Matthew Stone’s 2010 portrait of Kenneth Anger, an homage to Anger’s role in 1960s London. Thank you, matthewstone.co.uk.
In this post I’m going to detail how Kenneth Anger implemented Aleister Crowley’s system of control in ‘swinging’ London. In order to do this, we’ll need to look at what The Rolling Stones, Anger’s most sparkling quarry, were doing just prior to Anger’s arrival.
I wrote about filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s probable ties to the CIA through his cult and pornography work in my post Ken Anger in Context. In that post I stopped the narrative at 1968, just short of Anger’s association with Stones frontmen: the ‘Glimmer Twins’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Anger’s association with Jagger and Keith, as well as with other notable figures in their milieu, bears all the hallmarks of an exploitative religious cult. I’m not the first person to notice this, Anger’s biographer Bill Landis is quite open about Anger’s Crowleyesque crusade through moneyed London:
He [Kenneth Anger] made a pilgrimage to England, Crowley’s homeland. It was as much a business trip as a spiritual adventure. Like his idol, Anger was about to take up the obscure occupation of fixing heads…
Anger loved the attention. It was clear to him that these people wanted to believe he was capable of magick. [Landis, Anger]
I don’t think that Anger’s role as a cult leader should come as a surprise; he had studied Crowley since the late 1940s. Anger had also been exposed to Alfred Kinsey’s scepticism about Crowley, as well as the sexologist’s obsession with sex and power. Anger understood Crowley’s system of control and by 1968 *somebody* decided to plug Anger into London’s music/trust-fund crowd through art dealer and former military officer Robert Fraser.
Fraser had served in the King’s African Rifles during its suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.[1] Britain’s success in quashing the revolt is largely credited to ‘pioneering’ use of psychological warfare: using complete control of information services to spread disinformation and surreptitiously break insurgents’ resolve.
The KAR used control of the media to influence the Kenyan public against the Mau Mau rebels; this fact will be important when I talk about The Times’ and The News of the World’s coverage of the Rolling Stones’ staged drug-bust in 1967. Fraser’s African adventure set him up well to move amongst London’s privileged class of rich ‘revolutionaries’.
Robert Fraser during his glory days in the Swinging Sixties… right after the Mau Mau operation.
This is how ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, who talks about the Rolling Stones in his autobiography, describes Robert Fraser:
He was a charming man, and he began to build a large circle of friends among the rock stars who were fast becoming a kind of aristocracy. They trusted his advice when he talked about fine art investments for their new wealth, and they found his combination of culture and hip vitality enormously stimulating.
If readers are interested in what the post-war art market in London was like– a very profitable market for well-connected spooks like Roald Dahl– I recommend my post Steal the Mona Lisa? and Robert Wraight’s classic book The Art Game Again! Fresh from the KAF, Fraser was in an excellent position to capitalize on the art boom.
Robert Fraser is crucial to Anger’s story because it was Fraser who introduced Anger to the Stones; just as Fraser introduced Paul McCartney to the Beatles; and Japanese banking heiress Yoko Ono to John Lennon. Fraser was at the heart of the epic Beatles/Rolling Stones marketing battle in the late Sixties and was instrumental in making the political furor around the Stones happen.
Fraser is also the guy who introduced ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez to the musicians. Sanchez was a London mafia figure with ties to the infamous Albert Dimes. Sanchez tells us that after Fraser suddenly appeared on London’s art scene, he also suddenly appeared in the middle of London’s crime world. Fraser sought out Sanchez for his underworld connections in a way that reminds me of James Angleton’s work with “Lucky” Luciano.
Tony Sanchez is mischaracterized as ‘drug dealer to the Rolling Stones'; he was a fixer for Robert Fraser. Sanchez’s autobiography focuses on his relationship with Fraser, Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull– the mobster is grossly sycophantic to these three people, they formed the ‘core’ of his team.
Sanchez would use his mafia connections to fix problems for Fraser like his crushing gambling debts; where to find drugs for Fraser’s friends (Fraser introduced Brian Jones and Keith Richards to cocaine); and police trouble related to the Stones’ staged drug-bust in 1967.
I say ‘staged’ because that’s exactly what the bust was: a character called “King” from California, who Richards had met one year before in New York City, appeared at a Stones party one evening and equipped them with an illegal drug called “White Lightening”, amongst other narcotics. (I remind readers that George White’s San Fransisco drug-test den reached its heyday ten years prior.) “King” vanished just before the police raided the Stones’ residence and found a small amount of drugs. The police had acted on a tip from editors at The News of the World, a tip which just happened to coincide perfectly with ‘King’s’ deliveries. Sanchez describes ‘King’ as a “James Bond” with “a whole collection of different passports in different names and with different nationalities on them”.[2] In Tony Bramwell’s 2006 biography (published four years before Sanchez’s!) he identifies ‘King’ as David ‘Acid King’ Schneiderman, a.k.a. David Snyderman a.k.a Dave Jove, one of the late Harold Ramis’s set and another Crowley devotee. The Daily Mail says Snyderman was on an MI5/FBI mission to destroy the Stones and that Snyderman had “encyclopaedic knowledge of all the newest strains of LSD, combined with an almost magical ability to procure them”.
In classic, self-absorbed superstar style, Sanchez credits the trap to “someone right at the top” who thought “the Stones are becoming too powerful”. The police raid made the Stones, rather than destroyed them.
The News of the World and The Times coverage of this bust took the form of a delicious journalistic battle between the papers which propelled the Stones to martyr status. Instead of calling the ridiculous spectacle for what it was, the papers took opposing sides (Hegelian Dialectic) which on balance framed the Stones as young rebels fighting for progress and freedom.
Who handed the Stones this gorgeous publicity prize? The Carr family still owned The News of the World in 1967; The Times was owned by the intelligence-heavy Astor family. The squabbling and plotting between these two papers made the Rolling Stones into a riot-inducing force in Britain, then globally. For Fraser, The Rolling Stones’ drug-bust was the Mau Mau uprising played backwards.
The iconic photograph of Fraser handcuffed to Jagger prior to their trial for drug possession, which Sanchez says catapulted the Stones to “martyrs” and “heroes”.
The Rolling Stones made lemonade out of White-Lightening-Lemons, and in reality they owe a huge debt to “King” and whoever sent him. Once that media escapade had settled, America would float over another gift: headline-grabber Kenneth Anger.
Fraser introduced the Stones to Anger in 1968 on the heels of that serendipitous drug-bust; the next thing London ‘turned on to’ was Kenneth Anger’s take-two on Aleister Crowley’s Cefalù cult.
Bill Landis’ biography Anger and Tony Sanchez’s autobiography Up and Down with the Rolling Stones are both useful for fleshing out what Anger’s system of control looked like in practice. Guess what? Anger’s control tactics were a lot like Crowley’s.
The Stones’ lifestyle already provided the promiscuous sex– isolating sex– facilitated by their ‘open’ relationships with girlfriends. Anger achieved intellectual isolation, or what Philip Zimbardo terms ‘saturation and detachment’ by enlisting girlfriends Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull to influence Jagger and Richards:
Richards was saddled with his paranoiac drug addict girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg. Anger played on her uncertain place in the Stones contingent and her coke-induced phobias. Pallenberg ould be pretty dominant but could also be on the next plane out ant any minute, just a bad memory of excess herself. She needed Anger and his help. [Landis, Anger]
I had hoped that Sanchez’s biography would shed light on how Richards became “saddled” with Pallenberg, but instead he writes, “no one ever seemed to know quite where she [Anita Pallenberg] came from or who she was”. We do know that Pallenberg was of Italian-German descent; an actress (her film with Brian Jones was Germany’s 1967 entry to the Cannes Film Festival); and had worked in something called ‘The Living Theater‘ which featured works by Congress of Cultural Freedom kid Jean Cocteau, and was founded in 1947 in NYC just like Cinema 16.
Anita Pallenberg. Thanks, kzok.cbslocal.com.
Pallenberg’s relationship with the first Stone, Brian Jones, could be described as narcissistic, it was certainly unhealthy. According to Sanchez:
As a couple Brian and Anita exuded an almost surrealistic aura; they began to look, dress and think so much alike that they became one a single presence in silk and satin…
Sometimes of Brian and Anita’s arrogance was frightening. Those who displeased them would be banished from the flat and shunned immediately by any friends who wished to avoid offence to their highnesses.
Jones was a violent womanizer with six illegitimate children by six different women; his refusal to pay child support was a favorite joke between him and Anita. Anita was also preoccupied with Nazi fantasies, she encouraged Jones to buy a car that had once belonged to a Nazi official and even send pictures of himself in Nazi regalia to the British press. Sanchez says this about the photo incident:
The incident was symptomatic of the fact that Anita and the courtiers were cocooning Brian from the real world. Together they went ever further for their kicks: their sexual activities were extraordinary, and they took up astrology and magic. Eventually they were given some acid by one of their sycophants, and Brian and Anita tripped together for the first time. That moment marked the peak of Brian’s brief life and the start of his personality disintegration.
Could Anita Pallenberg have been working as some type of ‘handler’ who helped guide Jones’, and then Keith Richard’s, provocative antics? Could her mysterious appearance have been motivated by somebody in Langley recognizing that her PAS profile made her a good handler for Jones, and then for Richards? (For more on matching handlers to assets, see Marks’ Manchurian Candidate.) Whatever Pallenberg really is, she and Jones introduced LSD to the rest of their set, after they had been given hits by an anonymous “sycophant”.
When Jones ruined himself on drugs, Pallenberg swapped him for a more promising band member, Keith Richards. This partner-swap was encouraged by Marianne Faithfull “for reasons of her own” Sanchez says. Readers will remember that Sullivanian cult leaders would only sanction personal relationships inside the cult that had been approved by them, they felt deep interpersonal bonds were “dangerous”. Pallenberg quickly latched on to Kenneth Anger as soon as Fraser brought him into the Stones’ circle.
I’ve mentioned in a previous post that Marianne Faithfull comes from an intelligence family: her father was a British spook in wartime Berlin, where her mother’s half-Jewish family lived freely during WWII helping socialist partisans. Her mother was a cabaret dancer in Weimar Germany.
Marianne Faithfull, still living the nightmare. Thank you, dailymail.co.uk.
No one really knows why Marianne Faithfull decided to leave her husband (John Dunbar, who owned Indica Gallery which Fraser used to host parties) and throw her lot in with the Stones, but Sanchez speculates:
Though she felt most relaxed and at ease among academics and aristocrats, Marianne gained a vicarious thrill from mixing with the coarse, clever, energetic young men who played the new no-compromise, high-energy music that was clearly changing the world.
My take-home is that Faithfull’s reasons for hanging with the Stones were ones which she chose not to be honest about– or perhaps was only vaguely aware of herself. Like Pallenberg, Faithfull latched onto Ken Anger when Fraser offered him, though according to Anger biographer Landis, Faithfull had regrets later:
In her 1995 autobiography, Marianne Faithfull intimates that Anger was not as wonderful as she once believed, going as far as to call him inept as a magus and filmmaker. She felt her drug addictions made her a pawn for him.
In contrast, Anger describes Faithfull as one of the only six women he ever loved and that they worked well together while shooting ‘Lucifer Rising’.
With Faithfull and Pallenberg firmly in his camp, Anger built up his image as Crowley’s ‘magickal’ heir by performing miracles, e.g. attending a party at Indica Gallery via the astral plane (the punch was spiked) and weird witchy rituals on the lawn outside Jagger’s estate. (Remember Zimbardo’s mind-control tactic: cause confusion with nonsensical actions justified by arcane explanations which are delivered with confidence.) If somebody did something Anger didn’t like, he would put a magickal ‘curse’ on them and consequently believers ran scared of offending Kenneth. The legend of these ‘magickal’ workings and curses was then embellished by Anger’s buddies in the press.
Drugs were a huge part of Anger’s act, his work in San Fransisco in tandem with the CIA’s MK ULTRA program was crucial for building his knowledge, as Landis says: “Anger was an expert in the effects of certain drugs on different personalities.” Crowley had used drugs to isolate and confuse his followers at Cefalù. Also like Crowley, Anger was big on shaming followers, a mind control tactic that Philip Zimbardo describes as ‘increasing self-consciousness’ in the victim: Anger once sent Fraser a razor blade as a cure for his stuttering.
What I find most interesting about Anger’s system of control in London was how he encouraged unhealthy power worship. Crowley did this by promising power through Enochian magic and trying to attract well-connected people to his cult. This is how Landis describes Anger’s attempt at doing the same thing:
As he had done as a young man in Hollywood, Anger played social butterfly through the art gallery scene. He hooked into a seriously moneyed, exclusive, cocaine- and herion-addicted social circle through Robert Frazier [Landis’ consistent misspelling of ‘Fraser’] and his Indica Gallery in the fashionable Mayfair district…
Although he was dealing with a much more sophisticated crowd, Anger was using the same casting technique he had employed to find Bruce Byron and Bobby Beausoleil, blatantly appealing to narcissism. He provided the opportunity to live out their god/goddess power trip fantasies. Anger convinced the rock stars that only they had the special elemental quality to incarnate the occult deities they would portray [in Anger’s films].
Regular readers know I believe that narcissism, a type of character dysfunction, is useful to exploitative organizations. I believe that narcissism is exploited by unscrupulous leaders in the ‘intelligence community’ because narcissistic people are unusually vulnerable to control; they’re very reliable in serving whoever they look up to. If you’re interested in reading more about why I believe this, please see my posts Great Users of People and The Cult of Intelligence.
In his biography of Anger, Bill Landis recognizes how the narcissism of Anger’s followers opened them up to being manipulated by Anger. Cult-researcher Daniel Shaw, in his essay about Traumatic Narcissists in cults, also recognizes that narcissistic qualities in cult followers make them vulnerable to exploitative cult leaders. (Shaw’s essay is part of the International Journal of Cultic Studies vol 5, 2014.) The source of this vulnerability seems to be narcissists’ untempered desire to be seen as special and valued by authority figures, though nobody really knows for sure what motivates this behavior.
Anger was careful with who he targeted for recruitment, as Landis writes:
Wealthy, troubled, addicted rock stars and jaded billionaire socialites with their heads into hard drugs and mysticism wielded a huge influence over their peers, but their personal problems, fueled by intense lives consumed by work, left them vulnerable to a higher power.
Amy Siskind, another cult researcher who has written about isolating sex and cults, identified “religiosity” and unhealthy competitiveness as characteristics of people vulnerable to cults; Daniel Shaw says traumatic family lives also play a role. (Both from IJCS vol 5 2014). It’s interesting to note that Jagger has a superstitious streak; Faithfull and longtime Anger-funder J. Paul Getty, Jr (son of the art collector) both had very troubled relationships with their parents. I’ll speculate that Anger attached himself to certain figures in London’s ‘swinging’ scene because they showed personality profiles which CIA psychologist John Gittinger would recognize as exploitable.
(On the subject of money, in The Cultural Cold War Francis Stonor Saunders says that the CIA preferred to fund their operations through third parties, particularly wealthy philanthropists– just like J. Paul Getty Jr.! John Marks incidentally recognizes the same funding tactic in Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Getty would continue to fund Anger well after the filmmaker’s star in London had faded.)
J. Paul Getty Jr and his wife Talitha, who would die of a heroin overdose. Talitha was related to painter Augustus John through her mother, and ran in the same crowd as Ian Fleming.
As with any cult-leader, Anger became unbearably demanding and because of this Mick Jagger eventually dumped Anger and Marianne Faithfull. This is what Landis says about Anger’s ever-increasing demands, demands which would probably remind Daniel Shaw of his time in Siddha Yoga:
When Jagger arrived back in London, Anger kept his headaches pounding. Anger sought bigger and bigger pieces of him. Time. Money. Attention. Anger was becoming a control freak pest. Since he was such a control freak himself, Jagger never let things go as far as Anger wanted. He started politely backing away, but Anger kept his talons aimed at Richards and Pallenberg.
What saved Jagger from Anger’s vampirism? Family ties– specifically, a *more traditional* married relationship eventually saved Mick Jagger, and later Jimmy Page, from Anger’s grasp.
Bianca had apparently been instrumental in banishing Anger from the Jagger camp: “I didn’t dig Mick’s marriage to Bianca.” [says Anger] Faithfull, whom Anger was still friends with, “had a hard life when she was with Mick. He is a very sophisticated sadist.” [Anger, Landis]
Likewise, Charlotte Page saved her husband from Anger’s leaching:
In October 1976 Anger went to the Page abode in London. Page’s wife, Charlotte, argued with him, called the cops, and booted him out of the house. Though the door was bolted the following day, by week’s end Anger was collecting his belongings…
Anger now began mouthing off about Page and Jagger anywhere to anyone, calling them creeps, losers, junkies, and, the ultimate spiritual insult, spent forces. [Anger, Landis]
I think I’ve made it clear that Kenneth Anger was playing the same game in London circa 1969 as Crowley played in Cefalù circa 1920. Anger employed all the ‘mind control’ tactics I described in Aleister Crowley’s System of Control, The Banality of Mind Control, The Other Loch Ness Monster and Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System.
Kenneth Anger is an intelligence asset who was plugged into a ‘culture war’ operation that the British were already running, but that Kenneth was useful for.
My foray into cult research still leaves me with one question: Is Kenneth Anger a narcissist– like the cult leaders Daniel Shaw describes and like the typical intelligence operatives described by Peter Wright and Philippe de Vosjoli? I think that the answer is ‘yes’ he is, just like his idol Crowley.
This is what Richard Spence, a historian with ties to the ‘intelligence community’, says about the character of Aleister Crowley in Secret Agent 666:
If not the monster some have described, Crowley certainly was capable of immense emotional and physical cruelty. Real flashes of insight illuminate his writings, but if he developed anything to an art, it was selfishness. Aleister Crowley would indeed have been fascinating to meet, but, as others have noted, I would be reluctant to leave my children or my money in his hands.
It might seem that someone so obsessively self-centered and disdainful of common decency as Aleister Crowley would make a poor spy. On the contrary, those very qualities helped to qualify him for the job.
Those are strong words coming from anybody, but especially from Prof. Spence. Does Anger show the same traits as Crowley?
Landis describes two bitter motivations in Anger’s life: his frustrated career as a Hollywood actor and a frustrated career as a mainstream filmmaker. To hear Anger tell it, no one ever gives him the adulation he’s due– even from the time of his childhood. Anger, as his older brother describes, chose the stage-name ‘Anger’ because he was angry. It never seems to occur to Anger that his filmmaking is solipsistic and doesn’t cater to public tastes, so is therefore unlikely to earn him mainstream success. All the attention Anger got from the BBC (and it has been a lot of attention throughout his career!), attention from MOMA, and the Whiney Museum, and The British Film Institute, and PBS came despite his obscurity and some would say despite his mediocrity… but whatever Anger gets, it’s never enough.
Anger was never able to keep friends for long either; his friendships characteristically end with a fight; Anger banishing the ‘guilty’ party; and then smearing them in the press. By the 1980s Anger went to prostitutes for sex and was no longer in touch with his large family in California.
Like somatic narcissists, Anger hasn’t been able to grow old gracefully. As the years went by, he made a great effort to always be seen with desireable young men. On top of that, Anger has a tendency to push his bad feelings about himself onto people who offend him, take this slur against contemporary pornographic filmmaker Fred Halsted, for example:
He will have to go through those same changes like John Rechy of City of Night, because it’s terrible how– well, I was never a narcissist and it’s very hard for those who are hardcore narcissists to see that they go into a bar and people’s heads no longer turn. So that’s why I just wait. ” Anger chuckled. “No, I don’t dislike Fred.”
It’s easy for me to paint men like Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger as the bad guys, and they certainly have made the world a worse place, but in fairness they are just two of many confused– or even sick– people who were/are exploited by the ‘intelligence community’, as documented by the work of John Gittinger. IMHO, Anger would be better off if somebody in 1947 had scooped him up, like the father-figure in ‘Fireworks’, and taken the angry, confused man away from the spooks at Cinema 16.
[1] I couldn’t find exact dates for Fraser’s KAF adventures; the Mau Mau rebellion spanned 1952-60. In his autobiography Life, Keith Richard says this about Fraser:
Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the Kings’ African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant.
Idi Amin, the notorious Ugandan dictator, served with the KAF in Uganda and Kenya, where he fought the Mau Mau for the British.
[2] This detail about ‘King’ is interesting, because the CIA department responsible for issuing false identification and bogus foreign passports was disproportionately smeared by Colby’s 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, ostensibly because that department failed to keep track of the false documents they issued. Read all about it here.
Colby was setting himself up as a drug-lord in 1967 and by 1974 Colby clearly had a score to settle with the CIA false-passport people: could sloppy drug dealers with a stash of fake id’s like ‘King’ have had something to do with Colby’s vindictiveness?
