Background: Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer; February 3, 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor and author. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost forty works since 1937, nine of which have been grouped together as the "Magick Lantern Cycle". His films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing "elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle". Anger himself has been described as "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner", and his "role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate", with several being released prior to the legalization of homosexuality in the United States.
Context: In 1953, soon after the production of Eaux d'Artifice, Anger's mother died and he temporarily returned to the United States in order to assist with the distribution of her estate. It was during this return that he began to once more immerse himself in the artistic scene of California, befriending the film maker Stan Brakhage, who had been inspired by Fireworks, and the two collaborated on producing a film, but it was confiscated at the film lab for obscenity and presumably destroyed. Around this time, two of Anger's friends, the couple Renate Druks and Paul Mathiesin held a party based upon the theme of "Come As Your Madness"; Anger himself attended dressed in drag as the ancient Greek goddess Hekate. The party and its many costumes inspired Anger, who produced a painting of it, and asked several of those who attended to appear in a new film that he was creating - Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Inauguration, which was created in 1954, was a 38-minute surrealist work featuring many Crowleyan and Thelemite themes, with many of the various characters personifying various pagan gods such as Isis, Osiris and Pan. One of the actresses in the film was Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons, the influential American Thelemite who had died a few years previously, while Anger himself played Hecate. He would subsequently exhibit the film at various European film festivals, winning the Prix du Cine-Club Belge and the Prix de l'Age d'Or, as well as screening it in the form of a projected triptych at Expo 58, the World Fair held in Brussels in 1958.  In 1955, Anger and his friend Alfred Kinsey traveled to the derelict Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily, to film a short documentary titled Thelema Abbey. The abbey itself had been used by Aleister Crowley for his commune during the 1920s, and Anger restored many of the erotic wall-paintings that were found there, as well as performing certain Crowleyan rituals at the site. The documentary was made for the British television series Omnibus, but was later lost. The following year Kinsey died and Anger decided to return to Paris, where he was described at the time as being "extremely remote and lonely".  In desperate need of money, Anger wrote a book titled Hollywood Babylon in which he collected together gossip regarding celebrities, some of which he claims he had been told. This included claiming (with no corroboration or citing of sources) that Rudolph Valentino liked to play a sexually submissive role to dominant women, that Walt Disney was a drug user, addicted to opiates (reflected in the character of Goofy, who's perpetually stoned on cannabis), as well as describing the nature of the deaths of Peg Entwistle and Lupe Velez. The work was not published in the United States initially, and it was first released by the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert. A pirated (and incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965, with the official American version not being published until 1974. Now with some financial backing from the publication of Hollywood Babylon, his next film project was The Story of O; essentially a piece of erotica featuring a heterosexual couple engaged in sadomasochistic sexual activities, although it refrained from showing any explicit sexual images.
Question: was the book successful?

Answer:
The work was not published in the United States initially, and it was first released by the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert.