Tierney is another picture altogether…. He is a man who has had his head handed to him.
Lawrence Tierney was twenty-six years old in April 1945, when he became an “overnight sensation” in the title role of the gangster film Dillinger. In the years to follow, his erratic and violent behavior, and dozens of arrests for drunkenness and fighting, led him to be closely identified with the big-screen bad guy, and derailed his Hollywood career. By 1958, Tierney had retreated to New York City, and was working in construction and as occasional “muscle” for a loan shark. He was also picking up acting roles, as there was always someone willing to give him another “second chance.” In October of that year, Tierney caused another sensation with his most violent and brutal picture yet. In this excerpt from his book, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, author Burt Kearns explains that it was not a motion picture, but a picture in the newspapers.
Why does a 39-year-old guy like Lawrence Tierney keep getting in fights? Why doesn’t he act his age, like Jack Benny?
—Robert Sylvester, NY Daily News, October18, 1958
One of the last gossip items to feature Lawrence Tierney in 1957 was published the day after Christmas. Cholly Knickerbocker wrote in the New York Journal-American that Tierney had “hung one on Bill Wakeman’s whiskers in a Third Avenue bar and then walked off with the prize—Georgette McDonald.” Translated: Tierney had punched Wakeman in the face, he was still allowed in some of the Lost Weekend saloons, and he continued to wreak havoc over the woman who Cholly had observed made “Jayne Mansfield look like a boy.”
So what could the New Year bring? In early 1958, more of Tierney’s film oeuvre was running on television daily. Step by Step, Born to Kill, Kill or Be Killed, Dillinger, The Devil Thumbs a Ride—he could even be seen in the pre-Dillinger Leon Errol comedy, Mama Loves Papa. Yet, surely, one would think that by this time, Tierney was lost to show business.
One would think.
On January 9, Leonard Lyons reported that Tierney had joined the teaching staff of a drama school in Brooklyn. Cholly reported two weeks later that he’d played a real-life scene with Georgette at her place of work, and the scene was so dramatic that she was fired. Dorothy Kilgallen alleged on February 10 that Tierney was on the verge of an “aisle-waltz”—not with Georgette, but the “wealthy divorcee” Helen Kellogg. Cholly volleyed in March, announcing that a group of Broadway investors was serious about setting up the oft-arrested former movie star in a real-life detective agency. By then, Earl Wilson already had the only scoop that mattered: Lawrence Tierney was about to make another comeback, as star of a Hallmark television series called Civil Air Patrol.
Tierney was in north Florida in April to film the television pilot (also referenced as Wings for Hire) in and around the Silver Springs Airpark Field outside the city of Ocala. To prepare for the leading role as a pilot who ran a private charter service, the unpredictable alcoholic, convicted drunk, and reckless driver took flying lessons. His costar was Sammy Petrillo, a twenty-three-year-old nightclub comedian and Jerry Lewis impersonator.
“In the pilot I was ferrying in a bunch of rattlesnakes and I got bitten and had to crash-land,” Petrillo told Todd Rutt in Psychotronic Video. “Then Larry comes and saves me.”
The producers assigned Petrillo another task besides flying and providing comic relief. “They told me I had to keep Larry busy, running track and playing cards with him so he doesn’t drink. I said okay. So I’m a little skinny kid. I’d be exhausted running track with him, before we’d shoot, after we’d shoot. Then we started playing cards, but he wanted to bet money. It cost me eight hundred bucks to keep the guy sober.”
The television pilot did not get picked up.
More of Tierney’s old movies were added to the television rotation in May, including The Bushwhackers, Badman’s Territory, San Quentin, Bodyguard, and The Hoodlum. Moviegoers could still ogle Jayne Mansfield in Female Jungle in theaters and drive-ins.
By June, Hazel Kellogg was history, at least in the columns, as Kilgallen relayed the sighting of a “tamer” Tierney with “schoolteacher” Esther Landrau at Downey’s, an Eighth Avenue steakhouse that attracted a Broadway and showbiz clientele.
Lawrence Tierney was being seen in all the right places, at least until 7:30 on the evening of Wednesday, July 23, when he stepped out of the Hotel Astor into Times Square, and NYPD Lieutenant William Nevins stepped up and restrained him with handcuffs.
Tierney protested, nonviolently this time, but went along to the Nineteenth Precinct house on East Sixty-Seventh Street. The cops had been looking for him since May, intending to charge him with felonious assault. The last time he’d been booked in Manhattan, it was on the complaint of an advertising woman. This time, it was an advertising man, thirty-two-year-old Gary Jennings. Tierney had allegedly been drinking in Jennings’s apartment at 39 East Sixty-Fifth Street, when he struck Jennings and fractured his jaw. This time, Tierney allegedly used a fist, not a foot.
Tierney was charged and held overnight until his arraignment. He wore a gray suit, tight blue sweater, and brown shoes when he appeared before Magistrate Reuben Levy in felony court. The judge set bail at $500. Tierney posted the bail and headed home, which he told police was the address in the Bronx.
Tierney had work ahead. He’d been cast in an episode of Naked City, a television police drama that starred John McIntire and James Franciscus as a pair of detectives investigating cases around New York. The series was shooting at Gold Medal Studios (the former, historic Biograph Studios) in the Bronx and on location in nearby neighborhoods and Manhattan. The series would premiere on September 30, 1958, on ABC.
The surprise arrest didn’t affect that job, nor did it have much of an impact on Tierney’s swath through the city. He continued to drink and rumble. On August 6, Tierney was involved, according to Lee Mortimer in his New York Confidential column, in a not-so-confidential brawl at an apartment house on West Fifty-Eighth Street. He did not stray far from that neighborhood for his next blockbuster appearance.
It was Monday, October 13, the day after 750,000 people lined the streets of Manhattan for the annual Columbus Day Parade. Police in Midtown received the first alert around noon that Lawrence Tierney was on a bender. He’d shown up at the door of a woman he’d been seeing, and when she wouldn’t let him in, he got angry. On this occasion, he didn’t kick in the door. He smashed a window of her building. Tierney was gone by the time police arrived, but they remained on the lookout. Tierney hit some saloons, and got into a couple of fights as the afternoon progressed. Around 5 p.m., somebody hit the panic button at the Gorham Hotel on West Fifty-Fifth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Tierney was there, raising hell. By the time the squad car pulled up, he was already in the wind.
Sometime along the way, Tierney hooked up with Arthur Kennedy—not Arthur Kennedy the actor, but a construction pal—a thirty-two-year-old fellow lather from Lynbrook, Long Island. Tierney and Kennedy stopped in at several taverns and dives near the Gorham Hotel, and managed to be involved in several scraps, looking more bruised, their clothing more disheveled, and their eyes more bleary, at each successive stop.
Shortly before midnight, the pair came crashing into the Midtown Café at 1362 Sixth Avenue at the corner of Fifty-Fifth Street, not a block from the Gorham. The two of them were loud, disruptive, battle-scarred, and so obviously drunk that barmaid Esther Zinman took one look and knew they’d had enough. When she refused to serve them, Tierney and Kennedy complained loudly and harassed the few customers who remained. Tierney cursed and challenged any and all to a fight.
The hubbub brought owner Louis Pfaff to the bar. Pfaff was no stranger to aggressive drunks. He told the two Irishmen to scram, and when they refused, made the call to the local police precinct.
Officers Louis Romano and Samuel Saipan pulled up on Sixth Avenue, walked into the Midtown Café at 12:05 a.m. on October 14, and encountered a couple of loud louts and a very angry bar owner. Louis Pfaff demanded the men be arrested for disorderly conduct. They’d not only caused a disturbance, he said, but Tierney had used “boisterous language” in front of his barmaid. The cops could believe it, because, they later reported, Tierney continued to be “loud, boisterous and filthy-mouthed” in their presence. Both Tierney and Kennedy looked as though they’d been in a half dozen fights and were ready for a couple more. “Let’s go,” Romano ordered. Tierney refused at first. Romano led the two men out to the sidewalk. Saipan followed.
It was once they were in the early morning air, according to Officer Romano, that he placed the pair under arrest. Tierney began to resist. “I’m going to punch you two all around!” Tierney declared, and suddenly turned and swung. He popped Romano in the face, kicked at Saipan’s legs, and then thumped Romano in the chest before delivering the coup de grâce, stepping back and kicking the cop square in the groin. With the hard toe of the leather shoe banging directly into his testicles, Romano folded like a deck chair and dropped to the sidewalk. Saipan moved in, right into the fist end of Tierney’s roundhouse. He, too, hit the concrete. Romano rose to his feet and was pulling out his billy club when Tierney kicked him again. Now Kennedy whipped off his coat and began kicking at Saipan. Passersby stopped and watched the two sweaty, crazy construction workers take on two uniformed police officers. The fight didn’t last long. Kennedy cocked a fist, but before he could deliver the punch, a whack of Saipan’s nightstick quieted him. It wasn’t so easy to tame Tierney. An enraged and aching Romano got up for the second time and brought his club down on Tierney’s head.
Tierney kept fighting, dead-eyed, animal-like. Romano swung again and again, opening a gash on Tierney’s scalp that sprayed blood across the sidewalk. Both cops kept swinging and bashing until Tierney was under control. The suspects were handcuffed, squeezed into the back of the squad car, and sped to the Midtown North precinct house on West Fifty-Fourth Street.
A press photographer was waiting to get the shot of Tierney being dragged in for booking. The shutterbug didn’t care about the non-acting Arthur Kennedy, so the arresting officers got in place for the photo of Tierney being walked between the two of them. Saipan has him by the right elbow; Romano clutches his upper left arm. The cops are all business and camera-ready in their heavy uniform coats with shiny gold buttons and hats. Tierney is another picture altogether. His wrists are shackled in front, his shirt torn and open, chest and stomach exposed. His hair is matted, jaw swollen, and face bruised and caked with blood that poured from the wound over his right eye and splashed down his ripped shirt, neck, and bare chest onto his trousers. He is dazed from the booze, brawls, and beating. He is a man who has had his head handed to him.
The cops knew Tierney’s appearance didn’t reflect well on them. Romano told a reporter that Tierney and Kennedy were already looking “about that bad” when he and his partner arrived at the Midtown Café. Tierney was fighting so wildly and ferociously, Romano said, “we were forced to use the stick on him.” When Kennedy got into the act, “he kicked both of us, then drew back a cocked fist . . . but that’s as far as he got. We had to bop him.”
Tierney and Kennedy were charged with felonious assault. Tierney, who gave his address as the Belvedere Hotel at 319 West Forty-Eighth Street, was also charged with disorderly conduct. After the booking, the cops let Tierney button his shirt and gave him a sports jacket for another news photo. They sat Tierney in a chair and Romano stood over him, pretending to be asking questions. In the photo, Tierney’s head wound continues to bleed down his face and onto his shirt. He looks up at the cop hovering close to his left side, seemingly confused and uncomprehending, yet his left leg is crossed, defensively, and his left hand is on that knee, tense, balanced on four fingers, directly in line with the cop’s crotch, as if at any moment this wild animal might reach out suddenly to grab and tear out his bruised testicles.
The photo session ended without incident. Tierney and both cops were taken to St. Clare’s Hospital on West Fifty-First Street in Hell’s Kitchen. Romano was treated for his aching groin, and Saipan complained of ankle injuries from all the kicks. Their prisoner would not accept treatment. A hospital spokesman said that Tierney was cursing so profusely and lashing out so violently, that the staff was unable to handle or treat him. He was returned to a cell, according to the Daily News, “shrieking, cursing and challenging one and all to fight.”
Later that day, when Tierney and Kennedy were arraigned before Magistrate Francis X. O’Brien, Tierney was still belligerent. His plaid shirt stiff with blood, he said he intended to plead innocent and demanded an attorney. O’Brien ordered him held on $4,000 bail—$3,500 on the felonious assault charge, and another $500 for disorderly conduct. He set Kennedy’s bail at $500. When Kennedy announced that he wanted to plead guilty on the spot, the judge suggested that he find himself a lawyer and save his plea for the hearing on Monday, October 20.
According to the Daily News, Lawrence Tierney had the last word. As he was led out of the courtroom to jail, he turned to Officer Romano and snarled, “I’m a cop hater from the word go. You only made me more of a cop hater.”
Of course, every newspaper editor worth his salt ran at least one photo of the bloodied Lawrence Tierney. Many headlines mentioned the “one-time bad man movie actor” or “ex-movie tough guy” who was arrested on one of his “periodic rampages.” The New York Journal-American beat them all by publishing a close-up photo of bloody Tierney under the headline: “FACE OF A ‘COP HATER.’”
Before Tierney and Kennedy returned to court, Tierney’s lawyers had gotten the charges reduced to simple assault. If there was any justice in the case of the Midtown Café brawl, it was reported by Earl Wilson. Tierney, who’d broken the jaws of Dianetics auditor John Naylor and ad man Gary Jennings, was eventually treated for his wounds from his battle with police.
Among his injuries was a fractured jaw.
Meanwhile, he was back on television.
The above was excerpted from Chapter Twenty-six of Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy by Burt Kearns (University Press of Kentucky, 2022).
Burt Kearns is an author and writer who produces and directs nonfiction television and documentary films. A veteran print and broadcast journalist, he wrote the exposé memoir about his life in television, Tabloid Baby. He also cowrote the book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage.
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