Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets Mass Market Paperback – November 15, 1975

From reading this book you'll understand that Hollywood has ALWAYS been an outpost of BABYLON. From the misdeeds of Fatty Arbuckle to the present day our "stars" have been based in debauchery of the highest order. A titillating book - you won't be bored.

I think I first came across this book at the Dawn Treader Book Shop, way in the back where they shelve their Hollywood Film History books, among other popular sections like Science Fiction and Mysteries, like a pharmacy putting their most popular drugs in the back of the store so you have to walk past all their other products to get to what you came there for in the first place. And this is that kind of book - it’s like a drug, addictive, pleasurable, you can’t put it down. I have heard that it suffers from a surfeit of factual inaccuracies, and I can confirm that a cursory googling of almost any chapter of this book will turn up errors. For example, Peg Entwistle didn’t jump off the ‘D’ of the Hollywood sign, she jumped off the ‘H’. Barbara La Marr didn’t have 6 husbands, she had 4. And Thelma Todd’s body wasn’t discovered in a Packard, it was discovered in a Haverhill brown 1932 Lincoln KB Dual Cowl Phaeton. But getting bogged down over whether a starlet was discovered dead in a Packard or a Lincoln misses the point of this book. It is a salacious, well-illustrated, tabloidy counter-history of Hollywood. It’s a crime-scene photo-illustrated, sex and drugs scandal chronicle of the birth and adolescence of Hollywood, beginning in the unstable silent film era and progressing into the studio era when emergencies involving movie stars meant calling the movie studio brass at Paramount or Warner Bros. before calling the police.The style of the book is unique among Hollywood histories. Anger uses a tone and language that is taken from scandal sheets and tabloids and his ample illustrations indicate that he is aiming for an audience that likes to look at pictures as much as or more than they like to read. The sex, drugs, and crime in the text enter into a dialogue with the pictures of naked and dead stars mixed in with a few glossy public relations portraits. The result is a salaciously entertaining book which is a pure joy to read but also fun just to flip through. Every chapter has either some well-known star or some overlooked character from Hollywood’s past, often both, and the stories range from well-known scandals like Fatty Arbuckle to crimes and deaths among obscure Hollywood hangers-on who wouldn’t be out of place in Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”.

I bought this based on Candace Owen’s recommendation. Good book with good stories from old Hollywood.

One of the thing that needs to be pointed out is that there have been editing changes since it's original printing--changing Kenneth Anger's story such as for example, the death of William Taylor and how Paramount was able to take ownership of Taylor's Paramount property. This has been edited out of the later printing of this book. It is a good book not because I agree with it but because it shows you the depraved and demented or demonic roots of Hollywood that most of us never realized were going on. This fits in so well with the Chaos Book by Tom O'Neill.

The media could not be loaded. The pictures were of actual crime scenes and the stores were an uncensored saga of fame’s underbelly.

This book is not the original!! Things have been changed and many things have been omitted. It ends up being very hard to read because you end up not knowing what the author is getting at. Idk how they can legally claim this is complete and unabridged.

It was okay... the book was interesting in some parts but not all, the quality given was not the best either.

Great book crazy stories 🤯