Clancy Sigal

Going Away

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.

Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos

Black Sunset

This tale of a Russian immigrant is a “gripping and gritty memoir [and] a eulogy for a combative, self-conscious, often violent American working class” (Los Angeles Times). Jennie Persily, with her fiery red hair, buxom figure, and bohemian spirit, is a strong-willed fighter for justice and a passionate lover. A Russian-Jewish émigré who organizes unions in the sweatshops and on the mean streets of Chicago during the thirties and forties, Jennie frequently brings her son—the book’s author, Clancy Sigal—along to rallies and on dangerous missions, often eluding union-busting hit men. As unsentimental, intelligent, and brazen as its subject, A Woman of Uncertain Character is a candid look into a childhood shaped by a feverishly brave, sexually open, and very complex mother. Sigal gains a deep, satisfying understanding of the woman who made him, and the world that made her.

The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

A Woman of Uncertain Character

A riotously funny saga of institutional insanity, based on the author’s association with the notorious psychiatrist R. D. Laing Despite massive literary success, Sidney Bell feels perpetually unsatisfied and suffers unexplained physical ailments. Desperate to straighten out his twisted life, anxiety-ridden Sid seeks help from experimental psychiatrist Dr. Willie Last, whose therapeutic methods involve hallucinatory drugs such as LSD and trading places with his patients. After a tumultuous first trip, Sid ends up at Conolly House, a radical hospital for young schizophrenics where he serves as a “barefoot doctor.” From there, Sigal launches readers on a sardonic, rambling journey through a fantastic breed of insanity. With his freewheeling, ecstatic prose, Sigal spins a manic psychological quest into a telling portrait of a society in the grips of a turbulent decade. Zone of the Interior is a subversive and uproarious search for clarity and comfort in an increasingly mad world, grounded by an unforgettable narrator.

A Novel

Zone of the Interior

'An exuberant, breathless sprint through London in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies... It's bright, boisterous and extremely funny' Tatler If Fielding's Tom Jones were alive in postwar England he might be Clancy Sigal, the American author of this restlessly curious memoir. Honest and devious, faithful and lustful, a mass of plucky contradictions, Clancy first arrived in London in 1957. He was broke, homeless and, according to his FBI file, a dangerous 'subversive'. Over the next three decades, Clancy was to wander the soot-stained streets of London, devouring as much as life could offer him. From the birth of the CND and his affair with Lessing, to therapy with R. D. Laing and wondering whether the entire world was on acid, Clancy details it all to illuminating effect. Underneath all of these encounters is the character of Clancy himself: funny, hapless, warm-hearted and a self-professed 'crazy American'. Call it luck, charm or sheer lack of good sense, he escaped with a cracking good story.

My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years

The London Lover

Linda Sunshine

Offers an illustrated version of the screenplay of the film based on the tumultuous life of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, along with excerpts from sources, background information on the artist and her times, and details of the film.

Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film

Frida

Walter Salles

The life of artist Frida Kahlo, from her humble upbringing to her worldwide fame and controversy that surrounded both her and her husband, Diego Rivera.

Screenplay

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 revealing: Sigal’s memoir reads like a forgotten hardboiled detective novel and has all the makings of an instant classic.

Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal, and Raging Egos

With the release of a flurry of feature and TV films about his life and work, and the publication of new books looking at his correspondence, his boat and even his favorite cocktails, Ernest Hemingway is once again center stage of contemporary culture. There’s something about Papa that makes any retirement to the wings only fleeting. Now, in this concise and sparkling account of the life and work of America’s most storied writer, Clancy Sigal, himself a National Book Award runner-up, presents a persuasive case for the relevance of Ernest Hemingway to readers today. Sigal breaks new ground in celebrating Hemingway’s passionate and unapologetic political partisanship, his stunningly concise, no-frills writing style, and an attitude to sex and sexuality much more nuanced than he is traditionally credited with. Simply for the pleasure provided by a consummate story teller, Hemingway is as much a must-read author as ever. Though Hemingway Lives! will provide plenty that’s new for those already familiar with Papa’s oeuvre, including substantial forays into his political commitments, the women in his life, and the astonishing range of his short stories, it assumes no prior knowledge of his work. Those venturing into Hemingway’s writing for the first time will find in Sigal an inspirational and erudite guide.

Clancy Sigal

Books

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