Hollywood's handsomest couple face down their notorious past by getting married, making a truth may be far less colorful than the legend.

But the stories have entered the show-biz canon, and by now Basinger and Baldwin are probably used to them. After all, there's never been a time when the two of them have been together and people haven't bad-mouthed them.

It started in 1990, when they fell hard for each other after being cast in the Disney comedy The Marrying Man. At the time, her track record included 91/2 Weeks, My Stepmother Is an Alien, Batman and many others; he was coming off high-profile roles in Beetlejuice, Working Girl and The Hunt for Red October. Two years earlier, Basinger had ended an eight-year marriage to makeup artist Ron Britton, and since then she'd been seen with Prince and with producer Jon Peters; Baldwin's past girlfriends were said to include Michelle Pfeiffer, Cynthia Gibb and Janine Turner, to whom he'd been engaged. They were hot, available and attractive, and sparks flew — sparks that threatened to incinerate the movie when their differences with Disney executives led to an assortment of widely reported tales of tantrums, walkouts and imbroglios. (In retrospect, Basinger and Baldwin's main bone of contention with the studio — that the Marrying Man script needed more work—was amply borne out by the movie that was finally released.)

Things never really got back to normal. Their movies since then have been largely overlooked: Cool World, Final Analysis and The Real McCoy (hers); Prelude to a Kiss (his). (Baldwin's modest hit with last year's thriller Malice could be seen as the start of a comeback, however.) Basinger's purchase of Braselton, Ga. — a small town near her childhood home of Athens — raised eyebrows, and the renovations and improvements she hoped to make were never accomplished. Though she contributed less than $1 million of the $20 million purchase price, Basinger was blamed; since then she has severed her ties to the investment group that made the purchase and stopped talking to her brother Mick, who headed the redevelopment project.

Even more notable, she became interested in Jennifer Lynch's movie Boxing Helena, an odd, lurid tale of a man who cuts the arms and legs off the woman he desires. She talked to Lynch, said she was interested, then backed out; the producers, who'd already been through this cinema interruptus with Madonna, sued her for breaching what they described as an oral contract. She insisted that she'd never committed to the movie, but a jury disagreed and ordered her to pay $8.9 million. The amount was later reduced slightly and the case is under appeal, while Basinger has declared bankruptcy.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Basinger, 40, and Baldwin, 35, are getting on with their lives. They were married last summer in a quiet Long Island ceremony. They made a movie together: The Getaway, a remake of the 1972 action film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Steve Mc-Queen and Ali MacGraw, who were then romantically involved. Basinger and Baldwin work for a variety of political and social causes, from animal rights to several Democratic campaigns. They divide their time between her house in Los Angeles, his house in East Hampton, N.Y., and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. They've raised 10 dogs and talked about having kids. And they're trying to ignore all those old stories, those stubborn reputations. u! think," says a friend who worked on The Marrying Man, "you'll find them very contrite."

While Getaway director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, Cocktail) doesn't mention sackcloth and ashes when questioned about Baldwin and Basinger, he does take pains to ensure that his stars receive credit for proper movie-set deportment. "I don't know what happened in the past," says Donaldson. "But they were as cooperative and committed as anybody I've ever worked with. When it's 124 degrees, and you're down in Mexico, and you ask people to get into a dumpster so you can lock them inside, and no one complains, you know you're working with some real troopers."

Basinger and Baldwin are clearly battle-scarred as they sit in a New York City hotel suite a few days before Christmas. Baldwin, clad all in black, seems eager to dismiss some of the more troublesome subjects and playfully combative when they arise; Basinger, in jeans and a gray turtle-neck sweater, seems weary of them altogether and grows quiet when they come up. They sit on the couch together, but she soon slides to the floor, where she stays for the rest of the interview, deferring to her husband even when the talk turns to her recent string of calamities.

In fact, she defers to him especially when the talk turns to her calamities. Basinger visibly pales and withdraws when he begins talking about The Marrying Man or Boxing Helena. When she's talking about her relationship, though, she's happier, enthusiastic, even feisty. They may look too good to be true, and those reputations may be hard to shake, but at heart, Basinger and Baldwin act just like lots of other newlyweds.

Why did you finally decide to tie the knot?

BALDWIN: It was something we talked about abstractly for, like, a year before we got married. And then we saw that summer was the only window of opportunity to do it in any kind of decent way.

BASINGER: He'd wanted to get married for four years [laughs].

And you said no?

BASINGER: Well, you know, I always say, "When Alec wants something, he wants it yesterday." I didn't say no — I just said, "Yes, one day." And the wedding was sweet. Before, I'd thought, Can't we just go somewhere in our jeans and get married? But that would have been unfair. And it was fun to do it in a fantasy sort of manner.

BALDWIN: It really turned out better than we had any right to expect.

BASINGER: Really. Everything was great, the press was nice.... I mean, how many people can say they were happy about a piece about them on Hard Copy? I've got it all on tape, thanks to Hard Copy and Inside Edition and E.T.

BALDWIN: We didn't have to hire anybody to shoot the wedding.

Speaking of shooting: How did The Getaway come about?

BALDWIN: Walter Hill [screenwriter on the original Getaway] came to me. One thing Walter always wanted to do was to shoot the version that he had written, because Peckinpah did a lot of rewriting. So Walter and I talked about it. She didn't want to do it. [To Basinger] I won't speak for you. Go ahead, you speak.

BASINGER: You're doing fine, hon.

Did you want to do it, Kim?

BASINGER: No, I didn't. I liked the original movie, but it's really not an acting role. It was basically a male shoot'em-up, and I didn't want to make that film. So I said to Alee, "Hey, I'll look at the book, and if there's a relationship here that we could expand on...." And I knew that I'd love to do something with Alec.

BALDWIN: Well, the first question you asked, honey, was, "How much money are they going to pay me?"

BASINGER: [Laughs] Yeah.

BALDWIN: You didn't care who was in it, you didn't care if it was with me....

BASINGER: No, no!

BALDWIN: You said, "Are they going to pay me my money ?"

BASINGER: [Quietly] Well, those are among the questions that you usually ask. But in all seriousness, I wanted to see if the relationship would burst open on the screen. And sure enough, the original novel really was focused on just that and the element of trust: When is my partner my partner, and when is my spouse my spouse?

Which, in a way, was a question you faced making the movie, too. Was it hard to go out there and beat each other up emotionally and physically and then go home together?

BASINGER: I like this question. You know what I did? Before we did this, I said, "God, if we get through this, we'll get through anything." We moved into a hotel, we went about our own daily lives. But when we were on the set, he had his trailer, I had mine. And when we were in front of the camera, he was my co-star, and I was his. And before the toughest scenes, he'd come to my trailer and say....

BALDWIN: "It's a movie."

BASINGER: "I love you, it's a movie, I'm not going to talk to you after lunch."

BALDWIN: And then I'd hate her guts.

BASINGER: And then he'd go away and hate my guts, and I'd go away for a few minutes and hate his guts.... And it worked brilliantly. I was so happy when some of those scenes were over that we stood in the middle of this lonely Arizona highway and just cried.

Do people treat you as separate individuals or as one entity?

BALDWIN: Well, if there was one complaint, it was that if they'd want her to work late, they'd come to me and say, "Do you think Kim would work late?" And I'd say: "Why don't you ask her? I can't speak for her."

BASINGER: We really have tried to correct this. I mean, Alee and I have a life together, but it's funny how different and how separate our careers are. Just recently I was shown a poster of the movie, and I said, "Well, gosh, there's some problems with this." And they came back with, "Well, you've had it two weeks." I said, "No, I Just got it at my office today." And they said, "Well, Alec's had it two weeks." I said: "Listen, Mel Gibson could've been my co-star, and was he supposed to bring it over to my house? I'd have a better chance of Mel Gibson bringing it over to my house than Alec bringing it home and showing it to me."

Is it easier to do love scenes with somebody who is your partner in real life, or does it feel more intrusive?

BASINGER: They're very difficult to do, I don't care who it is. When it's someone you're with, you're much more protective, of course, but it wasn't anything we really focused on and made a problem out of. We just sort of did it.

BALDWIN: I don't want to linger on this situation, but the first time we did a movie together [The Marrying Man], we were supposed to do this love scene. And — I'll never forget — these guys came to my trailer and said, "We really want to get Kim in her underwear." They said, "We really think a little more skin would be great for the movie." And I thought, This movie is so thin, I'm sure there's a lot of things that would be really great for the movie. So when we went into [The Getaway], we really thought about what had gone on before, mistakes that were made by everybody, and every molecule of my body said that it was not going to be the same.
Those love scenes are a good example. We went in and we said, "We're going to give 'em whatever they want." And I know that I'm never going to do that kind of thing again with somebody else in a movie. I know you're never going to do that again in a movie with somebody else. [Basinger laughs.] This is really kind of burying that part of our career. So we said, "We're going to give 'em whatever they want."

BASINGER: And then they end up cutting it all out.

BALDWIN: Yeah, we shot rolls and rolls of stuff. But the ubiquitous tests told them that people were uncomfortable with that explicit lovemaking. Uncomfortable with us doing it, or uncomfortable with people in general? Who knows?

There's already been some talk about how, urn, realistic those love scenes are. If they hadn't made the cuts, people might really be buzzing by now.

BALDWIN: Well, I think they were kind of taken aback at how cooperative we were.

BASINGER: And by the way: No. That was Doc and Carol's life, and the way they do it. OK? That's not our life. Our life is not for filming [laughs}.

BALDWIN: You know, Kim is very clever at making you feel like you're getting a whole lot more than you really do. You hear people talk about 9 1/2 Weeks being so explicit....

BASINGER: And about how totally nude I am so much. Watch the movie again: You won't see me that way but one time, at the end of the strip scene. From the back.... It's in your own mind [laughs}. Like the first time I thought I met you, and you were wearing a cowboy hat.

BALDWIN: She keeps saying, "When I met you, you had on a cowboy hat." And I think, Wow, what does that tell me about what you subconsciously thought of me, when you swear I had on a cowboy hat? I never wore a cowboy hat in my life. I'm from Long Island. Where does a cowboy hat figure in to this?

When was this?

BASINGER: I was doing My Stepmother Is an Alien, and he came on the set, and I remember a cowboy hat. And I thought [disgusted voice]. Oh, an actor.

BALDWIN: She dusted me. Just as rude as can be. She almost knocked me over to get to the catering truck.

BASINGER: I did not [laughs]. It was lunch. I have low blood sugar. I'm sure all actresses who don't eat breakfast know exactly what that feels like.

BALDWIN: Actresses have to be fed.

I don't want to dwell on The Marrying Man,' but I do want to ask you about it, since it's where you got your reputation....

BALDWIN: What do you want to ask that you couldn't find out from your research?

Well, the research all repeats the same stories about how horribly you behaved. But I called a friend of mine who worked on the movie and said, "Were they that bad?" And he said: "No, they weren't the villains they've been made out to be. The production was going so badly that they decided to take as much control as they could to keep the movie afloat."

BALDWIN: So you can just write that. There you go.

Is it accurate?

BALDWIN: Well, our path lately is to just bury these resentments and the past that's really negative. The only thing I will say is that obviously we've paid a terrible price, because it's misrepresented who we are as people. It made us out to be very self-indulgent in a way that hurt the movie. And the only other thing I could say is that that kind of anarchy, so to speak, tends to be reserved for movies [grins] that are a lot more consequential than that movie. Had I known then what I know now about what the movie was, I would've done what everybody does: I would've walked in, punched the clock, phoned it in, gone home, taken my money and just said, "Go ahead and take this whole thing in a direction that I think is singularly unexciting and not creative and not interesting."

BASINGER: It was never about taking control of the situation. It was about wanting to be heard, because we wanted to make a really good movie, and there was a chance that we could have.

BALDWIN: I disagree that we had the chance to make a really good movie.

BASINGER: Well, it could have been....

BALDWIN: OK, it could have been better than it was. But it's taken a couple of years to really put that behind us. You know, I've worked in this business long enough to know a lot of stories, none of which I would ever repeat. Stories about really horrible situations. Man, there are just unbelievable things that go on that you're never going to hear about, because they don't want you to hear about 'em. You only hear about 'em when they want you to hear about 'em. If there are scandals involving studio funds going to hookers, that will all go away if certain people want it to go away. And when you're on the wrong side of that kind of energy, it's a big wake-up call. This is a really big machine, the press and the movies and the studios, and someone can pick up the phone and put a word out and really, really hurt you.

Did it change the way you feel about making movies?

BALDWIN: It kind of diminished my enthusiasm. Not that I'm not enthusiastic, but now I have it very much in perspective that movies are not my raison d'etre anymore. Right up until that point that was who I was: I was an actor, acting in films. Now, making movies is kind of like third or fourth on my list of interests. And hey, man, I have nothing to complain about. I did a lot of complaining for a while, because I was hurt. But that's over, I survived that, and The Getaway was the best experience I've ever had because we had a good time, and we really proved.... Not that I was out to prove anything, but maybe I was, you know? I mean, let's not be unrealistic. Maybe I was out to prove that she and I were professionals that really wanted to make a good film. I think the sad thing about that kind of reputation is that it tends to infiltrate and poison the view of your work. And that's painful. When I see that happen to other people, I feel bad. I feel very bad for people who, I know, work hard, and to see them torn apart on a movie....
Because movies are like having a miscarriage. Months go by, and you're waiting for them to get the movie together, and there's so much speculation and expectation. You develop it, you shoot it, it goes through post-production, they screen it, and then the movie comes out, and it can be gone in a week. Like, Kim wanted to go to work, so she did The Real McCoy, and it wasn't like she was saying, "This is Doctor Zhivago." It was a caper film, you know, based on a true story, with an attractive group of people....

BASINGER: It really wasn't a caper film. It just had to be that way in the editing room. It was a love story, too.

BALDWIN: Whatever.

BASINGER: A mess is what it was.

BALDWIN: What I'm saying is that you work for months, and then these things come out, and they're just dismissed. And you learn the hard way that it's your ass. If the movie flops, it's your flop, even if you have no control. That's the gamble. People always say athletes make too much money, and some people ask me, "Do you feel you're overpaid?" And I don't, because with the exception of a half a dozen men, people don't give a s— who the director is. They don't give a s— who photographed it or did the costumes. If it flops, it's the actor who flopped. Your movie flopped. That's what movie stardom is all about. You made it happen or you didn't make it happen, whether you had that control or not. So for that, pay me more money than I'm currently getting [laughs]. Like all these things we've talked about, it's an evolving thing, and you learn so much. I take every movie I did prior to The Getaway, and I just discount them as an apprenticeship. I knew nothing, and they mean nothing to me. That was just not me. That was me learning. I feel like I'm really starting completely over now, armed with what I've learned in the last couple of years.

Kim, have you changed your views on what you want out of your career?

BASINGER: After that speech, I'm exhausted [laughs]. Man, I have to rethink the whole idea of this career after that one. No, I don't know what's ahead of me, and I don't have myself on any course. I'm not trying to navigate my future, you know? And I can't guess where all this is going.

There must have been times over the past few years, between the reputation and the movies that didn't work and the 'Boxing Helena' lawsuit, when you've felt, "Enough, already."

BASINGER: What day doesn't go by...? [trails off]

BALDWIN: That's a rhetorical question.

True. To be more concrete: Can you see a day when that stuff will be behind you? Or is there too much still hanging over your head?

BASINGER: [Very quietly] Well, it's been a frightmare. And it's not over. I can't give you a date [laughs]. But this is funny, because somebody asked me, "What's been the best year of your life?" And I said, "This year," and they went, "Excuse me?" And all of a sudden it hit me what that meant. I said "this year," I guess, because we made The Getaway together and we got married.

BALDWIN: You want to know the truth? Those things are over, to the extent that they don't consume you every day. We don't wake up every day and relive the trial. It'll come up, and it's nagging. But the worst of that process is over. And with the lawsuit, two things come to mind. One, the movie comes out and almost every single piece of criticism opens with the sentence, "This is the smartest money Kim Basinger ever spent, not doing this movie." Like the movie was really, you know, less than wonderful. Is that a vindication? No. You don't think about it in those terms. What you think about is that this case is under a very viable, serious appeal. A serious, heavyweight contract appellate law firm says to us: "You really got f—ed. A lot of reversible error here. Major stuff."

BASINGER: I want to get back to something I was saying. Besides being married and besides The Getaway, I consider the gift of education the highest gift that you can get. I think this past year I've been a sort of silent observer. I can laugh and say I've learned more about the law than I'll ever know about the movie business, you know? But I'll also say it has been a grand awakening. The fact that the facts were never tried, that it was me on trial and my public image. The Jurors, God bless 'em, they knew nothing about this case. They just knew about an image, and I happened to be the girl with that image.

But it's not entirely out of your control. They did see you on the stand testifying.

BASINGER: The perception was already there.

BALDWIN: The tone was set.

BASINGER: I think you ought to say the quote that the plaintiff's lawyer....

BALDWIN: Oh, it's been said ad nauseam.

BASINGER: I don't care.

BALDWIN: Well, the woman got up and she said...

BASINGER: First day, opening argument.

BALDWIN: ...She said, "We all know what it's like for the pretty girl in school who always gets her way." We looked at each other, and we said, "Good God, it's not going to be on this level?" [sighs] The bottom line is, they won. And I learned so much. I wanted to be a lawyer my whole life, and after this, boy, am I glad I didn't.

I thought you wanted to be a politician.

BALDWIN: That's changed, too. I did want to. Hey, there's a part of me that still does. But I see it now as very diminishing returns. We now have what my friend calls the non-meretricious system of rewarding celebrity and jobs. People don't want someone who is greater than them or better than them or more learned than them. They want men like them. I don't want to vote for some guy in a bow tie who went to Harvard. I want a guy who, you know, ran the Zamboni at a skating rink out on Long Island. Make him a senator. There's nothing wrong with that, but it seems to be all about that now.

Any resolutions, based on what you've been through over the past few years?

BALDWIN: I don't want to work with anybody anymore that I'm not going to have a good time with. If you bring me the greatest opportunity in the world, if it involves people I don't think I could have a good time with, I don't want the job. Because it's my life. I mean, I did two movies in twelve months, The Getaway and The Shadow, and hey, man, I'm....

BASINGER: Fried. He's fried.

BALDWIN: I want to live. I want to do nothing.

BASINGER: [laughing] OK! Here it comes! "I want to live!" He's Susan Hayward. "I want to live!"

BALDWIN: I lay in bed every morning and say, "I don't want to get out of this bed."

BASINGER: He says, "I just want to go to the beach, I just want to go canoeing, I just want to get out of the house.... I want to live!" And I say, "Shut up!"

BALDWIN: She says: "Shut up. Go to work. Make money. Get in the car and get over to Universal." And that's one of the greatest things, about her and me and my life. She keeps me going. Some days I'm just dead and she'll go: "Yeah, I know, honey. I know it's tough, and I know this ain't going your way. Now get in the car and go to work."