Fear and loathing in La La Land
Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal And Raging Egos Clancy Sigal Icon Books (€14.80)
In his final chest-thumping book, Clancy Sigal, who died last year at the age of 90, describes his life in Hollywood in the years before Pilates and cellphones; when studio heads and producers were ex-vaudeville hoofers and immigrant pushcart peddlers rather than gutless lawyers and accountants; and when everyone’s racial and sexual prejudices were rigidly in place – Charlie Chan was played by a Swede, Mr Moto was a Viennese, and Cochise was ‘a cross-dressing Brooklyn Jew’.
Sigal was a war veteran and he applied his survival skills to the Los Angeles jungle. ‘Combat experience comes in handy,’ he tells us. Though often accused by adversaries of ‘unethical, unscrupulous, underhand behaviour’, these traits were necessary, even prized, in his career as an agent, or in his words, as a ‘flesh peddler, ten-percenter, shark’.
His job was to lurk at parties, openings, screenings and bar mitzvahs, showing up even when not invited, in order to do deals and negotiate fees for the likes of Jack Palance, Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck, who as the Fifties advanced was reduced to making television westerns. Peter Lorre, hooked on morphine, was grateful for any cheap horror pic that came his way. Abbott and Costello, still going through their slapstick motions, were dying from epilepsy and rheumatic heart disease respectively.
Though the Hollywood Sigal describes is superficially glamorous – the drive-in cinemas, cars with rocket-shaped grilles and chromium tail fins, girls wearing petticoats and girdles – under the surface there was menace, guilt and suspicion. For this was also the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Washington’s equivalent of the Moscow show trials. Sigal explains and superbly evokes the Cold War fears of communist subversion, the hidden FBI microphones, subpoenas, and the naming of names – ‘doing the dirty on best friends’ at the behest of J Edgar Hoover. What stands revealed is a hypocritical culture and society, where there was an open loathing of liberals, intellectuals and Catholics who broke the church’s sexual rules.
As Sigal knew, behind the scenes it was business as usual. One of the duties of a talent agency was to clear up studio messes, ‘like Rita Hayworth’s abortions and Frank Sinatra’s girlfriends’. Though you never knew who’d be blacklisted next, the daily craziness continued, the ‘serial phone calls, half-true deal memos, spun lines and doors slammed in my face’.
Sigal became adept at haggling. The rule of thumb was that ‘you ask for double and settle for half’. The three watchwords for an agent were ‘cheat, pretend, scam’.
Though an actors’ agent, Sigal’s prose style is that of a secret agent or special agent in the macho gun-toting sense, with a side-of-the-mouth, shoulderholster private-eye delivery out of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. You can just imagine the snap of his fedora brim in a line like ‘In Hollywood they come for the money and stay for the palm trees’.
He left the business when beatnik goatees and shoulder-length hair arrived. He quite failed to see the point of James Dean, who he decided was ‘monosyllabic, possibly retarded, and needs a bath. Forget him’. The times they were a-changing.