Is It Possible That Old Hollywood Was Even More Deviant Than Today?

HOLLYWOOD BABYLON by Kenneth Anger – PDF Download (BELOW)

“In “Hollywood Babylon,” his legendary 1959 book full of sordid tales of Tinseltown scandal from the ’20s through the ’50s, Anger invented how the dark side of celebrity, which was already coruscating through the Hollywood tabloids, would become an addictive and omnivorous culture of gossip, one that we would view through a scrim of derision even as we drank it all in. In the book, Anger stared with the eyes of a voyeur even as he was giggling past the graveyard. And that’s why it almost didn’t matter that a number of the stories in the book weren’t true. (A number of them were.) Anger was inventing the fairy-tale mythology of gossip, how the squalid underbelly of the dream factory was all part of the dream. ” – Variety Magazine

Below is a FREE download of Hollywood Babylon (1959) by Kenneth Anger.

EXCERPTS FROM Olive Thomas’s story in HOLLYWOOD BABYLON:

THE CLUTCHED HAND (chapter 2)

A cloud, no larger than a girl’s hand, was taking shape on the horizon. The shocking news that first revealed Hollywood in a scandalous light arrived on September 10, 1920 in the form of a Marconi Radiogram that waked Myron Selznick in the middle of the night.

The message made front page headlines:

“OLIVE THOMAS DEAD FROM POISON

Olive Thomas, sprightly Ziegfeld Follies’ queen, Selznick Pictures star and Mrs. Jack Pickford …”

The cablegram informed the head of Selznick Pictures that his top star had just been found dead in Paris. The sedate, renowned Hotel Crillon, on the Place de la Concorde, was a most unlikely setting for Hollywood’s first scandal.

On that September morning the valet used his passkey to enter the hotel’s Royal Suite with a breakfast trolley. What he saw froze him in his tracks. A sable opera cape was spread out on the floor, and on it lay a nude young woman. One hand still clutched a bottle of toxic bichloride of mercury granules.

The suite was registered in the name of Mrs. Jack Pickford, known to millions of adoring fans as the bright young star of the silver screen, Olive Thomas.

Olive Thomas!

New York remembered her as one of the most beautiful brunettes Ziegfeld had ever glorified. Ziegfeld’s showgirls were invariably young, and at sixteen Olive was a poised, vivacious young lady much sought after by café society, darling of the Vogue and Vanity Fair crowd, ornament of the penthouse parties given by the publisher of those modish magazines, Condé Nast.

Through the ministrations of Mr. Nast, Olive had appeared frequently as a fashion model in the pages of Vogue, and Mr. Ziegfeld singled her out to pose, unclothed, for the young Peruvian artist, Alberto Vargas.

This is Vargas’s painting of what is said to be Olive Thomas – although it’s unclear whether it actually is Olive Thomas or not.

Many think it is actually Olive Borden. Read the controversy here… —>

(Compare photos of Thomas and Borden below)

OLIVE THOMAS

OLIVE BORDEN

THE ARTIST HARRISON FISHER CALLED OLIVE “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD.”

Her subsequent departure for Hollywood seemed only natural. The bubbly beauty from Broadway “caught on” at once in the film colony, and her pert portrayals of young girlhood in light comedies like Betty Takes a Hand, Prudence on Broadway and — inevitably — The Follies Girl, swiftly won her a wide following.

In 1919 Myron Selznick launched his newly formed company by signing Elaine Hammerstein and Olive Thomas to lucrative contracts.

In 1920, with Olive’s success in The Flapper and her much publicized marriage to Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford’s brother and himself an idol of the screen, her place in the charmed circle of Golden People seemed assured.

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF A VERY INTRIGUING LIFE THAT ENDED TOO SOON….

A PICTURE OF THE AUTHOR – KENNETH ANGER – WITH HIS BOOK

**DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY OF HOLLYWOOD BABYLON –> FREE**

**Below is a poem from Don Blanding which sums it up perfectly.**

HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood, Hollywood … Fabulous Hollywood … Celluloid Babylon, Glorious, glamorous … City delirious,

Frivolous, serious … Bold and ambitious,

And vicious and glamorous

Drama — a city-full, Tragic and pitiful…

Bunk, junk, and genius Amazingly blended …

Tawdry, tremendous, Absurd, stupendous;

Shoddy and cheap. And astonishingly splendid

HOLLYWOOD!!

— Don Blanding

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As a writer and woman who loves men, I like to write sensual stories which offer insight into the dynamics between men and women. The stories do involve sex. It is always heterosexual and what most would term ‘vanilla’ by todays standards.

If you like reading erotica these stories may be of interest to you.

I might even be so bold as to call theses stories ‘literary’ erotica. I believe a reader’s mind should be stimulated, as well as, their body.

Find the ebook here…. and listen to the first story for free here.