Nevertheless

by Alec Baldwin

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my future, the only place

  where any possibilities lie.

  To my wife, my children, and all our moments together,

  which are a dream come true.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Lie Still

  Chapter 2: Squirrels

  Chapter 3: Not a Drop of Boy

  Chapter 4: Patchogue by Nightfall

  Chapter 5: Perpetual Light

  Chapter 6: The Love Taxi

  Chapter 7: Prelude

  Chapter 8: Back to One

  Chapter 9: What She Was Used To

  Chapter 10: The Pink and the Gray

  Chapter 11: Of Course, Of Course

  Chapter 12: So Long as You Know

  Chapter 13: Lemon, There Is a Word

  Chapter 14: So Long as I Know

  Chapter 15: The Interests of the Great Mass

  Chapter 16: Doubt Thou the Stars Are Fire

  Chapter 17: Nevertheless

  The Actors Index

  Acknowledgments

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Also by Alec Baldwin

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  I like to daydream about having a different kind of life. I’ve wanted to open a stationery store because I was obsessed with fine writing paper, boxed note cards with images of fine art from museums, and exquisite pens. That was on Monday. Or a store that sold antique clocks. Specifically, alarm clocks or mantel clocks. I had a fetish for antique travel alarm clocks, where the clock folded itself, turtle-like, into a pretty case from Hermès or Jaeger-LeCoultre. That was on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I’d be the warden of a prison because I thought that was a powerful way to reach some of the most forgotten people. I’d help those who had done wrong and were actually caught and put away by those of us who, by God’s grace, were neither caught nor punished. Come Thursday, I was sure it was an art gallery in Chelsea, one of those places in the West 20s. I’d live in London Terrace and walk to work every day. I’d travel to Europe, buying and selling acclaimed art. But on Friday, I wanted to be a teacher. I’d hide away behind ivy walls and teach literature or film studies. Or I’d become a lawyer and prosecute those who abuse power, making the bad guys tremble at the sound of my name. Then Saturday forced me to admit that I wanted to relax and have fun, so I’d open a nightclub. Like Rick Blaine, I’d surround myself with a cast of lovably quirky characters. All men would envy me. Women, against their better judgment, would throw themselves at me nightly. But I would demur. I would wait for Ilsa to show up and prove to me that love is real.

  I spent Sunday looking over this list, and I realized, after a while, that none of these occupations involved being famous. People who do these jobs may touch many lives, but they are not sports figures or movie stars or potentates. They go about their business and are immune, presumably, to the whims of the public’s praise and the scorn of the media.

  I didn’t end up choosing any of those careers and fell into a completely different line of work. I fell into a rabbit hole, which is defined as “a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.”

  I never imagined I would do what I’ve done for a living or see what I’ve seen. Acting can satisfy some of the desires and curiosities found in those imagined careers. Over time, I realized that, through acting, I could touch every station of the cross, as I perceived them (humility, service, loyalty), that might earn my late father’s approval. I never wanted to be an actor because it seemed so trite. But as I moved along the game board and thought I might be invited to play a bit longer, much of that cynicism fell away. Opportunities arrived to appreciate life’s beauty, mysteries, truths, and heartbreak, to understand life on a higher plane. All of this while you play like a child again. And try to become immortal, like Marilyn Monroe or Elvis. This is what most people in the entertainment business want, I believe. Just as much as they want money and power and adulation, they want a certain kind of immortality.

  My own relationship to the entertainment business was much simpler. Acting was a way to ease, though never eliminate, the financial anxieties of the boy from South Shore Long Island who remains inside me today. I’m not actually writing this book to discuss my work, my opinions, or my life. I’m not writing it to explain some of the painful situations I’ve either landed in or thrown myself into. I’m writing it because I was paid to write it. And as we go along, you’ll know that the mercenary force is strong in this one. You might want to stop there and put the book down, knowing that its theme is that I did a lot of things for money. Anything truly worthwhile that emerged was just a bit of luck or wonderful alchemy. I once read that Richard Burton made some choices in his film career so he could buy Elizabeth Taylor a diamond ring or whatnot. That’s my excuse, too. Except there was no Liz and there were no diamonds.

  However, just as the challenges and charms of performing in public for many years won me over, writing this book also became its own reward. To look at one’s life, to stare at all of those joys and mistakes, all of those moments and emotions—you’d be dead, in some sense, if it didn’t change you. As was so often the case during my career as an actor, money prompted this memoir until the moment something else took over. Now, I want you to know that my name is Xander Baldwin. (The x sounds like a z.) I’m from 25 Greatwater Avenue in Massapequa, New York, and my siblings, including Beth, Daniel, Billy, Jane, and Stephen, didn’t turn out all bad, and that is due to my parents: my mother, who lived to grow and change in remarkable ways, and my father, who sacrificed his life caring for and giving to his children and others.

  I’m also writing this book to share the truth, as well as my remorse, about some of the incautious choices I’ve made and subsequent difficult times I’ve lived through in public. The worst mistakes I’ve made in this life live forever on the Internet. Online, people remind me of them every day. I’ve endured and invited a level of scrutiny that has pushed me to the brink of self-destruction or simply a self-imposed anonymity. I cannot lie to you on that point. The media gauntlet we are either contracted or compelled to run can be soul-crushing. But the boy who first wanted to run for president in the fourth grade still lives in me. I dreamed of doing some kind of work that would make a difference in the lives of the people I cared about. I love my country. My way of loving it meant urging it toward being better. I believe we make it better when we are fully informed and engaged. Informing people, engaging them, that’s what I wanted to do. I ended up in the rabbit hole, however, where sometimes we play silly games, and other times we examine life as deeply as novelists, doctors, and judges. And the one difference is that our job is not only to play all the parts and to understand everyone onstage, but also to become them. When we’re done, we reacquaint ourselves with who we really are, perhaps the most difficult part of all.

  Every day, I’m filled with doubt about my choices. Every day. Writing this book presented a thousand such choices and, thus, has been both painful and therapeutic. Nevertheless, I am grateful to those who will read it and allow me to share some of what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, and who I believe I truly am.

  1

  Lie Still

  The woman lying next to me was a large woman. I will always remember her that way. Only five feet seven, she seemed taller. Her forearms were like blades, broad and flat, and packed with rippling tendons from endlessly carrying around children and groceries and whatnot. She was strong and had fast hands, gunfighter fast. When she struck you, her right arm sprang toward you . . . snap!
. . . like Navratilova’s backhand.

  Even in sleep, she seemed frightened or wracked, her face slightly contorted, sweat beading around her neck. Her dyed hair, thin and damaged, was matted around her forehead and temples, a brownish tint on a cotton candy fineness of texture. If I turned slightly in any direction, the arm whipped. “Lie still,” she ordered, as if she was at sleep’s portal until my slightest movement had intervened. I froze. What was I there for? Was it to ease her mind? Was it to protect me from whatever danger she envisioned I’d face if I went out and joined the other children I could hear playing outside in the afternoon? Was I there to keep her company?

  The room was as still as the moon. On a bureau against one wall was a television. Along another wall was another bureau, on top of which sat cheap plastic baskets of clothing, some tangled, some already folded. The arrangement of these baskets tumbled down onto the floor, where baskets were piled on top of baskets. One might think that the residents of this house were operating a laundry business. There was laundry, in baskets, everywhere: clothes from previous seasons; clothes passed along from friends as hand-me-downs; clothes purchased, still tagged and new, that were lost under the mountain and never worn. All of it was piled in a multicolored tangle of cotton and synthetics. Years later, it might have been a hit at some contemporary art gallery. Then, it was just a mess.

  The furniture in this room was chipped and marred. There were dark rings from wet glasses here, a handle or knob missing there. Go into another room, and it was more of the same. Threadbare chairs, some covered with bedsheets to hide escaping tufts of stuffing, sat in a living room no one used. A dining room held a table requisitioned for folding even more laundry. There was a den, with a TV, that was the center of the home, for all practical purposes. A small kitchen resembled a New York City subway car in the mid-1970s, in terms of traffic, wear and tear.

  Doors came off hinges, and windowpanes were cracked or broken. You might wait a year for them to be fixed. Appliances were often in need of repair. Nearly everything in the house was a donation from a relative or friend. Thus our gratitude flowed while they simply expunged their old stuff: sofas and chairs, beds and bedding, inexpensive dishes and mismatched collections of forks and knives. One exception was a beautifully carved bookcase with beveled glass doors, bequeathed by my grandparents, that sat incongruously in the living room, the books inside worth more, perhaps, than the other contents of the house combined.

  The woman, half asleep, now breathed heavily, in and out. On the bedside table was a small wicker basket nearly overflowing with a haphazard pile of prescription vials: sleeping pills, blood pressure pills, antianxiety pills, perhaps eight or ten small bottles. Even at my young age, I wondered if the active ingredients of these drugs were constantly rolling around inside her head. She stirred and reached over to sip from a raspberry-colored metallic tumbler, filled with Tab, which sat on the night table near Pill Hill. Beads of sweat ran down its side, making new rings on what was left of the table’s finish. The woman, believing that it held magical weight-loss potential, drank rivers of Tab. If slimming was her goal, it was to no effect. Each successive choice to have six kids in eleven years left her body wracked. From the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her pelvis, any muscular fiber was gone. When she coughed or laughed, her stomach, beneath her sheer bedclothes, seemed to ripple like water. I lay there and looked toward the window and wondered if the kids’ shouts and whoops accompanied throwing snowballs at cars.

  Why did she never want to go outside? Why didn’t she want to take a walk or get some fresh air or get out of this room? Slightly stoned and immobile, she might end up like some suburban version of the Collyer brothers, buried by an avalanche of unfolded laundry, I feared. What could I do to help her? “This is my mother,” I thought. “Whatever that means.”

  In the earliest days, she tried. She was alone in her tiny house with six kids and no help. (Sometimes, I repeat that to myself, over and over: “Six kids and no help, six kids and no help.”) So she baked, constantly: cookies, brownies, cakes. Popcorn and Kool-Aid were served on a picnic table in summertime. Back then, you controlled your kids, perhaps told them you loved them, by serving them their favorite sweets. Today, love means withholding much of that.

  Our previous house, where I had lived until I was nine, was a small ranch that had only two bedrooms. My sister Beth shared a bedroom with two of my brothers and me. The room had had two bunk beds. My younger sister slept in the living room in a playpen-like enclosure. My brother Stephen, then a baby, slept in a crib in my parents’ room. At the old house, a clothesline ran across much of the yard, packed tight with children’s clothes, sheets, and towels. In a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house with six young children, the absence of a working washing machine or dryer was enough to wear my mother’s patience raw. By 1967, my parents realized that these conditions were ridiculous and moved to a nearby dilapidated house with four bedrooms.

  Lying next to my mother, I forged a lifetime of conversation with myself. Other children talk to themselves, whispering intently to someone who isn’t there. However, I went all out here: not merely repeating lines from films, TV shows, and commercials, but attempting dialects and ethnicities and singing songs. While my mother was next to me “napping,” I was channeling Steve Allen, Frank Gorshin, and the Beatles, Allan Sherman, Dick Shawn, and Paul Lynde. All of them might appear in a single afternoon, all in that bed.

  Eventually, my mother would stir. Her fitful nap ended, she headed to the kitchen to grapple with what to make for dinner. She would tell me we needed milk or bread or butter. She would tell me to hike up to the local delicatessen, perhaps a mile away, to get the supplies. I’d be more than willing to go. “I’m out!” I’d think. I was nine years old and addicted to solitude.

  * * *

  If you went out the door of our house and looked west, there was a block of middle-class South Shore Long Island “white flight” homes. In them lived businessmen, contractors, a fireman. It was a mix of education levels and tastes. On their 120-by-100-foot lots, these properties seemed generous and appealing to Brooklynites like my dad. Whereas our neighbors’ homes were covered in antiseptic aluminum siding or traditional shingles, our house featured the more urban-style asphalt siding, in a dulled and cracked forest green. The house seemed to sag, a slight bulge here and swelling there, perhaps from dampness or some compromise in the framing underneath. All of the white-painted trim was peeling. The windows were dressed with cheap curtains on tension rods, all graying for need of washing. The pitted driveway was stained from unintentionally expelled automotive fluids. Some neighbors parked a small boat in their yard or planted a garden. Looking at our house, though, you got the feeling that Marjorie Main might come out on the porch and slap Humphrey Bogart across the face.

  Directly across the street from our house was a public nine-hole golf course. I walked through a hole that had been cut into the fence and stepped out onto the snowy plain. My lifelong worship of winter and snow was born on these walks. Heavy snowfall is a great homogenizer in making everything pretty. Even our uncared-for house looked slightly more charming, if only for that day.

  The golf course divided the neighborhood essentially in half. Streets with Native American names like Pocahontas, Seneca, and Seminole were labeled east and west. The course was called Peninsula and sat directly across Sunset Road from our house on West Iroquois Street. Before any talk of climate change, you’d swear it snowed more on Long Island then. The sun would come out after a big storm and shine on the frozen surface, creating a crème brûlée–like crust on top of acres of powdery snow. Walking across the golf course property after a grand snowfall was like stepping in and out of a series of buckets. Lift your leg straight out, extend, then punch your boot through the icy veneer. Up, out, down. Repeat, repeat. A walk that might have taken ten minutes across grass took thirty. However, a walk that took me along a plowed street was neither as adventurous nor as beautiful. I wanted to feel piercing wind lashing my f
ace. I wanted to walk across this field because it was pristine and white and no one was there. I could talk to myself all I wanted.

  In summertime, the golf course was our Hole-in-the-Wall, a sanctuary within which neighborhood kids drank their first beer, smoked their first joint, or had their first fumbling romantic consummation. And, above all, we played ball here for hours and only the darkness could send us home. We played baseball and football games in their seasons. We held the occasional pitch-and-putt golf matches in July and August, when the days were longest and we were guaranteed an hour of fading light after the staff of the club had gone home. The men who ran the place had names like Ferdie and Tiger and Frenchie. If we jumped the gun and attempted, too early, to whack a seven iron toward the third green that ran by our house, one of these guys would come rattling toward us in a golf cart, screaming and cursing. As we got older, they got older and their protests grew to sound more like pleas. When my brother Daniel eventually grabbed a bag of clubs and entered the modest clubhouse to play the course as an eighteen-year-old legitimate, paying customer, it was as if Butch Cassidy had walked into a bank to open a checking account.

  The town of Massapequa had a couple of thumbs of land that pointed out into the Great South Bay. Like on much of Long Island’s South Shore, canals had been dug to create more waterfront property. They were 1950s developments with names like Bar Harbor, Harbor Green, and Old Harbor Green. Our area was called Nassau Shores, or just “the Shores” by the locals, and it was the least of these areas, in terms of real estate value. The other waterfront communities were zoned so that their kids attended the town’s original high school, Massapequa High School, giving them a small but discernible boost of prestige. Older residents called it “The High School,” placing it above its crosstown counterpart, Berner High School, which my siblings and I attended.

  My dad taught at The High School, and there had been a suggestion that we could go to the school where my dad taught, as other teachers’ children had done. But my dad thought it might be too much for us (and I’m sure for him) if we all spent day and night under the same roof. So my dad taught at The High School, and we went to Berner, the more working-class and, in some ways, less desirable of the two. When I looked over my dad’s school yearbook every spring, I noticed that The High School seemed to have more of a polish to its efforts. Berner had a Drama Club. The High School had “Masque and Muse.” The High School had an “It’s Academic” team, aimed at scoring an appearance on the old TV game show. Its faculty adviser, my dad’s best friend, Arnie Herman, often laid out his own money to pay for supplies so that the kids had a shot to get on television. The High School’s sports teams dominated their league, until eventually Berner’s football team beat them in a game that was the final word in their crosstown rivalry that I was there to witness during my junior and senior years. Whereas Massapequa High School looked like a postcard suburban public school, Berner looked like a hastily financed annex, built to handle the overflow of a rapidly growing community. Berner was a concrete battleship of a building, with very few trees and little character.