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

by Clancy Sigal

For me it begins in such an ordinary way ... with a gorilla, a blonde, and a gun ... Mid- 20th century Hollywood; 'Raymond Chandler's LA before Pilates and cell phones'. Clancy Sigal (who would later be the inspiration for Doris Lessing's 'Saul Green') is just back from fighting in the Second World War and an abortive solo attempt to assassinate Hermann Goering at the Nurenburg trials.  Charming his way into a job as an agent with the Sam Jaffe agency, Sigal plunges into a chaotic Hollywood peopled by fast women, washed-up screenwriters, wily directors, and starstruck FBI agents trailing 'subversives'. He parties with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Tony Curtis and an anxious Peter Lorre, who becomes a drinking buddy. But this is the era of the Hollywood Blacklist and Sigal, like many of his contemporaries, is subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC. Will he give up the list of nine names , burning a hole in his pocket, to save his own skin?  Hilarious, touching, intimate and Sigal’s memoir reads like a forgotten hardboiled detective novel and has all the makings of an instant classic.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Media Tie In

352 pages, Paperback

Published February 7, 2019

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

[Anthony McGill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only discovered this book via an extensive article in film journal CINEASTE and what a find!

Clancy Sigal, who I knew nothing about (but should have) was one incredible man who led an even more incredible life! Hard to believe all this happened as it is one of those stranger than fiction autobiographies.

Fantastic insight into just about everything about life as a Hollywood agent, mainly working the innards of Universal and Republic in the 1950s, McCarthy-era paranoia, FBI wackos, all sorts of sexual intrigue - the full works- all reading like a hard-boiled sexy noir novel.

When you read a bizarre, never a dull moment life story like this - you wonder yourself: Have I really lived?

Even the chapter titles, many named after prominent films, are hilarious.
A great page-turner which seems just right to be published by an outfit called Soft Skull Press in Berkeley, California.

[Gram · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny account of Clancy Sigal's time as an agent in 1950's Los Angeles as he hustles for actors and writers and tries to keep one step ahead of the FBI who are investigating him in the midst of Senator Joe McCarthy's "reds under every bed" scare.

Each chapter is headed by a movie quote involving either an actor, writer or director who was illegally blacklisted by Hollywood's motion picture industry or someone who "named names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee causing people to lose their jobs and in some cases their lives as they committed suicide. A dark time in American history.

Throughout the story, there are marvellous piece of malicious gossip, many of which turn out to be true - including the tale of the movie producer who sought revenge by shooting his wife's alleged lover in the groin!

Sigal also recounts his time as a World War II GI, visiting the Nuremberg Trials with the aim of shooting Herman Goering. And there's a lot about his tangled sex life and that of his colleagues and friends and clients. A fun read and a real eye-opener about life in 1950's Hollywood.

[Jon Zelazny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brings home the savagery and psychological toll of living under the hammer of the fifties Red scare more vividly than any other account I've read. Sigal writes in a deceptively breezy, pulpy, smart-aleck-y way about truly hard times.

[Paula · Rating 2 out of 5]

A self-indulgent mishmash. But it did serve as a valuable reminder of the horror of the McCarthy era.

[Lara Corona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was way better than I was expecting. I picked it up for the blacklist anecdotes but I wasn't expecting the wonderful, hardboiled, less-cynical-James-Ellroy tone of the writing of this non-fiction book. Plus the humor is actually funny without the need for hopelessness. It's also refreshing to read about victims of the blacklist who were actually committed socialists and communits, rather than this gross narrative of "the real tragedy of the Hollywood blacklist is that it affected ~innocent~ people". It also - thanks to its Jewish narrator - spotlights how much of antisemitic attack under another name the blacklist was.

I was also surprised by the weird moments of "wokeness" this book had, where any other writer (Ellroy, for example, as much as I love him) would simply take the chance to enjoy the excuse - and it is just an excuse - to be politically correct. While the narrator participates in the bigotry of his environment he is also constantly remarking and aware that those prejudices are artificial and deeply fucked-up. The book paints a picture of 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles vibrant with the presence of women, queer people, Jewish people, political outcasts. The episode where Sigal points out how western movies would rather employ white actors in brownface instead of Natives even for background extras is a good example.

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

BLACK SUNSET by Clancy Sigal.

This memoir of a 50s Hollywood agent is a real treat. Sigal was a fascinating figure. After serving in Germany during the clean-up at the end of WW2, he attempted to kill Goering at the Nurenburg trials, being disarmed by a fellow soldier moments before.

He returned to the US and went to UCLA on the GI bill. He then became part of a communist cell and fell into a job as a talent agent at Sam Jaffe's agency, where they handled everyone from jobbing scriptwriters like John Fante and James Agee to huge stars like Humphrey Bogart.

Black Sunset is the brilliant story of this period of his life as he works the sleazy world of the movies while being hounded by FBI agents during the height of McCarthyism.

Anyone interested in the movies or McCarthyism will love this book. The writing is glorious, like James Ellroy living in Chandler's LA. It's great.

[Bill Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. For anyone interested in Hollywood in the latter golden era and the McCarthy era blacklists it is easily interesting. Sigal writes it simply and quick, his life as an apprentice film agent, dealing with the second tier studios and mostly writing talent. It's an insight into the world of the agent, although a very specific perspective, and details Sigal on the wrong end of the blacklist. However, he also pays due tribute to those who were blacklist and references those who named names, while wondering if he will do the same, when the call comes. At the same time, he doesn't cheat on the title, it's all there - especially the raging egos.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange lurid memoir, hard to look away from. I think I enjoyed it, I’m honestly not sure, but I’m glad I read it

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never heard of Clancy Sigal till I read his obituary in the Guardian as well as a comment by Andrew Loog Oldham. I immediately went out and purchased a copy of Sigal's Hollywood memoir "Black Sunset" which is remarkable. I'm not sure if this is the ultimate Hollywood Noir Blacklist book, but clearly, it belongs in at the very least, the top five books about Hollywood in that dark and shameful era of the Communist fear. Anyone who is a Leftie in that era when it was dangerous to be so, and eventually ends up in 60s London culture is my type of fellow.

Sigal, as well as being a leftie, was also an agent who worked with Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Donna Reed, and Jack Palance. His take on the 'agent' world is hysterical, but also profound for those who are interested in Hollywood system and in a nutshell, those who have an interest in Noir films, the Blacklist Years, Los Angeles, The Sunset Strip, etc. - will be fascinated with "Black Sunset."

[Conny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a First Read Winner of this book and I really liked it. I was not to familiar with all the ins and out of what a Hollywood Agent would do or with Clancy Sigal for that matter, so I found this a very interesting and funny read with a glimpse of what it was like to work in Hollywood after the war, and live in fear of being Blacklisted all the time. It was very entertaining, and it left me hungry to find out more about all the people who were blacklisted. However I wished the book would have gone into more detail about Clancy himself and the people the agency and he represented.

[Dave Wagner]

There are many, many Hollywood memoirs, probably enough to fill the hold of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, but few of them are as joyous or (at times) solemn as this one. Clancy Sigal reached into his cache of memories as a young agent at the turn of the 1940s and ‘50s, when he was dodging impatient girlfriends, bosses, competitors and FBI agents whose job it was to keep an eye on him from day to day and even from hour to hour. Meanwhile, Sigal’s job was to earn and protect the fees generated by the stars and writers assigned to him as clients of the formidable Sam Jaffe agency. That meant threatening poachers of Jaffe stars and writers by other agents while doing a little poaching of his own, all while digging up lousy short stories that might please the producers enough to be thrown into the narrative maw of the movie business.

In film agentry there was an art to everything--locking up depressed writers in hotel rooms with coffee and booze until they finished a script and when necessary taking over the typewriter to bang out an ending for them. Agents, apparently, had to be unscrupulous, willing to take an actual punch from rivals and be able to throw one in return to earn a reputation as someone willing to do anything for their clients. But they also had to have enough writing talent to maneuver in a world of storytelling. Sigal could do all of this, and he could tell a story in strokes of rapid-fire dialogue, a talent that makes Black Sunset play in the mind like a movie edited in jump cuts. It's a fast fly of a read, bouncing with laughs, as when he confesses that at one point he had something going on the side with the redoubtable matronly star of the Ma and Pa Kettle film series, Marjorie Main.

Marjorie Main! His portrait of this strong, funny, sexy (in real life) mature woman is irresistible. One longs for a moment to have been able to have a drink with her and hear (in real life) her half-strangled voice erupt in horse laughs. Likewise, Sigal’s tale of an encounter with Barbara Stanwyck on the set of a TV Western he managed to wrangle for her in her graying days is a tiny misfired love story told entirely at his own expense--not the only time in the book he reveals a generous heart.

But the book’s dark title is the signal that Black Sunset is not a romantic farce. As he circles the 342-page story into the Pacific twilight for a landing, Sigal brings the reader face to face with the cruelty of the Hollywood blacklist which, following hard on the Holocaust (whose effects he witnessed first-hand as a GI in the occupation of Germany) and the renewal of scarcely disguised anti-Semitism in the U.S., expressed most directly in the trail of personal betrayals and suicides the blacklist left behind. Hanging over everything was the impending threat that the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which empowered the president to confine loosely defined political dissidents in “emergency detention,” would be set in motion.

One of the historians of the blacklist period, Patrick McGilligan, has underscored the importance of personal politics to explain the tragic endings in a period in which many of the most talented members of the film colony were radicals vulnerable to exposure from jealous husbands, abandoned lovers and bosses looking for high talent at cheap prices. Sigal is the rare writer willing to evoke this rarely told personal side of the story.

One day, Sigal and a friend were driving down Melrose when they spotted a cherry-red Mercury coupe upside down in the middle of the street. Inside is Sigal’s girlfriend, “sprawled all over the inside of the Mercury’s roof.” They pull her out of the wreck, which, Sigal later learns after going through a similar experience, was likely caused by an agent of the U.S. government on blacklist duty. Even though she is badly bruised and shivering from shock, she refuses to be taken to the hospital. Sigal takes her home, where she insists that he make love to her. Sigal describes this scene as an example of “boxcar love”--”the frantic homicidal coupling of the transported women and men whose distant fate in wartime Eastern Europe haunts our nightmares”--referring to the death camps of WWII. Some readers will put down the book at this point and let their eyes dissolve into sightless reflection to wonder: If, as Theodore Adorno wrote, “After Auschwitz, poetry is barbarism,” what is love?

What a strange and haunting book this is--about a strange and haunting period in our history. . It’s a book that could only have been written by someone with long experience and an ability to make his story almost as complete an act as living itself.

[Sanjuro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fantastic read. I'm a sucker for old Hollywood. Sigal lived it in between two worlds, the glamorous and the wretched. One minute he's schlubbing low end writing talent to angry execs and running into gangsters, the next minute he's laughing at a party with Humphrey Bogart. Before his Hollywood days he tried to assassinate nazis and after his days in Hollywood he went on to have an interesting life; living with novelist Doris Lessing and getting mixed up with the FBI and Jimmy Hoffa. A true story that reads like a noir.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable backstage Hollywood stories, told by someone clearly born to spin a yarn, and delivered in the crisp, deadpan style of a 40s private eye thriller. More name drops than any movie lover could ask for, although I lost interest when it turned focus to the author's rampant sex life. I'm sure it was fun, but feels uncomfortably misogynist in the telling.

[Brice Fuqua · Rating 5 out of 5]

The adventures of a Communist talent scout in 1950s Hollywood. Sigal wrote this book at age 89, but it's full of youthful insolence. He name checks just about every star of that era. Fun read for those interested in the blacklist period of Hollywood.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my usual choice of reading.

This is a frank and no holds barred account of a new talent agent learning the business.

You need to be a film buff or over 70 to know some of the names put forth.

I was mildly amused but mostly bored.

I borrowed a copy from the public library.

[Tom Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a life. What a writer!

[Anita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased this book for €1 and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

[Adrian Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging and often very funny memoir of Sigal's time as a Hollywood agent in the 1950s, relentlessly hustling on behalf of his stable of actors and screenwriters against the background of America's "Red Scare" and the McCarthy witch-hunts. Under constant surveillance by the FBI, (his relationship with his assigned agents takes a hilarious turn towards the end of the book), he constantly tours all the studios, premieres and parties in search of the next big deal, while forever lusting after his female boss and carrying out various pranks as part of his Communist group.

Although the book is fast-moving and punchily written, it lacks a true narrative throughline (beyond starting with Sigal accidentally becoming an agent and ending with him being fired), and lands as an episodic slice of life of this fascinating character, but little more. However, although he disguises the identities of many of his Communist "fellow travellers", he's more than happy to name names when it comes to the big stars he comes into contact with, and old Hollywood gossip-hounds will have a ball with his salacious and often sad tales of the studio system at it's post-war peak.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys old showbiz tales, and as an aside, it would make a great starting point for a "Mad men" style TV show!