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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: May 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785784408

Clancy Sigal

Clancy Sigal was born and raised in Chicago, the son of two labor organizers. He enlisted in the army and, as a GI in occupied Germany, attended the Nuremberg war crimes trials intending to shoot Herman Göring. Although blacklisted and trailed by FBI agents, he began work as a Hollywood agent on the Sunset Strip, hiding in plain sight and representing Humphrey Bogart, among many others.  Sigal moved to London in the 1950s and stayed in the UK for thirty years, writing and broadcasting regularly from the same BBC studios that George Orwell had used. During the Vietnam War, he was the “stationmaster” of a London safe house for American GI deserters and draft dodgers. For several years, he collaborated with the radical “anti-psychiatrists” R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with whom he founded Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, a halfway house for so-called incurable cases. Sigal’s most recent book was the memoir Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal, and Raging Egos (Soft Skull Press, 2016).