And yet, for decades, the book shaped public understanding of early Hollywood more than any legitimate biography ever did.
Published in France before a delayed American release in the 1970s, Hollywood Babylon arrived at the perfect moment. The studio system had collapsed, its internal censorship weakened, and a new generation of readers was eager to believe that Golden Age stars had lived lives far darker than the era’s publicity machinery had ever suggested. Anger delivered exactly what they wanted: a decadent carnival of sex, drugs, illicit affairs, unsolved murders, suicides, and fallen idols.
The problem was simple—much of it wasn’t true.
Some stories were embroidered beyond recognition. Others were pieced together from rumors that had circulated for years but had never been verified. And a few—like the grotesque allegation that Marie Prevost had been "half-eaten" by her dog—were pure invention. Anger rarely cited sources, and when he did, they were often newspapers notorious for sensationalism or clippings that contradicted surviving documentation. Later historians would spend decades untangling fact from fiction.
Look at Virginia Rappe, whose 1921 death at the St. Francis Hotel became the centerpiece of Anger’s most infamous chapter. Anger portrayed the event as a depraved orgy ending in assault and murder. Court transcripts tell another story entirely: Rappe suffered from chronic medical issues, no physical evidence of assault was ever found, and actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials, with jurors issuing a formal apology. But Anger’s version—lurid, simple, and sensational—cemented itself in the public imagination.
Take the case of beautiful star Barbara La Marr, supposedly a cocaine addict who died from a drug overdose surrounded by a cloud of wanton sin. She died of tuberculosis and a lifetime of physical excess, not from a syringe. Wallace Reid, described by Anger as a drug-ravaged casualty of morphine dens, was in truth a man forced into dependency after a severe injury, struggling in an era with little medical understanding or support. Anger’s version of early Hollywood turned victims into spectacles.
Even Anger’s portrait of Lupe Vélez—the “Mexican Spitfire” who supposedly drowned in her toilet after a failed suicide—has been repeatedly debunked. Coroner’s records show she died in her bed, after an intentional overdose, and was found peacefully, not grotesquely posed as Anger described. Yet the myth outpaced the facts so successfully that Vélez’s fabricated death scene remains one of the most persistent falsehoods in film lore.
So how did Hollywood Babylon become such a force in popular culture if so much of it was wrong? In part, it was because the book was fun to read. Anger wrote with the gonzo panache of a gossip columnist freed from journalistic restraint. His prose was terse, outrageous, and cinematic. His images—even the manipulated ones—gave a voyeur’s glimpse into the underworld of the stars. And for those who had grown cynical of the fake morality tales of the Golden Age, the suggestion that Hollywood was really always just a den of iniquity was its own kind of revelation.
But perhaps more importantly, Hollywood Babylon filled a void. Academic film history was still in its infancy, studio archives remained locked, and many silent-era witnesses were gone. With official histories sanitized and real scandals carefully buried by the studios, Anger’s book slipped into the vacuum and offered itself as an alternative gospel.
The damage, however, was lasting. For years, biographers, film scholars and descendants of early stars have scrambled to set the record straight. But once a juicy lie takes hold — and especially one wrapped in glamour — it's almost impossible to eradicate. Today, even casual film fans can reel off a half-dozen Anger claims despite never having cracked open the book. His stories have bled into documentaries, online trivia sites, gossip columns and cultural memory.
This is not to say early Hollywood was innocent. It was full of dreams and desperation, creativity and corruption, privilege and vulnerability. There were murders, cover-ups, affairs, abuses of power, ruined careers and genuine tragedies. But the real stories, as grounded in fact, are fascinating enough without Anger's embellishments.
The problem with Hollywood Babylon was not that it revealed Hollywood secrets, but that it made them up. In the process, it stole the real lives of real people—the messy, complicated, heartbreakingly human truths of who they were.
As more archives are opened, as scholars keep combing through the first decades of cinema, a truer version of that history is slowly taking shape. It is still a lurid story, filled with heartbreak and with scandal. But it is so much fuller and richer and more complex than the monstrous distortions Anger provided.
Film history deserves more than rumor passed off as fact. And Hollywood’s first stars, many of whom died young and alone or just faded away, deserve better than to be consigned to such obscenities. They deserve the dignity of truth.
Did Hollywood Babylon expose hidden truths—or permanently distort film history? Share your thoughts and tell us how Kenneth Anger’s scandal bible shaped (or misled) your view of old Hollywood in the comments below.
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