I was 13 years old at the time, and I desperately wanted to go to college. MALLON: I used to watch his sitcom in 1965-66, which was the one year it was on. I imagine most of the people in our audience have never heard of him either. GROSS: Why did you want to write about this actor Dick Kallman? I certainly had never heard of him before. Mallon has also written novels about Watergate, Nixon and the couple who shared Lincoln's box seats at the Ford Theater the night he was assassinated. The novel has been adapted into a Showtime series scheduled to premiere later this year. In 1980, Kallman and his boyfriend were murdered in their Manhattan apartment by robbers, a murder that made the tabloids.Īn earlier novel by Thomas Mallon, 'Fellow Travelers,' is about two gay men working for the State Department during the lavender scare, when the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s was also a witch hunt for gay people, who were driven out of their jobs. He went into the antiques business with Dolores Gray, who starred in several movie musicals.

He was part of Lucille Ball's Desilu Workshop, co-starred in the Broadway musical 'Seventeen,' starred in a touring production of 'How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying' and starred in a short-lived sitcom called 'Hank.' And his roles dried up. The novel, which our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, calls dazzling, is based on the life of a pretty obscure actor named Dick Kallman, a closeted gay actor in the '50s and '60s who never quite made it. His new one, 'Up With The Sun,' ends where the journal excerpts begin. Mallon is best-known for his historical novels. He was in his 30s then, living in Manhattan, watching his boyfriend, friends and fellow churchgoers get sick and die, leaving Mallon in a constant state of anxiety over if and when he'd get the death sentence. Living through the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s is the subject of Thomas Mallon's diaries that were recently excerpted in The New Yorker.

Finale by thomas mallon