Nevertheless

by Alec Baldwin

  After eight years of Bush, I wasn’t sure what the country was ready for. When Obama won, I sat in the kitchen of my New York apartment and cried. What a great day for democracy. When he was reelected, it was even sweeter. I think Obama was a good president, and I was sad to see him go. Those who believe that Obama has betrayed his promises about things such as closing Guantanamo or questioned his policy on an accelerated drone program are missing something, I believe. The military, the CIA, and the NSA have their own agenda. The president is the one official elected by all Americans, and yet he does not call the shots. When presidents come into office believing they are actually in charge, that’s how you get to Dallas in 1963 and people get killed. Then, maybe, his brother wishes to pick up where he left off and is killed as well.

  I became complacent when Obama won, which is more a sign of my age than anything else. Our guy was in, so we were covered. Politics was also boring the hell out of me. I wondered who could right this ship after eight years of Cheney as puppeteer. Again, I thought of running for office myself. In 2013, some Democratic leaders from different corners of New York politics approached me, and we had a serious talk about me running for mayor, but my wife and I were expecting our daughter, Carmen, that summer, and we agreed that it wasn’t the time for an all-consuming race like that. What else would I run for? I believed that running for president, even building my way there by winning some other office, was impractical because the country remained stuck in the idea that the highest office should be held by someone inside of the current system. Also, I believed Hillary would win easily in 2016.

  As Election Day approached, a couple of friends, both New York media execs, asked me if I wanted to join them at celebratory events they were producing to mark Hillary’s pending victory. The Donald Trump we had been presenting on Saturday Night Live seemed to delight nearly everyone in the People’s Republic of Manhattan, so I had many such invitations. The SNL Trump sketches prompted people to approach me, thank me, and beseech me to “keep going” more than any other portrayal or piece I have performed. It was ironic, to say the least. In 2013, Harvey Levin wanted the public to believe I was a hate-filled homophobe. The Post said I was a racist. Suddenly, liberal downtown types were coming up to me everywhere I went, all day, every day, urging me to continue with this funny way to channel all of their not-so-funny fears, as well as their hatred of the suddenly viable Trump candidacy. And then this god-awful nightmare descended.

  There is no point in dissecting Hillary Clinton’s loss here. Enough analysis of that exists to last us all ten lifetimes. I had always admired Secretary Clinton’s mind, her courage, her self-control under painfully difficult circumstances, and her tenacity. Trump, of course, exploited the fact that voters across the country would accept him as the sharp, no-nonsense, can-do executive he portrays on television. And he knew that they would not consider the fact that in New York, his hometown and base of operations, Trump is endured, at best. I will not go so far as to say he is a punch line, because in New York, making a lot of money counts for something, and according to him at least, Trump has made a lot of money. But Trump was never an admired New Yorker, a sought-after speaker, or dinner guest. He has never shown an appetite for the Great Political Imperative that New York politicians must manifest in order to be a real leader: empathizing with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of working-class New Yorkers. In fact, he has actually been an enemy of the working class, refusing to pay many of his contractors and using undocumented workers on job sites going back to the 1980s. Trump has abused power at every station stop of his life. Now he has the most powerful position in the world. Some people make a lot of money, but it does not fundamentally change who they are. Others become rich while choosing to never honestly reflect on the role luck played in their good fortune, electing to tune out the cries and complaints of those who can only truly be helped by reforming the system that enriches the Donald Trumps of this world.

  I could go on. In another book, perhaps, I might go into greater detail about what the president of the United States ought to do and who that person ought to be. We have so many problems in the modern world, and we can no longer plead ignorance of any of them. Prioritizing those problems, knowing what order we must proceed in, like triage, is essential. Foreign policy, education, war-making, jobs, environmental regulation, disease control, infrastructure, criminal justice and incarceration, climate change, a fair tax policy, immigration, and, yes, a government role in curating our diverse cultural heritage: all of these, and more, must be on the table. The presidential candidate who defeats Trump in 2020 must present a clear, transparent plan for what he or she will do and when. The thing that is clearest now is that Trump must go, either in 2020 or sooner. It is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country with those who built it.

  On May 8, 1962, John Kennedy addressed the United Auto Workers in Atlantic City on the subject of the responsibility of both organized labor and auto executives to control inflation. This excerpt from that speech says it all. When we read it today, Kennedy exhorts us to raise the bar, increase our expectations, seek a man or woman who will at least attempt to work for all Americans and do as much good for as many of them as possible. As he put it:

  Now I know there are some people who say that this isn’t the business of the President of the United States, who believe that the President of the United States should be an honorary chairman of a great fraternal organization and confine himself to ceremonial functions. But that is not what the Constitution says. And I did not run for President of the United States to fulfill that Office in that way.

  Harry Truman once said there are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of other people, the hundred and fifty or sixty million, is the responsibility of the President of the United States. And I propose to fulfill it.

  I believe America is a great country, but we are never greater than when we actually do great things: World War II, the moon landings, the Peace Corps, the billions upon billions of dollars we gift every year to a world in need. At times, we’ve also elected some truly great leaders. One thing we ought to do, however, is shore up the integrity of our electoral system. Because it isn’t really a democracy if you can’t honestly count the votes.

  16

  Doubt Thou the Stars Are Fire

  I love second chances. I love the concept of renewal. I love to see people come back from some adversity, self-inflicted or not, and untangle themselves from a difficult situation. They may correct some perceived mistake they’ve made. Make amends, if you will. Consequently, they prove to themselves and to others what they’re capable of, what they’re made of. You can call it redemption, or choose another word, but most important, they find some real degree of peace, even happiness.

  I’m always nudged by the phrase “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I understand the basic impulse to live, to survive. I’ve witnessed how countless people around the world have suffered and died in pursuit of their liberty. It’s the last part, however, that always pokes at me. When was I happy? Truly happy? Back during my grass-cutting career, my brother Stephen and I would go to a Chinese restaurant near our house and order fried rice. We’d sit on the curb in the strip mall parking lot, eating out of the containers. It was our very own fine dining experience. I never ate better in my life. Those pickup football games at dusk, the testosterone and ego galloping up and down the field that we carved out within the golf course. I can feel that air around me now. We were so focused and present. No cell phones. No streaming TV. There was nowhere else we wanted to be, no one else we wanted to be with. When I close my eyes and think back to that time, that feeling runs through my heart again. What I wouldn’t give to go back and see us then. Just to look at us, at my young self, and say, “Do you realize that you have everything you could want right here?”

  I had nothing then, especially not pretension.
At GW, my well-heeled friends would talk of going to dinner at one of their favorite DC restaurants, Lonny Swa’s. “The guy’s name is Lonny Swa?” I asked. “What kind of name is that?” After cracking up at my expense, they headed over to La Niçoise. No eating fried rice on the curb of the strip mall for this crowd. A few years later, when I was sitting with David O’Brien and his coterie at the East Five Three, someone would make a crack that everyone was in on but me. While they were all chuckling, O’Brien would turn to me and quietly explain what a codpiece was. So funny and kind, a rare combination. I loved him. I was in love with him. I was never sexually attracted to men, but who knows? If I was braver, less hung up by what I was raised to believe about sex. “Just be yourself,” he seemed to say. I remember him like it was yesterday.

  Before Ireland was born, I would lie on the floor of a house in the San Fernando Valley, assuming that my first marriage was over, sleeping on the floor by the fire with ten dogs. Ten little dogs who became my friends and who gave me some of the only real love I had in my life then. I had some of the best nights of sleep in my life with those dogs on that floor. I had learned to love animals by Kim’s example. I learned to love them even more when she pulled away.

  When Beth and I sat in Ethel Kennedy’s living room on the Cape watching the 1988 debate, my dad was another man whose spirit was in that house, if only for one night, twenty years after our trip to St. Pat’s. My dad did everything he could to make me happy. Will I ever see him again? Do some parents seek their children beyond this life? That bond, that cord, that bloodline that pulls and pushes. Where did he go? What has he been doing with himself all of this time? Can he see and hear me?

  When I met Tony Hopkins, Meryl, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews, De Niro, Pacino, Peter Shaffer, and Scorsese, those moments made me happy because I was meeting Hannibal Lecter, Karen Blixen, Atticus Finch, Mary Poppins, Jake La Motta, Michael Corleone, and the man who wrote Amadeus. And the man who made Raging Bull. I was a fan. I still am. That never goes away.

  I want to end this book contemplating happiness and renewal. In my life, I have seen a number of people get a second chance. My mother has had that wonderful opportunity, and I’m extremely proud of what she’s done with it. After my father died, my mother sold our home to my sister Beth, who proceeded to move in and begin raising her family, which would grow to six children. Eventually, my mom and that whole gang packed up and moved to Syracuse in search of cleaner air, less density, and lower costs. After a while, they found a very pretty area that I love to visit. In Syracuse, you are never more than a twenty minutes’ drive from the farm belt, with its open land and silos and cows. We call it “Sibera-cuse” because of all the snow, but I love it there.

  But before they moved up north, my mother was approached by a coalition of Long Island breast cancer support groups to spearhead a project at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, not too far from where we grew up. Long Island is often the focus of intense debates about breast cancer statistics. One group there is named 1 in 9, based on the assertion that, statistically, one in nine women on Long Island will be diagnosed with the disease over the course of her life. My mother, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, had been working with the Susan G. Komen organization, and in 1996, doctors and administrators from SUNY Stony Brook asked her to lend her name, and her children, to a breast cancer research facility.

  The Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund was dedicated in 1996, with a ribbon cutting attended by SUNY and New York–area elected officials and my mother and siblings. Shirley Strum Kenny, the president at SUNY Stony Brook at the time, was overwhelmingly supportive of my mother’s organization and their fund-raising. The ongoing goal is to raise money so that the SUNY medical team can find a cure. Among all the talk about numbers and statistics, however, I focused in on one thing. My mother was transformed.

  The SUNY facility and the eventual opening of an upstate chapter, once my mother and sister had relocated to Syracuse, were not things I would have envisioned in my mother’s future. Born in 1929, raised in Syracuse during World War II, she gave up her early work as a teacher to have a family. She struggled for much of her adult life with the burden of raising six kids with no money. There were times she was, literally, about to go insane. Then, when she was fifty and her children were out the door—either in school, playing ball, or getting into some manageable degree of trouble—she went to work. Her job as a supervisor of a marketing research firm, operating on the floor of a local shopping mall, was just right.

  But while my father’s death in 1983 floored my mother, it also freed her. Gone from her life, permanently, were the haunting questions of what would become of them, as a couple, and of her as a woman in middle age if their marriage finally died. Instead, it was he who died. And with him went the fear, the mystery, and the fantasy of her own future. In the years after his death, my brothers and I had some success, and that certainly helped launch my mother’s fund, as it was understood that we would share certain duties to raise money for my mom. My sister Beth has made the quest for a breast cancer cure her life’s work as well. Over the years, we began to joke about how my mother had become a bigger celebrity than any of her sons. We joked that she’d push any of us off a cliff for a photo op, now that she was the “celebrity.”

  Over the years, the fund has matured. My brothers and I are middle-aged men ourselves now. Perhaps, up in Syracuse, we can still pull in a crowd to the charity’s banquet or golf match, but my family’s name, in terms of its celebrity quotient on Long Island, has waned. However, the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund is, to me, a great second act. Although my mother appreciated not only my father’s role as a pillar of our community but also his place in the hearts of his children, I think that she wanted something to be remembered for, too, just as we had dedicated the Massapequa High School auditorium for my dad. I am close to shedding tears as I write this: he never could have done all that he did if it weren’t for her. Never. None of her children could have achieved what they achieved without her contribution as well. All men want some degree of accomplishment. Women do, too.

  The tense relationship I had with my mother throughout much of my childhood cast a shadow over many of my relationships over the years. But since my father’s death and the organization of “The Fund,” as we call it, I have enjoyed a far better rapport with her. She wanted to be on an equal footing with him in the eyes of her children. Once that was realized, she actually became happy again. And seeing her change, watching her become so purposeful and fulfilled, made me very happy as well. I love you, Mom. And I am so proud of you.

  * * *

  My professional life has been, ostensibly, immersed in culture. But at the end of a film or TV project, the word that describes how I feel is not necessarily “renewed.” The most fulfilling experiences I’ve had as an actor have been in the theater, the only medium I could count on for a reliably satisfying artistic result. It was the only place I could bring what I had to offer and believe that it mattered. Often in filmmaking, the people in charge don’t even understand what you do, let alone appreciate it. Movies and TV are, primarily, commercial enterprises. And although the theater (Broadway in particular) is not without its commercial imperatives, the work there is more thoughtful and deliberate. More important, it is where you have the chance to grow in some meaningful way.

  Performing onstage in Prelude to a Kiss was the first time I ever believed that I had any talent for acting. Working with people as smart and nurturing as Norman René and Craig Lucas, as well as the incredibly talented cast, was a classroom, especially coming off the shoot for Hunt, which was a different sort of education. That growth continued in Streetcar three years later. Performing a role as iconic as Stanley, I truly believed that the result, the critical reception, didn’t matter. Just to play those scenes, say those lines, and rehearse with Greg Mosher could only help me grow. On closing night, tears rolled down my cheeks at the curtain call, as I knew I would never play
that role again. To the young actor I say take those chances. Fall on your ass. Fail. It will only benefit you.

  By the time we closed Macbeth at the Public Theater in 1998, I had learned a great lesson about keeping my focus on my own work by watching Angela Bassett, who played Lady M. Trained at Yale, where she received her undergrad and master’s degrees, Angela was intense, kind, and intelligent. But above all, she was prepared and this was instructive. She reminded me that acting is work. It’s unique work. It can be enjoyable. But it requires an effort and precision that can’t be faked or bypassed with good looks and charm. Just as I did with Loot and the likes of Joe Maher, Charlie Keating, and Zeljko Ivanek, I usually found something to learn from the people I worked with onstage, some of whom had decades of experience performing the theater’s greatest roles.

  Unlike working in film and TV, which nearly always requires complex scheduling, with everyone coming and going, in the theater there is a chance to share an experience like no other. As I got older, I wanted to pass on whatever I had to share by making myself available onstage and off, in both rehearsal and performance. Quite often, however, the younger cast members had longer résumés than mine and didn’t need my advice. In fact, I welcomed any they had for me! I also had one or two situations in which someone in the company was eager to take me on. In the movies, I was never a bankable star. That alone can make you feel a tad illegitimate. Similarly, in the theater, there was the occasional actor or director who wanted to test me, confront me, as they thought I wasn’t his or her equal onstage. When I performed in the Broadway production of Orphans in 2013, Dan Sullivan, a director I had looked forward to working with, appeared to be uninterested and it seemed as though there were other places, other rehearsal rooms, where he’d rather be. The production was a nightmare. And yet I learned a few things on Orphans. I learned that once you ascertain what the play is really about, you want to know the director’s relationship to that theme. Orphans was, for my character, about parenting, about being a father. Sullivan, it turned out, seemed like he didn’t want to do a play about fatherhood. But fortunately, those situations are rare. Rehearsing with someone like Walter Bobbie (Twentieth Century) and Scott Ellis (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) is the norm, and that is heaven.