A Condensed Star

Keeping the flame burning

It was a strange story that caught his interest as he scoured the LA papers in search of the dirty sequins with which he would ultimately dress his Hollywood Babylone; that lurid pastiche of scandal from the silent era through to the silver age. A book destined for the French press, beyond the reach of American lawyers:

Hotel guest claimed she worshiped fire and wanted to keep a torch burning in her room. The management refused.

He smiled to himself, only in Hollywood. Always a hoarder, like his friend the warlock Samson De Brier, Kenneth Anger clipped the tale for future use. The sacred relics from the lost pagan Hollywood of his childhood were jealously curated, the publicity shots, the scraps of costume, the props. But the tales he made them tell were often of his own devising.

Back from France, where he had worked with Jean Cocteau, and enraged his fellow cinéastes with plans to shoot Les Chants de Maldoror, he returned to his American dreamland. He sought the lost generation, those who never made it to the talkies. The bungalows and backstreets, the canyons and broken hotels were ghosted by silent stars from whom he could coax spoken memories. Yes, he would accept another cup of tea, and what a delightful china cup and saucer. Do go on, I’m not bored at all. He knew all the names that were no longer up in lights, their triumphs and the whispers that followed them. Anger, who doted on his grandmother, the Hollywood insider Bertha Coler, was raised to play this game with the lonely and the lost.

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A month after the fire-woman article, sometime in the Fall of 1953, Kenneth inveigled himself into a rendezvous with a character actress from the silent era to pursue his real interest, gossip about her co-star Mary Pickford. He sits opposite the small woman with cropped white hair and clear blue eyes, and they amiably talk, but his eyes keep straying to a picture behind her of a fleshy looking gentleman with a loosely knotted floppy bowtie. Kenneth improvises, looking for another lead, and inquires if he is perhaps an actor?

No, he is not. He is a teacher and mystic with whom she studied at his school in Sicily. Anger rises from his chair and is able to study the photograph, he reads the following warm words written in a looping extravagant hand, ‘To Jane, from your aging guru. Aleister Crowley’.

The lightning strikes.

Without the image of Crowley looking out at him, Anger would have finished his tea, made his excuses and left, none the wiser.

The chance of this encounter is remarkable. Jane Wolfe, known in the Order as Soror Estai, was only one of a handful of surviving Thelemites worldwide. She had known and studied under the Master, though only considered herself a Neophyte. Despite Crowley’s initial disappointment that the woman who disembarked in Palermo to join his Abbey was not a femme fatale, she was fated to endure whilst his other disciples faltered.

Jane was not living alone, she revealed to Kenneth that she had a guest: a stray spark, thrown out of a hotel for burning candles at all hours. A young woman with flame-red hair who wore a gold tube suspended from a chain which contained, as she insisted, a condensed star.¹ Jane had bedded down the fire-worshipper from the newspaper article, they had history. She had known her dead husband, the man who had headed the Agape Lodge that she herself had helped found. Cameron, back from her first sojourn in the desert and fully possessed by apocalyptic mania, needed shelter for her flame. So she was hiding out with Jane, the only one of the California Thelemites who would still tolerate her careening incendiary states. Further heightening the anticipation for Anger, when he visited Jane, the elusive Cameron wasn’t home. But their paths would soon cross.²

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Samson De Brier as drawn by Cameron

Samson De Brier had regaled Anger with tales of Angeleno black magician Jack Parsons in 1949, some four years earlier, while he shot the short film Puce Moment at De Brier’s house. Samson had entertained Jack and the fire-worshipper Cameron at some of his invite only parties. As Dennis Hopper recollected, ‘If you didn’t go to Samson’s house, you weren’t really in Hollywood.’

Hopper also related a crazy tale of Agape Lodge; a man falls down the stairs at a party and breaks his neck, the resulting erection means that several women fuck him before the ambulance arrives. To my ears that sounds like a pure Kenneth Anger invention of the period, but it bears repeating as it conveys a sense of how the Lodge was already becoming legendary in the LA underground.

Anger had been primed for his encounter with Thelema by De Brier, but when Jack died in 1952,³ Anger was in France, so he missed the pinnacle of whole scandal. Now back home in Hollywood, Anger was unmoored from his family and hanging with the Viennese artist Renate Druks, her husband Paul Mathison, and the erotic novelist Anaïs Nin whom he had first connected with in 1948 at a screening of his homoerotic sailor flick, Fireworks, at the San Francisco Museum of Art.⁴ It was in the company of these stars that Anger would discover his own destiny as the painter in light of our strange New Age. All of them were entangled with Crowley, Cameron and Jack.

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Renate threw a party that Halloween at her Malibu home and studio, an artist hangout in Paradise Cove, a place you could hear the ocean. The theme, now infamous, was ‘come as your madness,’ an irresistible challenge to the creative egos of her Bohemian friends. Dragged-out and costumed up, Renate, Paul, Kenneth, Samson, Anaïs, Curtis and friends became, for a night, Astarte, Pan, Hecate, and other unknown gods. What Anger stood among, were stars, having given themselves over to possession by divine madness. It is a theatre of Californian theurgy, performed by the occult-curious demimonde. Or just arty friends playing dress-up and make-believe, and getting pretty high.

Cameron wasn’t there. I like to think that because Halloween was Jack’s special day, the first successful rocket test at Devil’s Gate Dam, and the nativity of JPL, that she had other business. Maybe she and Jane did a little witchcraft. Lit a candle.⁵

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Anger immediately knew that he must immortalise the night, and doing so required that he ritualise it still further. He flung it into a painting of the event, which he gave to De Brier, but that did not exorcise the demon. It demanded to be filmed.

That December the dream is restaged in the fabric hung world of De Brier’s lair, tucked down 6026 Barton Ave – for those who know. Renate’s Three Cats canvas is brought from Malibu and hung in the background, maybe De Brier will buy it. Anger is flush enough to pay for film; probably the cash from his late mother’s estate. The filming will run for three months, shooting at weekends. There must however be some changes made to the cast. He needed Cameron.

Renate knew Cameron from back in San Miguel de Allende, where she and Paul also began their complicated union, complicated that is, by his homosexuality. Both had visited Cameron and Jack Parsons in Pasadena. So if any man did have sex with Jack, thankfully for our collective erotic imagination it was beautiful blond Paul, and not L Ron Hubbard as is sometimes erroneously implied.

As a recent participant in the sexual carnage of The Children, Cameron’s sex magickal coven, Renate, it is safe to say, was in her witchiest period. She introduced Kenneth to Cameron that December, a month or two after his meeting with Jane Wolfe. Cameron was now living at the Malibu house where she would stay for six months with her erstwhile student in the craft, smoking a lot of grass, getting haunted.

As with all first meetings there is a dramatic story. Anger opens the door to Cameron who announces herself ‘The Scarlet Woman,’ to which he responds, ‘I have been waiting to meet you for a thousand years.’⁶

Not all of the cast would be so delighted with her dramatic entrance. She is the new deity at the party, and it is she who presides, for good and ill.

With the party reassembled, Anger set about his hieratic task. As a director his method was to give precise instructions, and little to no explanations to his cast. It was totally controlled, like a ballet.⁷ He would then cut, splice, tint and tinker in secret. He made sacred film, beckoning the gods to come through the gate, and dance on the screen.

Cameron, her hair dramatically red, was dressed with that most sacred of items in the reliquary of Anger, Rudolf Valentino’s scarf. The token of the great lover sanctified her as the apocalyptic whore. Renate applied extravagant lashes, beneath which the widow radiated an imperious evil. People who encountered Cameron in this period often describe her as mad. It would perhaps be fairer to describe her as uncloistered. The film is dominated by her presence. Anger captured the trembling and awesome majesty that is Cameron. Anaïs was eclipsed.

Inauguration is a narcoleptic thirty-eight minutes of escalating drug chaos. Often mistakenly described as a Thelemic film; it is not. Frieda Harris, for one, hated it. Anger was a new convert to Thelema. If he had any training in magic, it is a cocktail shaker of what Cameron told him, urban legend, and the bitchy biography by Symonds. Gradually Cameron and Anger read Crowley together from Jack’s prized first editions, but during Inauguration, he knew next to nothing. Film studies have breathlessly misrepresented this for their own ends for decades, caught up in Anger’s self-mythologising as Magus.

Yet Kenneth has transmission. He has been touched by the live wire of the current. He is only one body away from the guru Crowley himself.

He recalls:

Thus my research for Hollywood-Babylone had brought me face to face with BABALON – for such was Cameron’s esoteric name – the incarnation of the spirit of the Great Prostitute of Babylon.⁸

Whether we agree with Frieda Harris, that his disorganised pastiche was a travesty of Crowley’s vision, Anger would nevertheless play a vital role, transmitting magick into the visual imaginary of the artists and poets of the burgeoning New Age. It was his Inauguration that raised Cameron to an icon on the immortal screen. The flame still burned, and now the world would see. By inviting Babalon to the banquet, Anger began the destruction of Crowley’s Thelema, liberating the energies and symbols for those who were hungry to feast with the gods - and often ill-prepared for the consequences.

1. No doubt containing some of Parsons’s ashes.

2. I have read several apocryphal stories of how Kenneth Anger first found Thelema, the philosophy of freedom that would transform his life. Sometimes it is said the precocious boy read Crowley while at High School; a difficult proposition to credit given that there were no popular editions of his works, and with only a smattering of fine-bound copies in private hands. Others say that fellow director Curtis Harrington gave him a copy of Symonds’ hostile, but wildly exciting Crowley biography The Great Beast sometime after its publication in 1951. But the account I have given, based on an unpublished and undated typed letter with an Abbey Road letterhead, is the most compelling by far. So my wager is that Curtis in fact gave him the book in Fall 1953, the year Anger returned to America, due to the death of his mother, and soon after he encountered both Jane Wolfe and Cameron. Certainly Anger will have crammed it in his quest to understand Crowley, and no doubt absorbed some of the style for his own salacious and gossipy tome.

3.

4. Nin, ever the glamourist, claimed a Crowley connection too, meeting the Magus with Henry Miller in Paris. Alas the dates make the tale improbable, and more likely reflects Crowley’s growing kudos in the counterculture.

5. As with Anger’s films, the timeline of all these events is difficult to fix. But what I can be sure of is that all of the individual events related here did occur. My cut looks like this: Anger is in LA in the Fall of 53, he meets Jane Wolfe, perhaps in October. Curtis gives him a copy of The Great Beast after the two discuss Crowley, perhaps prompted by meeting Jane. The ‘come as your madness’ party probably happens at Halloween, which makes sense of Renate’s mexican death mask costume. Cameron moves in with Renate soon after- as far as I can tell. Anger meets Cameron at the Malibu house and the filming of Pleasuredome begins in December.

6. Interview with Brian Butler in Disinfo 2003.

7. Interview with Carl Abrahamsson Fenris Wolf 4.

8. Thanks to Jonathan Davies of Midian Books for sharing the letter with me that contains both this quote and the unpublished Jane Wolfe anecdote.