Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos

by Clancy Sigal

Overview

This a hilarious memoir of Clancy Sigal’s escapades as a young Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, peddling writers and actors in a blacklist-crazed “golden age” movie industry of the 1950s. Atom bomb tests light up the night sky, and everyone is either naming names or getting named in the McCarthy witch hunt. By day a fast-talking salesman, at night he’s the point person of a small circle of anarchistic oddballs. He’s dogged by two FBI agents who want to be set up with starlets and have a screen test. They trail him as he goes from studio to studio hustling clients like Humphrey Bogart, Donna Reed, Jack Palance, Peter Lorre and Stanwyck. Barred from a studio he brazenly uses a bolt cutter to break through the chainlink fence to make a deal.

Black Sunset’s riproaring ribald style belongs to a hardboiled school that includes Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. He is one of the few remaining witnesses and reporters of this absurd and terrifying time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619028524
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	463 KB

About the Author

Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two labor organizers, Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own, with a mostly absent father. After an army stint he worked as an entertainment agent. Sigal arrived as an immigrant in Great Britain, where he met and commenced a four-year affair with the writer Doris Lessing. He lived in Los Angeles with his screenwriter wife, Janice Tidwell, until his death.

Table of Contents

Part 1

1 The Fugitive 1

2 Farewell, My Lovely 7

3 Where This Story Takes Place 17

4 Bride of the Gorilla 21

5 The Killers 29

6 From Here to Eternity 37

7 The Night World War II Ended 45

8 Theatre of Blood 47

9 On the Waterfront 51

Part 2

10 Holding My Nose and Praying 59

11 Liar, Liar 63

12 Pulling an All-Nighter Cramming for the Job I Bluffed Into 71

13 O Brother Where Art Thou? 73

14 Who Are the Omegas? 77

15 The FBI Story 81

Part 3

16 First Day on the Job after My Lying Interview 89

17 Where the Bodies Are Buried in Hollywood 97

18 Act of Violence 99

18 Socrates in Tasseled Loafers 105

20 Gangster Chic 109

21 Ghost Story 113

22 The Thousand Guns of Dale and Peter 117

23 The Big Knife 121

24 The Trial of the Century 129

25 Sweet Smell of Success 135

26 Who Served, Who Didn't 139

27 Teacher's Pets 141

Part 4

28 Time Out of Time 147

29 Harmless as Doves; Innocent as a Lamb 149

30 The Big Steal 157

31 The Demon Barber of Wilshire Boulevard 167

32 A Double Life 173

33 A Perfect Crime 179

34 Portrait of Jennie 187

35 Torah! Torah!-Torah! 193

36 The Informer 205

37 Picnic 215

Part 5

38 Cold War Sex in a Lonelier Place 225

39 The Women 229

40 The Ladies Auxiliary 231

41 The Price of Love 235

42 The Crash 237

43 A Visit from a Constant Reader 241

Part 6

44 The Storm Subsides, Sunrise over Malibu 253

45 Enter Doctor Charisma 257

46 She's Only a Poor Workin' Girl 263

47 Baby Face 269

48 The Man Killer From Double Indemnity 273

49 Blazing Saddles 281

50 A Star Is Born 291

51 How to Break a Writer's Block 295

52 The Defiant Ones 297

Part 7

53 Death of a Salesman 309

54 The Long Goodbye 315

55 The Non-Union Indian 319

56 Mojave Green 323

57 You Bet Your Life 329

58 Dance, Girl, Dance 333

Epilogue 335

Acknowledgments 337

Where are they now? 339

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Black Sunset



"The beauty of Black Sunset, for most readers, will be found in the details, lovingly or painfully described, page after page . . . Clancy Sigal brings the innocent and guilty back, once more, at close range, and proves himself the liveliest of literary nonagenarians in the process." —Los Angeles Review of Books



"Black Sunset moves with the express swagger of a Hawks or Wellman picture, although it feels like an Ozu once it’s all over and the characters linger in silhouette as if they were a fixture of the freeway system at night." —Counterpunch



"Black Sunset is, I can attest this time around, an autobiography: a funny, cynical, score-settling romp through blacklist-era Hollywood." —<>Bookforum

From the Publisher

2016-09-26
Inside the chaotic Hollywood of the 1950s.Social iconoclast Sigal (Emeritus, Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Hemingway Lives! (Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today), 2013, etc.) mined his early years as a leftist in novels like Going Away (1961). Here, he returns to this rich autobiographical well with a gonzo memoir about his life in the ’50s as a talent agent (“flesh peddler, ten-percenter, shark”) at the prestigious Sam Jaffe Agency in Los Angeles. The book opens with a reckless, chaotic pace in rambling, scattered, and jumpy prose describing the 25-year-old Sigal losing his job as a movie gofer. The narrative eventually settles down, but the book’s episodic, digressive structure, punctuated with movie and actor references, makes it a messy read, a never-ending litany of having clients, losing clients, and getting them back. All in a day’s work. Keep those commissions coming in. The back story is the McCarthy Hearings and the Commission’s unrelenting pursuit of getting Hollywood folks to turn on each other: “Informers rule my Hollywood.” Even Sigal was being pursued by FBI agents to give names: “Every nerve end tells me to get out before I make a splendid mess of things.” The agency boasted a spectacular client list—e.g., Jack Palace, Richard Burton, Ginger Rogers, Peter Lorre—and Sigal’s job was to hobnob with them, talk shop, promise them a role they probably wouldn’t get. They did help a number of blacklisted actors and writers. Numerous profiles and anecdotes are scattered about, some insightful, some just icky. Out drinking one evening at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with Sam Jaffe, Humphrey Bogart, Sheree North (“our bid against Marilyn Monroe’s increasingly fragile stardom”), and Louella Parsons (“queen/matriarch of vipers”), Sigal recounts how Parsons started “pissing, hugely, drunkenly, in her pants.” As a more in-control memoir, this could have been a rich gold mine about Hollywood legends and lore.

Kirkus Reviews