Filmmaker’s odd life included rock stars, Lucifer and Hollywood gossip

The influential Kenneth Anger made sex-obsessed short films and wrote a scandalous book on the often squalid lives of Hollywood stars.

Kenneth Anger circa 1984. Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Kenneth Anger died in 1967. No inadvertent obituary, this was a full-page advertisement that he himself put in the Village Voice in New York. Simply saying “in memoriam”, its description read: “Filmmaker 1947-1967”.

In fact his work had begun rather earlier than 1947, but the advertisement was redolent of a sometimes cantankerous career which, amounting to just a few hours of film, was bedevilled by his wayward habits and sparse funds.

Yet any avant-garde film director who, without ready money, was able to call upon the acting and musical services of Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was not short of chutzpah.

His “film poems” were notable for their innovative use of jump cuts and enigmatic imagery – suffused with the occult – and the directors David Lynch and Martin Scorsese were among those who acknowledged him as an influence – not least for the way he was first to use pop songs as soundtracks.

Anger captivated a far wider audience by detailing the shenanigans of Hollywood stars, including their drug addictions, abortions, sexual deviations and even mention of the size of their genitalia.

First published in Paris in the 1950s, his salacious book Hollywood Babylon had an underground, bootleg circulation before his brisk, sometimes wearying accounts of misplaced lives was published in America in 1969, only to be promptly banned. It finally made it past the nervous lawyers in 1975 and became a bestseller.

Born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, he was the son of a machine-gun manufacturer and a seamstress, but he never felt at ease with either father or siblings.

He claimed to have played the part – as a child actor – of the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s extravagant, even lumbering 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s debatable; he was a great curator of his own mythology.

He claimed more plausibly that around this time he danced with his fellow child actor Shirley Temple, and that they lost a contest owing to his incorporating a surreal twist. Even as a teenager he was creating works of his own, including an unseen variant on Flash Gordon. At Santa Monica High School, he was aloof, and influenced by the French poet Jean Cocteau: in 1943, he made the The Nest, with echoes of the incest in Les Enfants Terribles.

The following year, he moved to Beverly Hills and there made another short film, Demigods. He also began to hear Hollywood gossip and studied silent films. Becoming a friend of the director Curtis Harrington, he began to move in underground circles. Anger’s tastes now extended to Luis Bunuel, Leni Riefenstahl, Tennessee Williams and the British occultist Aleister Crowley.

His family continued to provide the allowance which enabled his exotic way of life. He studied cinema at the University of Southern California and, around this time, truncated his surname.

In his homoerotic short film Fireworks (1947), he cast himself as a character who wakes, goes for a stroll, and is then set upon by a gang of muscly sailors, the dreamlike narrative setting the tone for subsequent work. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges for Fireworks, but later acquitted by the Supreme Court of California. His next film, The Love That Whirls, was so rich in full frontal nudity that it was deliberately ­destroyed by Kodak.

Meanwhile, his hero Jean Cocteau had seen Fireworks, and sent word that he appreciated it. Anger was on the next plane over there and he and Cocteau duly collaborated on Rabbit’s Moon, a film project that fizzled out through lack of funds.

About this time he sampled (then-legal) LSD and was inspired to make Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) which, at 38 minutes, was to go through several versions as its characters partake in an orgy. The sexologist Alfred Kinsey became an acquaintance around this time. He too was fascinated by Crowley and, with funds from Picture Post, their unlikely close friendship led to a film made together at the occultist’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily.

It was suggested he turn his knowledge of gossip and rumour into the first version of Hollywood Babylone (1959), as the now-rare French edition was called.

He returned to America and made Scorpio Rising (1963), a 30-minute succession of scenes in which lithe, leather-clad bikers play out homoerotic fantasies while a series of pop songs – including Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet – are played.

His cult status was undeniable, and he was an influence upon nascent filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Anger set up a form of home with Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician given to devil worship. He acted in the first version of Anger’s film about Lucifer – but their disputatious relationship led to his stealing the footage and burying it in the Mojave Desert. He then borrowed Anger’s van, only to break down outside Charles Manson’s ranch, wander in for help and become one of the “family”.

Anger moved to London and made connections with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Indeed, Mick Jagger was partly inspired to write Sympathy for the Devil by Anger, who was certain Keith Richards’ girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was a witch.

Anger had cast Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in his next Lucifer film, Lucifer Rising, and tried to persuade Jagger to take the title role. But after the notorious Altamont concert, where the Hell’s Angels murdered an audience member, Jagger turned it down. He opted instead to provide and play the soundtrack, on a moog synthesiser, for Anger’s 10-minute variation on Crowley’s satanic rituals, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), starring Beausoleil, shortly before Beausoleil was arrested and condemned to death – later commuted to a life sentence when California suspended execution.

Meanwhile, Anger had met another Crowley enthusiast, Jimmy Page, and a friendship had developed, with the guitarist working on the music for Lucifer Rising. The half-hour result finally emerged towards the end of the ’70s, starring Faithfull.

Rumours continued to surround Anger – including that, in Hawaii, he had not only been approached by Mark Chapman but shown the bullets that would kill John Lennon.

Erratic, sometimes bitter, Anger prepared a second volume of Hollywood Babylon. The books defy continued reading, but exposed some interesting detail, revealing, for example, that Alfred Hitchcock sent actor Tippi Hedren’s daughter a doll version of the actor in a coffin, and that Busby Berkeley once appeared in court on a bed to answer charges of causing death while drink-driving.

THE TIMES