Blind Ambition

Up With the Sun a novel by Thomas Mallon.  Knopf.  337 pp.  $28.00.  *****

It’s a horrible thing to say, but I like Dick Kallman better when he’s dead.

That’s partly because author Thomas Mallon has chosen to tell Kallman’s story from dual viewpoints, one in the first person, told by Dick’s occasional piano-accompanist Matt Liannetto; the other in third person, tracing Dick’s early promising career, followed by its eventual nosedive.  Though the third-person sections are beautifully written, I prefer Matt’s quiet and modest voice.  As a person, he reminds me of Tim Laughlin, a character in Mallon’s political novel Fellow Travelers (with a wink at Mallon’s larger corpus, Tim’s lover Hawk Fuller does a cameo in this novel, as a casual partner for Kallman).

Kallman, alas, is anything but quiet and modest.  As soon as he enters a room he’s in your face, talking constantly about the great successes he’s recently had (always exaggerated) and the brilliant future he’s looking at, if you could just introduce him to that friend of yours, or put in a word with so and so.  I used to know a politician like that, a state senator who, every time you met him (he was famous for this) asked you to do something for him.  Don’t such people have a clue about how tiresome they get?  Apparently not.

By an odd coincidence, I just read The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel about the people who don’t make it, who go to Hollywood to find their dream and wind up as a hairdresser and part-time prostitute.  The eventual rage of those people is something to behold.  Kallman is not like that.  He’s a genuinely talented person, for one thing, who got his start in the musical Seventeen (based on a Booth Tarkington novel) and went on to be a member of Lucille Ball’s Desilu Workshop, before getting his own sitcom, entitled Hank, about a young man who is illegally auditing classes at college and impersonating students who are missing, a funny premise that turned out not to be not terribly funny in its execution.

That could have been Kallman’s big break, but it turned out to be a bust, getting canceled after a single season (it ran opposite Wild Wild West, which probably doomed it from the start).  By that time Kallman, with his world class abilities at name dropping and ass kissing, had started to wear everyone out, and a fair number of people were happy to see him fail.  He moved on to the fashion industry (where his constant hype seemed to work) and finally the antique business, where he lived in an apartment that was a showcase for his wares.

He achieved notoriety at the end of his life (Gore Vidal would have called this a good career move) by getting murdered, apparently by one of his customers (this isn’t a spoiler; it happens in the first chapter).  Our first-person narrator Matt, who knew Kallman through all his ups and downs (he was one of the pianists for Seventeen) was with him on the evening he died, and is an important material witness in finding his killer.  Sections about Matt’s posthumous life alternate with the third person story of his career.  I found those alternations a most effective way of telling the story.  But I was always longing, just a little, to get back to Matt, because I liked him so much as a character, and because (like the story of Tim and Hawk in Fellow Travelers) his story gives us a glimpse of gay life in the early eighties.

As a good-looking young man in the world of entertainment, Kallman was always having to pretend he was straight, show supposed interest in attractive women, start rumors about possible engagements.  In the meantime, there was all kinds of background patter about what was really going on and who was actually gay; a lot of that is most entertaining.  One of my favorite moments was when he made a move on Lesley Gore as a possible date, and it turned out she liked girls.  It’s her party and she’ll cry if she wants to.  But it’s not Johnny she wants; it’s Judy, who—as we may remember—left at the same time.

Mallon is a political junkie of epic proportions, as he demonstrated in his three novels about Republican Presidents, also in Henry and Clara (about the young couple in Lincoln’s box on the night he was assassinated) and Dewey Defeats Truman, but I find, somewhat to my surprise, that he seems to know as much about the entertainment business as about politics.  The sheer gossipy aspect of this novel is one of the most delightful things about it, at least for me.  I kept thinking, how does he know all this stuff?  I lived through exactly the same era and didn’t know any of it.  The cameo appearances just don’t stop happening.  I spent as much time googling people on my phone as I did reading the novel.  He should do an annotated volume.

But I must say, finally, as much fun as the novel is, it’s a cautionary tale about ambition, and how people are never free of it.  Almost no one in this novel is succeeding as they would like to, not Sophie Tucker (she takes solace in a cream puff), or Lucille Ball, or Dyan Cannon, talented and famous people.  Toward the end of Kallman’s story, a singer named Dolores Gray becomes his business partner, and she absolutely cannot get enough attention; when she finishes talking about herself it’s time for you to talk about her, or she isn’t listening.  She’s a successful person who is making herself miserable.

The exception to all that—hiding there in plain sight—is our narrator Matt, who enjoys his role in the background as a piano accompanist, always seems to have plenty of work, is happy when he finds a young lover who is good to him and wants to be with him, something poor Dick Kallman could never do (he wound up taking lovers who beat him up, as if life hadn’t done that already).  Matt enjoyed his talent because he accepted it as it was, and wasn’t constantly trying to be greater.  For me he’s the hero of this story.  Kallman is a sad casualty.