Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire 10-01-14 10:49 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 US’s 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, Anaïs Nin, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Anger has always liked visiting cemeteries. “They’re peaceful,” he says. “They’d 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, http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/features/5483/kenneth-anger/ Page 1 of 19 Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire 10-01-14 10:49 the classic account of Tinseltown’s 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 Anger’s 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 that’s 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). Anger’s 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 Anger’s 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. We’d arranged an interview but, when I arrived at his modest hotel, that idea http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/features/5483/kenneth-anger/ Page 2 of 19 Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire 10-01-14 10:49 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 didn’t 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. Anaïs Nin, the diarist and lover of Henry Miller, was a close friend of Anger’s 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. Anger’s 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 Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) as The Changeling Prince, scampering in spangles and plumes through the enchanted forest thrown up on the backlot of Warner’s studios. The smell of the shellac, he recalls, was “almost like getting high”. http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/features/5483/kenneth-anger/ Page 3 of 19 Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire 10-01-14 10:49 He knew that acting wasn’t his calling, but film had cast its spell. As a teenager, he began making his own films using the family’s 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. It’s 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 Cinémathèque Française as the assistant to Henri Langlois. He’d 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 d’artifice (1953), a circus midget in an 18th-century evening gown darts, like a figure from a hallucination, among the fountains of the Villa d’Este 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 Boyfriend’s Back”, Ricky Nelson’s “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. *** http://www.esquire.co.uk/culture/features/5483/kenneth-anger/ Page 4 of 19 Kenneth Anger: Where The Bodies Are Buried - Esquire 10-01-14 10:49 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 Anger’s 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 world’s 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 (Anger’s first film sale) for $100. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Anger became Virgil to Kinsey’s Dante, introducing him to LA’s gay underworld, while Anger and numerous friends, among them the playwright Tennessee Williams, contributed to Kinsey’s survey.