“Heck, I threw away about seven careers through drink.”
Best known to modern audiences as Joe, the gangster mastermind in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Lawrence Tierney had a string of tough-guy roles dating as far back as 1945. A star athlete at his Brooklyn high school, he received a scholarship to Manhattan College but dropped out to work as a laborer on the New York Aqueduct. After a few theater productions, he signed a contract with RKO in 1943. The titular role in Dillinger (1945) became the template for his onscreen persona, as he was continually cast as a traditional tough guy (Badman’s Territory and San Quentin, 1946) to outright sociopath (Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, 1947). Numerous run-ins with the law for drunken behavior and fighting destroyed his career before it really even started. Landing parts here and there—John Cassavetes cast him twice, in A Child Is Waiting (1963) and Gloria (1980)—Tierney rarely worked again as an actor until the 1980s, when he was cast in a series of guest-starring roles on TV shows like Hill Street Blues, Fame, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The Simpsons. His final film was the low-budget feature Evicted (2000), written and directed by his nephew.
THEY WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO let him drink. They had been warned. But something needed to be done. The entire cast and crew of Reservoir Dogs had, in one short week, come to despise Lawrence Tierney, the irascible seventy-something actor.
During the most recent day of shooting, director Quentin Tarantino and Tierney had to be physically separated from one another. When Tierney stormed off, the crew broke into applause. Tim Roth had declared he didn’t even want to be in the same room with the guy. Only Michael Madsen wanted to make an effort. Tierney had earned it, hadn’t he?
Known as one of film noir’s consummate tough guys in the 1940s, Tierney claimed to loathe the parts he was given. “I thought of myself as a nice guy who wouldn’t do rotten things,” he once told an interviewer. But as real-life gangster Mickey Cohen once hypothesized about Tierney, reflecting on the actor’s behavior after his turn as John Dillinger, “I guess when actors are given a certain part to portray, and they portray it year in and year out, they begin to play it somewhat for real.”
By 1955 Lawrence Tierney had been arrested sixteen times. He spent three months in jail in 1948 for breaking a man’s jaw in a gin mill. Later that year he was arrested for kicking a cop. (For good measure, he was arrested for punching one eight years later.) In 1952 he fought with a welterweight boxer outside a bar in New York City—a feat he topped in 1975 when he took on an accomplished knife fighter and wound up getting stabbed in the gut. Such was his reputation among Los Angeles police that when Robert Mitchum was awaiting trial for marijuana possession in 1948, two cops taunted the actor by saying, “Hey Bob, we’re keeping Lawrence Tierney’s cell warm for ya.”
Tierney gave up drinking—mostly—in 1982, after he suffered a stroke. It was around that time that he finally started getting work again, primarily in television. By then, old age and sobriety had rendered him largely harmless, but he still had the ability to put the fear of God in people. His opportunity to become a recurring character on Seinfeld (as Elaine’s dad) was probably squandered when he “jokingly” threatened Jerry Seinfeld with a butcher’s knife he’d attempted to steal from the set.
And so, on the set of Reservoir Dogs, Michael Madsen decided to see if he could help settle Tierney down. He took the old man to Musso and Frank’s for vodka tonics. Everything was going fine until Tierney excused himself to go to the bathroom—and didn’t come back. Just as Madsen started to wonder what happened to him, he heard commotion outside the restaurant. Honking—lots of honking. Madsen got up to investigate. When he looked outside, there was Tierney, in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, pants down, wagging his finger at every car that swerved past him—a miracle it was just his finger.
ON A SIDE STREET within spitting distance from Musso and Frank’s, this neighborhood bar (“a local hang for the Who’s Who and Who Cares”) has been a hometown favorite since 1942—not quite as long as its more famous neighbors, but an unheard-of length of time by L.A. standards. The space was leased by singer Gene Austin in the early 1930s (he named it My Blue Heaven, after his biggest hit) and had already undergone three different incarnations, including those of a restaurant and a gay bar, when Steve Boardner, a longtime bartender who’d most recently manned the bar at the landmark Crossroads of the World on Sunset, took over the lease in January 1944.
A former athlete with social ties to both the sports and film worlds, Boardner brought with him a built-in crowd of celebrities, including Errol Flynn, W. C. Fields, Wallace Beery, and boxing promoters George Parnassus and Suey Welch. Members of Xavier Cugat’s band would drop by, as did singers Jack Leonard and Phil Harris. (Harris, legend has it, would eat dinner with his wife at Musso and Frank’s, then meet his mistress at Boardner’s later that night.) A postwar mob hangout with insider protection provided by notorious L.A.P.D. lieutenant Harry Fremont, who used to play craps in the drained fountain on Boardner’s patio, it was seedy enough to attract Charles Bukowski and rowdy enough to humble Lawrence Tierney, who reportedly called the cops when a wrestler pal of Boardner’s had the guts to stand up to him. Such was the bar’s reputation, it was even rumored to be the last known sighting of Elizabeth Short the night she died in the infamous Black Dahlia murder case.
In 1980, with failing health and accumulating debt, Boardner sold the bar to Dave Hadley and Kurt Richter, two regulars who’d made their money in porn (they were among the first to sell X-rated movies on videotape). The new owners had planned on turning it into a regular destination for employees of the adult-film industry. That plan never quite materialized, but Hadley kept the place going for more than twenty years, even after his partner died behind the bar on Christmas night in 1997. These days, Boardner’s has expanded to include an additional nightclub and a full kitchen; it caters to a younger crowd with such tired standbys as Goth Night and 80s Night. But the bar still opens every day at five, the better to soak in whatever remains of its heyday.
