Clancy Sigal - The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years

Weekend in Dinlock

Going Away

Zone of the Interior

The Secret Defector

A Woman of Uncertain Character

Hemingway Lives!

Black Sunset

and my weekend with Clancy Sigal lasted thirty years.

His life was filled with writing, voracious reading, illness, anxiety, colossal insomnia and depression, but also with a profound and singular vivacity and the call of the typewriter bird his obsessive relationship with a keyboard. During those years we married, had our son Joe, went to Little League games, worked together, wrote scripts together, argued together; I edited his work, and he edited mine. He left England to live with me in California.

Yes, Clancy Sigal really did leave his beloved London. He kept a journal of dreams: zig-zagging through chaotic streets, geese flying over Primrose Hill, his flat in Princes Square, broadcasting on the BBC, pub food. He dreamt of his friends, the women he knew (keep on reading), anti-war marches, anti-nuclear marches, and even megalithic mounds. He dreamt of acid trips he took with R. D. Laing (Doris Lessing called him that poseur) and a Beatle or two, smashed on LSD straight from the Sandoz Swiss lab. Those days, it was legal, though it wouldnt have mattered either way. Clancy was frank: he said he had never slept with Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton or Princess Margaret, but Ill let the reader decide. Nothing would surprise me.

The first time I met him the very first time I was hanging in inversion boots, a 1980s Southern California fitness fad. Upside down like a sloth, straining to do sit-ups from a metal bar in a doorway, I was clad in a silver unitard a skintight, one-piece number and this combination of ballet leotard and tights really didnt leave much to the imagination. We exchanged greetings: Hello, hello, so nice to meet you. He came by to talk to my then-boyfriend, David Strick, a photo-journalist, for a piece Clancy was writing for the Observer. This was prior to his massive heart attack in 1984 after eating a Dodger [hot] Dog with everything on it, landing him in the hospital for a month. Our three-way marriage: Clancy, his dodgy cardiac health and me.

After his recovery, we ran into each other at a packed and drunken party in Venice. My silver unitard was still etched into his NHS-issued black-rimmed glasses. Woody Allen could have directed the scene: Clancy trying to hit on me couldnt be heard over the twenty noisy bodies smashed between us. Three years later, I was single, so was he. A dinner party at the Santa Monica flat of Grover and Rae Lewis. (Grover was one of the early, great Rolling Stone writers.) On the wall of the screened-in balcony, a few blocks from Ocean Avenue, a pink neon rainbow cast a cool light. (Gus Hasford, author of The Short Timers, had christened this niche, with affection, the Caf Cafard.) Here, complicated OK, neurotic pals came to argue jazz, blues, books, and movies, and shoot the shit. Pitchers of Raes lethal margaritas flowed. Canary Island palms with heavy dark pediments blocked out the moon. Clancy asked me to a movie. We walked out after ten minutes; I demanded our money back and what can you say? If you have the same taste in movies, live it up: fall in love.

Clancy had many close encounters with history. It was no coincidence. He was fuelled by causes. It was in his DNA. He was always Going Away (the title of his second book, a runner-up for the National Book Award). He was an American Jewish soldier packing a gun, going AWOL to bum rush the Nuremberg Trial of Hermann Gring, meaning to kill him. Going to UCLA, battling his arch-enemies, future Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, whom he earnestly interviewed during and after their prison terms. Going to Hollywood during the time of the toad, what Hollywood Ten blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo called the infamous period of McCarthyism. Communist Clancy had the balls to get hired as a Sunset Strip talent agent who yes he did rejected both James Dean and the Hillbilly Cat Elvis as clients. Going to Paris to fuck Simone de Beauvoir, as he boasted to his client Nelson Algren. (Nelson: He didnt know Id knocked around with her, so I kept my mouth shut.)

And yes, Clancy went to London for the weekend

He became Doris Lessings lover; sorry, Doris was Clancys lover. Ancient history, except for Saul Green in The Golden Notebook. People are still curious who can blame them? Their three tumultuous years together forged a relationship that lasted a lifetime. They never stopped being incensed at each other, yet they corresponded warmly (mostly) up until she couldnt. In the early sixties at British Vogue, Clancy wore a brown wool, Friar Tuck-type monks robe. I wondered where he got it at the local Monks Robe Shop? Doris made it for me. What?? Doris Lessing, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, sewed you a monks robe? What a genius way of cursing her ex-boyfriend!

The last few years of Clancys life were very difficult physically. Strangely, it was a most productive time. Seldom a day went by when he didnt write all day. He lost his sight in the last few months. While dictating a new book, in terrific pain, he said he was ready to die. I tried to understand: You want to die; you want to write? Absolutely, he said calmly. There is no contradiction. Clancy died on July 16, 2017.

Why did he write The London Lover? CLANCY WAS HERE thats why. He wrote it for our son Joe, whom he had very late in life. Doris wrote to Clancy in 2006: Tell me, have you wondered what sort of a labyrinth your boy will find if he ever tries to find out about you?

Janice Tidwell, Los Angeles

HOMELESS AND ILLEGAL IN LONDON

Kicked out of Paris by the French police for having a cancelled US passport and no visa (and probably for speaking the language so badly). Fed up with Europe, Im going back to Hollywood, but first a London weekend so this trip isnt a total waste. Dovers white cliffs loom over the cross-Channel ferry backing into its berth where, hiding among tourists, I purposely jostle a teenager to distract the duty Immigration Officer. Then out free on the street I grab a bus rolling up the A28. What sort of money do the English take? Constantly swivel my neck to look over my shoulder. Did it! Without permission of the US State Department. When I see my FBI file in later years, Im proud to see Im noted as, SM SUBVERSIVE (FOREIGN INFLUENCE).

Forty dollars remain from an original thousand. Where did it all go? Fool! Drawing to inside straights to impress my Paris girlfriend. Dont ever play poker with French intellectuals: they take forever to bet and then sucker you.

Roll into Victoria coach station. This London spring is like a Chicago winter, Im shivering in the pale sunlight. My bones shake in the cold. Keep walking to stay warm.

ON THE RUN

An American living rough in the Smoke has a few eminent examples to follow. London Yankees like Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Mark Twain and Hart Crane lived high; even a socialist like Jack London, posing as a sailor, sewed $100 in gold coins ($2,500 in todays money) in his jacket lining when he plunged into the slums of the East End to write The People of the Abyss. Smart Jacko. Im a homeless bum, finding a snug berth under Charing Cross bridge and on Hyde Parks wet grass. Ill be gone tomorrow, Inspector, I swear.