by Alec Baldwin
I cracked this guy right on the chin. I only weighed 190 then, but he went flying backwards, his arms windmilling, and crashed into a metal rack of candy and gum. The Iranian bodybuilders were right on me, lifting me nearly off the ground and shouting “No to be fighting in zee store” as they escorted me out. The voices of my high school coaches may or may not have been sounding in my head, like in some Alan Sillitoe short story. The last time I experienced that was when, during my college years, Eugene Valentine put fireworks in my mom’s garbage can, waking her up one evening. Eugene, very drunk, virtually walked into four or five punches, and it was over. I was always someone who hated that kind of situation. But it was the LA paparazzi who really turned me.
Walking through the terminal at LAX with Kim and, later, with Ireland, we had a bodyguard/driver, the great Jeff Welles, who would peel off and put Kim and Ireland in the waiting car while I went for the baggage. One day, as we separated, a photographer began his taunting spiel. “What happened to you, Alec? You used to be such a nice guy. Then you met that crazy fucking bitch and—” Bang! I hit him. Another time a guy, walking in front of Jeff, lunged over his shoulder and, single-handed, tried to snap Kim’s picture, his long lens nearly hitting Kim in the face. Bang! I hit him. The day we took Ireland home from the hospital, a photographer named Alan Zanger followed us. In the driveway, Kim was sobbing, asking me to get rid of the guy so he couldn’t get a picture of her with the baby. As I approached him to wave off his camera, he said, “Let me get the picture and I’ll go,” as if we were bargaining. Then he cocked his arm back as if to hit me with the camera. Bang! Zanger had me arrested. That evening, on the local CBS affiliate, their legal correspondent railed against me for my assault of Zanger. The correspondent was a lawyer named Harvey Levin.
On the Internet there are many pictures of me wrestling a paparazzo named Paul Adao. In August of 2013, immediately after the birth of Carmen, Adao was around every lamppost and awning on our block. The pattern was typical. I don’t bother with photographers who keep their distance. Adao not only did not keep his distance; he literally tripped, fell, and sat on a baby in a stroller as he walked backwards, shooting film, on a residential street in Manhattan. The thought that my neighbors now had to contend with the excesses of the tabloid media since I had moved onto their block saddened me. Just a few months later, the tabloids wanted to hound me about a stalker who tried to rush her way into our lobby and, eventually, up to our apartment, insisting she was my jilted girlfriend and had to either explain something to my wife or attack her. (The woman was found guilty at trial and literally chose to accept a sentence of six months at Rikers Island rather than enroll in court-supervised therapy.)
Whenever these eruptions occur, sanctimonious tabloid types get on some bullshit show like Nancy Grace and scoff at celebrities who insist on some degree of privacy, especially for their children. On November 14, in the wake of a verdict in the stalking case, the swarm of bees got close again. I yelled for them to get away from my wife, our car, our lives. And as I turned away, you can hear everything I say quite clearly, every word up until I say “cocksucking . . .” something. In a moment such as that, I don’t jump into a car and write down the dialogue. On subsequent broadcasts of the videotape of the event, viewers also can hear every single word I say—except that word. Harvey Levin, of course, wanted to make sure you didn’t miss a thing. So, on his broadcast, he put a title across the screen, which was the word “faggot.” That was on a Thursday. By Monday, I was fired by MSNBC.
In the wake of that, I wasn’t attacked only by the likes of a CBS affiliate legal correspondent or some screechy hen like Nancy Grace. On CNN, Anderson Cooper, joined by blogger Andrew Sullivan, sounded off about the need for me to be “vilified.” I was condemned by GLAAD spokesperson Rich Ferraro. The response from every corner of the gay community was one of either judgment, condemnation, or a good deal of free psychoanalysis. Over time, I have come to understand the role certain people play inside of the gay community. There is no larger platform and no wider audience for their pontifications than when a famous person is “outed” as a homophobe. It’s the form of outing that they love, the outing that’s right and necessary. The rest of the time, Cooper and Sullivan make due with relatively modest audiences. Unless, in Cooper’s case, it’s New Year’s Eve. Ferraro, no doubt, is on a vigilant watch for the next homophobic outburst that GLAAD can raise money on. And if you’re wondering if I’ve ever used the word “faggot,” I call my gay friends that all the time.
In subsequent litigation (contractually stipulated mediation, actually, which I am prevented from getting into too great a detail about), MSNBC’s lawyers opened up with the TMZ video. I had assumed that a news organization such as NBC would have enlisted an “acoustician” (a word I picked up while at these meetings) to provide incontrovertible evidence that I had said the offending word. That didn’t happen. Their lead attorney, poured into his conservative suit like melted wax and resembling Jabba the Hutt, smirked and sighed at my every utterance. Those years in divorce court with Kim, however, had paid off. Not even this guy’s douchebaggery could distract me. My lawyer Ed Hernstadt was sharp and helpful. Typical exchanges went like this:
HERNSTADT: “Did you fire my client because he said ‘faggot’?”
JABBA: “‘Cocksucker’ is a homophobic slur as well.”
HERNSTADT: “Just to be clear, which word is he being fired for?”
* * *
NBC has a “human resources” problem. When it came time to dismiss or ease into retirement names like Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Ann Curry, David Gregory, and, eventually, Brian Williams and Billy Bush, NBC’s owners, during the GE and Comcast eras, did not view their stars as people who required or deserved any special treatment as they were being fired. Perhaps especially as they were being fired. They were employees, like in any of their other businesses. MSNBC eventually settled on a portion of the unpaid balance of my contract. I believe they did that because they could not prove I said the offending word. The reason they couldn’t prove that is because I didn’t say it.
(When I subsequently offered, online, the word “fathead,” I was joking. Ineffectively.) So long as I know, that is all I have to hold on to. Such battles with the press, tabloid or otherwise, can have lasting and toxifying results. When you lose all perspective, you run the risk of getting in touch with your inner Nixon, a condition marked by a romanticized paranoia, teeming resentments, and a limitless appetite for settling scores.
On an episode of the PBS television program American Masters devoted to the life and career of Woody Allen, the subject of Allen’s personal tribulations and tabloid scandals is touched on. Allen responds with an aplomb I only wish I had, saying: “Everybody had an opinion about my private life, which I felt they were all free to have. And free to respond in any way that made them happy. They could sympathize with me, not sympathize with me. They could dislike me, they could like me. It could have no effect on whether they saw my films. They could never see my films again. None of that mattered to me.”
I wasn’t that self-possessed.
That same year, a photographer from the New York Post, accompanying a Post reporter who attempted to interview me outside my apartment, later told the paper that I had called him a “coon.” Aside from the fact that I wasn’t in the habit of using such racist language, let alone words more commonly found in the Deep South in the 1950s, I thought “Where’s the proof?” The Post is published and edited by people who don’t let the truth stand in the way of a successful smear campaign. But, if the photographer is like every other one I encounter, his camera records video as well as shoots digital pictures. Where was the recording?
Walking down East 9th Street near 5th Avenue one evening, within days of the claims of the Post (whose photographer turned out to be an ex–police officer) I passed by an older couple, a black man and woman. He was dressed in a suit and tie and camel overcoat. This distinguished man looked up at me and, unmistakably, recognized
who I was. His face completely changed as he shook his head slightly from side to side. “Et tu, Alec?” was the message I picked up from him. How I wanted to appeal to him, right then and there. “I went to Florida in ’96 to do voter registration work in black communities!” “You don’t believe what you read in the Post, do you?” Whatever work I had done on behalf of progressive causes over the past thirty years was washed away in one act of the nullification that News Corp outlets and their operatives crave. My heart broke.
The memory of that man’s expression was tattooed on me right up until I visited the Hate Crimes office of the Manhattan District Attorney. In the interview they conducted, I asked, point blank, “Is there a video?” The woman running the interview with four others from her staff paused and stared at me, as if to indicate that she was hoping I might incriminate myself in spite of the existence of the video. “There is a video,” she replied, after a long pause. “Let’s play it,” I said. On the video, at no time whatsoever do I use the word “coon” or any other racial epithet. As the photographer rejoins the young reporter, she asks, “What did he say?” He replies, “I think he called me a coon or something.” Of course, that claim, with no substantiation, is enough for the Post.
That day on East 9th Street, as the elegant man in the camel coat came closer and made out who I was, I could have sworn I heard a disgusted “Mmmm” emanate from him, that low sound coming from a shock or disappointment you didn’t see coming.
I wondered how many more African-Americans believed that about me. I had been embraced by many fans in the black community. How many now thought I’d let them down, or worse? Similarly, how many young people who are gay thought that I was judging them or condemning how they lived? I would never be the same after that. It’s remarkable what a few trips to the dunk tank of American media can do for your soul.
A couple of months later, I was approached by the writer Joe Hagan to do a piece for New York magazine. I once loved the magazine, in the days of Nick Pileggi and Robert Sam Anson. I had little use for it once Murdoch took over in the ’80s. But people told me Hagan was a square guy. I was in Madrid in January of 2014 shooting a film and I didn’t have much free time. Hagan interviewed me and, in the style we discussed, sent me a piece that was essentially a transcription. When I got his initial draft, it was an incoherent mess. I wasn’t interested in writing the piece in the first person, but I had no choice. In the article, I speak of being finished with public life. What I should have written was that I was finished with expecting to find any fun or joy out of public life again. And by “public life,” I mean cooperating with the media in any attempt to communicate with an audience. The press is something you develop a relationship with that is, hopefully, polite. It can be pleasant, even playful. But a tabloid mentality seems to have overwhelmed nearly all of that, and the resultant trouble is something you shrink from in order to protect your family.
When I first logged on to Twitter, I thought it was a brilliant means of bypassing the media to speak with your audience directly. Eventually, that idea was crushed by the Internet’s right-wing marauders, who level scorching personal attacks while shielding their identities. The majority of the public you want to communicate with are not on Twitter, though some on Twitter are worth the trouble. It can be an excellent news aggregator, so long as you consider the source. But after a year of unfair charges of racism and homophobia; of hearing that Bill de Blasio had condemned me for the TMZ incident in his never-ending quest to be the most politically correct politician in America; after watching cable news anchors, regardless of their sexuality, take me down based on the testimony of someone like Harvey Levin, I knew that we had entered a new era in terms of the effect the press was having on the country and vice versa.
On social media, people called me a drunk. They said I was abusive toward my daughter. I was a “libtard.” I was a wife beater. I was washed up. Irrelevant. I should stay out of politics. I was un-American. The profiles of these people almost always featured words like “Support the Troops,” “Christian,” “Military,” “I support law enforcement,” “Make America Great Again.” A tsunami of such raw bile, excreted by those Americans with a boundless suspicion of or abject hatred for anything unlike themselves, propelled Donald Trump to be elected president of the United States. Even as I write that, I stare at those words in disbelief.
Throughout my life, I have embraced a lot of causes that I believed in. Eventually I formed a foundation to channel certain sources of my income toward supporting the arts, the environment, and education, to name but a few. Some of the greatest satisfactions of my life have derived from my work with the New York Philharmonic, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and the East Hampton Library. But whatever I have done involving politics, regarding both candidacies and issues, has come at a real cost. The New York Post is not evenhanded in how they treat celebrities, and those labeled as liberals suffer the most by way of the Murdoch machinery. The cauterization of progressive thought, progressive achievement, and progressive history is what fuels the Breitbart–Murdoch–Koch brothers–Roger “Drop Your Pants” Ailes–Sheldon Adelson–Richard Mellon Scaife version of the news. Their goal is the destruction of any emergent leadership that they view as an obstacle to their accumulation of greater wealth and power. I’ve been told, over the years, that my politics have negatively affected my career. Maybe some didn’t realize that speaking out about what was best for the country was also my career. I only wish it were more so.
15
The Interests of the Great Mass
If I ran for president of the United States, you’d be lucky. Just as if you ran for president, I would be lucky. This country needs to see some new faces in that arena. American politics needs some new blood, because the problem in our country today is one of choice. We don’t have enough men and women who would make good public servants who are willing to run for elective office as well as submerge themselves in the immorality of our current campaign system. You really do have to sell your soul, or a significant portion of it, to corporations, super PACs, and rich donors in order to win most statewide elections today. And that transaction is a big part of what is killing this country.
I learned a good deal about campaign financing and proposed reforms to it from a man named Burt Neuborne, a professor and the legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. I met Burt, and his colleague Josh Rosenkranz, through my association with The Creative Coalition (TCC), which I served as president of beginning in 1995. TCC was founded by the actor Ron Silver. Silver had the ego of an Argentinean polo player. When we traveled together to Albany on an Amtrak train in 1990, Silver masticated every syllable while expertly coaching our group for a meeting with Governor Mario Cuomo about the pending New York State Environmental Quality Bond Act. Silver was there again in 1997, when we gave testimony before Congress regarding the federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. Silver drilled us with the opposition’s talking points and anticipated questions. He taught us about “cover”—the response we’d have ready when our opponents made the inflammatory remark we hoped they would make—which often served as the counterpunch that won the argument for our side. It was the political education of a lifetime. Silver, who had played Alan Dershowitz in the film Reversal of Fortune, possessed the mind of a lawyer beyond anyone I had ever met who didn’t actually hold a law degree, as well as a political acumen that easily could have put him in office. In fact, several people I’ve met while on the TCC advocacy path were among the most informed and dedicated of activist-artists. Richard Masur, a TCC member and onetime president of the Screen Actors Guild, knew more about health insurance, in terms of both policy and politics, than anyone I’d met. The same goes for Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H regarding the death penalty.
My own political education began in the den of my childhood home as I sat with my father watching the events of the late 1960s, particularly the Vietnam War, unfold on network television news. By the time I was ten, m
y political consciousness was already nearly concretized. In that regard, I’m no different from people who are raised in a home that is pro or anti any of the issues of the day: the NRA, immigration, gay marriage, abortion, or Obamacare. Politicization starts at home. My politics are my dad’s politics, based on the simple idea that, as the richest nation on Earth, America has a greater obligation to reach out and help those who have not realized even a modicum of what we take for granted here. The standard of living, the freedoms, the educational opportunities, and the hopes for a better life, if only for our children, are either elusive or completely out of reach for an exploding number. This is also true here at home, and it’s unconscionable.
On the cold afternoon of November 22, 1963, my friends and I played in a neighbor’s yard while our mothers huddled around a television watching the news following the assassination of President Kennedy. This was the first political event I recall. I was five years old. My father deeply admired the Kennedy family’s blend of intelligence, wit, and, above all, idealism, so JFK’s death hit him very hard. He drove down to Washington to experience the president’s funeral, standing among the large crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue to view the cortege.
A mere five years later, Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles, an act that would dramatically change my father’s life, as well as the fate of the country. The hope that the United States would leave Vietnam and end the insanity there, for both countries, died in the Ambassador Hotel as well. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral would be different for my dad. He took my sister Beth, my brother Daniel, and me into Manhattan, where we stood in the incredibly long line filing north up Park Avenue from what was then the Pan Am building. The line turned left onto 51st Street, and the mourners were ushered into the northern entrance of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As I was about to enter, a reporter for WOR radio approached me with a microphone, and asked, “Are you going to pray for Senator Kennedy?” I was stunned and silent, but the reporter persisted as my father just shrugged, as if to say, “Well, answer him!” “Are you here to pray for the senator?” the reporter asked again. “Yes,” I replied sheepishly. “What are you going to say?” he asked. “A Hail Mary,” I said. “How does that go?” he asked. On June 8, 1968, at the 51st Street entrance to St. Patrick’s, I recited the Hail Mary at Robert Kennedy’s funeral for a New York radio audience. After that, politically speaking, what other future could I possibly have?
