Up With the Sun 
by Thomas Mallon
Knopf, 2023


Meet the late Dick Kallman: Actor, singer, dancer, murder victim.

Prolific writer Thomas Mallon—11 novels since 1987, plus a hefty handful of non-fiction works—has made idiosyncratic historical fiction his métier. Two of his early novels were among my favorites of the ‘90s: Henry and Clara examines the sad fate of the couple assigned to share the box at Ford’s Theater with the Lincolns the night of the president’s assassination; Dewey Defeats Truman, set on Election Night 1948, captures the head rush—and ultimate dispirited letdown—of the citizens of Thomas Dewey’s Michigan hometown, after what seemed an inevitable triumph became a shocking reversal of fortune.

Mallon’s most celebrated work has been the 2008 Fellow Travelers, concerning a gay relationship between two Washington DC government employees struggling against the backdrop of Joseph McCarthy’s war against Communists and homosexuals. The book was adapted into an impressive opera and will have further life as a non-musical TV series streaming soon on your favorite device.
After fictive forays into goings-on in the Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush administrations (which I have not read), Mallon’s latest returns energetically to mid-century, using as his canvas the glittering, sordid landscape of Broadway and Hollywood from 1950 to the early ‘80s. Mallon has gleefully mined these worlds for sexual hijinks, naked ambition, narcissism, backstabbing, greed, and ultimately murder—both real and imagined. (In an Author’s Note, Mallon writes that many of the book’s details have been “considerably altered by the author’s imagination . . . Some of this novel’s characters never existed at all.”)

At the center is Dick Kallman, a real, once-promising but ill-fated stage, film, and TV performer, whose charming demeanor (he’s called “aggressively ingratiating”) and pleasant musical skills helped him rise above chorus-boy status, but not far enough above to please Kallman himself: stardom remained frustratingly out of reach.

There were small roles in Broadway musicals, a fair-to-middlin’ night club act, and a promising boost by Lucille Ball (herself enjoying something of a pop culture renaissance of late). Post I Love Lucy, Ball created and mentored a repertory company of promising young performers, including Kallman. None of them went on to lasting fame, but at least it won Kallman a prime-time sitcom (with a predictably asinine premise), cancelled after one season.

Broadway fame tantalized as well, when Kallman sought the lead in one of the era’s greatest successes, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He lost the role to Robert Morse, whose career endured, albeit bumpily, for decades. Kallman had to settle for headlining the show on its first national tour. Ditto with Half a Sixpence, a modest hit on Broadway that Kallman headlined on the road. (I saw both, in Detroit, and vividly remember the shows, but not their star.)

When he finally faced the reality of his failing career, Kallman called on his entrepreneurial skills—plus a handy instinct for fine art and antiques—to begin anew as a private dealer based in his plush New York apartment. It’s there he met the grisly end that gives the book its momentum: shot to death, along with his lover.

Two alternating narrators tell the story: one takes us into in Kallman’s head, the other belongs to Matt, a Broadway pianist whose life dovetailed with Kallman’s, from the early 1950s, where they both worked in a flop musical, to the early 80s, when Matt becomes a fact witness to Kallman’s murder.


Mallon seems to have been exhilarated with this sabbatical from the buttoned-up halls of DC and immersing himself for a time in the uninhibited raciness of showbiz. He excavates deeply into the mines of the lore. Real life cameos from celebrities—readers under 50 might wish for a glossary—give the book its pep. Those of us familiar with Kaye Ballard, Carole Cook, Mabel Mercer, Ted Hooks, Sophie Tucker, Janet Gaynor, Henry Willson, Earl Wilson, Jerry Zipkin, Dagmar, Pat Buckley, and more are rewarded with a nostalgic rush, many of whom prove the point that fame can be fleeting.

(Speaking of cameos, Mallon has slyly provided an Easter egg when Hawkins Fuller, a closeted— fictional—State Department official from Fellow Travelers makes a brief appearance to meet and flirt with our boy Dick. Whether they “tricked”—the word of choice for hooking up in that era— is left to the reader’s, and Mallon’s, imagination.)

Mallon also honors gay history with nods to historic events, including placing both Kallman and Matt in the audience of Carnegie Hall the night Judy Garland performed her legendary 1961 concert. Mallon makes the event a turning point for Kallman:

“Every other seat seemed filled by the kind of old homo he’d seen sneaking into every Third Avenue bar since before the El came down... Two of them here had tears running down their faces. As everybody and his uncle knew, whatever was broken in these guys was reaching toward and sparking whatever was broken in her. He would never connect like that with an audience; he had sensed it all along, and come to know it in some hard, real way during the last few stalled years.”

Speaking of gay icons, let’s hear it for the contributions of Dolores Gray—rich of voice, plain of face—and cherished since the early ‘50s, thanks mostly for her camp classic numbers in MGM musicals. She makes frequent contributions to the fun, not only as a walking punch line, but also as an enduring relic of the era. As Kallman’s latter day business partner in his commercial endeavors, Gray is perpetually snobbish, vain, overcostumed, and suspicious that his death will cheat her out of her financial due.

And then there’s Kallman, about whom almost no one in the book can find a positive word: “You’re trying to swim but feel yourself sinking and he’s the one with his hand on your head,” says one character. Another: “I’d never seen Dick be truly sincere about anything, and if he started now, I think it would have repulsed me.”

This blend fact and fiction leaves the reader tantalizing questions. Did Kallman take advantage of an heiress’s naiveté by cruelly using her as a beard? Did he sell out his friend and patron Lucille Ball by fabricating a lurid story and trading it to a gossip columnist to advance his career? Did his regular visits to an Episcopal priest and family friend for counseling usually end with oral sex as a therapeutic add-on?

Mallon’s attempts to mitigate Kallman’s bad behavior via an overbearing mother and society’s widespread homophobia soften him a bit, but he remains throughout a chap most would avoid at parties (Episcopal clergymen excepted).

Still, antiheroes can be fun, so by contrast Matt the pianist is something of a milquetoast, a useful tool to fill in the narrative gaps, and he’s carries the burden of the book’s latter half with the aftermath of the murders and the trials of the killers. These chapters are largely suspense-free and include the appearance of Devin, a former hooker with a heart of gold, who’s also an ace police informer and office dogsbody, who becomes Matt’s boyfriend and eventual caregiver. He seems grafted from another novel.

Mallon is a solidly conventional novelist, and the book is a pleasant read. But I couldn’t help but wish for something more sharp-edged, satiric, and sexier. (Paging Bruce Wagner and Paul Rudnick?) But it’s clearly the best (only) book we’re going to get on Dick Kallman in our lifetimes, and I take some comfort in imagining the joy it would bring him to have captured even a small portion of the spotlight—even if it comes four decades late and meant taking a bullet to the brain.

I could not put this book down. I absolutely loved it because it was a mix of true crime and old Hollywood/Broadway. The book alternates between the story of Dick Kallman as a struggling actor in the 1950's and 1960"s who knows many famous people and the 1980's in the aftermath and trial for his murder. There is a pin that carries great significance throughout the book even though it seems inconsequential at first. I got really engaged with the characters and the heartbreak of being closeted during that time with fears of being outed. This is a fictionalized novel of real life characters and celebrities and I found myself referring to IMDB to read up on some of the key players. I really enjoyed the read -- Thomas Mallon is a great and clever writer and I plan to read "Fellow Travelers" an older book of his next. I highly recommend this book.
Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Loved this book! Delighted to highlight it in the February edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (column at link)

Mallon, author of such previous gems as Bandbox and Dewey Defeats Truman, seems to be confusing writing with name-dropping lately. In his loosely connected Republican Apologist trilogy, the names are members of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 administrations. Here, the names are from show business in the 1950s-1970s. And while I appreciate that one of the names he drops is that of my own cousin, The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, Sophie Tucker, I know that most people these days have never heard of her, nor of many of the other players who come and go through this book.

The story centers around the life and murder of Dick Kallman, a never-star of stage and screen, who most people have also never heard of, and, harsh as it sounds to say this, probably won't care much about. Mallon portrays him as a shallow, callow, unethical, and more to the point for the main character of a novel, uninteresting.

The more interesting character is the purely fictional Matt Liannetto, who knew Dick sporadically through his acting career, and who was one of the last people to see him alive. Through him, we see the both the law and the order aspect of bringing Dick's killers to justice, which is somewhat compelling, in a macabre way. Matt himself is just a more interesting character, and I wish Mallon had just written a book about him, and made Dick Kallman a footnote to his story.

Let me fess up - I’m a big Thomas Mallon fan, so I was very excited to read his new novel,#UpWithTheSun, the fictionalized telling of real life wannabe actor and celebrity of the 60’s & 70’s Dick Kallman. Here, Mallon leaves his usual stomping ground of politics behind and replaces it with Broadway and Hollywood and all the glitz and grime that go with them. In telling the gossip laden tale of Kallman’s kinda rise in show biz followed by his murder in the early 80’s, #Up With The Sun is a page turning piece of “ tabloid literature” that never fails to entertain. Kudos to Mr. Mallon for bringing Dick Kallman’s salacious grab for the brass ring of fame so vividly to life ( and death ). A terrific tale !

I was a little confused when I started this book, because even though the Author’s Note at the beginning says it’s a fictionalized rendering of Dick Kallman’s life and death, I’d never heard of Dick Kallman. That made me wonder if maybe this was actually fiction, with the author trying a little bluff by characterizing it as based on a real person. But a quick bit of Google-fu set me straight. There really was a Dick Kallman who had a career on the stage and TV. And it is not a spoiler to say that the other notable thing about Kallman—and this book—is that Kallman and his boyfriend were murdered in their New York townhouse apartment (which doubled as an antiques shop) in 1980.

The story plays out in alternating chapters. One set of chapters is narrated by Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist who started out on the New York stage with Kallman back in 1951, in a show called Seventeen, and nearly 30 years later was surprised to find himself invited to be one of several guests of Kallman’s for dinner the night of Kallman’s murder. (As far as I can tell, Liannetto is fictional, but I don’t know for sure.) The Liannetto chapters make for a sort of whodunnit, in which Liannetto describes some disquieting events at the dinner party, his involvement in the police investigation, and his meeting, through that investigation, a young man who becomes his late-in-life love.

In the other chapters, an omniscient narrator takes us through Kallman’s career and encounters with far-more-famous actors like Lucille Ball, with scores of other famous names making cameo appearances, like Dyan Cannon, Rock Hudson, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, Henry Fonda, Myrna Loy, and many more. Kallman fell in love with a fellow Broadway actor back in that 1951 show; a love that was very much unrequited and remained an obsession for Kallman throughout his life. Kallman had talent, but he made no friends, because he was so ambitious that he would betray any relationship if he thought it might help him get ahead.

Mallon is known for writing fictionalized stories about politics, so why write about an actor few readers will have heard of? It looks to me like the connection is that Mallon likes to write about how people with power and/or ambition can often crash and burn because they go to far, and there is a self-destructive side to their characters. That’s certainly the case with Kallman, a man who is his own worst enemy though, with his talent, he might have had more success if he’d just been a nicer guy. As the years go by, he often runs into Carole Cook, another veteran of the Seventeen show, who seems to serve as a sort of what-might-have-been character. Cook, another real person, is a sincerely nice person, and while never achieving the heights of stardom, she worked in theater, TV and film regularly from the 1950s until the late 2010s. (Cook’s most notable role was Grandma Helen in Sixteen Candles. She died just last week, three days short of her 99th birthday.)

Liannetto’s character is sweetly appealing, and his whodunnit chapters hold interest even if they can be a too long-winded, but the Kallman history chapters are not a pleasure to read. The problem is that he’s just so hard to sympathize with, even when he’s berating himself for being a jerk. He was just a nasty, grasping, user of a man whose lousy character sabotaged everything his talent gained for him. No matter how well-written and insightful this book is—especially about the silly games closeted actors used to have to go through—it’s a depressing read.

A cracking good read, if you like show biz gossip/bitchery combined with a love story and a murder mystery. Nothing too intellectual here, but a mass of research cleverly arranged into a double timeline narrative centered on Dick Kallman, a true life artiste and a mendacious striver, doomed to lovelessness and a grisly death. Narrator Matt offers the gentler side of life, solves the mystery and finds his heart’s desire, only to be felled by AIDS. Engrossing stuff, delivered with enough but not too much detail and crafted with considerable accomplishment.

Rounded up from 4.5 stars.

I'll admit that it was the hint of sensationalism that drew me to "Up with the Sun": Former Broadway actor and star of a one-season '60s sitcom slides into obscurity until his murder. That the story was true to a degree added to the appeal. I don't know if actor-turned-antiques dealer Dick Kallman really was as miserable a person as he's portrayed here, or if he harbored a decades-long obsession with a one-time co-star, but it is true that he worked with the likes of Sophie Tucker and Lucille Ball. Yet Dick's horribleness would have grown tiresome, at least to me, were it not countered by the parallel story of Matt, an acquaintance of his who becomes tangentially involved with the murder case. While Matt's story is less glamorous and more mundane than Dick's, it's ultimately more rewarding and moving, which seems to ultimately be the point. While Dick's story ends with a (literal) bang, Matt's burns steadily with a quiet warmth through to the end, and it's his story that resonates after the last page.

Thank you, NetGalley and Knopf, for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book semi factionalizes the life of Richard(“DIck”) Kallman a minor tv player and off broadway theatrical personality. The book alternates in view point from Dick’s experiences in show business and his brushes with the greats and not so greats of film, tv and theater (1950-1980) and from 1980 forward for a few years dealing with his death by murder, the murder trial and the aftermath of that trial. I found the show biz oriented parts fascinating particularly since I remember the series Kallman was in and certain of the other shows he appeared in. This is an unusual book by virtue of the story alone—and Mallon of course can write. Highly recommended.