(The following review of Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy was published on January 31, 2023, in the Republican-American newspaper of Waterbury, Connecticut. The R-A site is protected by a paywall, but you can view five articles for free by registering at rp-am.com.)
Connecticut author pulls no punches in Lawrence Tierney bio
By ALAN BISBORT January 31, 2023
Lawrence Tierney came out of retirement and went back into acting,
including the TV show "Hill Street Blues" as Sgt. Jenkins. He appeared in
the NBC series from 1985-87. (NBC)
You know you’re in for a wild ride when a book opens with an aging tough-guy actor, Lawrence Tierney, taking a swing at his much younger director, Quentin Tarrantino, on the set of “Reservoir Dogs.”
No Hollywood trickery could hide the fact that this tough guy, Tierney, was the real deal. By the time he was taking swings at Tarrantino, he’d left in his wake decades of brawls, jails, drunk tanks and more second chances than Saul Goodman ever got. (As Tierney himself put it in a late-life interview, “I threw away about seven careers through drink”).
Tierney may be best known for his first major role, as the title character in the crime biopic “Dillinger” (1945), which made him an overnight star. The film was one of the earliest smash successes of an independent studio; with a budget of just $65,000, it took in $2.5 million on its initial box office run (and has been a cult classic since). Tierney’s face was suddenly on a billboard above Sunset Boulevard, and the star-making machinery was in full thrust.
Meanwhile, the new star was arrested three times for public drunkenness, and jailed for 10 days on the third charge – all within weeks of the film’s release. Still, he’d made such a striking, hulking, menacing impression that he was then cast in other, similar roles – “The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” “Bodyguard,” “The Hoodlum,” “San Quentin” and as Jesse James in “Badman’s Territory” – with equally jarring reactions. Critics didn’t know what to make of him, partly because he was totally untrained as an actor and played every role on gut instinct.
Unfortunately, off the set, Tierney continued to play the same character. He was arrested 11 times in the first two years after “Dillinger” and then repeatedly for the rest of his surprisingly long life (he lived until 2002, making it to age 82). Barely out of the gate as an actor, he was already being lumped in with Hollywood “bad boys” like Robert Mitchum, Robert Walker and Errol Flynn. Unlike these other actors, however, he became an outcast and eventually an exile, living for many years in France and working odd jobs.
Actor Lawrence Tierney stands by his Hansom Cab horse after driving a party
to a theater in his rig, In New York, Oct. 8, 1974. After retiring from acting
Tierney took up driving the carriages through Central Park. (AP Photo)
Burt Kearns has the perfect credentials to get Tierney’s story on paper. The Stamford native and Fairfield University alum has lived in Los Angeles for many years, having made his name as a writer, producer and director for tabloid TV programs (and authored one of the funniest memoirs about that world, called “Tabloid Baby”). Kearns has a rollicking good time telling Tierney’s tale, bringing his deep knowledge of film history and the film industry, as well as his nose for salacious detail, to this meaty subject.
After his early troubles, Tierney may no longer have been box-office boffo but he sure was gold to the gossip columnists of the 1940s and 1950s. As Kearns tells it, Tierney’s life can be compared to a rollercoaster, with a few ups and downs at the start, a steep climb in the late 1940s and then all downhill after that. Because of his alcoholism and lack of impulse control, he spent the last decades of his career as, at best, a supporting actor in feature films with occasional forays into stage productions (including an ill-fated stab at Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and bit parts on TV (including as Elaine’s father in an episode of “Seinfeld,” the finale of “Hill Street Blues” and a voiceover in “The Simpsons”).
It would be nice to report that, despite his chronic legal and bottle troubles, Tierney was a colorful and well-loved man, but it’s simply not true, as hard as the fan in Kearns tries to burnish his reputation. This is one of those odd biographies where the writing is far better than the subject, who really comes off as an entitled sociopath (which could probably be said for about 75% of Hollywood). The repetitive nature of Tierney’s life is ultimately just sad. There’s never a final redemption, even as you keep hoping there will be.
Still, Kearns carries a reader along to Tierney’s late-career resurgence, when some of the best anecdotes in this biography occur. The description of filming the “Seinfeld” episode is alone worth the price of the book (“You know, that Seinfield, I don’t think he’s funny. I’ve known every comic from Jack Benny, you name it. This guy is not funny.”). But the real icing on the cake is the whole “Reservoir Dogs” episode. I refuse to spoil it here by giving away any of the details. Read it and weep (with laughter). Suffice it to say that Tarantino got way more than he bargained for in Lawrence Tierney.
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