The Secret Defector

by Clancy Sigal

During his struggle to find a new life for himself in 1956 London, self-exiled American radical Gus Black enters into an affair with novelist Rose O'Malley and struggles to become a writer himself.

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Clancy Sigal was the child of a love affair between two idealists. His parents Jennie Persily and Leo Sigal were labor organizers. Jennie, a single mother, raised Clancy on her own. Chicago-born, he was an ordinary street kid until the army sent him overseas. He attended the Nuremberg war crimes trial, and then enrolled at UCLA where his classmates included the later Watergate conspirators, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Blacklisted by a movie studio, and chased by the FBI, he lucked into a job as a Hollywood talent agent for clients like Humphrey Bogart. He slipped into Great Britain as an illegal immigrant and had a years-long affair with the writer Doris Lessing. Intending only a tourist weekend, he stayed in London for 30 years where, as well as broadcasting for BBC, he collaborated with the ‘anti psychiatrist’ R.D. Laing in the care and feeding of “incurable” schizophrenics. Relocating to Hollywood, he co-wrote “Frida” (Kahlo) and the Hemingway love story “In Love and War”.

Reviews

[Gayle]

never finished...

[John Devlin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Almost no present tense actions. The narrator describes his life as a wannabe communist in broad strokes that evoke little interest.