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According to Sam (as I always called him), he started out as a young man arriving in Hollywood from the east coast, by way of Paris, as one Arthur Jasmine, determined to write and learn about this wicked town in the manner of Elinor Glyn, if you were really to believe all the hyperbole of those early days of the roaring twenties, a skinny pale youth often given to the muse as we are told, not to mention somewhat of an exhibition dancer (more of the former I should think). Apparently Arthur then meets the legendary Nazimova and is immediately cast in the small but showy role of Herodias in her notorious all-gay version of Oscar Wilde’s SALOME, with great attention paid to Beardsley’s brilliant illustrations when it came to creating the sets which were spectacular…

Now I for one do not believe that Arthur/Samson is really in the film at all. I find it fascinating that both Kenneth Anger and Samson claim to have these juvenile appearances in films that nobody will ever be able to accurately document. For the record Kenneth Anger has always maintained that he was the changeling prince in Max Reinhart’s Warner Bros all star production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1935). However, bear in mind that this is the same man who has said in print interviews that he was sodomized by Puck, i.e. Mickey Rooney, in said film, off-camera of course. So who are you to believe when all is said and done?

The one true reality regarding Samson De Brier and his reputation as a celebrity is that for a period of time in the fifties and sixties, and perhaps even into the early seventies, Samson used his Hollywood home as a salon for like-minded artistic types to meet and converse. I mean he really did attract the movie stars like Marlon Brando as well as the Los Angeles intelligentsia people like Anais Nin into his home. Samson must have been quite a different person in those days and I for one wish I had known that Samson De Brier, rather than the rancid version I am recalling here for posterity. So it was those glory days that allowed Samson to enjoy the benefits of having first-hand gossip to use as his passport for invitations to countless Hollywood dinner parties over the years.

By the time I got to know Samson the salons were long a thing of the past and he was on the dinner circuit based primarily for having been part of Kenneth Anger’s legendary INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME (1954) which was indeed shot in his ramshackle home off Vine Street and El Centro, to this day a dangerous, seedy part of Hollywood. The film flatters the location more than you know, because when you were actually in Sam’s place there was very little that would make you aware the film was ever shot there. Any documentation you can find regarding Samson or his place in Hollywood history will always be as a footnote in Kenneth Anger’s filmography.

When I try to think back to just when Samson came to my house, I seem to remember a party around 1977 when I was beginning to seeing a lot of Curtis Harrington socially at his home, and then at mine, so Samson just turned up one evening at my apartment and seated himself in a corner of my living room where I had placed an old Spanish chair that could be said to resemble a throne of sorts. It was there that La Perversa, as Curtis liked to call him, would hold forth during that first evening. I remember he was wearing an antique necklace in the shape of a dragon, which suited him oddly enough. At first I liked him, after all he was a character, and in those days he still had a charm about him that comes from years of telling people what they most want to hear. I suppose Samson wanted to find out why Curtis was accepting so many of my party invitations, and also to meet and connect with my circle of friends who for the most part were all young and beautiful new faces – who can really blame him for that?

Celebrity is like a drug in Hollywood. Almost everyone I knew was taking it in one form or another. Kenneth Anger loved and despised Hollywood while Curtis Harrington learned how to work within its system. Samson De Brier used his relationship with both these men to travel in their circles when it suited him, and after so many years of networking in Hollywood, he had his own circle of old Hollywood friends who found themselves fascinated with this seemingly wicked man who really had no life of his own, except as a reflection in other people. He had a desire to meet younger people and experience what was going on in the current Hollywood which was moving well beyond his ability to keep up with.

Looking back on the complicated relationships of Samson, Curtis and Kenneth the one common denominator was how much they really disliked each other for the duration of their relationships… Curtis had a long-standing feud with Kenneth and vise versa. I remember being told by each of them separately that I was not to discuss one with the other. Unfortunately they forgot to tell Samson who kept the flames burning throughout their lives, gossiping back and forth between the two directors and then going to dinner parties and making fun of them both for their individual shortcomings. Samson really did not admire or respect anyone towards the end of his long and tedious life. And what soured me on Samson De Brier pretty much for good was his disloyalty to the very people who made it possible for him to be accepted in Hollywood society in the first place.

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