by Alec Baldwin
It was forty-eight hours of Bloom exposing me to great acting and great actors. He encouraged me to believe that, with enough work and some degree of luck, I could climb my way into their ranks. He had thoroughly instilled in me the idea that if you didn’t make your bones in the theater, your acting career was built on sand. Bloom’s encouragement meant the world to me. At that point, I had worked on the soap for nearly a year. The cynicism I initially felt toward the soap was gradually replaced by a commitment to use this to my advantage and to move ahead to jobs that provided greater challenges. As we sat parked in his convertible sports car, I thanked Bloom for his belief in me. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. Then he jerked me toward him and shoved his tongue in my mouth. He was strong and pressed me against himself, seemingly bent on devouring me. Stunned, I pushed him away and took a deep breath. Bloom, who’d been here before innumerable times, barely contained a sheepish grin. I turned to him and said, “You’re my friend, so I’m gonna let that go. But if you ever do that again, I’m gonna break every bone in your body.” He nodded, as if to say, “Got it,” and then we drove off back to New York. He never made a move on me again. And our real friendship was born.
I had gone to NYU with a guy named Gary Lazer. Right after we left school, we were roommates on 29th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, a nondescript block just around the corner from the Belmore Cafeteria, the twenty-four-hour restaurant and cabbies’ hangout featured in Taxi Driver. Lazer was a young stand-up comic and lived the life of one; by that I mean I think his mother paid a portion of his rent. At night, I would stuff the next day’s Doctors script in my pocket and follow Gary and a small cadre of his buddies around to the lesser clubs, where they would perform at open mike nights. They even got a booking here and there. Joints like Who’s on First and the Good Times were where I got my first good look at the clever and incredibly neurotic people who seek approval through laughter for a living. Gary was funny, and effortlessly so. Through him I learned that true comedic timing is a gift. If I could actually make Gary laugh, I had accomplished something. We’d go to clubs, he’d do his act, and we’d get buzzed. I slept on the couch in our living room most nights, as I had to be up at six a.m. to go to work, while Lazer took the bedroom in the back of our dumbbell flat, where he’d smoke a half a pack of cigarettes from one a.m. to three a.m. while he read books.
The women in our lives were instructed that if they left our apartment in the early morning, they should avoid going west on 29th to Park Avenue, lest they came upon the supermarket of hookers who were finishing off their last pieces of business at sunrise. Men sat in their cars with Jersey plates, their heads tilted back, eyes closed, while some brassy orange wig bobbed up and down at steering wheel level. This was New York in the ’80s, before the Internet and Grindr. Prior to the age of “broken windows” policing or the Central Park Conservancy, New York was pretty much a mess. There was graffiti on most of the subways and garbage strewn on the tracks. Most of the streetlamps in Central Park were busted, along with a lot of the benches. Living below Houston was a new idea. Every ad for real estate there underlined the “fixture fees” required to bring commercial, even light-industrial, spaces up to residential code. I dated a girl who was an artist and lived in Tribeca, which was a virtual outpost then. We’d wake up in her loft, and she would say, “Roll up the futon and help me put it in the closet.” The place was her studio, and if she got caught sleeping there, she’d be evicted. Politicians talked about preserving some of Manhattan’s last great manufacturing spaces and fought against the residential development of Soho. But no one was coming back to make thread or nuts, bolts, and washers. With remarkable speed, the pressure to convert the gorgeous cast-iron buildings along Prince and Spring, Grand and Broome, turned the market upside down. Suddenly everyone wanted to live in Soho, much like the Brooklyn influx of recent years.
In 1981, Gary and I moved to the apartment on 58th and 1st, around the corner from the 59th Street Bridge and the Roosevelt Island tram. I fell in love with Linda, a nineteen-year-old who lived across the street. She was the first woman I ever dated who was born and bred in Manhattan. I went with Linda to visit her cousin in Los Angeles, my first trip to California. Like a lot of my travel when I was younger, it was constrained by lack of money, ingenuity, and inspiration. We spent the whole week hanging out at her cousin’s house in the Valley, with no car. We might as well have been limbless.
As I couldn’t broaden my professional horizons much, due to the soap, I did small showcase productions, some for only ten performances. After work, I lounged around the city, drinking while watching Gary in clubs. And once in a while, I went home to Massapequa. Compared to the nightlife and the fruitless auditions I was going on with directors like James Ivory and John Sayles and for theater companies like Manhattan Theatre Club and Circle Rep, going home felt like a chore. Home began to change around that time, as my mother had gotten a job at the local shopping mall doing marketing research. The company that hired her was called Quick Test, and it was essentially a brigade of women, mostly housewives and college girls plus a few guys, who cornered people on the floor of the mall and asked them a series of survey questions. If the shopper was lucky, she would be invited to come to the office to sample anything from hosiery to fabric softener to hand lotion. My mother changed, markedly, once she started getting dressed up, getting her hair done, and going to work for the first time in decades. At times, she seemed transformed, grateful for the companionship that any professional life brings. My father began a descent in the opposite direction. With other kids heading to college, his expenses were higher than ever, and my parents’ combined income still didn’t make a dent.
Many years later, my wife Hilaria once said to me, as a means of underscoring some forgetfulness on my part, “When I’m not with you, I still exist.” That comment reminded me of how wrapped up in my own concerns I was during this period. I saw my siblings infrequently, something I look back on with a lot of regret. By contrast, my sister Beth was a steady presence in the lives of our siblings even after she moved out to marry her boyfriend, Charlie, when she was nineteen. She had met him when she was sixteen, and although he was a tough, working-class young guy from a family of firefighters and cops, perhaps not her type, nonetheless he gave her a way out of our parents’ drama, which was now steeped in resentments. Beth wanted to make her own home and quickly. It didn’t matter if the guy she made that home with didn’t go to Harvard or take her to Paris. Like me, she was conditioned to believe, “As long as the bills are paid.” Remarkably, she would replicate our very household by having six children of her own.
Beth had moved out when I was almost seventeen. Soon after, when I went away to college, I could sense how difficult things were becoming for my siblings when I spoke with them now and then. When they were out of the house, they found companionship, joy, and identity. When they came home, they had to traverse a minefield. I would call my mother and she often sounded sad, as she must have perceived that she was getting close to some transition. My father was almost impossible to reach in the age before cell phones. I pictured him sitting in the driveway for a long moment before he sighed and finally went in. Calling the house was painful, and brought on feelings I wanted to run from.
I recalled that when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old, my brother Daniel and I found out that the local town park was offering tennis lessons during the summer for a very low enrollment fee. The instructor was an older student in our town named Jimmy Luchsinger, who, along with his brother Jack, was a sports legend in our school. As Daniel and I stood at the bottom of the stairs talking, my father overheard us and said, “I will get you the lessons.” He then added, in his typical fashion, “But if you miss one lesson, it’s over.” A couple of days later, he came home with two of the old Wilson wood racquets with “Davis Cup” emblazoned on them. Our mouths fell open. As we offered our thanks, he went in to the den, turned on the TV news, and hid behind the New York Times, which was the
wall he built around himself. When that paper was up at half-staff, you might try your luck. But full staff meant stay away.
As he lay on the daybed, he would fall asleep and often remain there overnight. One of my strongest images of my father is of him stretched out on the daybed, his shoes dangling over the edge, the soles worn and two large holes visible from wear. He smoked cigarettes for years, and once he quit, he smoked a pipe filled with Amphora Brown tobacco. When the pipe sputtered, it sent tiny embers onto his shirt. One day, I opened my dad’s closet to look for something, and in the sunlight, I saw the dozens of pinholes burned through each of his shirts. No moths were here, only Amphora Brown. He never did anything for himself. Nothing, that is, that mattered. When he wanted to binge on something, he sat down with a bucket of blue crabs and a jar of mayonnaise and ate the whole thing.
As we clutched the tennis racquets, beaming, he lowered himself onto the daybed, holes in his shoes, his shirt, and his psyche. The pressures and frustrations that swirled inside him barely concealed a pent-up rage that actually served to tamp down some greater sadness.
At one point, around the fall of 1981, my father moved out. As always, I learned about it from Beth. Everyone was stunned. He had no money to sign a lease somewhere else, so he went to Massapequa High School, his other home. He carried with him his mother’s frugality, compassion, and conscience. He had that key ring that could choke a hippo, with the keys to everything, including the faculty lounge, where there was a couch no better or worse than the one at our house. He slept there, and he showered and dressed in the coaches’ locker room. Surely some knew what he was doing, but they said nothing. Finally, after a couple of months, my father told me that Frank, the chief custodian, approached him and said he would lose his head janitor’s job if the situation continued.
During his summer job at the rec center, my father had hired a young woman who was his former student. Bright and positive, Linda brought to my father’s everyday life the wit and warmth he lacked at home. Linda was his O’Brien. Later, after Linda had finished her degree, she returned to Long Island to teach in a nearby town. With nowhere to go and no money to fund his escape from the crushing realities of his family life, my father moved into Linda’s home. The animosity this triggered within my family was epic. Even I, living somewhat blithely in Manhattan, was pulled into the tumult. My mother played her usual victim card, telling me she had no money for her bills, including food, so I got my father on the phone and threatened him. I said I would give my mother the necessary funds to take him to court. I could feel his pain, anger, and sense of betrayal through the phone as I sided with my mother over him, an unfamiliar position for me. After that, we spoke even less often than before. But the handwriting appeared on the wall once he left that indicated that it had fallen to me to fill whatever gaps I could.
By the summer of 1982, Michael Bloom was telling me to seriously consider heading out to LA for the network television pilot season, and another excuse to distance myself from my family and their problems presented itself. And although my father was also running away from home, it was too late for him. Right at the time that Bloom was enlisting me to go west, my father was diagnosed with oat cell carcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. The doctors at the area hospital told him they had found a tumor in his left lung. He chose, for a critical period, to ignore them. It was time to go without again. Like when he and my mom decided to have six children, it was time to rely on Providence again. And by the time he was back in a hospital for tests, the cancer had spread significantly. I asked him, point-blank, if he felt he was in real danger. He said no. And for a period that lasted for several months, he lied to me. My mother lied to me. My sister Beth lied to me. They all told me he had a very good chance of beating it.
I decided I would drive cross-country to LA, sublet a place there for four months, and give it a go. My contract on The Doctors was up in October of 1982. The three producers pressured me to extend for an additional four months. In September, I told the new executive producer, Gerry Straub, that I wasn’t going to sign up again. In a hysterically funny moment, I walked down a studio hallway with Barimo behind me, and Straub shouted, “You’re making a mistake! What? You think you’re gonna go out to Hollywood and become a big star?”
“Well,” I thought, “maybe a little star.” The short span of the extension had seemed odd, and later I found out why. The show was canceled in December, for good.
While Beth was bringing her own children into the world, Daniel was at Ball State in Indiana, Billy was at the State University at Binghamton, Jane was finishing high school, and Stephen was polishing his legend on the streets of Massapequa, I got into a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with Tuck Milligan and headed to Los Angeles on January 7, 1983. While I snorted and drank my way to Hollywood, my sister Beth ferried my dad to work on whatever days he wasn’t at Sloan Kettering and, later, Mount Sinai. Every day, the man I looked up to for his bottomless reserves of power, his intense sense of duty and unswerving commitment, grew weaker and weaker, all out of my sight. When I left New York, I left behind Gary, my dad, and my TV dad, David. Only Bloom, whose California office was beginning to thrive, would be available to me for the next phase of my life. He would become among my dearest friends, as my life turned fortunate and gratifying on one hand, and abruptly and numbingly painful on the other.
5
Perpetual Light
Tuck and I had shared a small rental cottage in Amagansett the summer before and had become good friends. It was during that period that I fell in love with the East End, and Amagansett in particular. We lived the life of two bachelors, with a very small beach house and not much else. The days were spent cooking at home, punctuated by visits from the occasional kindhearted female visitor, drinking and sleeping on the beach—things I’d never want (drinking) or have time for (cooking) again. But the beach in Amagansett is a good place to get acquainted with God.
On our cross-country drive, I may have alarmed Tuck, my future roommate, with a preview of what was to come regarding my developing self-destruction. I suggested to Tuck that our route be guided not only by places where we had family and friends, but also by where I could deepen my relationship with cocaine. Drugs and alcohol, much to my own surprise, would become an increasingly powerful force in my life. At first slowly, then a sudden, rapid acceleration. All of the feelings behind it were the “self-centered fear” that AA’s Big Book discusses. The self-centered fear that we would either not get something we wanted or lose something we already had. My life was changing in so many ways, most of them good, but others, painful. I was lonely and scared. I missed my family, the simplicity of being myself, of being accepted, even loved, simply for who I was. I often dreaded performing and, even more, the performing you had to do off camera. I was alternately tense, cocky, needy, inspired, or depressed. I felt that tremendous opportunities were in front of me and, therefore, there was no turning back. And as I wanted everyone to believe that I had it together, I was unwilling to ask people around me for help. I left my home with a case of OCD, a consuming desire to earn a respectable living, if not make a fortune, and a nagging need for attention that would fill the holes my parents were too enervated to address. But sometimes, dreams where I would go back to Massapequa and wait for my dad to come home and watch the late night movie show with him would flood me with feelings that I didn’t know what to do with. So I drank. I took drugs and I drank. The chance at a career in Hollywood represented ever greater change for which I was poorly prepared. So, LA would prove to be the Kitty Hawk where my addiction really took off.
Our first stop was the Virginia suburbs, where the woman I’d first seen lying on the floor of my freshman dorm at GW, none other than Avis Renshaw, now lived with her husband and kids. We had stayed in touch. Her husband, Steven Cox, resembled Montgomery Clift as photographed by Dorothea Lange. My nickname for him was Male Model Farmer. They owned a farm and grew things. Avis had purchased a pizza oven, installed it in her garage, busted a ho
le in the wall to allow access to the oven from inside the house, and, thus, birthed Mom’s Apple Pie Company. They had a lot of kids, one of whom, Biansa, later became my assistant. Avis was happy. She had a home and a family, things it would take me another thirty years to find. After a day of envying Avis and Male Model Farmer, we drove on.
Tuck was living the life of a real actor and, therefore, was not obsessed with box office numbers or red carpets, the adoration of fans and critics, or special treatment in restaurants, hotels, and other public places. He had, and still has, the career that nearly all actors should expect after their apprenticeship, one that is about the work. In this situation, performing roles in the theater is your life. If some degree of security comes your way, like a soap opera or any paying gig, some means to take the pressure off and earn a couple of bucks, that is welcomed. During our friendship, I’ve seen him act in several productions, from La Jolla to New York to Palm Beach. A skilled and dedicated stage performer, he’s traveled the country and, as a result, developed a skill that truly great thespians possess: sizing up one’s overnight accommodations.
