‘ Steer clear of that cave boy & grease ball’
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London, Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume ( perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), Been there, done that’ would make a good catch- all title.
Sigal had already lived more than most of us by the time he fetched up in Hollywood. Born in Chicago — or Brooklyn, family accounts differed — in 1926 to two unmarried trades union agitators, Sigal was only a teenager when he joined the Communist Party. ( His mother, a socialist Russian Jew, was disgusted.)
Conscripted and sent to occupied Germany, he goes AWOL in order to attend the Nuremberg trials and blow away Hermann Goering. Alas, he’s stopped outside the court by an MP who spots the automatic stuffed down his pants. Once inside, he gets into a two- day staring contest with Goering, w h o ‘ grins at t h e judges as if daring them to believe his a b s u r d claim of i n n o c e n c e ’ . Then, out of the blue, He winks at me. If only, Sigal thinks, he had brought the smaller .38 instead. He’d be dead meat now.
Automatics, .38s, dead meat. Even if Sigal didn’t admit it, you’d have him fingered as a Bogie fan. But he does admit it — admits it, in fact, to Bogart himself. That’s after he’s back in the States and has wiseguyed his way into a gig at the Jaffe agency. Bogart is one of its biggest clients. On Sigal’s first day in the office Bogart stops by. ‘ Say something to impress the kid,’ says Bogie’s agent. ‘ Bogart scowls, grunts, and delivers on cue, “Get away from that phone, Major Strasser”.’ At which point Sigal, who has an eidetic memory for movie dialogue, puts him right on the closing scene of Casablanca. ‘ Excuse me, sir, but isn’t it, “Put that phone down!” and no Major Strasser?’ Indeed it is, which doesn’t mean Bogie was wrong when he called Sigal a ‘ pedantic little shit’.
Certainly he wasn’t much of an agent. Hired because he was young and therefore presumed to know what the adolescent audience the movie studios were chasing would want, he turned out to be clueless about the teen scene. He counselled Nicholas Ray, who was putting together Rebel Without a Cause, to steer clear of a monosyllabic, possibly retarded… cave boy… needs a bath by the name of James Dean. And he poured scorn on a grease ball who masturbates his guitar and sneers the blues through his nose… and can’t carry a tune called Elvis Presley. Little wonder Black Sunset ends with our hard- up hero fleeing to London where the recently revalued pound is ‘ worth nothing’.
There are other pleasures to be had here too, of course — among them the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whose ‘ liberal arrogance’ Sigal finds ‘ immensely appealing’. Almost as appealing as the peacenik girls he pals up with at rallies. Carolling Jerusalem in the Methodist Central Hall, Sigal vows with Blake: Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.
And nor did it. The young Sigal had women the way most of us had hangovers. When his sword did sleep — which wasn’t often — it slept in someone else’s hand. Indeed, on his very first day in London, Sigal boarded an 88 bus and rode it all day in order to keep warm. When night drew in, the conductor, the delightful sounding Jean, says it’s the end of her shift so why doesn’t he come back to her place and ride her instead. All this by page 7 of The London Lover.
So advised Clancy Segal, employed as an agent and talent scout in 1950s Hollywood, according to his uproarious posthumous memoirs