Swelter

The night before his dinner at the Foundlings, Anger received the Maya Deren award for independent film and video artists from the American Film Institute in New York ("a Tiffany crystal star and $5000 A experimental filmmakers are still the orphans of the art community"), and had a rude shock later at the home of art collector/museum benefactor Jill Sackler, who hosted a gala dinner for the AFI. In the land of the rich was a totem from Anger's past, a renowned work of art that he hadn't seen in two decades: "It was one of those Manhattan palaces with twenty butlers, and right there on the wall was my mirror, an eighteenth-century baroque piece depicting the fall of Lucifer. I'd bought it in the mid Seventies for $10,000 at Sotheby's in London, using a royalty check from Hollywood Babylon. An extravagance, and, unfortunately, I later had to sell the piece for a small loss. Now the Metropolitan Museum in New York has offered a million dollars for the mirror. My life could have been changed forever."

Anger's life has always been marked by what he calls a series of "surreal and diabolical coincidences," but he has gotten lucky at times. Although he never appeared in another mainstream movie after A Midsummer Night's Dream, he gleaned old Hollywood stories from his classmates at Beverly Hills High School, studied French, and made Fireworks in 1947 at the age of seventeen. A few years after graduating, he moved to Paris and worked at the Cinemathäque Franaaise, directed the dreamily beautiful Eaux d'Artifice -- now preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress -- and socialized with the likes of Coco Chanel and Alfred Hitchcock: "A very sadistic and fetishistic man. The story in Hollywood Babylon about Grace Kelly privately stripping for him was told by Hitchcock during a gentlemen's dinner in Paris."

In the early Sixties, he moved back to the U.S., creating Scorpio Rising, with the American biker as mythic figure. During a stint in San Francisco he began work on Lucifer Rising, and became involved with an aspiring musician/actor named Bobby Beausoleil. According to Anger, Beausoleil was a "bad boy who took himself entirely too seriously as Lucifer." He was also a thief of art, stealing Anger's Lucifer Rising footage and eventually winding up with the forces of Charles Manson: "The Manson gang wanted $10,000 dollars as ransom for the footage, and I told them to go to hell, which they promptly did." Beausoleil was convicted for his role in the Manson slayings, but he still stays in contact with Anger ("We've become friends again, now that he's behind bars for life at Tracy Prison") and he figures prominently in Anger's 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother.

By the late Sixties, Anger had moved to England, landing smack dab in the swinging London era. In typical Hollywood style, he set aside creative differences with Beausoleil, who, from prison, composed a remarkably accomplished soundtrack for the second rising of Lucifer Rising. For a time the royalty of English rock cultivated Anger, who knew something about the black magic of showmanship, "Sympathy for the Devil" and all that.

It was an unusual milieu, even for Anger, but he doesn't seem particularly impressed: "The rock stars of that era -- the Beatles, the Stones, Jimmy Page -- were my social friends. Keith Richards was the toughest cookie, but Mick [Jagger] never went haywire on drugs -- he's too hooked on himself. Brian Jones was very neurotic and shy; drugs made him look like the picture of Dorian Gray. I can't say if he was murdered, but he did have enemies. Richards's girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, had a cruel streak: a woman very aware of her feminine power, though I hear she's quite fat now. It was all very Sixties.

"Marianne Faithfull could be quite conservative really, rather bitchy as well, even though she was always high on heroin. When we all went to Egypt to shoot Lucifer Rising, she smuggled drugs into the country in her make-up kit -- we could have all gone to jail. In that scene where she climbs the rocks, she fell backward and almost snapped her neck; I caught her within inches of death. Actually I saved her life twice. At Mick's house one night, she wandered away and I found her in his bedroom, sawing at her wrists in a pathetic way. Now if you really want to kill yourself, it's very easy -- one quick painless slash." Anger picks up his dinner knife and with a frightening vehemence quickly passes it over his wrist before filling out the details: "But of course Marianne's efforts were only designed to get Mick's attention. She had a red and black scarf on her neck -- a little bit like this shirt I'm wearing -- and I wrapped it around her wrist. Afterward she gave me the scarf as a memento -- the blood stains have turned brown now, of course."