Cricket and the Occult ii
An investigation in three parts
Part Two
Arrangement in White On Green
Last time we looked at the history of the underground occult film Lucifer Rising, its maker Kenneth Anger and the composer of its unreleased soundtrack, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. There was not a lot of cricket, but two big cricket fans are about to enter the story…
John Paul Getty Jr was the third of five sons born to J. Paul Getty, petroleum industrialist, founder of the Getty Oil Company and very probably the world’s richest man, at least for a while. By 1966, John Paul Jr was 33 years old and had been married and divorced, fathering four children with his first wife Abigail before marrying again, this time to the Dutch actress and model Talitha Pol. He was working in the family business as head of the Getty Oil Company’s Italian arm, but he and Talitha got drawn in by the allure of the counter-culture and all of that blew up. They became addicted to heroin while on a head trip to Thailand, and Getty’s father, who abhorred drugs of any kind, gave him an ultimatum: get clean or leave the business. Getty resigned.
He and Talitha separated, and their attempted reconciliation in Rome in 1971 ended in terrible circumstances when Talitha was found dead from an apparent overdose in Getty’s apartment. Getty left Italy, never to return. Riven with guilt and hopelessly addicted, more horror was to follow when his 16-year-old son from his first marriage, John Paul III, was kidnapped for ransom by Italian gangsters, who demonstrated their intent by sending John Paul’s severed ear to a newspaper. Getty Jr begged his father for the three million dollars demanded by the kidnappers, but J. Paul Getty refused on the grounds that it would make targets of his other thirteen grandchildren if he paid. He ultimately loaned his son the money he needed at four per cent interest and John Paul III was released, although he never really recovered, a drug overdose five years later leaving him partially blind and paralysed for the rest of his life.
By 1984, John Paul Jr was 52 and suffering from a severe depression that had lasted for almost a decade. Having inherited much of the family fortune, he checked himself into the London Clinic, where he stayed for more than a year. While there, he bought a rundown estate of almost 3,000 acres in the Buckinghamshire countryside called Wormsley Park, and in rescuing the estate, he transformed his life.
He rebuilt the 18th century manor and added a glorious library to house his significant collection of rare books, which had become one of his great passions. Another was cricket. Mick Jagger had introduced him to the game during Getty’s time in London in the 1960s, and while in the London Clinic he had been cheered by a visit from the president of MCC, Gubby Allen. At Wormsley, he created his own ground, a magical bowl set beneath the tree-lined hills that he inaugurated with a game skippered by Imran Khan, managed by Brian Johnson and attended by the Prime Minister John Major and the Queen Mother. He united his love for cricket and books when he purchased Wisden Almanack, and once described the visit of the touring Australians for a game at Wormsley as “the happiest day of my life.”
And then, in 2003, he commissioned Kenneth Anger to make a film about cricket.
While Anger had spent much of his life in the company of very rich people, riches had almost always eluded him. The moment in the first part of our story when he was introduced to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page at an auction of Aleister Crowley ephemera was one of the rare occasions that he was flush enough to be bidding.
The person that introduced them was Timothy d’Arch Smith, a rare book dealer, an expert in Crowley and Crowleyana and a cricket nut who lived a few minutes’ walk from Lord’s in St John’s Wood. Smith would soon gather and buy many books, paintings and other items of occult esoterica for Page, and the pair got along well. His encounters with Anger were far different: “[He] always scared me to death,” he said. “He never smiled.”
Smith was one of the crossing points for Page’s journey into the occult circles that had Crowley at their heart. Most secret of them all was the Ordo Templi Orientis or O.T.O., an order dreamed up by Crowley to practice his magick rituals (Crowley apparently insisted on the extra ‘k’ to distinguish his version from conjuring). Kenneth Anger was widely believed to be a high-ranking and prominent member of the O.T.O., and it’s likely that d’Arch Smith was, too.
When my old friend Mick Wall, whose brilliantly entertaining Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked The Earth deep-dives into Jimmy Page and his occult tendencies, met Timothy d’Arch Smith, “the first thing he asked me was, are you a member of the Order then?”
Page has spent much of his life dogged by rumours about his involvement with the occult, one of the more persistent stories being that he too obtained the highest possible rank in the O.T.O. As we saw in part one, the relationship between Page and Kenneth Anger had broken down entirely while Anger was lodging in Page’s basement at the Tower House, and again if rumours are to be believed, Anger followed through on his threat to curse Page, choosing The Curse of King Midas, which metaphorically immobilises its subject in gold. It’s stretching a point, but as Mick Wall suggests in his book, Page’s professional life has in a way become frozen in time, unable to replicate the vast success of Led Zeppelin’s decade together, or, as was his long-held wish, to reform the band in later years.
Magick makes great use of the circle as a symbol, and this one first closes around Kenneth Anger on that trip to London as the 60s finally burned out. Along with Jagger, Richards, Page and the rest, it was there that Anger first met John Paul Getty, who had been drawn to the same bohemian, rich and wasted scene.
They were perhaps the oddest pairing of all, certainly once Getty got clean and began regenerating Wormsley. Yet in 2003, Anger wrote to the film producer Paul Gallagher, asking if he would be interested in line-producing his next film, to be titled Arrangement In White On Green. “It was to be about cricket,” Gallagher wrote in a lovely piece on Flashbak, “[and] a sports film was the last thing I ever imagined the director of Lucifer Rising would make.”
Intrigued, he contacted Anger, who revealed that he and Getty had been batting the idea back and forth “for a decade,” or about as long as the ground at Wormsley had been in existance. Now, Getty was putting up £250,000 for Anger to make it happen. Anger asked Gallagher to sort out equipment and accommodation, but then, true to form, failed to commit to a start date for filming.
A month later, John Paul Getty Jr was dead. Paul Gallagher wrote:
‘I called Anger.
– You heard the news?
– I know. I knew this would happen.
– Well, I guess that’s the end of it.
Anger let out a world-weary sigh.
–I wish I’d asked him for a million, he said.’
In the final part of the story, we’ll explore what Kenneth Anger’s film might have been like, and what Wormsley really means to cricket, and to England.
Part Three tomorrow at 10am