Look back at Anger #2: Jagger & Mansfield, Page & Manson
Devilish dealings and dangerous glamour
LAST TIME we met ANTONIO PINEDA he was living the high life mingling with filmmaker Kenneth Anger, various Beat poets and other members of the new rock community – the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and It’s a Beautiful Day to name only some – on the 1960s West Coast.
Like a subterranean Damon Runyan, a slick hipster in the very midst of the burgeoning San Fransciscan scene, Pineda picks up his psychedelic quill once more to scratch out some further eye-popping adventures in the dark heart of the underground movie community. Check them out right here…
PART II: ‘The Russian Embassy, Rolling Stones and Babylon brothers’
By Antonio Pineda
Albert Nieman and I rolled up to the William Westerfeld House aka the Russian Embassy. Located at 1198 Fulton Street, the registered San Francisco Landmark is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company hung out there and the Calliope Company, an avant garde theater collective, lived there.
Kenneth Anger would famously film Invocation of My Demon Brother there starring Bobby Beausoleil, as Lucifer, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and featuring a synthesiser soundtrack by Mick Jagger. The San Francisco poet Lenore Kandel, author of The Love Book, and Hells Angel partner Sweet William smoke drugs out of a death skull, a scene shot at the Straight Theater. Mick, Keith Richard and Anita Pallenberg are uncredited in archive footage.
We fetch Kenneth and drive him to the venue where he will screen The Magick Lantern Cycle. Impeccably groomed, Kenneth made a Hollywood star entrance. He captivated the crowd at the Straight Ashbury Viewing Society.
Pictured above: Kenneth Anger, dark showman extraordinaire, ‘part Puck, part Lucifer’
I had the privilege of introducing Anger to the podium. Brilliant raconteur, he charmed the audience with tales from Hollywood Babylon. He brought Surrealist poet Anaïs Nin to the attention of the audience, his dear friend whom he cast as the Phoenician goddess Astarte in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
The film is also subtitled Lord Shiva’s Dream, creating the acronym LSD, his recreational drug of choice. Nin, author of Delta of Venus and A Spy in the House of Love, also muse-lover of writer Henry Miller, retained her ethereal beauty in this 1954 film.
Scorpio Rising was shot in Coney Island circa 1962; It was conceived in Paris where Anger swigged cocktails with Jean Cocteau and Anaïs Nin. Kenneth gigged for the prestigious Cinemateque Francaise and shopped saucy stories of Hollywood’s Golden Age to periodicals.
The film shocked and rocked the straight world with its exposition of methamphetamine, motorcycle culture, Nazism, rock-pop, homoeroticism and the cult of leather. In many ways, Scorpio Rising is the progenitor of MTV. This was underground modern art at its zenith.
After an overwhelming reception, Kenneth approached me to cadge a few tabs of acid to go on to his next scheduled public appearance: The Church of Satan, where he would liaise with Jayne Mansfield, the bombshell sex symbol film actress, and its High Priest Anton LaVey. Anton was later rumored to be cast as the devil in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. I surrendered my personal stash to Kenneth, and asked to tag along, but he replied that it was only for high initiates.
Anton and Jayne met in 1966. The devilishly handsome couple‘s photographs by German paparazzo to the Hollywood stars Walter Fischer hypnotised and enraptured the audience. Shot in the ritual chambers of the Satanic Church, and at Mansfield’s Pink Palace in Hollywood, the images truly belong in Anger’s epic Hollywood Babylon.
Pictured above: Actress Jayne Mansfield
My friend Cornel Hillmann reminisces: ‘I became friends with Gisela, who married John Paul Getty III, her during the time I lived in Los Angeles between 1985 and 1992. She was friends with Olaf Kraemer, who is also a close friend of mine. I was often socialized at their house. The Gettys and I had a lot of common friends in the occult underground, that is how we met. Anger was a dear friend of theirs. Paul Getty was also a patron of his films.’
He adds: ‘Kenneth became the godfather of Anton LaVey’s daughter Zeena. When I was resident in a house with Anton LaVey, Zeena had already moved out and was living with her then husband Nikolas Schreck. Zeena and Schreck’s music, as part of the musical collective Radio Werewolf, was released on my record label Gymnastic Records, so we were business partners and friends. Anger selected a plot in Hollywood Cemetery next to Johnny Ramone as his final resting place.’
Cornel Hillman has more to reveal. ‘The twin German sisters Gisela and Jutta were the queens of the underground renowned for their beauty and cool. Hanging out with film directors Roberto Rossellini and Roman Polanski, sought after by Federico Fellini and rolling with Mick Jagger, the twins lived la dolce vita influenced by sacramental use of LSD.’
He continues: ‘John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Mafia. His right ear was cut off and sent to his billionaire family to extract ransom. Nine months later he and Gisela married. They knew all the cognoscenti and intelligentsia, were held in high regard by the literati and he was a philanthropist and patron of the arts. Kenneth Anger often visited them in their London digs. Much later, Ridley Scott filmed All The Money in the World re the tragedy of that notorious kidnapping.’
Meanwhile, fellow filmmakers the highest order David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, John Waters and Jean Luc Godard would all, in the future, be influenced by the oeuvre of Anger’s sensational, occult, experimental cinema.
Anger had chanced upon a performance of the Orkustra at a legendary happening, the Invisible Circus. Struck by Bobby Beausoleil’s magnetic stage persona, Anger offered to cast him as Lucifer, to which he agreed as long as he performed the cinema soundtrack. His remarkable band the Magick Powerhouse of Oz would become one of the most influential and collectible myths of the unknown legends of rock and roll.
Pictured above: The poster for The Equinox of the Gods
Straight Theater poster artist Randy Salas created the memorable poster to herald Anger’s production of The Equinox of the Gods. Featured artist was Bobby Beausoleil and the Magick Powerhouse of Oz. Kenneth Anger was the headliner, alongside the Amazing Charlatans in all their Edwardian cowboy finery, the Straight Theater Dancers, the Mime Troupe, Duncan Dancers and the Congress of Wonders.
It was an event to kickstart finances for the completion of Lucifer Rising, in which Anger originally cast Beausoleil as Lucifer, a film that was finally released in 1980. The poster is dominated by Egyptian iconography as is the film. Ben Van Meter, a San Francisco Art Institute graduate filmmaker, shot footage that night. Van Meter’s footage was later assimilated into Invocation of My Demon Brother.
Anger and Beausoleil fell out after the show. Anger accused Bobby of stealing film footage and moved to London. Bobby fell in with a bad lot, Charles Manson and the Family, and relocated to Los Angeles and the Spahn Ranch. In 1969, on Manson’s orders, Beausoleil murdered musician Gary Hinman.
Anger commissioned British rocker Jimmy Page to compose the soundtrack which Page did. Anger reconciled with Beausoleil, in prison serving a life sentence, and Bobby returned to reprise his soundtrack in Lucifer Rising, although Jimmy Page’s compelling soundtrack can be heard on collectors’ editions. To his credit Beausoleil has become a prolific artist, and contributes to society as best he can with his music and art.
Pictured above: Guitarist Jimmy Page. Anger commissioned him to compose a soundtrack for Lucifer Rising
I was not to see Anger again for quite some time. Five years later I went to a screening of The Magick Lantern Cycle he was performing at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Kenneth greeted me warmly, and we exchanged stories of days of yore. With a conspiratorial wink he enquired if I had anything. I produced tabs from my personal stash and we both dropped.
Kenneth kicked off his show. He lit incense and waved joss sticks at the audience. Anger produced sparklers, ignited them, and created his own magical world. He drew the audience into his world in the same manner he did with his films. He invoked Pan and Lucifer and solar phallic deities.
That is the image of Kenneth I wish to remain with forevermore. Elegant, cheeky, a cinematic bard, and an iconoclast born to challenge society’s norms: part Puck, part Lucifer, the shining one, holy one, bringer of dawn, the morning star…
CODA
‘Winged Bull’
A tribute poem for Kenneth Anger composed by Antonio Pineda
Equinox of the Gods, summer becomes fall.
A savage wind deflowers eucalyptus trees.
The bluebell woods in turn ravaged by bees.
As sunrise holds Stonehenge in its thrall
The chariot of the sun is drawn by black stallions.
Stallions hooves propel a sudden gust of rain
Whilst the charioteer guides his fiery minions
Over a mahogany house festooned with flowers.
Dandy by day, Corsair hierophant by darkest night,
Above the roofs of filigreed cupolas and towers,
The sky reddens as he assumes the guise of Winged Bull
And flies over casuarinas and tropical foliage.
Rosy Cross, Star of revelation and divination,
the core of the vortex is the future prophet.
The Magus presides over the metaphysical revolution
As twilight falls and the Druid sun does set.
Infidel and libertine, meretrixes belie your union with godhead
Winged Bull, you reign over the nuptive moment.
When thunder and lightning peal , and your seed is spent.
He shall be reborn to dispel the fog of falsehood.
Mercurial eroticism will overthrow the Empires
Of corporations and financial oligarchs who ransom
Democracy of espionage to the highest bidder.
Winged Bull, vengeance is thine, worship the Phoenix.
Anonymous grenade bombings transformed Metropolis
Into a reeking sewer. Civilization sings of longings
For a world devoid of frequent assassination
spilling over turreted palace funereal flowers of fame
See also: ‘Look back at Anger #2: More than a touch of magick’, March 9th, 2024’
OMG this SS page really delivers. The text in this article and the poem blow me away, it's going to take all day to get my head on straight again. I'm planning to chisel the poem, which surpasses anything I've ever read, into stone.