by Alec Baldwin
I pull over to the side of the winding road. My eyes are wide and I am hyperventilating. Thank you, God, for intervening with this insight, this gift. Fuck. If they’d shot me, I would have deserved it. Or maybe stabbed me. Then they’d chop me up! My eyes are really wide now. I’m breathing harder. Fuck. Thank you, God. Maybe twenty minutes later, I return to my hotel, holding on to not only the couple of grams of blow, but also some sick, lingering remorse that I’m not deep into the Strip Trivia tourney by now. In the hotel, I am alone with my least favorite company, the guy who complains to me about his life and criticizes me about mine, more than anyone I know.
I sit and pack cocaine, musket-style, into cigarettes. I gently roll out some tobacco, then mix the drug with it and pack it in. I adopted this method some years before, in order to walk along Columbus Avenue and get high while cruising the Upper West Side. I turn to it now to calm myself with something familiar. That’s right. Calming myself by smoking cocaine at three a.m. Or perhaps I’m doing this because addiction forces you to a place of inevitability that must include overwhelming risk, shame, or death.
Jane is speaking, but it is not having the desired effect. Shortly after Room Service Rick is gone, I realize I have hit that place where none of it is working. I cannot get high and I cannot come down. I’ve walked out on a ledge, only to find that I lack the true resolve. But I’ve also closed the window and there’s no way to get back in. I think for a moment and decide to give it one more try. Now I’m slightly panicked. My heart is like a speed bag, thumping very fast in my chest now. As I dial the phone, I think how I’ve never been this aware of my heart beating before. RING RING!! Not ever. RING RING!! “Room service? This is Mr. Baldwin again in 224. Yes, I did get that delivery, however my friends have informed me that they will be a somewhat larger group and I’m thinking that perhaps we’ll need ANOTHER bottle of champagne, NOW, in order to accommodate everyone, so, yes . . . er . . . ah . . . Baldwin, room 224.”
Knock, knock. It’s Rick, staring straight ahead with a jaundiced look as he hands me the bill to sign. As I turn and put the paper on the counter, I follow his gaze over to the now empty bottle of champagne, upside down in its bucket. I turn back and he says, glancing over my shoulder, “Shall I take away the empty bottle?” His expression seems sad. Seeing myself reflected in this guy’s eyes, I glimpse a chance, in that moment: a last, unrecoverable chance. I actually sober up for four seconds. He’s Angel Rick now. He’s here to save me, not to deliver room service. But Mick keeps singing:
He don’t go in the light of the morning
He split the time the cock’rel crows
So I resume, muttering “Sure, sure” and gesturing him out. As I close the door, I feel as if I’m on a surfboard and an enormous wave is gathering. I’m now left to ride this colossal beast to the shore all alone. I take a few more gulps and I lie down and light a cigarette.
My heart starts fluttering. I sit up, gasping a bit for air. Jane is smiling. I lie down again and begin to breathe deeply and sharply, trying to calm myself down from an emerging megapanic. I inhale, attempting to push the air up toward my clavicle and down toward my lower back. I’m scared. My speed bag heart drums away inside me while my skin begins to feel wet and cold. As I reach my right arm across my body to get another drink of champagne, I begin to go completely deaf. Did Jane just look at me through the TV and mouth, “Oh, Alec”? Now the speed bag is replaced by a hummingbird, trapped inside my chest, trying to get out. It’s too fast. My eyes start to tear up. I start to whimper. Am I overdosing? I press my right palm over my heart and my left one over the right. I am trying to massage my heart and contain the hummingbird while gulping in air. I am fucked. I am so fucked. I actually know it now. The wave is gathering me. It’s going to fling me like a fucking paper airplane onto the floor. The bird gets faster. The wave is curled over me. Then there is this bizarre pause as the beat stops. Now my heart feels like a bubble gum bubble is blowing up inside of it. Puff, the bubble gets bigger. Puff, bigger still. Puff, and I have no idea what is happening and then the bubble pops. There’s a pop inside my chest. POP! Then I black out.
When I open my eyes, I have no idea how long I was lying there, knocked out by a hummingbird. When I raise my head, I find I can’t move without some corresponding tachycardia. Each motion awakens the bird. When I stop moving, the bird is quiet. I crawl across the carpet to the phone on the other side of the bed, a twenty-foot journey that takes me thirty minutes. I call a woman in the cast who will understand, I’m hoping. When she picks up, she sounds appalled. It’s nine a.m. on her day off. I try to tell her I think I need the kind of help someone needs when he’s just overdosed on cocaine, but I don’t use the word “overdose.” More than his own health, more than his life, the addict clings to the lie.
We drive to the emergency room, where the doctor asks if I’m on drugs. I think, “Fuck you, asshole. You’re gonna take my blood and find out.” In this business, even taking a standing eight, let alone getting knocked out by drugs and booze, is frowned upon. And a diagnosis of addiction can follow you forever. So I lie and tell him, “We’ve been working hard, Doc. Long hours. I took some speed.” He stares down at me on the gurney. He must be good at poker, because his expression doesn’t say, “You lying little shit,” which I assume he’s thinking. Maybe he’s seen lots of lying little shits like me come through there: black, white, rich, poor, promising, or hopeless. Or maybe he’s an angel, too? He seems kind when he says, “I’m going to give you something to sleep.” Although I can’t move my body, a tear rolls down the side of my face. “What’s the matter?” he asks. I say, “I’m afraid I’m not going to wake up.”
I slept the next thirty-six hours. I woke up Monday morning and had the day off. I was still rooming with this guy, however, who was trying to kill me. Tuesday morning, I went to work and never spoke with anyone about what happened. The girl who drove me to the hospital simply asked, “Are you OK?” as if I had poison ivy.
I returned to Los Angeles, alternately scared out of my mind and grateful beyond words, and went to a meeting of Cocaine Anonymous, an association of people who measured their lengths of sobriety more in months, weeks, and days than years. Due to the overwhelming grip cocaine had on its largely younger membership, relapses were more frequent. But as I had been warned in my first AA meetings, abstinence from drugs requires abstinence from alcohol as well, because otherwise the addict substitutes drinking for drugs.
And that’s just what I did. Rather than pull over to my dealer’s house at four p.m., I’d hit a bar. I’d never been much of a drinker compared to others I’d known. But I now found myself spending the fall of 1984 keeping my feelings and my drug addiction at bay by drinking liquor in LA bars.
By that point, Tuck and I were living just off of the Ocean Front Walk in Venice in an apartment that looked out onto the water and the surge of beachgoers who flocked there on weekends. Venice was a Bleecker Street–type carnival of humanity, vendors, and food. The walkway was a filthy and garbage-strewn mess by Sunday evening. On Monday mornings, the beach cleaning crew arrived, a small brigade of sand-sifting trucks and workers who spent the day soaping and rinsing the benches along the promenade. By Tuesday morning, it was as clean as the entrance to Buckingham Palace. The smells and sounds of those Tuesday mornings became my Bright Lights, Big City moments. A sparkling, clean Venice made me think that maybe I could be cleansed, too.
In the winter of 1985, Larry, an old friend from New York, came to visit me at the beach, and for the first time in six months, I got high. He drove away after just an hour or so, claiming he was off to procure more coke. He never returned, leaving me to pace the floor in a desperate, metronomic march, waiting for him. That was it. That was the last day: Saturday, February 23, 1985. I spent most of Sunday sleeping, thinking, praying, and accepting. On Monday morning, I went to an AA meeting in West Hollywood. To tell you what was said there would be a violation of the principles of anonymity that I respect. I’m comfortable tellin
g you I am a member, but I’ll leave it at that. I haven’t had a drink or recreational drug since that day over thirty years ago. I surely have not had the courage to face all of my issues in the way AA gently recommends. However, I am profoundly grateful for discovering the program that saved my life. As frequently as I have gotten in my own way throughout my sobriety, I shudder to think of how much more painful and destructive my behavior might have been had I not been sober. Most important, through AA, I have a renewed relationship with God, a relationship I call upon every day. A couple of short years later, Larry died of AIDS from IV drug use.
AA teaches you to make no serious decisions in your first year of sobriety, including moving, changing jobs, and getting into serious relationships. I obviously ignored the last part as soon as I met Holly Gagnier, who visited the Knots Landing set one day to see her father, Hugh, the cinematographer. Beautiful and funny, Holly would be my girlfriend, off and on, for the next five years.
Knots Landing was a good opportunity, but it wasn’t my show. The cast was a lovely bunch that had formed a family, and Joan Van Ark, who played my sister, made me feel like a real sibling. But I didn’t want a career like that of my castmate Ted Shackelford, whereby you come in week after week and do the same thing every day. The women in the Knots cast ruled the roost, and the show’s creator, David Jacobs, expressed his beliefs, curiosities, and passions through the three female leads, who were given more interesting things to do on-screen than the men. The producers of Knots Landing had my character commit suicide, and although I had mixed feelings about leaving, I was off the show in the spring of 1985.
In the beginning, I had thought I might try acting for a while and see if it fit. As the work I was offered became more interesting, it became my life. The challenge of doing it well at an ever-higher level appealed to me more than anything else. It also took its toll on the rest of my life. I dated a bunch of women from 1980 through 1985. The cycle was always the same. I fed them crumbs and water and insisted they pretend it was a five-course meal. The moment work presented itself, and another chance to get ahead, I rushed into the arms of The Business. I discovered that in my private life, I was a chauffeur. People got in. I drove them around. Everyone seemed to arrive somewhere except me. I was a taxi that brought women to their next relationship and, hopefully, a better one. They got out of the cab and got married, had kids. I just kept reading scripts, going to meetings, trying to hustle my way into the movie business.
By the end of 1985, I had been in Los Angeles for a few years and California had begun to seem like a bit of a political loony bin, with Reagan having won reelection the year before. The lens of sobriety forced me to see everything more clearly. I wanted to go home. When I flew to New York on a red-eye for an audition, the city’s stark reality overwhelmed me. Jet-lagged and hungry, I walked to the old 79th Street Coffee Shop on Broadway. That morning I thought, as some elderly folks shuffled by, “New York’s got so many old people.” A moment later, “New York’s got so many fat people.” And then, “I never realized how black New York is,” as I noticed at least a third of those on the street were African-American. “New York is so old and fat and black,” I thought. Coming home from LA, the land of the trim, youth-obsessed, and racially polarized, made me realize that I had been away too long. I ate breakfast, went home, and slept. Once I was in my right mind, New York seemed just right. Perfect, in fact. I sublet my half of the Venice apartment, bought a little place on West 80th Street in Manhattan in December of ’85, and in the spring of 1986, I moved back to New York. Within a month, it would prove to be one of the best decisions I had ever made.
7
Prelude
The first Broadway show I saw was Shenandoah, starring John Cullum. Our high school bused us into New York for a field trip to the stock exchange, police headquarters, the United Nations, the botanical gardens, or Broadway. New York in the 1970s was filthy and unlovable, but while watching a good Broadway show, you could forget that. And inside the grimy Alvin Theatre, Cullum showed me, for the first time, what acting talent truly is. Leading men on Broadway like Cullum, Philip Bosco, and Len Cariou may have lacked the symmetrical features, perfect bodies, and ability to hold a close-up solely with a style like Cary Grant or Bogart. But they more than made up for it with wit, technique, and timing. Cullum had that theater eating out of his hand.
When I returned to New York in 1986, the Manhattan Theatre Club produced Joe Orton’s black comedy Loot with a cast that included Kevin Bacon. The show garnered good reviews, and though subscribers may have yawned or slept through Orton’s signature language and madness, true Ortonphiles showed up in the final days of the run to laugh convulsively at the late English playwright’s dark and twisted take on family, sex, and politics. I was told that the legendary producer David Merrick attended one of the last performances and decided to move the show to Broadway. Bacon, on his way to starring in many films, could not make the move with the rest of the cast, so I got a call to audition for the role.
The producer, Charles Kopelman, gave me a copy of Prick Up Your Ears, John Lahr’s definitive biography of Orton, where I read about the playwright’s role in the cultural life of “Swinging London” in the ’60s and his tragic end, bludgeoned to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. (Gary Oldman played Orton in a film version of the book, which was released the following year.) John Tillinger, the director, warned me from the moment I was cast that we would only do a “put in” rehearsal, due to the brief window of time before the opening. Thus, it was eight days of “Kevin did this” and “Kevin did that.” There was a smattering of apologies from people assuming they were offending me with a rehearsal that bordered on puppetry, but I couldn’t have cared less. I loved every minute of it. The role of Dennis, the undertaker’s apprentice, was a small one, so the obstacle wasn’t about memorization, but about my nerves. We previewed briefly, as all the other cast members were ready to go. It all seems a blur now, but the opening night was indelible. I made my first entrance feeling like I’d been fired out of a cannon. On that stage I tasted, for the first time, the joy of doing a well-oiled show. Knowing what I was going to say, how the other actors would respond, and the ultimate effect it would have on the audience became an addiction.
Charles Keating played the patriarch (a pejorative in Orton’s worldview), Zoë Wanamaker was the nurse, and the talented Zeljko Ivanek played Hal, my character’s lover. All three of them were such a pleasure to watch. But the otherworldly and brilliant Joe Maher was the Meadowlark Lemon of this team. Maher could bend a line, a phrase, or even a syllable to suit his desires. You couldn’t take your eyes off of him. I’d first gotten a glimpse of Maher when I’d auditioned for Tillinger four years prior to replace Max Caulfield in Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Awed by his playfulness, pomp, sinister sexuality, and thunderous eruptions of conceit and indignation, I thought, “Imagine having gone to school with this guy!”
Throughout the run of Loot, which lasted only three months, I stood each night by the desk of the stage manager, Peggy Peterson, while she called the show. I was nearly hypnotized by Maher as, again and again, he tickled the crowd and his fellow actors with his signature zany effusions. In one scene, Maher brandished a book, intoning, “You have before you a man who is quite a personage in his way. Truscott of the Yard!” He then snapped open the book to indicate his picture. Beforehand, Joe would go to a newsstand and buy male porn magazines like Honcho and Mandate, cut out a shot of a guy with an appendage the size of a wrench, and paste it into the book. Zeljko’s next line, “It’s you,” was meant to be thrown away, as if his character was unimpressed. But Zeljko and I could barely contain ourselves. Zeljko would spit the line out, stifling a laugh. That alone indicates how funny Joe was, but he was also kind and instructive offstage. Working with him was the most fun I’ve ever had. Wicked, funny Joe, I miss you.
As soon as the show closed, I was back on a plane to LA to audition for a film. In the beginning of my movie career, I met with casting d
irectors frequently, and that year I was lucky enough to meet Jane Jenkins and Janet Hirshenson. Jane and Janet are two of the biggest names in casting in all of Hollywood, but when you talked with them, they were kind and generous, unpretentious and professional. Meetings with them were like going to the school nurse. If they brought you in and they liked you, they wanted you to get the job. In those days, when I had to audition for a role, I never knew if I was going to be offered the job until the end of the casting process. Eventually, I got to a place where I rarely have a discussion about a role without an offer, but the old days were more fun. The expectations were low. The excitement was real. For every job you were cast in, no matter how small, you had immeasurable gratitude.
I went through the casting process with Jane, Janet, and the director John Hughes, and got the role of Davis McDonald, the leading man’s best friend, in the film She’s Having a Baby. It was set to star Kevin Bacon, coincidentally enough, and Elizabeth McGovern. Hughes, slightly awkward yet smart and funny, reminded me of a resident assistant at a college dorm, having focused his films on the woes and triumphs of the young. I loved shooting with him, as he was very thoughtful toward me on my first real movie. Liz was that rare kind of actress with both beauty and talent but devoid of ego and insecurities. She reminded me of Katharine Hepburn. She knew who she was. Kevin was quiet, and his shyness suggested that the nature of movie stardom itself was a bit of a rash for him. We shot the film in Chicago and LA, and when it was over, I wanted more. I was attracted to the slower, more thoughtful pace of the movies, the professionalism on the set, and the belief that film is an art form.
The Hughes film was also my first time seeing a truly top cinematographer at work. Don Peterman, who had shot Flashdance, Splash, and Cocoon, among others, was a reserved guy who began my education about the camera. The first lesson he taught me is that the camera is the real star of every movie, and your first priority as a film actor is to get your relationship right with it. How you have prepared, how you look, how truthful you and the choices you make for your character only matter if they are revealed to the camera. Otherwise, it’s like painstakingly crafting a painting only to hang it on the wall backwards.
