Up With the Sun

September 1, 2022

In the 1950s-60s, actor Dick Kallman starred on Broadway and prime-time television but retired as the roles thinned out; in 1980, he was murdered during a robbery at the Manhattan apartment where he lived with partner Stephen Szladek. Reimagining his life, Lambda and Pen/Faulkner finalist Mallon brings out Kallman's sharp edge and self-destructive tendencies, backdropped by the strains of show business and the era's suppression of gay rights.

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Starred review from November 28, 2022
Mallon’s sparkling latest (afterWatergate) draws inspiration from real-life actor Dick Kallman’s career on Broadway and television and his 1980 murder. A pianist named Matt Liannetto, who first met Dick while working on the 1951 Broadway musical Seventeen, provides the narration. Matt had dinner at Dick’s in 1980, the night Dick and his partner, Steven, were killed during a botched robbery. Alternating chapters describe the actor’s career. The “aggressively ingratiating” Dick opens for comic singer Sophie Tucker (who gets in a few good lines); works with Lucille Ball, who has the manipulative and bombastic Dick’s number; and stars in the touring company for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which leads to his ill-fated TV series, Hank. After Seventeen star Kenneth Nelson rejects Dick’s advances, Dick’s decade-long obsession with Kenneth drives the story. Meanwhile, Matt goes to identify a murder suspect in a “vocal lineup,” where he meets and becomes romantically involved with Devin Arroyo, who works with the police. Mallon finds a natural sweetness in his depiction of Matt and Devin’s relationship as the trial and its aftermath unfold—a nice contrast to Dick’s unpleasant story. Peppering the juicy drama of Dick’s ambition and unrequited love with pop cultural references, as well as cameos from Dyan Cannon and Kaye Ballard, Mallon creates a fascinating, page-turning tale. Readers will be swept off their feet. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

December 1, 2022
Mallon follows up his 2019 novel Landfall with another superb novelization of real life; this time it's a fictionalized rendering of the life of onetime actor and antiques dealer Dick Kallman. The book opens dramatically with an account of Kallman's 1980 murder as reported by his longtime acquaintance--and first-person narrator-- Matt Liannetto. The novel then flashes back to 1951, when an omniscient narrator begins to limn Kallman's life, beginning with his obsessive love for the real-life fellow actor Kenneth Nelson. Other real-life characters include Sophie Tucker, Kaye Ballard, and actress/singer Dolores Gray, who plays a major supporting role as Kallman's friend and business partner. The novel then moves back and forth in time as readers get to know Matt and his boyfriend Devin, as well as Kallman. The two time lines finally merge with a reprise of Kallman's death and what happens to Matt and Devin thereafter. Fluidly written with well-realized characters, the novel is great gossipy fun to read. Film and theater buffs will be delighted.

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January 1, 2023
The author of a smart, tart series of political novels--most recently Landfall (2019)--casts an equally well-informed, unromantic eye on the entertainment industry and its closeted gay denizens. Once a moderately successful actor, then a shady antiques dealer, Dick Kallman is dead when the novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980. Narrator Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist and intermittent friend, recalls the strained dinner party Dick threw on the night of his murder, interrupted by the arrival of a supposed client who in retrospect is a glaring suspect. (Kallman's career and death are factual; the circumstances of his murder are bent to fictional use.) Matt then flashes back to 1951, when he was pianist for the musical Seventeen, Dick had a supporting role, and both were smitten by leading man Kenneth Nelson (among the many real-life show-biz figures who make appearances). Dick's crush proves to be a lifelong obsession as chapters alternate with mechanical regularity between the rise and fall of Dick's career and the grim aftermath of his death. The crime brings love to Matt in the person of much younger Devin Arroyo, a former hustler now working at the police precinct, and their sweet romance provides a welcome respite from Mallon's depressingly accurate portrayal of life on show business's striving fringes. From landing a promising spot in Lucille Ball's television empire, through decent gigs as the lead in Broadway touring companies, to a one-season television flop, Dick always finds that his embarrassingly obvious scheming ends up thwarting his naked ambition. He stops getting work by the 1970s, he admits to himself, "because nobody, at least nobody that knew him, liked him." Dick's personality is skin-crawlingly plausible, but that makes it hard to feel sorry for him, even as Mallon acidly limns the ridiculous games gay actors were forced to play--dates with "beards," fake engagements--in those pre-Stonewall days. The novel's tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick's unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true. Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon's work, but overall a disappointment.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 1, 2023

Mallon (Landfall) is known and lauded for fictionalizing historical events, political and otherwise; with this newest offering he puts a highlight on the brutal murder of a flash-in-the-pan actor turned fashionmonger turned antique salesman and the trial that brought the murderers to justice. Indeed, it seems, Dick Kallman did anything and everything he could in his many attempts toward the attainment of fame and glory. Told in first-person accounts from one-time friend and murder witness Matt Liannetto and third-person accounts that span three decades of the actor's life, this sprawling look at being gay in the 1950s and 1960s seems to leave nothing out. Here we read about everything: from Kallman's relationships--or lack thereof--with Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Carole Cook, and other celebrities of the day, to his bids for prominence in musicals such as Seventeen and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Then there was his title role in the 1965 TV show Hank, which received terrible reviews and lasted but a season. Notably, nearly every effort by the celebrity seemed doomed from the start. VERDICT Had the author's note left unspecified the many liberties taken, readers could easily assume this was a true-crime biography. Historical fiction or otherwise, this account of the tragic death of an inhabitant of gay Hollywood certainly captivates.--Joel D. Shoemaker

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