 Kenneth Anger explores Hollywood's darkest recesses in his landmark tell-all. 
Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon is the grandaddy of all Tinseltown exposés. It was published in 1965, banned ten days later, and shelved until 1975. It's exactly as advertised, outing everybody that was anybody for everything. Entire chunks are devoted to Charlie Chaplain, Lana Turner, Errol Flynn, Fatty Arbuckle and other cinematic luminaries. Some of its claims have been proved false—for instance the assertion that Lupe Velez died with her head in a toilet, and that Clara Bow screwed the USC football team (we doubt anyone really believed that one, even back then). But other tales are basically true, including accounts of various legal run-ins and feuds. Anger's writing is uneven, but at its most effective mirrors the type of pure tabloid style that influenced the likes of James Ellroy and others. Besides the salacious gossip the book has a ton of rare celeb photos, and those are of real worth. We've uploaded a bunch below. They came from a digital edition because our little paperback was too fragile to get on a scanner. By the way, don't feel as if we're working overtime on our website this Christmas morning—we uploaded everything in advance and are actually nowhere near a computer today. We're glad you took a minute to drop by. Copious vintage Hollywood below.                                      
 And you think America is polarized today. 
The iconic polar bear rug. What can you say about them? Well, it's not a good look nowadays, but back then people thought these sorts of decorations were quite chic. When did that end? Possibly shortly after the three-hundredth Playboy model posed on one, or when many people began to see trophy hunting as the obsession of vain and unsavory millionaires. One of those two. Personally, we blame Hefner. In the shot above Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay take polar bear style to its pinnacle. Just look at that room. Besides the bear they have a copper ceiling, satin curtains, and a white shag rug. It's a pimp's wet dream and all of it must have cost a fortune. We like to imagine what the look on Jayne's face would have been if anyone walked in with a brimming glass of red wine. We bet she'd have turned whiter than the bear.
We have more photos in the same vein below. If you need help identifying the stars, their names are in our keywords in order of appearance. Looking at the entire collection, we tend to wonder if there were three or four bears that ended up in all the photos. You know, like bears owned by certain photography studios or prop departments. Just saying, a couple of them look suspiciously similar. But on the other hand, how different from each other do bears really look? You'll notice that the poor creatures were generally posed to look fierce. But by contrast Inger Stevens' bear, just below, strikes us as a bit reflective and melancholy, which is understandable. Elizabeth Montgomery, meanwhile, gets extra points for wearing her bear. We have twenty-plus images below, including another shot of Mansfield, sans Hargitay.                     
 Hanging with Mr. Cooper. 
We were just writing about Gary Cooper in our history text and… You do read the history text, right? Please tell us you read that stuff, because we really do work hard on it. Anyway, Cooper died fifty years ago yesterday, so we thought we’d share one of the posters we had sitting around. Above you see the Japanese one sheet for his 1953 western Blowing Wild, with Barbara Stanwyck and Anthony Quinn. We’ll get into Mr. Cooper a bit more down the line. We have to—we can’t possibly ignore a guy who Clara Bow said was “hung like a horse and can go all night.” And we also have to get into the story about how Lupe Velez stabbed him for drawing a face on one of her nipples. When you do something like that to a woman known as the Mexican Spitfire, you have to expect incendiary results, but we'll explore that and other Cooper episodes soon.
 
We wrote about actress Lupe Velez just a few days ago, and now we’ve come across this great Film Fun cover she posed for. Film Fun ran from 1915 to 1942, and was a lighthearted zine that always had pin-up style art, either painted with utmost skill by the likes of Enoch Bolles and John Held, Jr., or photographed in a style that made the subject look like a painting. It was Bolle who produced the fantastic pirate-themed cover above, and it looks like he had a ball doing it.
 Her beauty, talent and determination were not enough. 
Lupe Velez was born in Mexico, bounced from Hollywood films to the Broadway stage and back to Tinseltown, but never achieved the level of stardom she craved. She had a career, though—she made more than forty films, including the Mexican Spitfire series, which consisted of five projects over three years. But there were failed love affairs and a divorce. When an unmarried Velez became pregnant in 1944, her strict Catholic upbringing prevented her from seeking an abortion, but also caused her to believe giving birth out of wedlock would be an unbearable stigma for the child. Unable to see a way out, she took a handful of sleeping pills that killed her and her unborn baby. The suicide rocked Hollywood, and even inspired a 1965 Andy Warhol film entitled, appropriately, Lupe. She died sixty-two years ago today.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1912—U.S. Invades Nicaragua
United States Marines invade Nicaragua to support the U.S.-backed government installed there after José Santos Zelaya had resigned three years earlier. American troops remain for eleven years. 1936—Last Public Execution in U.S.
Rainey Bethea, who had been convicted of rape and murder, is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in what is the last public execution performed in the United States. 1995—Mickey Mantle Dies
New York Yankees outfielder Mickey Mantle dies of complications from cancer, after receiving a liver transplant. He was one of the greatest baseball players ever, but he was also an alcoholic and played drunk, hungover, and unprepared. He once said about himself, "Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been." 1943—Philadelphia Experiment Allegedly Takes Place
The U.S. government is believed by some to have attempted to create a cloak of invisibility around the Navy ship USS Eldridge. The top secret event is known as the Philadelphia Experiment and, according to believers, ultimately leads to the accidental teleportation of an entire vessel. 1953—Soviets Detonate Deliverable Nuke
The Soviet Union detonates a nuclear weapon codenamed Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina, aka Stalin's Jet Engine. In the U.S. the bomb is codenamed Joe 4. It is a small yield fission bomb rather than a multi-stage fusion weapon, but it makes up for its relative weakness by being fully deployable, meaning it can be dropped from a bomber. |
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