DL Book Club: 'Up With the Sun' by Thomas Mallon

OP is this supposed to be a book club thread or a specific books's thread?

Thanks OP! This sounds like a delightful mix of reality and delusion -- I just put it on my list at the library.

I enjoyed the chapters set in the past as Dick Kallman’s career on Broadway and in Hollywood was shown with appearances from real celebrities. I was a little bored by the post-murder chapters.

Always enjoy Thomas Mallon’s books. I have a copy of this book at my bedside, but I’m currently reading Blood & Ink, a double homicide from 100 years ago.

^ about a double homicide

The doomed Dick Kallman on Hullabaloo.

Dick Kallman naively allowed a magazine article to be written about him that featured all his rare pricey antiques in his home. Could that be what gave the perps the idea to rob and kill him?

Wonderfully tawdry. Full of casual gay sex encounters. And the violent crime that ends in Kallman’s death is a scintillating mixture of antiques, cocaine, the disappearance of a Macguffin -like jeweled souvenir of unrequited love, gay hustlers and an innocent boyfriend studying at Columbia Law School.

And Dolores Gray as Helen Lawson.

There was a thread on this late last year, so I bought the book.

Entertaining and worth the read.

Introduced at 11:07, Dick was one of the "kids" on the Desilu Playhouse, a gig that was a subject of the book.

Kallman sounds like he was a piece of work. All previous accounts of his murder were more sympathetic than Mallon's version which apparently is well supported.

[quote]Kallman sounds like he was a piece of work.

In Mallon's telling, so is Dolores Gray. Vain, selfish, moneygrubbing, holds a high opinion of her career.

I adore her extreme Fifties style, which clearly inspired Lypsinka.

It’s fun to see so many of the “characters” in Mallon’s book show up in R10’s link.

Are we so sure Dolores Gray isn't Frank Langella in drag.

The author, interviewed about the book.

I was there for the interview. He was very entertaining. I can hear my friend's laughter in the video.

He's the definition of unctuous in R6's link.

[on working with Lucille Ball and Robert Osborne and Dick Kallman of the Desilu Players] Robert Osborne was an actor at that time and his lover was a guy named Dick Kallman who was the most evil human being I ever met. Obnoxious and mean. He always had Lucy's ear. He and Osborne were always together. For instance, we'd be rehearsing and something wouldn't work. You'd say, "I don't know if this stuff is going to work" And within two minutes Lucy was walking through the back saying, "What do you mean it doesn't work!" Kallman would get on the phone and call her and tell her that I was complaining about the material. What we were doing was going through the regular rehearsal process. But it was bizarre. Dick Kallman was killed in his apartment in New York. They never found the killer. He was shot. When I said to Roger Perry, who had been one of the Desilu Players... I ran into him years later... I said, " Did you hear about Dick Kallman? He was killed." Roger said, "Yeah!" With a big smile.

R12 is what happened after Bea Bernadette went to Madonna’s plastic surgeon and insisted on looking just like Audrey Meadows.

I saw him in a production of "How to Succeed" when I was a baby gaylette. Willard Waterman played the Rudy V

R19 Was Bea Bernadette played by Jennifer Jones?

A little more of that interview with Howie Storm about Dick Kallman.

I wonder how Lucy picked the people for the Desilu Players---Carole Cook was the only one writh real longevity, but basically as a working performer, not a star. Roger Perry had a series with Desilu and did guest shot for quite while, but he seems more noatble for having married Joanne Worley and DL fave Joyce Builfant (after Bill Asher)---I alwayts confused him with his contemporary Roger Perry (who had a longer career) and with the younger Mark Slade (who looked like both of them but became a writer and acrtoonist).

I wonder how Osborne could stand Kallman, but then again he seemed to have remained friendly with Lucy who was no walk in the park. I wonder if he stayed in touch with Kallman?

It's hard to separate fact from fiction, since Mallon says in an intro that he invented quite. a bit. I too saw Kallman in How to Succed plus Half a Sixpence. Remember both shows vividly, but not Kallman. Did he really offer a columnist some dirt on Lucy to futher his career? Did. Dick have a very strange relationship with an Episcopal priest he consulted for therapy? Hard to tell.

Robert Osborne talking about the Desilu Players and how he, Carole Cook and Dick Kallman were Lucy's favorites.

The February 26, 1966, TV Guide has the article about Kallman mentioned in the book. It is indeed a sharp criticism of him that reveals everything negative about him and his show...... Barbara Stanwyck is on the cover.....and if you're interested in the subject you can usually find a copy on Ebay for $10 or less.

There was a discussion in the Theatre thread, I think, on this around 4 or 5 months ago - I read it, too, based on that discussion.

Interesting book to a degree, though Kallman seemed to be a self-important bore. The fun was in the small details. Agree that it seemed to lose most of its oomph about 2/3rds of the way through.

[quote] Robert Osborne talking about the Desilu Players and how he, Carole Cook and Dick Kallman were Lucy's favorites.

If the book is to be believed Kallman very much fell out of Lucy's favor.

Howie Storm is, at 90, still alive.

A footnote on Kallman’s Wikipedia page links to this 2010 DL thread.

Thanks, R30. I see that R7 in that thread had the impression that Dick was a great person. Ha.

The author had contacted my aunt, Carole Cook, to interview her regarding Dick Kallman. I doubt she dreamt she would be a character in the book. Nor did I, but I’m reading it now (the author, Thomas Mallon, kindly sent an inscribed copy). A bit surreal. Of course I recall Carole speaking of Kallman, and that he had recommended her to Lucille Ball. The TV Star was looking for a comedienne for her Desilu Review, and apparently Kallman said, “I know just the person!” Carole was a bit surprised by the gesture. She and Kallman, while acquainted, were not really friends, nor particularly close at all. In any case, the author did capture her “voice” and many of her expressions. While Carole was shocked by Kallman’s murder, she would not have been so invested in the event to have attended the subsequent trial, etc. At the time of Kallman’s death, Carole was appearing in Bernie Slade’s “Romantic Comedy” with Mia Farrow and Tony Perkins, and subsequently went into the musical “42nd Street.” She simply wouldn’t have had the time or energy to focus on much else.

I'm reading this right now because it has been so recommended on this forum, and it really is the ultimate Datalounge novel. It's very well written, and the characters (who are almost all shallow and scheming) and very well defined. It's a great look at that kind of minor world of popular culture from 1957-1980, and how it moves from having its roots back in time to vaudeville and variety (at the hotel his grandparents owned where Dick Kallman was raised in the NE), then spreading out to Broadway (the world Kallman wants to conquer most of all), and then ending up with a rock 'n' roll world most of the characters were not able to adapt to quickly enough.

Dick Kallman comes off very vividly as a mean, ruthless, heel who loves to show off. Dolores Gray is a vain and self-important mess.

This is the culture DL adores and talks about incessantly, but that the rest of the world seems to have forgotten--where Dolores Gray could casually compare things in real life to Michael Kidd's choreography for the Broadway version of "Destry Rides Again" and fully expect NYC gay men to understand what she's talking about.

[Quote] I was a little bored by the post-murder chapters.

Funny, I had the opposite feeling, for two reasons.

1) As I was a 70s kid (well, late 60s to mid 70s, if we assume being a kid is ages 5-12), I associated with that vanished world more than the 1950s or even early 60s.

2) The post-murder scenes involve almost entirely fictional characters. I could just sit back and enjoy the fiction as fiction. The Kallman life story contained a mix of real and fictional people and events, and that has the storytelling equivalent of the “uncanny valley” for me. It’s real but not quite real. I’m never sure if I’m learning about the past, or reading a story. I found myself googling characters a lot to see if they were real.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book. I’m just never certain how to digest this sort of historical fiction.

Mallon has really good ideas for books but he's a terrible prose stylist. His editors have always had to do a major job cleaning up his prose.

I loved the book! Read it when it first came out, as a fan of Mallon and also somewhat acquainted with Kallman's history, and this thread makes me want to reread it. I really enjoyed the way Mallon intertwined the fictional character of the musician into Kallman's (more or less) real story, especially his poignant ending. I didn't find the book to peter out at all.

Brilliant scene when Kallman meets up with Lucy years after their initial relationship on the Desilu lot.

IIRC Mallon does not write up Bob Osborne as a lover of Kallman, is that correct? Mallon might be a friend of NY entertainer/producer David Staller who was Osborne's (much younger) widower - so possibly he didn't want to incur his wrath, even if the Kallman/Osborne relationship was true.

Staller had not heard of the book until after it was published. I doubt he was a friend of Malllon's. More likely Mallon knew Osborne was closeted and protective of his privacy. He never came out during his lifetime.

It’s both extremely well researched—and fictionalized, which can be puzzling. If Mallon says Kallman was on Johnny Carson on such a date with these other guests, look it up—he was on that night with those other guests. So—is the account of what he actually did on the show accurate? Those early Tonight Shows were notoriously erased—but in all the author’s interviews, listed on the same page he describes the book as fiction, maybe somebody (Osborne? Cook?) remembered the show? Hard to tell.

Or, more intriguingly, Dyan Cannon appears as the female lead in the How to Succeed national tour referenced above—true. So, was Kallman so jealous that she was getting laughs and pulling focus from him that he deliberately closed a door on her, smashing a finger, during a performance to teach her a lesson. A real incident or invented?

And, yes, R36, the book explicitly states Kallman and Osborne were involved, right down to a description of their sex life—Kallman more passive than usual because of Osborne’s leading man looks and years in the Air Force.

I'm reading it and it's as if all the favorites from datalounge keep appearing in it. The narrator runs into Dick and Pat Nixon walking in the city in 1980. At one point Dick Kallman goes to see Judy Garland at the famous Carnegie Hall concert (he's so self-absorbed he barely mistens to most of it), and he notices little Lorna and Joey sitting in the front next to Rock Hudson, who will hand them over the footlights at the curtain call. Then later Kallman goes to see opening night of "Wildcat," and while Lucy disappoints everyone with a "lifeless, hoarse" rendition of "Hey, Look me Over," Kallman looks at the other woman on stage with her and thinks, "I do wish that were Vivian Vance."

I wish I had read this years ago. Dick Kallman in this novel is a wonderful realization--he's so spiteful and envious, and keeps undoing himself via his own ruthless ambition and ill-will. He's a great anti-hero character--sort of like Sammy Glick.

In Mallon's defense, he wrote three other books that I think are terrific: Fellow Traveler, Henry and Clara, and Dewey Defeats Truman—all historical fiction, mixing fact and fantasy. I think that's what he does In the Kallman book.

So far, no one has mentioned his love-hate relationship with Kenneth Nelson in the book. Lovers, but Dick was so jealous of Nelson's successes with Fantasticks and Boys in the Band.

As a teen, I saw him do How to Succeed and Half a Sixpence on their national tours. Forgettable.

I don't think there's a consistent rule to Mallon's writing in terms of mixing fiction and fact and IMO that's just fine. It keeps you guessing. And in my case, anyway, keeps me googling.

I have had issues with some of his other novels that are set in historic political periods. Unlike Up With the Sun, I'm not always knowledgeable enough about the history or politics to follow them and I find Mallon, for better or worse, presumes that particular context within the reader's knowledge. I've eagerly started a few and then find myself gradually lost.

But an early book of his I would highly recommend is Bandbox which is set in Manhattan in the 1920s at a fashionable men's magazine (sort of like Esquire). Outright funny and farcical unlike his later books and with some wonderfully drawn (closeted) gay characters. A great summer read.

The interviewer at r15, handsome Louis Bayard, is a great novelist, too. Several of his books are fictionalized bios or histories, the most recent called The Wildes, about Oscar Wilde's wife, two sons and young lover Bosie and what happened to them all after the infamous indecency trials and Oscar's death.

I also loved his book Courting Mr. Lincoln, about young Abe Lincoln, his courtship of Mary Todd and his simultaneous and rather mysterious friendship with Joshua Speed (with whom he shared a bed).

And Jackie & Me, about young Jackie Kennedy when she was a roving newspaper photographer and her long friendship with JFK's old roommate Lem Billings.

Definitely an author for DL book lovers to check out.

[quote]I'm reading it and it's as if all the favorites from datalounge keep appearing in it.

I swear I saw Helen Lawson's name in it (just started reading it)

There's a special place in hell for people like Mallon, a lifetime far right republican (who wrote Dan Quayle's autobiography), who earn their money from the gays who buy their books but who support right-wingers who pass laws that endanger gays' lives.

I think Mallon has come around, I believe he has spoken out against Trump

He's a tiny man.

100 % in agreement with r42.

I read it when it came out and was engrossed by it at first, but as I made my way through it, it became clear that once you take away the celeb cameos and stringing together the gossipy details, there's not much that's original or inventive there in terms of the story.

[quote]"I do wish that were Vivian Vance."

Something every Datalounger has thought or said many times.

One of the things that's odd about it is that Dick Kallman is insanely ambitious but it doesn't seem to occur to him to use the casting couch to get ahead. And yet he was attractive and had a great ass (as you can see from watching clips of "Hank" on youtube).

Maybe Kallman did use the casting couch IRL but Mallon chose not to go there?

No, Mallon is still a right-winger who supports anti-gay legislation while making money off the gays.

He's basically the log cabinettes literary hero.

Could you please provide some documentation on that, r52?

What's the significance of the title?

R54, it comes from a line in the theme song for Hank

r52, unless you can back those claims up, we're going to have to assume you're talking out of your ass.

I finished reading it. It's much more interesting as a sort of sociological study of a certain world at a certain time than it is as a novel, mostly because Dick Kallman is both horrible and ultimately negligible as a person (he doesn't have enough to him to make him intriguing for long, and he's--probably accurately--always cracking cheesy jokes when anyone's paying attention to him). That's supposed to be balanced by making the main narrator Matt much more likeable, but he's a bit too idealized and humble to seem real or interesting.

I was interested in the depictions of famous show biz types: Dolores Gray comes across as vain and performative and manipulative, but not a bad person the way Kallman is; Kaye Ballard comes across as likeable and human; Carole Cook is very winning and funny; Lucille Ball is a bit sentimental at times but mostly hard as nails. I would guess all those things were likely true.Kenneth Nelson and Robert Osbourne get pretty idealized, but I'm sure that was deserved in Osbourne's case--it does seem to cause a flaw in the book, though, that Nelson (who is Kallman's constant object of erotic obsession) is so nice and good. The only thing does that's all negative is reject Kallman sexually very early on when they do a musical together, and it's never entirely explained why (since Nelson is also gay, and Kallman is very attractive when he;s young).

It's interesting to me it's not a sexier book than it is. Mallon is very clear that until he gets sick Matt enjoys a healthy sex life with his partner, and that Kallman became increasingly into leather, B&D, and S&M as he got older, but there are practically no actual sex scenes in the book.

^Thank God.

Mallon does not write sex scenes.

Interesting that Mallon not only starts threads about himself, but comments on them voraciously

After reading this thread (thanks for it btw, love Datalounge) I thought the Dick Kallman book might be a fun read so I picked it up/downloaded it and found it a fascinating mix of fiction and real life. I had no idea that Mallon also wrote Fellow Travelers, so I downloaded that as well but couldn't quite get through it (still trying), maybe after having watched the TV version -- the shifting of time periods seems even more difficult to understand than they did on TV. I like how Mallon describes himself as being a D+ talent with an A+ discipline. Untrue. He's a remarkable author. Really liked the interview by Louis Bayard above and have read him as well. Even at 60, he's a babe! Thanks OP ♥