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Dick Kallman was an up-and-coming actor in the fifties and sixties—until he wasn’t. A costar on Broadway, a member of Lucille Ball’s historic Desilu workshop, and finally a primetime TV actor, Dick had hustled to get his big break. But just as soon as his star began to rise, his roles began to dry up and he faded from the spotlight, his name out of tabloids and newspapers until his sensational murder in 1980.
Through the eyes of his occasional pianist and longtime acquaintance Matt Liannetto, a tenderhearted but wry observer often on the fringes of Broadway’s big moments, Kallman’s life and death come into appallingly sharp focus. The actor’s yearslong, unrequited love for a fellow performer brings out a competitive, vindictive edge in him. Whenever a new door opens, Kallman rushes unwittingly to close it. Even as he walks over other people, he can never get out of his own way.
As Matt pores over the life of this handsome could-have-been, Up With the Sun re-creates the brassy, sometimes brutal world that shaped Kallman, capturing his collisions with not only Lucille Ball, but an array of stars from Sophie Tucker to Judy Garland and Johnny Carson. Part crime story, part showbiz history, and part love story, this is a crackling novel about personal demons and dangerously suppressed passions that spans thirty years of gay life—the whole tumultuous era from the Kinsey Report through Stonewall and, finally, AIDS.
Author: Thomas Mallon
Paperback Published 6 February 2024 352 pages
Originally published in hardcover 7 February 2023
"Engrossing. . . . [A] keen portrait of 1980s New York, [an] effortless evocation of the period. . . . What emerges as the book unfolds is a pensive, often gorgeous depiction of the contrast — or really, the continuum — between gay life in Manhattan before Stonewall and life on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic, a contrast that grows sharper, and infinitely sadder, as the book proceeds. . . . [A] vast, sweeping pattern that comes into view in the book’s final quarter, when its grand design, and Mallon’s true historical subject, reveals itself. . . . Up With the Sun's great triumph is to render its world in not two dimensions but three, to make the lives of a pair of peripheral players not merely operatic but genuinely, shatteringly tragic." —The Washington Post
"Much of the fun in Up With the Sun comes from Mallon’s treatment of the parade of showbiz players that cross paths with Kallman. . . . Where Mallon sprinkles his celebs you can bet their activities and résumés are rooted at least partially in reality (he includes photos of Kallman at various points of his career, adding to the novel’s documentary sheen). . . . In the end, Up With the Sun has its cake and eats it, too. It’s an ode to the more poisonous elements of show business that it also manages to bask in the ridiculousness of it all. You won’t like Dick Kallman. But good luck taking your eyes off him." —The Boston Globe
“In this funny, vicious tale of ambition and moral corrosion, Thomas Mallon turns his rapier intelligence and seismographic sense of the workings of power to the worlds of Hollywood and Broadway. Among imperishable legends and declining stars, he chronicles desperate competition and half-open secrets, the longing for the next new thing and the lure of the past. Up With the Sun is a novel as stark as a Greek drama and as delicious as gossip.” —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You