by Alec Baldwin
Quite quickly, however, my dream of costarring with Guinness disappeared as the Fox execs rode roughshod over Norman and Craig’s casting desires. Ultimately, to shoot the film in New York was too expensive, so Guinness had to withdraw. Naturally, Norman had wanted Mary-Louise to claim the role that was rightly hers, but Joe Roth, the head of Fox, and Roger Birnbaum, his second, protested. They insisted that Mary-Louise and I would need to be bolstered by a big name in the role of the old man, and strongly suggested Jack Lemmon or Art Carney. Norman told me he would rather not make the film if it meant hiring someone he did not see in the role. And then, in what reminded me of the Julie Andrews/My Fair Lady casting tale, Mary-Louise was gone and Meg Ryan was playing the lead. As a concession to Norman and Craig, the remarkable theater veteran Sydney Walker was cast as the old man.
Roth, a successful executive who’d also directed with little or no success, had overseen countless films from his office, but seemed to have learned next to nothing about how to create one. He and Birnbaum had me in to see them on a couple of occasions, hoping to enlist me in their cause of placating Norman about specific creative decisions they had made. In one meeting, after the film was finished and had been screened for test audiences, Birnbaum announced, “We have to cut the kiss.” Roth sat by, nodding pensively. By that, Birnbaum meant the eponymous kiss, the kiss between the old man (now embodying my wife) and me, THE kiss, which is the incontrovertible emotional climax of the film. “What?” I asked. “We have to cut it,” Birnbaum said. “At the screening, there was audible groaning.” Roth repeated, “Audible groaning.” This would be Prelude to a Hug. Their idea was like suggesting that The Longest Yard be moved to a basketball court to reduce the number of cast members, but still titled The Longest Yard. Birnbaum, whose round, boyish face, expressive eyes, and silly intonation reminded me of a borscht belt comic out of Broadway Danny Rose, just stared at me. “It’s gotta go.”
Norman and Craig told me they would sue. The idiocy of the Fox note was plain, so the kiss stayed. But the whole thing began to slowly swirl downward. Meg is a wonderful actress and was at the peak of her career then, but she was not Mary-Louise. We finished the film, and when it came out, Fox put minimal effort into supporting it. Some of the blame has to go to all of us for the final product because, during the shooting, we all began to wonder what it might have been like if Mary-Louise had been there. That winter, I was invited to Craig’s Christmas party. In a throng of people, music blaring, Mary-Louise appeared. She saw me, burst into tears, and bolted away. I realized that there really are rare occasions when there is one person who is meant to play a role. That was true of Mary-Louise. The movie tanked.
Normally I try to avoid working in the summer. Being from Long Island means that an extended celebration of the beach, boats, and sunsets feels like a birthright. However, when my agent, Michael Bloom, was contacted on the heels of Prelude about the film version of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, I broke my usual routine. Like Prelude, this would be another adaptation of stage material, but the two films were night and day. Pacino was set as the lead, Ricky Roma. But Bloom had an instinct about the project due to Pacino’s reputation for being in and out of certain projects, including Glengarry. So Bloom made a suggestion to the producers: if Pacino faltered again, let me play Roma. They agreed. Pacino flip-flopped again, Bloom called them on it, and count to three, I was set to play Roma. But Pacino is the person they wanted in that role, so when he reconsidered, the producers asked Bloom “if I would mind stepping aside.” It was just a few months after the Red October situation. I was now dealing with a group of people who politely asked if I could accommodate them, unlike the assholes at Paramount who violated agreements and stabbed people in the back as a matter of course, so I chose to accommodate them.
Al played Ricky, and I took the role of Blake, a part not in Mamet’s original play. Mamet’s work, in my mind, is often about predation among human beings. I was told that Blake is there to incite the other men, men who are not criminal by nature, to commit a crime. Blake is the screw that turns and pressures them to do something desperate. Blake, with his turgid language and metronomic delivery, is sent to hammer home the message: if you don’t make money, and make it right now, you’re out.
The rest of the cast was like an acting school, an assembly of men so varied in style, I knew that whatever happened here, it was going to be special. The cast included Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, and Jonathan Pryce. While I came to rehearsal with a fondness and high regard for everyone, I outright worshipped Jack Lemmon. The great actor and film star was a role model to me, especially for the signature key he often played in, a combination of weakness and valor, doubt and resolve, anxiety and clarity. Few actors have appeared as vividly human as Lemmon did on-screen. He had starred in so many great films, including Mister Roberts; Bell, Book and Candle; The Apartment; Days of Wine and Roses; The Odd Couple; and The China Syndrome. Lemmon, despite the corrosive tone of Mamet’s material, was an unerring gentleman of the old school throughout. Here, perhaps, was the great opportunity I had missed with Alec Guinness. Lemmon is breathtaking in the role of Shelley “The Machine” Levene and the fact that he wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar is a crime. He should have won it.
The director, James Foley, is a smart guy. He had a great script. He brought in the talented Juan Ruiz Anchia as cinematographer. With a cast like that, a good director chimes in specifically and as needed. Foley stood back and let everyone do their thing. He did offer me a truly fabulous piece of direction. I was anxious about shooting a scene in which I so relentlessly harangue some of the greatest actors in the business. Foley said, in so many words, “It’s like that scene in Patton, where George C. Scott slaps the soldier in the medical tent. He’s doing it for the coward’s own good and for the benefit of the other men. Patton asks, ‘You call yourself a soldier?’ Well, this is, ‘You call yourself a salesman?’ You’re doing it for their own good.”
That was all I needed, something to authorize me to lean into these guys without fear or doubt. People are always commenting to me about that scene in Glengarry, commending me for those blistering moments, but I’ve still never really understood audiences’ appetites for that kind of double-barreled acting. Mamet’s pieces are tough. You have to give the horse the stick out of the chute and all the way to the finish line. It’s mean and it’s relentless, and if you’re not exhausted by the end, you haven’t done the job. But as I get older, I’d rather do a more thoughtful role, like Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind or Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Or I even fantasized about doing a comedy, a television sitcom written by some truly funny and crazy people! That sounded like fun.
As the Red October fiasco came and went, the fall of 1991 found me sitting on a couch in Kim’s house in LA believing that our relationship was coming to an end. In the past, I had a timer set, an unconscious alarm that went off at a certain point and told me to move on. My outer limit was around eighteen months. I’d met Kim in April of 1990. Now it was November of the next year, and the pressures of The Marrying Man, Kim’s failed real estate development deal in Braselton, Georgia (a very good opportunity that was just poorly executed), and her overall anxiety as a private person living a public life were mounting. My commitment to doing Streetcar had enabled Kirkpatrick to torpedo my Paramount deal, although I’m sure they would have figured out how to get rid of me even without it. Now it was time to go do that play. Kim said she felt Broadway was where actors go who can’t make it in the movies. I bit my tongue instead of saying that the opposite was more often the case. For some, the movies are where you go when you don’t have the talent for the stage.
My entertainment lawyer at that time was the colorful, reedy Jake Bloom (no relation to Michael), a guy who reminded me of a thinner Jerry Garcia. Bloom was one of the most connected and adroit players in Hollywood. So when he called to tell me that, in the wake of the Paramount implosion, he wanted me to meet another agent,
I sensed how much trouble I was in. One Bloom in my life was poised to push the other Bloom over the side of the ship. Michael had been the only agent I’d ever had.
I was in a rut, and as Jake Bloom suggested, I needed a tow truck to pull me out. Ron Meyer, one of the founders of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), arranged for me to come to his Malibu home to talk about leaving Michael Bloom and coming to CAA. Meyer, an ex-marine, is a compact, bespectacled man with the look of a wrestling coach who favors cardigan sweaters. His lack of pretension is legendary. But in Hollywood, a town overwhelmed by its obsession with personal power, Ron Meyer is the OG. Together with Mike Ovitz, he transformed the business. The formation of CAA heralded a period of unusual power for agents who packaged their writer, director, and actor clients into deals that created a sellers’ market that spelled huge fees for them.
I asked Meyer which agent would do my day-to-day, meaning the person with whom I would communicate about offers, etc. He said he would be that person. I laughed out loud. How would someone like Meyer, who headed a company that handled the biggest stars in Hollywood, find the time, let alone the interest, to cover my career? Meyer promised to handle everything personally, and he wasn’t kidding. Over the course of the next few years, right up until he sold the agency and went on to his lengthy run at NBC Universal, Meyer took my calls like I was his brother. People joke that Ron would take calls as he was being put under for surgery. But the truth is, he was generous and forthright with me in a way I was unprepared for. “We’ll just keep throwing it against the wall till something sticks,” he would say. Eventually, the offers for starring roles in big films would become fewer and further between, but Ron gave it everything he had. I remain indebted to and fond of him to this very day.
The painful task of parting with Michael Bloom occurred in a small café near the Miracle Mile in LA. Bloom had been in this boat before, having watched several of his stars-in-training move on to other, usually more powerful agents and agencies. Also, by 1988, his business was on the ropes. That year, the Writers Guild of America had taken its members on strike from March 7 to August 7. At 155 days, it was the longest strike in their history. The town shut down, and the ripple effects were staggering. Restaurants, dry cleaners, private schools, travel agents, florists, clothing stores, limo companies, you name it, everyone was affected. Some B-level agencies in Bloom’s league folded. Others were smart enough to merge, and though their power was diluted, they survived. Bloom, with his outsized faith in himself, refused such merger offers. He couldn’t imagine working for someone else. His name was on the door and it had to stay that way.
At a café that day, Bloom cried. I think I cried, I don’t remember. (I am a pretty good crier.) He asked if Kim was in some way an influence here, as she was already with CAA. Kim had in fact voiced the opinion that I needed a change. (When Kim spoke about Bloom, I reminded myself of the changes that Mace Neufeld had recommended.) But the reality was that when I was in trouble and I needed answers, the heads of studios didn’t even know Bloom’s name, let alone return his calls. Underlings would get back to him, offering little in the way of hard information. When I was struggling with the Jack Ryan deal, Bloom called Stanley Jaffe at Paramount many times. Jaffe never called him back.
Ron Meyer could never be Bloom, and I would miss our trips to the West End of London and our long dinners in New York after a show, critiquing everyone and everything we’d seen. But I knew I had to climb out of this well I had been thrown into. I told Bloom we were done, and I headed to New York to start rehearsals for Streetcar. In the coming years, mutual friends told me that Bloom took my decision hardest of all his clients’ defections.
As I prepared to begin Streetcar, a decision that forced me to rethink my career, I was questioning other things as well. Life with Kim was largely centered around the narcissistic passions of two childless actors. We worked most of the time, and when we weren’t working we were thinking about work. But troubles on the set of The Marrying Man, along with Kim’s age (she turned thirty-eight in December of that year), had seemed to let some of the air out of her tires. I, on the other hand, needed a break from the sweepstakes mentality of Hollywood, and I went to New York knowing that I needed a break from her and her self-absorption as well. Kim could be funny. She could be a mess. But, most of all, Kim was about Kim. I needed to heal and she wasn’t built to comfort her significant other. Kim lived to be understood, not to understand. To heal, I needed a meaningful experience, a mountain to climb. So Tennessee Williams would help me by providing me with one of the greatest challenges of all.
I had seen a production of Streetcar, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos, at Lincoln Center in 1988. It had starred Frances McDormand as Stella, the wonderful Frank Converse as Mitch, Aidan Quinn as Stanley, and Blythe Danner as one of the best Blanche DuBois I’ve ever seen. I’ve always admired Aidan and thought he was good in the part of Stanley, in a production I’d actually auditioned for myself, but he seemed to hold back, like he was asking permission for this or that. At one point in the play, Stanley slugs his wife, and in less than five minutes, she comes back to him and they go to bed. Unless the director makes cuts or you’re doing some revisionist production, it’s World War II New Orleans and you play these roles without comment or apology.
When I’d studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute on East 15th Street, I’d met Elaine Aiken, who became my friend and private coach. When I worked on scenes from Streetcar with her, she would say, “Honey, you’re either sexy or you’re not. No acting lessons can help you there. This guy is an animal. You can’t be polite about it. You’ve got to be clear. It’s more than ‘You want something, you take it.’ When this guy wants something, he’ll destroy anyone who gets in his way.”
Gregory Mosher, who, along with Bernard Gersten, had reshaped Lincoln Center Theater, was directing this production. The cast included Jessica Lange as Blanche, Tim Carhart as Mitch, and Amy Madigan as Stella, as well as Jimmy Gandolfini and Aida Turturro in supporting roles. At the first rehearsal, an actor read a line from the New Directions edition of the play, and Maria St. Just, the coexecutor of the Williams estate, snapped, “That’s not the line!” Mosher arrived the following day, plopped down three other somewhat varied editions of Streetcar, and said, “What line do you want?” The Williams estate had yet to codify the playwright’s papers, and the extant texts of his classic dramas contained certain inconsistencies. Many had blamed the disarray of Williams’s official papers on Maria, who, through some unusual arrangement with the playwright toward the end of his life, wound up having approval of everything, including the casting of his shows. Mosher is smart and funny, and just the type of person I needed for this situation. He warned me that Lady St. Just (she was the widow of some guy with a title) would have notes about everything, and he was right. During rehearsals, Maria would ask if she could get a lift home in my car. On a couple of occasions, early on, I acquiesced. During the ride, she tore everyone in the cast to pieces and then sought my opinion on them, too. She was a shrill ferret of a woman with a British title and the power to at least try to tell us all what to do. Fortunately, Greg got her to fade into the background.
Jessica Lange had never performed on Broadway at that point, and making her debut playing Blanche DuBois in Streetcar was a very daring move. She was a celebrated film actress who had been nominated for an Oscar several times and would eventually win twice. It was assumed she was awash in theater culture and history, but her stage credits were slim when we started rehearsal. What many observed about the production was that if you were in the first ten rows, she was wonderful. If you were onstage with her, she shone in the role. To the majority of ticket holders, however, she failed to project in the way to which they were accustomed.
Greg Mosher was assumed, at one time, to be the heir to the Mike Nichols Chair in Film and Theater before a corporatized show business eliminated that position. Capable in ways that translated into great success directing early productions of Mamet’s work i
n Chicago, and later in his great run with Gersten at Lincoln Center, Mosher is the smartest guy in the room and doesn’t have to work to remind you of that. He just shows you and usually in an elegant way. He was enormously helpful to me in the role, both in terms of the text and in the psychology of taking on a role overshadowed by so iconic an actor.
I had never once hesitated to take the part, never once doubted I could play Stanley. And, up to a point, I never thought about Marlon Brando and the threat posed by comparisons to him. Brando, however, was twenty-four when he appeared on Broadway. I was thirty-four in 1992. I always contended that Stanley’s self-absorption, bullying, and passions were best served by a younger man. Therefore, in order to straddle the need to serve the script and my own hesitancy to lay into the brutality too hard, I tried to make it funny where I could. Other male actors my age would constantly say to me, “It must be great to get all of that anger out of your system every night.” My response was, “I don’t have that much anger in me.” Indeed, some nights I wanted to ad-lib a scene with Blanche in which we sat down, had a beer, and talked out our differences, ending up as good friends.
On opening night, though, it hit me. Brando owned the role to the exclusion of all pretenders. Now, I was the latest pretender, sitting in my dressing room, suffocating under the weight of a Broadway opening. What the hell had I done? Mosher came to see me, and I told him how I felt. Mosher, as kind as he is bright and talented, told me, “Marlon Brando is sitting up on Mulholland Drive right now. He’s three hundred pounds, he’s sixty-eight years old, and he’s not coming down here to do the show. So, if they want to see it live, you’re it. You’re Stanley now.” He wished me luck and headed out. Onstage, Williams’s writing has the effect that all great writing has on an actor. It steadies you. It emboldens you. You ride an elevator to the top floor of a building, you jump off the penthouse balcony, and you fly. Just put one foot in front of the other, one line after the other, one moment after the other, and you are walking on air. It was the creative experience of a lifetime.
