Book Review: Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy by Burt Kearns

Lawrence Tierney

Burt Kearns' biography of Lawrence Tierney is obviously a labor of love and a must read for noir fans, but I found it somewhat monotonous. This is not really Kearns' fault because he applied due diligence in his research. I doubt we will ever get a more complete survey of Tierney's career and alcoholic misadventures. Kearns' background is in tabloid journalism and it appears he was quite eager to comb through the voluminous newspaper clippings that chronicled Tierney's brief rise to Tinseltown stardom and numerous scrapes with the law. Kearns certainly seems to have tabbed every Tierney mention in the gossip columns of his heyday, from ones still remembered like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper to figures now largely forgotten like Jimmie Fidler and Earl Wilson. 

However, if you've heard the tale of one Lawrence Tierney barroom scrape, you've pretty much heard them all. There are variations, but the theme is always the same. Kearns' prose is simply a device to connect the pasted press clippings he has unearthed. There is very little in the way of analysis of Tierney's psyche or his acting craft. More ink has been spilled in this book on fisticuffs than Tierney's love life or career. Now, in Kearns' defense, Tierney's propensity to end up his evenings in the hoosegow did blight his career and personal life. He had a brief comeback in the 1990s, but always managed to alienate colleagues and employers. Still, I expect a biography of an actor to try to evoke the poetry a performer conjures. Because this may be out of his ken, Kearns doesn't try.

Kearns fills up Lawrence Tierney... with the grubby tabloid scandals of the day, ranging from Robert Mitchum to William Tallman, that have only a tangential relationship to Tierney. Now I think it is possible to write a good biography on a pop figure utilizing the tabloids of yore as a source, Nick Tosches' classic Dino comes to mind, but you cannot provide a full chronicle of a figure within such a limited worldview. Kearns reports that Tierney recited Shakespeare to his dates, but such tantalizing details are limited. What did Tierney like to read or enjoying eating? Beats me after reading this book. Kearns reports that Tierney dated Gloria Vanderbilt and was a drinking buddy of Brendan Behan, but these are Page Six facts and don't give a clue to the flavor of the man and what made him tick. Kearns should have remembered Oscar Wilde's line in Lady Windemere's Fan: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." This biography wallows unrepentantly in the gutter.