British hell-raisers have tended to be fruity-voiced, self-aware thesps. American ones are more serious, more macho, more scary. And the man whom many believe to be the scariest of all has left us. The brilliant comic actor Rip Torn has died: an indefatigable, long-lasting performer on film, stage and TV who continued working until almost the very end. But alongside Rip Torn’s screen credits are the tales told of him as the legendary drinker and wild man, a gonzo veteran of the brawling 1960s counterculture.
He found his breakthrough playing Judas Iscariot in Nicholas Ray’s movie King of Kings in 1961, but achieved his masterpiece on the small screen in the 90s, playing the unforgettably cantankerous and hilarious Artie, the TV producer on The Larry Sanders Show, diplomatically keeping the egotists and narcissists in line.
With a scowl that would occasionally break into a satanic jack-o’-lantern grin, Artie made Rip Torn a titan of US TV comedy. His character said the unsayable about media celebrity – bitterly wisecracking behind the scenes, in the green room, in the production office, far from the studio set in front of the live audience, where the magic is supposed to happen. Watch Armando Iannucci’s HBO comedy Veep and you can see how Artie lives on in Kevin Dunn’s Ben Cafferty, the gloomy White House chief of staff. But then Artie’s impervious cynicism has now invaded most of the other Veep characters as well, no matter how young, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s president. Rip Torn’s great creation is everywhere.
As for his personal life … well, even Dennis Hopper (with whom Torn quarrelled) calmed down eventually. But Rip Torn wound up in 2010, at the age of 79, being charged with carrying a gun while drunk, attempting to break into a branch of his local bank. He claimed he thought it was his house. In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s online series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Alec Baldwin (himself not averse to the occasional outburst) does a growly impression of Rip recounting a normal evening out. “I live up there in Salisbury. Some of the people up there are a little strange. One time I was in a bar up there … and these two guys there, they gave me the eye, see. And I knew something was going to go down. I started to go out the door and go to the car and one guy makes a move on me so I CRACK him in the jaw, and the other guy SMASHES me with a bottle in the face; I KICK the other guy in the balls, I stick a fork in his knee!” Baldwin says Torn would have been 74 at this stage. He was probably a few years older.
In the 70s and 80s, Rip Torn’s youthful good looks cragged up; his body bulked out and he became a character actor, much in demand. He was the lascivious country singer Maury Dann in Don Carpenter’s 1973 movie Payday; he played Dr Nathan Bryce opposite David Bowie in Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and received an Academy award nomination for his supporting role playing Mary Steenburgen’s neighbour in Cross Creek in 1983.
But perhaps his career would have had a bigger, starrier trajectory, were it not for a ferocious row he had with Dennis Hopper in a New York diner in the late 60s. They were discussing Easy Rider, a movie in which Torn had been cast in the role of the drunk civil-liberties lawyer George Hanson. After the bust-up, Torn was fired from the production and replaced by Jack Nicholson. Later, Torn would successfully sue Hopper for claiming that Torn had pulled a knife on him midway through this argument.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It was impossible to prove, but, frankly, easy to believe, given his legendary confrontation with Norman Mailer, with whom he was acting in the 1970 movie Maidstone. This was Mailer’s weird, semi-improvised vanity project in which he played a film-maker with political ambitions who fights, literally, with his needy brother, played by Rip Torn. Perhaps nettled by the way he was made to look like a beta male, Torn went for some real full-on violence while the camera was rolling, hitting Mailer with a hammer. Mailer responded with a Tysonesque ear-bite. There was real blood. This schoolboy brawl is deeply embarrassing, yet also fascinating as an example of what male violence actually looks like.
Perhaps Rip Torn suffered some karmic payback for his improv attack when, in the 80s, he attempted to direct a movie, The Telephone. Torn was repeatedly undermined by his star, Whoopi Goldberg, who refused to stick to the script and made up her own stuff. As the bigger star, her word counted for more than Torn’s.
Who knows what Artie would have had to say about it? I’d love to see him somehow transported into the past to calm Rip’s spats with Dennis, Norman and Whoopi. Artie is Torn’s great legacy: a Larry Sanders box set binge is a good way to honour his passing.
