Look into his eyes.
Between the Mad Hatter mustache and Wizard of Oz wig, just south of the frazzled thicket of eyebrows gone AWOL from Andy Rooney.
Look again ... harder.
There it is! You catch it? That flicker of ... something. Naked and shivering. Desperate to disappear behind that carnival bark of showbizzy bravado, to duck inside that armored suit of prickly, protective sarcasm.
It's fear. I'll be damned. Fear. His watery blue eyes are swimming in panic. Seventy years on the planet and five decades as a comic knockabout, with the stones to survive a business that can slice 'em off in one stroke, yet Rip Taylor—in-your-face, hyper-mouthed, confetti-crazed Rip Taylor—is a sensitive, even fragile soul.
Instinctively, I back off, dial down the interrogation, leaving the escape hatch open a crack for the tailor-made Rip to reemerge in full fabulousness.
"A lot of people recognize me, and some are fun, but I had a rude one yesterday," he says, revving back to full mock-boil in a corner booth beneath his framed, fleshy, black-and-white mug at Jason's Deli on Maryland Parkway. Cindy, the deli manager, holds a whistle, a gift from Rip, to bark commands at employees and listens, bemused, after he stops her just for this story. "So, I'm sitting and eating and a man walks over to me. He says, 'I don't know you.' And I said, 'Let's keep it that way.' He got mad and walked away."
We're a little lost, Rip. That makes no sense.
"Tell ME? Tell ME?"
Bingo! The exaggerated exasperation and feigned fury reconfigured into comic bitchiness—the Rip Taylor trademark. One-hundred percent stage shtick? No, but close. The con is gone in my eyes. Snippy asides aside, this man seems as secure as a piece of Baccarat crystal at a Strip implosion.
"It took this long for me to bring it out," he says, misting up and morphing back to Rip the abused child, Rip the taunted adolescent, Rip the haunted grown-up. The Rip of his one-man, autobiographical show, It Ain't All Confetti, at UNLV. "What were these people like to do these things to me?" he gasps, eyes moistening, a pinkie dabbing them dry. "Who did it to them? Why do it to me?"
Shattered sass. The shards of a life ripped open.
I got it now. This is as personal as it gets. Soon to be as public as it gets. They reject your act, you hurt inside. But what if the product they reject, packaged as an act, is your life?
You'd feel the fear, too.
So how's 'bout a little preview, Riparoo. What will we see?
"Why bother to see the play?" snaps the longtime Las Vegan. (How long? "I know Lincoln was alive.")
We'll take the easy pun here: Rip's on a tear.
"I'll tell you one thing. I was a page in the United States Senate, and I reenact some of that. And I got fired from television, from a MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR show. Something so devastating happened backstage that it changed my career, set me back five years. I can tell you privately, but you're sworn to secrecy. But knowing you [for roughly 11 minutes], you'll probably say, 'HEADLINE! GUESS WHO!' But my whole life was just turned around. I was going to quit. Oh, PLEASE!"
He finally tells me. I won't tell you. I'm a hack of my word.
If you're a Boomer, you recognize his singular screech from the pop-cultural cacophony of TV's, and your own, adolescence. A madcap maestro of hysteria who carved a career out of playing the campy, catty, bewigged elf on game shows (The Gong Show, The $1.98 Beauty Show); talk-fests (The Ed Sullivan Show, where Ol' Stoneface dubbed him "The Crying Comedian" after he couldn't recall Rip's name, then glimpsed a distressed Taylor in the wings; The Merv Griffin Show, where his confetti act was born of rage at his woeful material, when he tore it up and sprayed the audience; The Mike Douglas Show, et.al. ); variety series (Bobby Darin, Jackie Gleason, Phyllis Diller, Dino); even cartoon voice-overs (various Jetsons characters).
Yes, that's him on The Bonnie Hunt Show, him as Demi's boss in Indecent Proposal, him as Kate's dad in Alex & Emma, him as himself in Jackass: The Movie and Wayne's World 2. With theater (Sugar Babies, Oliver, A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum) and a nightclub act threaded throughout. Even frolicking at the Flamingo with the Rockettes. The man has a star on Hollywood Boulevard "in front of the ugliest wig shop in town. I wonder why?"
In short: a carnival pinwheel on legs, spinning furiously through a goosed-up audience, dumping buckets of confetti and zippy zingers as a band blares "Happy Days Are Here Again." Paul Lynde in third gear.
The King of Kvetchy Kitsch.
"No one wants to do slapstick anymore; it's too much trouble," complains the comic who worships the consummate clownsmanship of Red Skelton. "I dress up, with the costumes and the wigs and the makeup. The others are cussing and smoking, saying, 'Where are you from?' They have no act. I play a character."
Bits of that Rip cameo at UNLV. But it ain't all confetti.
He pushes in at his two front teeth. Wobbly. Rattling. Threatening to snap off at the gum line and plop onto his tongue. He pushes harder. Harder. Willing them to hang on.
"This is killing me!" he moans, stopping mid-act in the mirrored rehearsal room at the Ham Fine Arts building on a sunny Sunday morning. "I can't keep on!"
"It'll be all right, Rip," says a soothing Bob Brewer, UNLV's drama guru and the show's director and co-writer. "Keep going."
Bless his trouper's heart, he does.
As a crew member slips into the room, already occupied by Brewer, assorted assistants and Rip's pianist, Joe Darro, the star vents. "I hope the next one is a dentist!"
Self-mocking and self-reverential, like the man himself, Confetti is a frequently funny streamer of ripe-and-ready Rip schtick—"Can you imagine me defending you for two years?" he asks in his extravagant whine, about his Army stint during the Korean War. "On our side?"—sandwiched between slices of searing emotional examination.
"I didn't want it to be a pity party," Rip says. "And I didn't want it to be a 'guess-who-you-know?' It's BORING. I don't care who you know. I want to show what happened to a man who's funny, still doing it, and he's survived. I happen to be that person. It has things I've never discussed and you didn't know about."
Of this he insists: "I will have you weeping."
Spurred on by Brewer's gales of giggles (seeming equal parts genuine amusement, director's stroking and staged effect for the visiting reporter), Rip takes it from the top of a life that began as Charles Elmer Taylor in Washington, D.C., in 1934 and winds through a difficult childhood, strip-joint gigs in D.C. and Baltimore, the Catskills circuit, his breakthrough (hilariously lip-synching to Aaron Lebedeff's frenetic Yiddish classic, Romania, Romania, Romania!), his adventures amid the honorable and dishonorable of Hollywood. The trauma of abuse is imaginatively staged in a twisty device that bookends the play. The central horror of a man's life is treated as little more than a grace note, but so powerfully played that it's all the more gripping for its brevity.
He declares his pain. He does not dwell on it. "You either wallow, or you move on," he says.
"He has so many anecdotes about his life, and it's factual, and never cruel in terms of exposing someone, but I wanted it to be more than a segment of Biography," says Brewer, who wrote the play with Rip everywhere from Jason's Deli to Kentucky Fried Chickens throughout Honolulu, where, Rip acknowledges, he drove his collaborator insane. Brewer laughs it off.
"I saw Rip not only as a wonderful man, but his place in the spectrum of comedy," adds Brewer, who admits that directing his star requires unconventional methods. "I don't think one actively directs Rip Taylor. You give him room to create, then suggest. You allow him freedom, especially on his life story. This is a tour de force."
Of all the gigs, all the gags, all the years, this one matters most to Rip Taylor. You see it in the anxious eyes, hear it in the tremor of his voice, feel his fear of failure, the pent-up frustrations and poignant catharsis of a star who never became A Star, itching for long-suppressed expression. And perhaps a little payback for the "No Trespassing" signs posted along his career path. He craves respect as an actor, recognition as a man of substance. At 70, against ominous odds in youth-quaked America, the man who was irony incarnate before we became Irony Nation dreams of one last act in his showbiz life, a chance to align his winking, postmodern sensibilities with the arched era to which they truly belong.
It's a gutsy gambit. But with one glaring question. So we asked for an answer.
Is he or isn't he? Why should anyone care? Or feel entitled to know?
Because it's widely assumed. Because back when he forged his career, an admission of it could choke off one's livelihood, making it relevant to an autobiographical tale. But more to the point: because Rip himself raises the specter of it, then leaves it hanging, in Confetti:
• He tells us he was raised among six women, then quips, as he sweeps a hand daintily through his wig: "You wonder why I turned out ... grand."
• In a riotous/wrenching recollection, he is bullied and beaten for being a "sissy boy."
• He laments a marriage to a Vegas showgirl that dissolved, leaving him a bachelor from there on. "Since then," he says, "I send out."
And the assumptions?
• "To tell the world that you were gay simply by throwing confetti is utter genius. ... To the homosexuals of Stonewall and the Castro District, he was a free speech partisan and patriot in the vanguard of their movement." (Nicholas Kolya in his book, You Never Ate Lunch In This Town to Begin With: An Outsider's Look at the Inside of Hollywood.)
• "In his day of the '60s and '70s, Rip Taylor was the most flamboyantly gay-appearing star on television." (dvdfuture.com)
• "I love Rip Taylor. And Jackass has a lot of gay overtones. It's pretty much chock-full of 'em." (Johnny Knoxville, in a 2002 interview with Chris Nieratko.)
Rip, for the record:
"I'm not gay. They're wrong. They're mistaken. It's because of my flamboyance. I don't have a gay following that I know of. And if I say no, then they think I'm hiding or lying, because I am so effervescent. And I'm not about to explain anything. You cannot change their minds."
For those whose needle is stuck on this point, we direct you to Rip's Confetti confessions of a strip-club comic. Not the onstage moments. The offstage ones.
Clutching Rip's whistle, Cindy the deli manager has moved on. His audience has dwindled. But Rip's still in full froth. Over Rip Torn.
"I was always mistaken for him, and when I met him, it was insulting!" Rip says of Rip. "He said, 'I'm not you.' He's a brilliant actor, but now that he's doing all this comedy, doesn't it sound made-up? And you know who he was married to? Geraldine Page!"
I compulsively interject. "You mean like, Torn-Page?"
Uh-oh. Dead silence. That mock-withering glare. The mustache twitches. The forehead wrinkles, yanking the famous rug down toward the haywire eyebrows. I've sidetracked a master.
"Can I finish doing the act, please?"
There's not a trace of fear in his eyes.
But there is in mine.