Whew! Kenneth got me at a very weak moment – I was completely dependent on the kindness of strangers, and, in fact, met a lot of very kind strangers. My friends the meths drinkers, for example, and the people in the Chinese laundry and my drug dealer – well! – and all sorts of funny, generous people I ran into. Even the police looked after me.
Strangely, Kenneth thought he could take me, a heroin addict, off the street, transport me to Egypt, and get me to play Lilith. It was great to go to Egypt – don’t get me wrong – but to have to crawl around an Arab graveyard dressed as a nun covered in Max Factor blood with skulls all around me was insane! It’s amazing they didn’t stone me to death, actually. The scene was shot very early in the morning when nobody was around, thank God. Of course today I’d probably be on some list of infidel dogs for desecrating a Muslim graveyard in a movie. Anyway, lightning didn’t strike – but, of course, it did eventually.
Naturally it was a huge mistake. Karmically a seriously wrong turn for me and something that took me a long time to overcome. I never should have done it, and had I been in my right mind I wouldn’t have considered it for a minute. That was one of the problems of being as high as I was at that moment, that somebody like Kenneth Anger – who is definitely on the dark side – could come along and get me to do mad, satanic things. What did I think I was doing? Well, I thought it was art, I suppose. I never got paid, which I always think is a sure sign it’s art. It was art, wasn’t it? It was the Devil’s art, and it’s very hard to get paid by the Devil, as you may know. There’s a few other people we could put in that category – mainly from the music business.
But before I get any further into the less charming aspects of Kenneth’s character I want to bang on a bit about the good things he did, because so far I’ve only given you his ruthless side.
One memorable evening Kenneth took me to see Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the National Theatre. Kenneth was naturally a huge fan of Marlowe, that Elizabethan ‘student of the School of Night’ whose death – a blow to the head by his own knife – is often seen as being foretold in his bloody and demon-haunted plays. ‘Black is the beauty of the brightest day,’ he has the ruthless tyrant Tamburlaine boast. Tamburlaine – parts I and II – is awe-inspiring and grotesque in an epic sort of way that only Elizabethans and Jacobeans could manage. I am grateful to Kenneth for that, even though it was three or four hours of disembowellings and upside-down crucifixions and tits being cut off and children being slashed. ‘Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.’ Endless horrors, but still fantastic. Kenneth was drooling throughout, and so was I, Christopher Marlowe being one of my heroes, too. Marlowe had his profligate vision, his wayward, possessed intent and conception of himself as the doomed, ‘brain-sick’ artist (‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’). I’m always impressed when I see monstrous happenings turn into art before my eyes. When you see Tamburlaine, orany Christopher Marlowe play, you are confronted with actual genius, with a metamorphosis of horror into art. The great Elizabethan ‘blank-verse beast’ whirls words like a conjurer juggling sapphires, swords, stars, and the axle-tree of heaven as if they were so many balls:
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about; And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
Heavens! You truly believe some word-mad god tunes this music to our souls.
On the other hand, I’m afraid I’ve never really felt that Lucifer Rising was art. To be kind, let’s say the jury is still out on it. The thing is, for me it’s just sort of undigested cult stuff. There’s no question that it fits exquisitely well into this ghastly world we live in, but there’s a difference. I didn’t have a very high opinion of him to begin with and after I’d seen the alchemical films of Harry Smith I realised where Kenneth must’ve got many of his images from. The idea of drawing flying saucers coming into the screen – that was Harry’s idea. You could say Kenneth nicked it or you could say he was influenced by Harry, depending on how generous we want to be. Or we could say they influenced each other – which may well be the case. Harry started out as a fan of Kenneth’s work.
Harry, in any case, was at the other end of the spectrum. He was cool and relaxed – he didn’t have to promote himself. Kenneth tries too hard. Harry wouldn’t have minded whatever I said about him. He could take a joke, but Ken can’t – which is something I learned when I wrote my last book.
I suppose I was a bit unfair to Kenneth in my autobiography. The way I described my experiences was honest – the whole fiasco was so disturbing I still flinch when I think about it – but at the same time, I understand why Kenneth was so upset.
Obviously he was expecting a delightful, charming portrait of himself instead of what he got. I suppose I was pretty harsh, even a wee bit nasty, and now I’m trying to see it from his point of view – which isn’t all that easy. But, whatever I said about him, I certainly didn’t expect the vituperative response I got. Sometime after the book came out, Kenneth sent me a letter containing a curse written in fake blood. I opened it up and basically flipped out. I was so troubled by it I immediately took it down to my friends, Julian and Victoria Lloyd, to figure out what to do. On one level the letter was silly and hysterically funny, too. There was the part where he says, ‘You Jew! You Jew, like Kirk Douglas, like DANNY KAYE!’ What kind of curse is that? A Hollywood witch’s curse, I imagine, right out of Vampira’s grimoire. It was all about Jews and Danny Kaye – because Danny Kaye was Jewish, not a fact you would be likely to focus on, but Kenneth, of course, would (being virulently anti-Semitic). I’ve got a lovely Jewish granny, thank God, from whom I got my blonde hair and the big lips. Kenneth knew about all that. This put a rabid bee in his bonnet.
He’s been going on about my being part Jewish for years. He’s given lectures about it, about ‘my flaw’. I’ve heard from other people about this terrible flaw in my character: the fact that I am Jewish! That was funny and silly; I just laughed at that. But then the really vile stuff started to spew out: ‘DIE OF LUNG CANCER!’ and all that generic malice right out of the Common Book of Beastly Spells. For someone who considers himself a magus scrying out his victim’s secrets, he somehow missed a few critical things that might have hit home to me rather more effectively. Like sleeping pills! You’ll die from an overdose of sleeping pills! Or painkillers. He missed all that. Kenneth was quite capable of picking out the one thing that would truly sting you. The curse he sent to poor Robert Fraser had nothing in it except a razor blade and a piece of type saying: ‘Something to cure your stutter.’ I joke about it, but at the time I was absolutely panicked, holding the vile curse in my hands – not a fun thing to have in one’s possession. I went down to Jules and Vic’s – they were still living on the corner by Leixlip Castle then and showed it to them. Victoria was appalled but Julian was giddily impressed. ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ he declared. ‘You’ve got to send it to the V&A!’ I don’t know exactly what the Victoria & Albert Museum would’ve made of it, but visually it was an astonishing item. Very graphic and ghastly at the same time, and as maliciously