Kenneth Anger is a well-known author who wrote the best seller “Hollywood Babylon,” and revealed many interesting stories about the stars of the pre-code era. The troubled lives of film stars during golden era I can appreciate Old Hollywood camp as much as the next man, but I've come to love these people and their legacy too much to share Anger's callousness. He was an actor I've always loved and I had no idea of how life had played out for him. Charles Boyer's tragic end, when I first read of it in Jeanne Basinger's 'The Star Machine', left me near tears, frankly. Several of these stories I had encountered before in other books. He celebrates the self-destruction of people whose only crimes, truth be told, was that they possessed the aspiration to make something of themselves, however deluded that might have made them. It was here I realised that Anger loathes his subjects. To call this depressing reading barely touches the sides. But after that, much of the book is devoted to a catalogue of celebrity suicides. What text that is provided at least starts out terrifically with the chapters on killer Paul Kelly, the Pantages frame up, and Joe Kennedy's disgusting skulduggery - all of which are fascinatingly sordid tales I confess I knew nothing about. Too few of the photographs are backed up with any actual story. But in too many cases this is all we get: suggestion. The most tantalising snapshots, with their accompanying barbed captions, suggest gob-smacking tales of disillusion and tragedy. The pictures promise SO much in 'Hollywood Babylon II' - a promise I had clung to since the 80s - but the text doesn't quite deliver.

Kenneth Anger was a trail blazer in the 60s with his bitter brand of celebrity reportage - Perez Hilton owes a debt to him - but the truth is that Anger's photo library is the best thing about this book, his sequel to the original bestseller. Now that the subject of Old Hollywood is truly obsessing me, I finally purchased a copy. I just gasped at the pictures - and there were plenty to gasp at. Poverty struck as I was then, I never actually BOUGHT it, or indeed, READ it. This was a book I used to stealthily pick up and thumb through back in the 80s when it could be found in 'cult' bookstores, all shiny and new.

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