Clancy Sigal
Writer who tried to shoot Goering, became Doris Lessing’s lover and said Elvis was ‘going nowhere’
CLANCY SIGAL, who has died aged 90, was a journalist and author of autobiographical novels whose résumé also included stints as a GI in occupied Germany, where he attended the Nuremberg war crimes trials intending to shoot Hermann Goering; as a Hollywood agent who failed to appreciate the potential of Elvis or James Dean, and as a leftist blacklisted during the Mccarthy era.
After moving to Britain (where he lived for 30 years) in the late 1950s, he famously became the lover of the novelist Doris Lessing as well as a drinking companion, colleague and sometime patient of RD Laing.
Clancy Sigal was born on September 6 1926, in Chicago. As he recalled in his 2006 memoir, A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to be a Respectable Jewish Mom) his mother, a “flamehaired, high-kicking woman who loved to dance, loved to party”, was a rabble-rousing Jewish immigrant. She led her first sweatshop strike aged 13 and later became involved with fellow Jewish immigrant Leo Sigal, a pistolpacking union organiser and the mostly absent father of her son. Clancy’s parents never married.
Because childcare did not exist, young Clancy travelled throughout the southern states with his mother as she pursued her mission to organise workers into unions. In one town he sat on a bench in the same room while his mother was roughly interrogated by police, an interview that led to them both spending the night in a prison cell.
Later they settled in Chicago where Clancy spent his Depression-era adolescence on the streets with a gang. By his own account a “terrible student” at Marshall High School, after two years he was given a choice by the Jewish Social Service Bureau of completing his education at Jones Commercial High School or at a reform school. He chose Jones, embarking on two years of business training that, he claimed, had turned him into a “Red”, though there may have been other reasons behind his decision to join the Communist Party aged 15 – including to annoy his mother who, though staunchly socialist, was vehemently anticommunist.
When America entered the Second World War, Sigal enlisted in the army and, as a sergeant in the American army of occupation in Germany, and the only Jew in his unit, put his .45 automatic in his holster and sneaked away to the war crimes trial at Nuremberg, intending to look Hermann Goering in the eye and shoot him dead – only to be relieved of his weapon by military police.
Returning to the US, Sigal read English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, on the GI Bill, after which he worked at various jobs in the Hollywood studio system before he was blacklisted for his communist background and lost his job.
Nothing daunted, he returned to the film world by the back door by getting a job with the Jaffe Agency, which represented the cream of golden-age Hollywood. Sigal’s job was to “keep them in ranch-style houses and kidney-shaped swimming pools”.
As the agency’s “Young Turk”, Sigal was supposed to have his finger on the pulse of youth culture, but he recalled the day when he was asked to watch a demo reel of an obscure Mississippi rockabilly singer who billed himself “The Hillbilly Cat”: “I lounged back in my mid-century Knoll chair, feet on my desk, and pronounced: ‘Forget it – he’s going nowhere.’ The Hillbilly Cat was Elvis Presley.”
Not long afterwards Nicholas Ray asked him to look at a young man called James Dean whom he was considering casting in a new film, Rebel Without a Cause, for which Sigal had supplied the screenwriter. “Nick,” Sigal advised, “the kid has BO, he walks around barefoot and mumbles”.
Tired of being tailed everywhere by the FBI, in 1957 Sigal migrated to London, where he spent the first few years as an illegal immigrant, working as a skiffle singer and washboard player in the coffee bars of Soho and Earls Court.
One night, he recalled, Princess Margaret turned up at the Fulham Road coffee bar where he was playing a gig: “One thing led to another, and Margaret and I began chatting. Sitting at adjoining tables, we swayed in time to the trad jazz group on the podium, our shoulders touched, eyes met, I caught the signal, and placed my hand on her knee. Oh gosh. Instantly, she sat bolt upright and her eyes grew cold and distant as diamonds. Within seconds, a couple of her chinless Guardsmen escorts – equerries? boyfriends? – loomed over me threateningly. I had unwittingly crossed a threshold into lèse-majesté.”
Meanwhile, he had embarked on a stormy relationship with Doris Lessing, which lasted four years before breaking up in acrimony. Lessing transformed Sigal (“hot and steaming into her prose like a still-struggling lobster”, as he put it) into Saul Green in her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook.
Sigal, meanwhile, explored the literary possibilities of their relationship in autobiographical novels beginning in 1962 with Going Away, in which he also documented the decline of the American Left.
In his sequel The Secret Defector (1992), his alter ego Gus Black complains to his lover Rose that he is “not the one who gets up in the middle of the night to transcribe on my typewriter what my lover has just gasped on the pillow”, although he then concedes, in an aside to the reader, that he “waited till next morning and wrote in longhand”.
In the early 1960s Sigal found himself in the Wimpole Street consulting room of the “celebrity shrink” RD Laing: “‘What are ye fookin’ around wi’ all that neurotic s--- for, Clancy?” he says in a Scottish accent I am to learn he can put on or off at will. ‘Tummy aches and faintin’ spells is crybaby stuff. Ye’ve got the makings of a good schizophrenic. Lucky ye’ve come to the right place.’ ”
They hit it off immediately, became drinking companions, took LSD together and co-founded at Kingsley Hall in East London “a haven for the truly desperate cases whom other doctors had given up on”. Their friendship ended, however, when Sigal had a genuine schizophrenic episode at the centre and was forcibly injected with Largactil: “Before I could fight back – at least four big guys, including Laing, were pinning me down – the drug took effect. The last thing I remember saying was, ‘You b------- don’t know what you’re doing.’”
His experiences would inspire Zone of the Interior, another fictional memoir in which Laing was the model for the renegade psychiatrist Willie Last (who returned for a cameo in The Secret Defector). It was eventually published in 1976 after several years in which no British publisher would take it on for fear of being sued for libel.
Over three decades living in London, Sigal worked as a correspondent and critic for various newspapers, including the Observer, whose editor David Astor sent him in 1962 to Dublin on a mission to save the life of Brendan Behan, amid fears that Behan was drinking himself to death. Sigal arrived in Ireland confident he could tempt the Irish writer off the bottle. Instead Behan took him off on an “unforgettable” week-long bender.
During the Vietnam War, Sigal was the “stationmaster” of a London safe house for GI deserters and draft dodgers.
At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, which Sigal had been sent to report on for the Observer, he met and fell in love with Janice Tidwell, who became his screenwriting partner and wife. His marriage ended his long sabbatical in England and he returned to the States to live in Los Angeles, teaching journalism at the University of Southern California.
He was one of several co-writers of the screenplay for the 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida, based on the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera. In 2013 he published Hemingway Lives! Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today.
He is survived by his wife and son.
Clancy Sigal, born September 6 1926, died July 17 2017