Nevertheless

by Alec Baldwin

  I worked out pretty hard for the role. My trainer was a boxing pro named Michael Olajide, whose son, Michael Jr., fought professionally under the name “Silk” Olajide. Olajide, a Nigerian émigré, was a gregarious and patient man who called all of his charges “Champ”: “How are you today, Champ?” Or, “OK, Champ, let’s hit the heavy bag.” Fred Ward had gotten me into boxing while we were shooting Miami Blues about four years earlier. Fred and I walked into the 5th Street Gym in Miami and right into the legendary Beau Jack, a world-class fighter who ran the place where Ali trained when he was photographed “knocking out” the Beatles in 1964. Over the years I fell in love with that form of training, which eliminates any downtime. The bell rings, you move. The bell rings, you stop. Repeat. Repeat. Ninety minutes of that, and you start to feel pretty good.

  Olajide had me lift weights for thirty minutes after the bag, rope, and sparring work. I put on twenty pounds of muscle. I felt like if I hit a building, the building would wince. If someone leaned on me on the subway, I was ready with the look you flash only when you can back it up. I felt invincible. I was becoming Stanley. But the physicality of the role, the animal lack of self-consciousness, is counterweighted by the character’s obsession with and love for Stella. Each night, it was like Prelude again. Amy Madigan was more Annie Oakley than the languid beauties normally cast in the role of Stella, but she is a woman who beams talent, heart, decency, passion, and technique. She is right there at the top with Mary-Louise and Jennifer Jason Leigh as one of the greatest actresses I’ve worked with. With the deepest respect to Ed Harris, I fell in love with his wife on a regular basis, too, and loved her with all my heart and soul. In the iconic moment where Stanley wails for the loss of his one good reason to live, I imagined having and losing a woman as wonderful as Amy/Stella, something I would not know in my own life for some time to come, and the pain just poured out of me.

  Performing the role of Stanley took a real toll on me physically. I broke my knuckles while pounding the Kowalskis’ kitchen table (“Every man is a king. And I am the king around here!”), which I swear was made of hickory. After I injured my hand, I kept at it until the knuckles turned a blackish blue. I switched over to pounding the left side of my chest with my right fist, in a basic ape-like manner. Eventually, I crushed a nerve in my chest. One night, as I dropped down to do some push-ups offstage, my left arm just collapsed—my pectoral muscle was simply dead. To add to my problems, the stage of the show was pitched, or raked in Broadway terminology. If you turned toward another actor while opening slightly to the audience, you stood on a slight incline, one leg lower than the other. After six months of that, my back went out. I never had a back problem in my life until Streetcar, where I developed back pain that would eventually drive me nearly mad. I enjoyed saying those lines and being that guy, but I literally hobbled to the finish line. Having also added twenty pounds of weight, I finished the play injured, exhausted, and bulky. Rather than do what I could to take the weight off, I kept lifting as I turned thirty-five and then headed toward forty. One day, a guy in the gym said, “You work out like the Cowboys are gonna call you to carry the ball this season. I got news for you. They’re not gonna call.” Within a few years, age and a diagnosis of prediabetes made weight gain an issue in my life. The vanity that propelled me through Streetcar had its price.

  On the opening night of the play, we all gathered at Sardi’s for the party. Many of us were tense in anticipation of Frank Rich’s review. Rich, the powerful and unsparing critic from the Times, occupied a place beyond the one Ben Brantley does today, as Rich actually knew what he was writing about. Brantley seems to serve a function for the Times similar to Page Six in the Post, insofar as his writing is random, uninformed snark. There was no digital edition of the Times then. The paper would hit newsstands in New York just past midnight. Kim and I headed home from the party and arrived near my apartment as the paper literally hit the shelves. “Don’t read that,” she said. “I mean, you don’t really believe that, do you? You don’t believe anything those people say?”

  Rich had been kind to me just a couple of years earlier when Prelude to a Kiss was at Circle Rep. The commercial success of our production hinged on his review. But I caught Kim’s intention, which was to make sure I didn’t enjoy the evening too much. She had once told me, as a kind of self-penned letter of recommendation regarding her on-the-job performance in romantic relationships, “I am so ‘for’ the other person. You couldn’t be any more in the other person’s corner than I am.” Now, Kim had grown tired of bad publicity about Evian hair rinses and failed real estate investments. She seemed to demand that everyone be as miserable as she was. In 1992, I had the old Record-a-Call answering machine in my apartment. The morning after the opening, the tape was filled with the scores of congratulations from friends who quoted the Times review, as Rich was positive toward my performance. Elaine Aiken, who had helped to coax a bit of Stanley out of me, framed the review and hung it in her acting studio.

  Jessica Lange is a tough woman, but the challenges of Streetcar tested her. When all the reviews came out (mixed for all of us, actually), Jessica must have been perplexed and certainly hurt. She was rather remote to begin with, and the response to her performance simply made her retreat while at the theater even more. But she was used to winning, so after our show, she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and went on to build a whole wing of her career dedicated to the theater. She did The Glass Menagerie in New York, Streetcar in London, and in 2016 won the Tony Award for best actress in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey. For me, Streetcar was also pivotal. McTiernan, not a dramaturge by any stretch, said that the Jack Ryan character’s story was essentially “a boy goes down to the sea and comes home a man.” He was right. I showed up at Paramount a boy and left Streetcar a man. It was in losing Hunt and gambling on Streetcar that I realized who I was, what I could do, and how little I cared about most of the moviemaking in the era I was working in.

  In the fall of 1992, I went off to shoot Malice, a tepid thriller written by a young Aaron Sorkin and directed by Harold Becker, whom I enjoyed working with. Bill Pullman is a talented actor and a great guy, but the best opportunity the movie offered was the chance to be photographed by the great Gordon Willis, who shot a slate of Woody Allen’s richest films, not to mention The Godfather. Gordon’s signature chiaroscuro meant we were lit low. Very low. In one scene, I turned to Bill and said, “Do you think if we left here right now, anyone would even notice?” Gordon was tough, but what an honor it was to shoot with him.

  At the end of 1992, Kim was informed that the producers of a film she had pulled out of intended to sue her. By the spring of the following year, her career and her finances would be sunk like the Titanic. In 1993, Kim would enter a courtroom and be mauled by opposing attorneys, the jury, and the judge. Years later, when we divorced, it was the lessons from this trial that she would apply in a concerted effort to have the last word, to control the outcome, and to effectively represent herself as the victim in any and all disputes, which is what Kim was used to most of all.

  10

  The Pink and the Gray

  I had first met Kim in 1989 on the set of My Stepmother Is an Alien, a comedy she was shooting with Dan Aykroyd, while I was on the Fox lot to meet with Jim Cameron about a role in The Abyss. Her personal costumer, Linda Henrikson, thought that Kim, after a divorce from her first husband and relatively brief relationships with Prince and the producer Peter Guber, among others, was ready to meet someone. When I called Linda, whom I had worked with on Beetlejuice, and said I would be around for a visit, she arranged things, and the next thing I knew, I was in front of Kim as she was asking me, “You’re the guy in the boat movie, right?” referring to Hunt. I didn’t see her again for a few months, when we started the Neil Simon film. There was a playful side to Kim that prevailed in the early days. Wry one minute and awkward the next, with her angular features framed by her signature corona of blonde hair, Kim is a creature, an object like a leopard
or an orchid or a magnificent mountain lake. At times, her attempts to dress down and disguise herself in public were laughable. Kim is Kim, from five feet away or five hundred, on the red carpet or in the grocery line.

  If you’ve never been sued in a civil court in this country, particularly in California, you’re really missing something. Civil trials, like the ones I have observed in Los Angeles, provide you with insight into the darkest corners of human malice, greed, corruption, and cowardice. They’re like a hockey brawl, Bush v. Gore, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all rolled into one. You see judges posing with a mock certainty and air of control when, in reality, they are pawns in a game controlled by big law firms seeking profits.

  Well before I set foot in a family law court, I had attended much of Kim’s trial in 1993, when she was sued for breach of contract by the producers of a film. In the fall of 1992, while I was shooting Malice in LA and western Massachusetts, Kim had signed with a new agent, an old guard character named Guy McElwaine. As agents often do, he wanted to sweep aside as many of her pending commitments as possible, as he would not get a commission on those deals. Boxing Helena was such a project, and Guy told Kim that he would extricate her from it. Additionally, the script explicitly called for nudity and sexual contact that required Kim’s approval, none of which had been spelled out to her satisfactorily by the director. Other actresses had been approached about the role before Kim, and Madonna had actually been hired for a time before walking away with little fuss. However, when Kim decided to leave, the producers, feeling powerless and thwarted, were determined to make an example of her. They sued her, and the case went to trial in early 1993.

  During pretrial preparation, Kim rehearsed mock cross-examinations with her lawyer Howard Weitzman. Sometimes, she would come home in tears for fear of what lay ahead. Jake Bloom, who in addition to being an agent also one of Kim’s lawyers, told her to settle the case. Hollywood is a place where the pay scales are so out of proportion that Bloom’s suggestion made perfect sense to everyone involved. “Give them a million to walk away,” Bloom spouted. “That’s definitely better than getting in front of a jury.” He was, in hindsight, wise on that front. But Kim would hear none of it. The idea of handing over a large sum of money to these producers while she was certain that she was right was out of the question.

  When the producers appeared in court, it was plain to see that they would likely earn more money in that courtroom than they ever would in their careers. The director, Jennifer Lynch, the daughter of David Lynch, had apparently inherited his unruly hairstyle but none of his talent. Lynch parlayed her unkempt appearance and inarticulate demeanor into an image of herself as the victim of “Big Hollywood” and its bullying tactics. Her producer, Carl Mazzocone, a soft-spoken, obese man, also dialed up the victimhood in order to lobby a jury that ultimately was more than inclined to side with the have-nots.

  The plaintiffs’ attorney was Patricia Glaser. I have written about Glaser before, but perhaps that characterization could use a finer point: in the courtroom, she was like a creature out of Jurassic Park, in appearance, body language, and demeanor. Glaser is one of the most contemptible people I have ever encountered, a cartoon rendering of the rapacious litigator, representing everything that I believe is exploitative and unfair about our civil system. Her opening salvo was, “Now, we all know what it feels like for the pretty girl in school to get everything she wants.” Glaser, not the pretty girl, wanted to take Kim down in some schoolyard-style Betty-vs.-Veronica dynamic straight out of Archie comics. Naturally, she won.

  Kim had dressed herself with great care every day before heading to court, in order to avoid appearing too extravagant. Some mornings, sitting on the edge of the bed, wondering what to wear or not wear in order to project the “right” image to a jury of strangers, she would quietly start sobbing. It was heartbreaking.

  The case proceeded for several days without any clear cause for alarm until it was announced that Kim’s agents, who were co-litigants in the complaint, would be dismissed from the case. Thus, the entire burden of any potential verdict and subsequent award would fall on her alone. The judge further ruled that the jury would not be informed that the deep-pocketed codefendant was now out. The jury should level its judgment for damages blindly, without regard for Kim’s financial position.

  Everyone in the courtroom twisted the truth or outright lied. On one telephone call during the pretrial period, one of Kim’s lawyers spit at her, “They’re going to lie! So you have to lie if you want to win!” But she didn’t lie. Not once. In the end, they handed her a bill for $8.9 million. She filed for bankruptcy in the hope that the verdict would be reversed on appeal. As was widely reported at the time, the judge, a disgrace to the bench named Judith Chirlin, strode across the courtroom and hugged the two plaintiffs in full view of the jury. In September of the following year, the verdict was thrown out due to Chirlin’s improper instructions to the jury. However, the damage to Kim’s reputation was done.

  During the trial, I didn’t work and stayed in LA to attend the proceedings. During that time, Walter Hill, the great screenwriter and director, approached me about a remake of Peckinpah’s The Getaway, which he wanted to direct using his original script. The producer, Larry Gordon, wanted Sharon Stone to play the female lead, if only for the financing she would bring. I asked him if Kim, who desperately needed to go back to work to take her mind off of her troubles, could play the part. Gordon agreed, but only after slashing the budget considerably. With less money on hand to shoot, Walter walked away and Roger Donaldson stepped in.

  Quite often, when evaluating actors and their creative choices, the public fails to see them as husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers. Entertainment writers and critics in particular, who are assumed to actually know something about the business, never seem to understand that performers want to alternately stay home or get away from home, to do something heavy and dramatic or something light and fun, to dig into a performance and give everything they’ve got or just pick up a paycheck. With The Getaway, I just wanted to be with Kim. I wanted her to get back on her feet and shake off the effects of the trial. We went off to Arizona and shot all over the state. Beginning in Phoenix, living at the great old Biltmore Hotel, we made our way to Prescott, Jerome, Sedona, and then finished down in Yuma, where on one shooting day the temperature hit 126 degrees.

  We brought with us our movie family: hair and makeup, wardrobe and stunts, stand-ins and assistants who formed the personal crew we had assembled over several years of moviemaking. On the first day of shooting, Kim was compelled to sign papers declaring bankruptcy in response to the verdict. However, my overall idea worked, as in the ensuing weeks, she genuinely seemed to relax and enjoy working.

  The first thing critics do when you remake a film like Peckinpah’s is to make a negative comparison to the original. Just like with Brando and Streetcar a year earlier, not once did I ever consider I could top Steve McQueen in the movie-star department. McQueen became an icon by perhaps doing less than any film star in history. His acting was so casual that at times it barely registered on-screen. His voice, his line readings, his whole demeanor seemed like he was a few moments away from a siesta. And yet it worked. Stage acting is about doing half a dozen things, all at the same time, and doing them well. Movie stardom is about doing two, maybe three things on camera, but doing them to perfection. Stars like McQueen taught me that sometimes the trick is to do nothing at all.

  On the last day of production, at the very hotel where the cast and crew were staying, Kim and I ambled around the pool, shooting a scene where Doc McCoy and his wife, Carol, are reunited after his prison term in a Mexican hellhole. When they called “Cut!” on the last take, Kim pushed me in the pool. Everyone laughed and then much of the crew jumped in after me. That night, we held a party at the hotel bar. Everyone showed up and got drunk, and Kim and I could finally share a smile about how the two spoiled monsters in Susan Lyne’s Premiere magazine article managed to shoot a picture wh
ere everyone had a good time. All the more reason it was so hard to go back to LA to face Kim’s ongoing problems.

  Going home meant facing a mountain of appellate and bankruptcy court filings. I wanted to continue the feeling of hope and positivity that the Arizona trip had fostered, even slightly. So I went to Tiffany’s in Beverly Hills and bought Kim a ring. One afternoon, I sat in our backyard with Kim’s sister Ashley and her husband, Joe. Joe was a quiet, shy Southerner and one of the most decent and easygoing guys I’ve ever met. I had told Joe and Ashley of my plan. Neither of them endorsed it and for different reasons. Ashley knew Kim was cursed in her romantic relationships. Joe joked that it was the men who married into the family who were cursed. I brought up the subject of marriage to Kim infrequently. When I did, I sensed alternately that she was enthusiastic or that I was putting a saddle on a wild horse. I thought my idea of getting married was a chance to start over, albeit through that most traditional of commitments. Ashley just looked at me sweetly and sympathetically, as if to say, “One can never tell with Kim.”

  Undaunted, I drove Kim to Taft High School at the foot of the hills along Ventura Boulevard, where we would often run on the track. As we walked along the track, there were kids playing soccer while others jogged past us. Did she see the proposal coming? I couldn’t tell. When I asked her to marry me, believing at that moment that, united, we could face her mounting difficulties, she seemed genuinely confused. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She was, to say the least, overwhelmed by all the turns her life had taken.