20 Questions: Rip Torn

Artie, the producer of "The Larry Sanders Show," steers Garry Shandling's fictional late-night star with the hand of a veteran. Playing Artie is the veteran actor Rip Torn. Torn, perhaps the country's busiest—though least appreciated—actor, gives the talk-show parody a jolt of smarts with experience gleaned from years in theater, movies and television.

Torn started out on Broadway and in the live television dramas of the Fifties and appeared headed for stardom. But his outspoken political views and what has been described as his impatience with certain directors tarnished Torn's reputation. His inability to land marquee roles fueled rumors of his being blacklisted. But if big Hollywood parts eluded him, Torn kept up his craft in the theater and in offbeat films. He earned an Oscar nomination in 1984 for best supporting actor in "Cross Creek." Television and film roles followed, not a few of which were forgettable, but Torn makes no secret of needing paydays as much as any father of six.

Torn, who was married to—and occasionally appeared onstage with—actress Geraldine Page (she died in 1987), has for years owned a house in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. A young Sissy Spacek boarded there while her cousin Rip helped tier make the rounds of theatrical agents. Torn also rents a house in Malibu, but the Texas native prefers New York's tolerant atmosphere. "If somebody got caught with the wrong lady in Texas, he'd hear about it the rest of his life," he says. "New Yorkers are more good-hearted."

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker met several times with Torn, who sometimes brought along a batch of yellowed newspaper clippings, Army discharge papers and parts of his FBI file. "They'll help you think of questions," Torn insisted. One morning Kalbacker phoned him to report that Jay Leno, on the previous night's "Tonight Show," had cited Torn's "Payday" as his favorite movie. Kalbacker recalls, "Torn—who hadn't seen Leno's show—was surprised and delighted when I told him, but then launched into an analysis of the differences between Leno and Artie's man Sanders. 'The Larry Sanders Show' had been renewed for 22 episodes, and Rip clearly relished the coming ratings battle."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Give us Artie's appraisal: How will The Larry Sanders Show fare against this season's late-night competition?

[A] Torn: Larry's main competitor is Letterman. Their zany styles are alike. Leno is more traditional. What I always liked about Leno is that he did the most fearless kind of social commentary and went after big-shot political figures. He has a lighter touch now. Can you imagine the stress that guy's been under? He's gone a little gray.

This discussion is kind of crazy. Garry Shandling doesn't really have a late-night show. But his show is more real to people than some of the networks' shows. Garry tried to get Arsenio on his show and they were going to have a fistfight, but I don't think Hall wanted to do it. We all have to call Shandling "Galarry" now—that's what Dana Carvey calls him—because you're calling him Larry during the rehearsals and then you have to shift to Garry.

2.

[Q] Playboy: As long as we're talking about character, can you offer a biography of Artie the producer?

[A] Torn: Artie came out of some gang in Brooklyn and went the Las Vegas route. He was probably a pretty bad boy. He's comfortable in a lot of social strata. He's polished, but down deep he's a killer. He was very warm to Dana Carvey when he guest-hosted, which then got Garry—or Larry—uptight. But when Artie thinks that Carvey is going to do something that will harm the show, he instantly calls him a little shit. Artie is not a namby-pamby guy. He's a little cruder in his approach to comedy than Larry is. This is a guy who will do anything for a laugh. The spider episode was Artie's idea. It's pretty good television if you have a guy like Larry who's frightened by spiders. When it erupted the way it did, you could see Artie going crazy. He loves it.

3.

[Q] Playboy: A coffee-shop waiter recently complimented you on a live television performance he recalled from the Fifties. Does the "legend" mantle rest comfortably on your shoulders?

[A] Torn: I ignore it. I'm a veteran. God, I've done a massive amount of work since 1955. When I first came to New York every actor mumbled. They all wanted to be Marlon Brando. I figured out that it's better to be a third-rate me than a second-rate somebody else. So I always tried to be loud and clear and I played a wide variety of roles. I was Paul Newman's understudy in Sweet Bird of Youth and then I got to play the part. Then there was the live television industry. The stage-trained actors were really prepared to do a one- or two-hour show live. If something went wrong they could ad-lib or pick up. When that camera was on you, twenty million people were watching every move you made. But it didn't scare me. I had all these relatives in Texas and I felt this was a way to visit with them. I knew my Aunt Rose and Uncle Weldon and my mother and dad and all the other Rips were watching.

4.

[Q] Playboy: The name on your birth certificate is Elmore. Rip is a family nickname. How many Rips are there?

[A] Torn: There are three of us now. There was my late father, Elmore—I'm named after him. My cousin Sam. My uncle Roland Torn in Houston is the patriarch and the big Rip of the family. It's just a gag because our last name is Torn. But my kids will get it the way I got it. Somebody will have to stick it on them. I got it because I went to Texas A&M, where my father had been called Rip when he was on the yell squad—he was a cheerleader. It was very prestigious. You tried out and they voted on you. I was on the squad as a freshman and someone said I should use my father's name. When I came to New York, the comics picked up on Rip and they used it in their acts. I became the mythical crazed Method actor. It really burned me up. But I remember one comic saying, "We like you, otherwise we wouldn't be goofing on you."

5.

[Q] Playboy: You've been described as an actor's actor. Wouldn't you rather have been a star?

[A] Torn: Sure, I always wanted to be a star. The actor John Heard—a friend of mine—says (continued on page 140)Rip Torn(continued from page 115) that I set an example for the younger actors by playing these offbeat parts. I told him I didn't choose a lot of parts. I had kids to feed. When I was seventeen years old, my acting teacher told my mother and dad that I had the looks and the voice of a leading man. But he also said I had a gift as a character actor. A real character actor doesn't always play small-bank presidents, he creates characters. Every time you see him, he's virtually unrecognizable. My teacher said that if I took that path, I might never be a great star, but I would have a longer professional life. I cussed the guy for years. But this has been more interesting. Women write that part of the fun of watching me is arguing with their husbands over whether or not it's me.

6.

[Q] Playboy: You were up for the role in Easy Rider that catapulted Jack Nicholson to stardom. If you'd landed that part, would it have put an end to arguments about your identity?

[A] Torn: It probably would have been a wonderful part for me, but it might not have done for me what it did for Nicholson. The story came out that I threw a fit in New Orleans and walked off the set. I was never on the set. They were just negotiating with me because they wanted me to play the part. My friend Terry Southern wrote the part with me in mind. I made some good comments about the script and I gave them a few other ideas. But I was broke. There was a tax lien against my bank account for $3500. Peter Fonda was one of the producers and he said everybody was working for minimum, around $400 a week at the time. I asked them for $3500 for six weeks' work and never heard from them. Regrets? Hell, yeah. I wouldn't have to hear these stories.

7.

[Q] Playboy: You received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for your role in Cross Creek and lost out to, of all people, Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment. Any hard feelings?

[A] Torn: Come on. He wasn't a supporting player. His name was up there above the title. Anyway, I didn't care. Actors say it's an honor to be nominated because it's our peers who nominate us. But the fix was in. Nicholson was going to win. My game plan was to make him sweat. And he did. He sweated through his tux that night. Literally. Yeah, right. [Laughs] I have a witness. My daughter was right there. When he won, he looked at me and I nodded to him that it was OK. The cameras were on my face. They always go to the losers—a lot of them are saying "Shit!" or they're sad—and you can see anguish on their faces. But Rip gave Nicholson the fuckin' ear!

8.

[Q] Playboy: You insist that you're not a Method actor. To borrow a line from Defending Your Life, can you tell us what percentage of your brain you use when you prepare for a role?

[A] Torn: Oh, Jesus. I hope more than two or three percent. My son John always beats me at chess in a couple of moves. Lee Strasberg—who was a good friend enough to battle with—told people I wasn't a Method actor. I select my props like a basketball player selects his shoes and his jockstrap. I work from the outside in. I wear the clothes of the character—I hope to get some of Artie's suits—walk and talk like the character and look like I'm doing the work that the character's supposed to do. Not to pat myself on the back, but when I worked on Payday, I spent four months learning to play all those songs so that on camera I would look like an accomplished guitarist. When I started in the theater, I was always told you pitch your performance to the deaf lady in the second balcony. For Shakespeare, for any play with a tragic dimension, you have to have emotion. My teacher Sanford Meisner said you can train and train and learn the Method, but it won't make any difference if you don't have talent. That's the mystery. A lot of times I don't really like to know what I'm doing. If you like it, fine. Don't try to pick it apart and analyze it.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Did you seek out Johnny Carson's longtime producer, Fred de Cordova, for advice on how to create Artie?

[A] Torn: I've never met Fred de Cordova and wouldn't know him if I saw him. But I wanted to base the role on Freddie de Cordova, who had his finger on everything. He was a legendary producer and a fine director. He directed Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo. People told me he was totally in control of The Tonight Show. So I fought to be there right off the set at my monitor. They keep what they call the Artiecam on me all the time. De Cordova probably never approved of me. I was never on Carson's show. In fact, several times they advertised that I was going to be on and they brought on Rip Taylor. They just gave me the barb all around.

10.

[Q] Playboy: The Larry Sanders Show is your first comedy series. How did Garry Shandling discover your unheralded ability to get laughs?

[A] Torn: Albert Brooks told Garry about me. They're neighbors. They jog together. I met with Shandling and with all the guns from HBO. Somebody said to me, "Do you think you can play in a comedy series, and how do you think you can sustain it?" They never knew that I'd played the same show for a year and a half on Broadway. I kept that fresh. And I always loved comic actors. I still watch The Honeymooners religiously. Shandling tells me that the comics on the show are my friends, that they like me, they like my timing.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you have to defend your life every time you're up for an acting job?

[A] Torn: I've always believed it has something to do with being involved in civil rights work. I wasn't working mainstream from the time of John Kennedy's assassination to when President Carter came in. I just worked off-Broadway and made little movies in Europe. It didn't put beans on the table. When I went to work on the Shandling show, somebody—not Shandling—questioned me about my politics. He asked, "Weren't you a well-known radical in the Sixties? What are your politics now?" And I said, "A secret ballot, that's my politics." I think it's partially a device to knock you down so you're not on your high horse in a negotiating way. You have to negotiate the price you're going to get. But it's gotten even more difficult. A lot of times they want you to read for the casting director, who probably hadn't been born when you were starring on Broadway.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever advocated the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence?

[A] Torn: Horseshit. I think because of my military background some people said, "Gee, this guy was a training officer in the Army and maybe he's training an army of guerrilla fighters." That's just a bunch of happy horse hockey. I did talk with the Kennedys about civil rights, and with Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin during the early part of that administration. I didn't volunteer, I was asked. I said, "Look, I grew up in my own society, but I'll do my damnedest to help." It was said that after that meeting, instead of opposing the civil rights movement, the Kennedys decided to lead it. Pretty heavy. That meeting may have led indirectly to their deaths. I was a bit naive. I just felt I was speaking out as an American and I thought I'd serve my country. I didn't think I would suddenly be considered a danger to my country. I think my FBI file started then. I became paranoid, but not without reason. Right before shows opened I always got accidentally hit by a police or FBI car. I got all kinds of broken bones that weren't really my fault. I look like a prophet now. I knew a lot of the stuff coming out now about the way intelligence groups operated in our country. I'd been part of it in the military police. There isn't any privacy. Hoover's gone and I don't know how gay he was or wasn't, but there's no doubt that he used blackmail. People say, "What if they're taping you?" I think they're better at it now. But I don't give a damn. I'm just trying to take care of my family, do my work and have a little bit of a good time and not hurt anybody.

13.

[Q] Playboy: As a white Southerner with liberal beliefs, did you ever have a close encounter with that crowd in white sheets?

[A] Torn: I was in Louisiana with Burt Reynolds doing an American Sportsman show and these guys came by and wanted to talk to me. One of the guides actually thought they were Klan. Old Burt, I'll say this for him, he stayed right there with me. The guys knew I had been working in civil rights. I had a beard at the time and one of them said, "Oh, my God, that's disgusting." And I said, "What's the matter, brother? What's upsetting you?" He said, "That fuzz on your face." I said, "This beard?" He said, "That's disgusting." I said, "Well, you're going to have to get a sledgehammer and go around to all the courthouses in the South and smash the statues because Robert E. Lee had a beard." And he said, "His was trimmed." I said, "Old Stonewall Jackson didn't trim his beard." And he said, "He don't count." So I said, "What's it going to be, guns or knives? I'll tell you what, I'll challenge you guys to push-ups." As scared as I was, I imagined I could do about fifty. And he said, "Oh, hell, let's drink." I always try to put out plain what I believe in.

14.

[Q] Playboy: The YMCA recently fouled up your gym registration. Will that cramp your performance style?

[A] Torn: It deters me from working out. Olivier himself—we worked out at the same gym—said that the most important thing for an actor is physical strength. I'm terrified every night I go onstage, but I try to relax by doing a lot of leg raises. I predicted that at the end of thirteen weeks of the Shandling show, I'd be the one left standing. I was. I don't know when Shandling got any sleep. I used to tell him: "You should use your lunch hour and breaks to take naps instead of having these conferences." I keep myself in shape.

15.

[Q] Playboy: You're a veteran of tough-guy roles. Do you have a special understanding of what it means to be macho?

[A] Torn: Muy macho means being like a big bull with your cojones clanging around and taking offense at whatever might challenge you. Sometimes you're forced to be macho. I'll meet people who say they saw me onstage and I scared the piss out of them, or they saw me in a movie and thought I was a big guy, but they realize I'm just a pussycat. Then I say, "Don't make a mistake." I guess you can be brave without being macho, but you can't be macho without being brave. It's a way of behaving that we're trying to ameliorate. As I've gotten older I like the idea of a gendeman being a gentle man. In Latin societies, men are secure enough to hug and pound on one another's backs. Actors have always done that. I remember years ago being at a screening and meeting Dustin Hoffman, whom I hadn't seen in a long time, and we hugged each other and the people around us were astounded.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you have the reputation of being a difficult actor to work with?

[A] Torn: You may hear some producer say that I'm giving him a hard time, but you'll never hear that from my fellow actors. I've never missed a day's work. I've never walked off a set—I may have walked to a telephone sometimes. I would never stand for somebody cursing me or abusing me or telling me how rotten I am. It's not part of my contract to take verbal abuse. In one episode Artie was scared of being fired. I've been fired and replaced so much in my life, it's part of my persona. Because being fired is a kind of death. But a lot of times they've been amazed that after they fired me and got somebody else the whole project went down the tubes.

17.

[Q] Playboy: You've remarked that casting a hook into Croton Reservoir has eased the pain of losing out on acting jobs. Does fishing give you the satisfaction of controlling the barb?

[A] Torn: It's a blood sport. But I don't want to get a big string of fish, just a couple of trout to put on the table. I like to be in water, and wading in a river is soothing. Fishing is zestfule You're taking an illusion—the hackle on a dry fly looks to the fish like the feet of an insect when the fly rests on the water—and acting like a puppet master with it. That play of light and shadow is very artistic. It takes many different skills and crafts to be a good fly-fisherman. You study the water. You make a certain kind of cast. Even if you know all those things, that doesn't mean you're going to catch the fish. I want Artie to take the guys on The Larry Sanders Show fishing, because there's a story there. They want to fish. But the writers will never let Artie fish. They want him to be just a city guy. I think they know that I'm a better fisherman than they are.

18.

[Q] Playboy: Theatrical marriages are notoriously unstable. What was the secret of your twenty-four-year marriage to Geraldine Page?

[A] Torn: It was tough till I figured out how to do it. I told her never to take any messages or scripts for me and I would never take messages or scripts for her. People assumed that if they offered me a part in a project I could talk her into doing it, too. That made me very angry and I'd turn into the street Artie. I made a lot of enemies in those days. I'm not an agent. I'm not a pimp.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Rip and Artie's use of "horseshit" sounds almost quaint at a time when "fuck" seems to be the expletive of choice. Are you out to set an example of softer speech for the nation?

[A] Torn: Actors have a way of underlining those words that make them sound a bit unnatural. When people really use those words, they don't usually stress them so much. I just try to say them the way somebody would naturally. And now that everybody cusses a lot, I try to clean up my own language.

20.

[Q] Playboy: You've described Artie as a "gent" and a "spiffy dresser." Do you think—or hope—he'll be allowed some sex appeal?

[A] Torn: Fred de Cordova was known for squiring the most beautiful women in the world. Why should the character I play not have any luck at all? I've been fortunate. My first marriage was to the actress Ann Wedgeworth, who was a gorgeous woman. I was married to Geraldine Page for many years. She was sensational, just beautiful in every way. And I have two kids with Amy Wright, who certainly does not lack fans for her charm and beauty. Have I said enough good about those women? And Artie is a more glamourous guy than Rip is. Why can't he be seen with some nifty-looking gal on his arm? It's a wish for just one episode.

acting's renegade senior states-man reflects on fishing, cussing and the care and feeding of killer instincts