Bess Rattray surveys the role he was born to play
Stories about movie stars are supposed to open with a meal,
over which the actor discloses his or her hard-won sense of
satisfaction with the world: Cameron Diaz and a plate of
steak frites reach new levels of personal awareness; Brad
Pitt, contemplating a mesclun salad with ciabatta croutons,
posits that a sense of harmony comes from within. This
story opens with Alec Baldwin and a plate of linguine
primavera and talk of radioactive seepage.
Midway through a lung October weekend—scheduled at the frantic pace of a campaigning politician's eleventh-hour barnstorm— Baldwin sits under the bare beams and Arts and Crafts wallpa per of an East Hampton, New York, dining room, wondering if the aging nuclear reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory is poisoning me children of Long Island. Down Main Street, on a chilly night, the Hamptons International Film Festival is in full swing: There is a hangar-sized white party tent, under which young actresses with absurd hairdos try to catch the eye of someone important; there are klieg lights raking the sky as if a zeppelin attack were imminent; there are camera crews to beam the fiesta into the living rooms of America. But the biggest star in town has other fish to fry.
Baldwin's marathon started Wednesday after he fled the Los Angeles set of Mercury Rising (an action thriller co-starring Bruce Willis) and husded to New York tor me inauguration of the Cantor film-studies center at NYU, his alma mater. Friday afternoon, he hightailed it out through the Midtown Tunnel, away from Manhattan, to address a press conference for Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR), a newborn activist group that will—among other somber tasks—test baby teeth donated by local parents for traces of me radioactivity that may or may not be leaking from Brookhaven.
Tonight, Friday, he manages to be only half an hour late to host the seventy or so liberal-minded Hamptonites who have paid $500 to dine on stuffed chicken and roasted beets (a vegetarian, Baldwin special-ordered his linguine) with STAR'S founders and hear more about the toxic contamination that could be creeping—eastward, ever eastward—under their summerhouses at night. Saturday, ifs west again on 1-495 for the dedication of a breast-cancer-care pavilion at Stony Brook medical center in the name of his mother, Carol, a seven-year cancer survivor and a public voice for the thousands of Long Island women who make up the shadowy "clusters" of victims that haunt these suburbs. Sunday, all six of the blue-eyed Baldwin kids—Alec, Billy, Stephen, Daniel, Beth, and Jane—and their blue-eyed mom gather again, this time at Massapequa High, for the dedication of a new auditorium in the name of their father, Alexander Rae Baldwin, Jr., who taught social studies there, coached the rifle team and football, and died of lung cancer in 1983.
The eldest Baldwin boy has a voice that makes writers go purple with simile: It's like a hand on corduroy. Like ripping velvet. Like smoke, like a hound dog, like gravel under a boot. Tonight, moving slow and easy in a blue suit that's half movie-star casual, half Washington wonk, he turns his voice on the wealthy Democrats and activists and lawyers who have settled into cheery, overstuffed couches after dinner to hear what STAR has to say: "Tritiated, contaminated water—am I wrong?—is moving this-a-way." He glances with a sardonic look from eye to eye. "It's not moving toward Peerskill, for all you people who know [New York Governor] Pataki's farm up there. It's not moving toward Albany.... It's moving out here." He holds each of us in a gaze that could be construed as either a merry twinkle or as a look of menace. "Radioactive contamination is on its way here, to the East End of Long Island. What are we going to do about that?"
Baldwin's delivery is fierce. Remember the Kodiak bear he wrassled with in The Edge? . If Alec met that bear on his way home tonight, he'd take him down in two rounds. Unlike other stars, who somehow seem to shrink when you see them in real life—Madonna, for all her insinuating charisma, turns into a pocket Venus who talks like Ethel Mertz, Robert Redford distressingly morphs into a small man width orange hair—Baldwin is even more formidable in person than onscreen.
Which might be why it took so many years for the percolating rumors about a pending run for public office to hit full boil: Until they've seen him in action, most people have a hard time envisioning the Shadow as Congressman or Senator or Governor Baldwin. But he sure has been out there stumping. As president of the Creative Coalition (the alliance of arts-and entertainment types who act as celebrity pundits and fund-raisers for causes like the First Amendment and the environment), he has campaigned for Ted Kennedi and against Oliver North. He has opinionized on the NEA in THE New York Times and on Crossfire. He has lobbied in Washington on Arts Advocacy Day and in Albany to protect clean drinking water. He has met dozens of state legislators and Congressmen and senators—and been eyed ner vously by them as though they were me jealous stepsisters and he was Cinderella with a steely jaw and dimples. Baldwin may have worked with Andrew Cuomo for the homeless and with Robert Kennedy, Jr., to protect New York waterways from development and pollumon—he may have ventured onto the floors of the Democratic and Republican national conventions to fight for campaign-finance reform—but until tills weekend, he remained, in the public's perception, your basic heart-on- sleeve-wearing Hollywood spokes-hunk.
"My wife and I think about it all the time," he says of the laundry list of causes he's taken on: "We live in a world, new, I open my mail and I marvel and I say to myself. God, this is something mat the government used to do. This is something the government used to take care of. The privatization of all this work is just a very daunting proposition."
This weekend, he's gone over me top. From here on, me old Mario Cuomo parlor game will begin: Will he run or won't he? Certainly he behaves as though he will. As many politicians have done before him—that prissy Yankee, George Bush, headed down to Texas to play oilman—Baldwin has laid down new roots, a prerequisite for public office, in a community not far, at least geographically, from his hometown. He has been on the road with the Creative Coalition for the past two years, building a platform for himself should he decide to challenge East End Congressman Michael Forbes or go for the real prize. New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's seat, in 2000.
Like Cuomo, Baldwin is coy when discussing his political ambitions. Last fall, for instance, he told New Tork magazine he "would love to be governor of New York. It would be great. You can do a lot of things for a lot of people." The day after the story appeared, however, he told a local reporter at a freedom-of-speech fund- raiser that he was absolutely not running for anything.
But this winter the citizens of New York are going to have plenty of time to get used to the idea, to visualize him bounding purposefully up the Capitol steps. In January, Baldwin will step down as head of the Creative Coalition, passing the scepter to his younger brother Billy. To devote more time to his wife, Kim Basinger, and their one-year-old daughter, Ireland? Hardly. He's taking advantage of the quick breather between acting projects to hit the road for Democratic candidates across New York State, touring parking lots and backwoods to help turn back the Republican Juggernaut that, in his mind, has sacked New York. (Washing a lot of backs along the way of men and women who can someday be called upon to wash his.)
"His message," says New York Democratic Party chairwoman Judith Hope, "is that Democrats need to get up off their fannies and start winning some elections."
Massapequa High, with its new Baldwin memorial auditorium, sits across the road from the Sunrise Mall, the metaphoric and literal town center of Long Island, kingdom of malls. It rests on a swampy patch of ground once known as "the Hole," where Ron Kovic (a student of Mr. Baldwin's who would go on to write about his Vietnam experiences in Born on the Fourth of July) caught frogs before anyone knew what a mall was. "Future homemaker" Jessica Hahn (who would rise to infamy as Jim Bakker's other woman) hung around Sunrise Mall and ate mini-burgers at the White Castle next door. So did Steve Guttenberg (his neighbors pronounced it Gut-enberg) of Three Men and a Baby fame. So did Jerry Seinfeld (who immortalized another Massapequa High teacher, driver's ed instructor Albert Bevilacqua, on his sitcom).
The Baldwin family saga has an iconic, larger man-life feeling, too. As he stood on the stage at Massapequa High to read the plaque dedicating the auditorium, Baldwin said that his father, after his death, had achieved a "kind of JFK status" in me family. He had been a role model not just to his kids, but to an entire neighborhood—an exemplar of community involvement, of an energetic striving for what you want and what you want for those around you.
"Ultraliberal" is the accusatory phrase usually pointed by the press in the Baldwin clan's direction. Actually, the family espouses the kind of traditional liberal-Democrat views that people were proud of in the '70s. Their public opinions come out of an earnestness that no one felt the need to apologize for when they were growing up: Letting the government experiment blithely with nuclear materials is a bad idea; giving corporations free reign to leak dubious waste into our water is not a clever plan; censorship of the arts by government runs counter to the founding principles of the nation; "freedom of speech" applies to everyone, even if you want to say something loathsome; abortion is a woman's right; Jesse Helms is a cretin.
"Growing up in that community—my family, and particularly my parents—instilled the values that left me with no other choice but to be an activist," Billy Baldwin says. "Long Island is indirectly and directly responsible."
Xander (Zan-duh, as the kids in the neighborhood called young Alec) made good on his father's legacy—and how. He was a little boy who dreamed of riding in Air Force One, who was elected president of his high school class. In the red-white-and-blue year of 1976, he graduated from Berner—known to all as Burn-Out—High and headed to Washington, DC, to major in political science at George Washington University. He was a big man on campus. But then he lost a race for student-government president; disappointed, he listened to his friends' advice and decided to abandon politics altogether. Next stop. New York, and acting school.
To understand the antagonism (and snobbery) hurled in a westerly direction by East Enders—both Bonackers, as native East Hamptonites are known, arid those who proudly let it be known that they've "summered here for twenty years"—you have to understand that the Hamptons are to the rest of Long Island as Newport is to Rhode Island, or, say, Princeton is to New Jersey The classist gap is further exacerbated by two elements: First, there is the accent. UpIslanders talk with a distinctive twisting tongue that leaves off Rs (as in whatevuh) and adds w's to words with As and Os (as m cawfee). The old East End twang (which transformed most vowels into a flat O sound, so "By guy, that's good pie!" came out "Boy goy, that's good poy!"), on the other hand, died off a generation ago, leaving the current populace twang- free. Second, people still like to remember that in colonial times, the East End was tied administratively, legislativelv, to Connecticut and the rest of New England, business being conducted by boat across the Sound. There is even a movement, reinvigorated even' decade or so, to secede from the rest of Suffolk and form a new county, putting up a governmental moat against the fast-food joints and tract houses that menace from the West. So where Bonackers see a picture of Baldwin in the paper, bearded, looking like a contractor, wearing a windbreaker and chomping on a big cheroot as he leaves the local polling place, they shake their fists in the wannabe-local's face.
Baldwin is aware that a warm, fuzzy feeling may not be the automatic response to his public displays of compassion: "If you pull up to your local multiplex and you think Alec Baldwin is a Commie pinko troublemaking pain in the ass," he told a reporter during one of his many run-ins over animal rights (this tussle involved an annual pigeon shoot in a small Pennsylvania town called Hegins), "you're going to go see Daylight instead of Ghosts of Mississippi."
But though a war may rage in his head between tile forces of career and the forces of conscience—and though he is the first to admit that many Americans would like to tell these rich, spoiled Hollywood activists to put a cork in it—Baldwin keeps on keepin' on.
Despite the resentment, despite the denials, despite the jokes about Alec and Kirn's struggles on behalf of our four-legged friends everywhere, Democrats are beguiled by the idea of a Baldwin candidacy. People don't want to take no for an answer, because it's obvious that Baldwin's got the goods: "He's the genuine article," Judith Hope says. "He's passionately driven by his value system. You can't fake that."
"Alec's passion can sometimes take over on an issue, and the Nassau Comity street fighter in him comes out," says Tony Bullock, Senator Moynihan's chief of staff, who has known Baldwin for eight years. "He doesn't mind getting into a verbal or physical brawl. But I think that a lot of that disappears as you get into your forties [Baldwin will turn forty in 1998], and he's still a pretty young guy. I would be surprised if he didn't run. It's really about tuning, and when would be approriate and what level would be appropriate."
It's not exactly a coincidence that both Bullock and Hope were once town supervisors of East Hampton. In New York politics these days (as in media and movies and modeling), the aisles of Dreesen's Market on Newtown Lane often become the corridors of power. Baldwin has not just put down the roots that movie stars so love to yearn for as they "tuck" contemplatively into those steak frites and caesar salads, he has, as a full-time resident, met the requirements for a future in politics— whether he's been welcomed with open arms or not.
Baldwin's pitch to STAR'S well-manicured supporters would give the public-relations crew over at Brookhaven a serious case of agita, if only they could hide behind a potted palm to listen: "I want to know if there is a causal link between the contaminated groundwater here in Long Island and the fact that the highest incidence of breast cancer in the U.S. is here, in Nassau County. I want to know if it's related to [Brookhaven] or aggressive use of pesticides in farming and golf courses and other kinds of turf management that are very common here, on Long Island."
Standing next to a glossy grand piano, he appeals to us conversationally, casually, but with the unexpected rhythmic refrain of a Baptist preacher—a '60s civil rights orator with the volume turned down several notches: "I really just want to get some answers, you know? And the minute I get involved in a cause like this, and I ask some questions, and I want some answers, and they say, 'Oh, don't you worry about that' "— he makes a shushing gesture with his outstretched hands, and we all chuckle—'Don't you worry about that.' ' Well, that is absolutely the wrong thing to say to someone of my political stripe: 'Don't worry about it.' "
When the speeches are over, Baldwin joins a conversation circle in which a state assemblyman, several soldiers from the environmental- ist trenches, Jan Schlichtmann in an aggressively upbeat necktie—and Mark Schiffer, the twentysomething director of a film called Strong Island Boys (about growing up violent on Lawn Guyland), who has somehow gone astray from the film festival down the street—are assess- ing just how far STAR'S fight can go. "The problem is, it's a generational thing," Baldwin puts in. "People of a certain age hear the word nuclear, and they feel concern. Younger people hear the word nuclear, and it means nothing, it means the '80s. There is no fear." The circle nods.
What can Baldwin do to help? This weekend, at least, he is more than a celebrity spokesmodel. He is a man of the people lobbying in his people's cause. He is a suburban everyman. He is a strong island boy.
"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir."—Macbeth (I, iii, 143), in which Baldwin play the title role this winter at New York's Public Theater
Every politician has a story. A shorthand biography that runs through voters' minds like a silent movie as they stand behind the curtain and pull the lever: Lincoln was a rail splitter out of the pioneer woods who taught himself to write in a one-room cabin and was never worldly enough to bullshit the people. FDR was anything but an everyman: He was an American aristocrat, and his appeal stemmed from the tingly emotion voters felt as they watched him stoop, cigarette holder clenched between his sharp teeth, to lift the huddled masses out of the gutter. Clinton is a regular-guy's guy, brought up in rural Arkansas—chasing loose women, watching football, getting thick around the middle. He got where he is because he's wilier than the rest of us.
If there's ever a Senator or Governor Baldwin, his supporters' silent movie will feature a middle-class boy born under a good star— fated to rise and rise and rise. The success of Alexander and Carol Baldwin's generation carried them east from New York into the rust- and-avocado shelter of a neighborhood where each tidy house had a rec room, and tiny Zorros and Sleeping Beauties ruled the tidy streets on Halloween; Alec Baldwin's success has carried him eastward, ever eastward, to a neighborhood where financiers and fashion designers gather on beachfront decks for Bridgehampton wine and Peconic oysters and sunset over the Atlantic.
We've never seen a politician with Baldwin's background before. Reagan may have been the Great, Communicator, but you always got the sense that he was artificial, spun from plastic and polyester—like the Technicolor empire that spawned him. Clinton may have been a lower- middle-class kid, but you can't forget that he's called "Bubba," a good- ole-boy trading on memories of a childhood that's long ago and far away: fishin' and coon hounds and boyhood pranks straight out of a Willie Morris novel. Today, America gets teary-eyed about old Steak- Umms jingles and prom makeovers at JCPenney. "Baldwin"—shorthand for the quintessential suburban stud—has more social (and perhaps political) relevance today than "Bubba" does.
And despite having a father who in death achieved the status of a small-town JFK, Baldwin is not an ersatz JFK, Jr. He and his brothers may have blue eyes and look good in suits, but the Kennedys were children of tremendous privilege—the Baldwins most certainly were not.
Alec Baldwin is an Irish-Catholic boy from a blue-collar suburb, with the gifted tongue of a fledgling Jesse Jackson. Shakespeare put the words in his mouth: "I bear a charmed life."
Midway through a lung October weekend—scheduled at the frantic pace of a campaigning politician's eleventh-hour barnstorm— Baldwin sits under the bare beams and Arts and Crafts wallpa per of an East Hampton, New York, dining room, wondering if the aging nuclear reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory is poisoning me children of Long Island. Down Main Street, on a chilly night, the Hamptons International Film Festival is in full swing: There is a hangar-sized white party tent, under which young actresses with absurd hairdos try to catch the eye of someone important; there are klieg lights raking the sky as if a zeppelin attack were imminent; there are camera crews to beam the fiesta into the living rooms of America. But the biggest star in town has other fish to fry.
Baldwin's marathon started Wednesday after he fled the Los Angeles set of Mercury Rising (an action thriller co-starring Bruce Willis) and husded to New York tor me inauguration of the Cantor film-studies center at NYU, his alma mater. Friday afternoon, he hightailed it out through the Midtown Tunnel, away from Manhattan, to address a press conference for Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR), a newborn activist group that will—among other somber tasks—test baby teeth donated by local parents for traces of me radioactivity that may or may not be leaking from Brookhaven.
Tonight, Friday, he manages to be only half an hour late to host the seventy or so liberal-minded Hamptonites who have paid $500 to dine on stuffed chicken and roasted beets (a vegetarian, Baldwin special-ordered his linguine) with STAR'S founders and hear more about the toxic contamination that could be creeping—eastward, ever eastward—under their summerhouses at night. Saturday, ifs west again on 1-495 for the dedication of a breast-cancer-care pavilion at Stony Brook medical center in the name of his mother, Carol, a seven-year cancer survivor and a public voice for the thousands of Long Island women who make up the shadowy "clusters" of victims that haunt these suburbs. Sunday, all six of the blue-eyed Baldwin kids—Alec, Billy, Stephen, Daniel, Beth, and Jane—and their blue-eyed mom gather again, this time at Massapequa High, for the dedication of a new auditorium in the name of their father, Alexander Rae Baldwin, Jr., who taught social studies there, coached the rifle team and football, and died of lung cancer in 1983.
The eldest Baldwin boy has a voice that makes writers go purple with simile: It's like a hand on corduroy. Like ripping velvet. Like smoke, like a hound dog, like gravel under a boot. Tonight, moving slow and easy in a blue suit that's half movie-star casual, half Washington wonk, he turns his voice on the wealthy Democrats and activists and lawyers who have settled into cheery, overstuffed couches after dinner to hear what STAR has to say: "Tritiated, contaminated water—am I wrong?—is moving this-a-way." He glances with a sardonic look from eye to eye. "It's not moving toward Peerskill, for all you people who know [New York Governor] Pataki's farm up there. It's not moving toward Albany.... It's moving out here." He holds each of us in a gaze that could be construed as either a merry twinkle or as a look of menace. "Radioactive contamination is on its way here, to the East End of Long Island. What are we going to do about that?"
Baldwin's delivery is fierce. Remember the Kodiak bear he wrassled with in The Edge? . If Alec met that bear on his way home tonight, he'd take him down in two rounds. Unlike other stars, who somehow seem to shrink when you see them in real life—Madonna, for all her insinuating charisma, turns into a pocket Venus who talks like Ethel Mertz, Robert Redford distressingly morphs into a small man width orange hair—Baldwin is even more formidable in person than onscreen.
Which might be why it took so many years for the percolating rumors about a pending run for public office to hit full boil: Until they've seen him in action, most people have a hard time envisioning the Shadow as Congressman or Senator or Governor Baldwin. But he sure has been out there stumping. As president of the Creative Coalition (the alliance of arts-and entertainment types who act as celebrity pundits and fund-raisers for causes like the First Amendment and the environment), he has campaigned for Ted Kennedi and against Oliver North. He has opinionized on the NEA in THE New York Times and on Crossfire. He has lobbied in Washington on Arts Advocacy Day and in Albany to protect clean drinking water. He has met dozens of state legislators and Congressmen and senators—and been eyed ner vously by them as though they were me jealous stepsisters and he was Cinderella with a steely jaw and dimples. Baldwin may have worked with Andrew Cuomo for the homeless and with Robert Kennedy, Jr., to protect New York waterways from development and pollumon—he may have ventured onto the floors of the Democratic and Republican national conventions to fight for campaign-finance reform—but until tills weekend, he remained, in the public's perception, your basic heart-on- sleeve-wearing Hollywood spokes-hunk.
"My wife and I think about it all the time," he says of the laundry list of causes he's taken on: "We live in a world, new, I open my mail and I marvel and I say to myself. God, this is something mat the government used to do. This is something the government used to take care of. The privatization of all this work is just a very daunting proposition."
This weekend, he's gone over me top. From here on, me old Mario Cuomo parlor game will begin: Will he run or won't he? Certainly he behaves as though he will. As many politicians have done before him—that prissy Yankee, George Bush, headed down to Texas to play oilman—Baldwin has laid down new roots, a prerequisite for public office, in a community not far, at least geographically, from his hometown. He has been on the road with the Creative Coalition for the past two years, building a platform for himself should he decide to challenge East End Congressman Michael Forbes or go for the real prize. New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's seat, in 2000.
Like Cuomo, Baldwin is coy when discussing his political ambitions. Last fall, for instance, he told New Tork magazine he "would love to be governor of New York. It would be great. You can do a lot of things for a lot of people." The day after the story appeared, however, he told a local reporter at a freedom-of-speech fund- raiser that he was absolutely not running for anything.
But this winter the citizens of New York are going to have plenty of time to get used to the idea, to visualize him bounding purposefully up the Capitol steps. In January, Baldwin will step down as head of the Creative Coalition, passing the scepter to his younger brother Billy. To devote more time to his wife, Kim Basinger, and their one-year-old daughter, Ireland? Hardly. He's taking advantage of the quick breather between acting projects to hit the road for Democratic candidates across New York State, touring parking lots and backwoods to help turn back the Republican Juggernaut that, in his mind, has sacked New York. (Washing a lot of backs along the way of men and women who can someday be called upon to wash his.)
"His message," says New York Democratic Party chairwoman Judith Hope, "is that Democrats need to get up off their fannies and start winning some elections."
"Maaa-sa-pee-qua, Exit 30 off the Southern State!There's something strange about Massapequa—call it a blessing or call it a curse, but it has become the suburb, from which emanate our quintessential suburban tales: The door Mary Jo Buttafuoco opened to face a pistol is on Adams Road West; Eddie Byrnes, who became the most famous shot cop in New York when he took a drug dealer's bullet in the head in 1988, grew up on the comer of Boston and Baldwin Drive. The news stories that come out of the town have a bizarre, symbolic quality: A girl working in Burger King falls down near-dead when a three-inch nail fired from the gun of a workman (putting up a poster next door) shoots through the wall and into her skull. Two bored teenagers fashion a blowgun like those you see in National Geographic and go on a drive- by-darting spree.
Where kids wall-to-wall
Hit the Sunrise Mall,
It's the cheapest place to take a date!" —Baldwin on The Rosie O'Donnell Show, singing to the tune of "Oklahoma!"
Massapequa High, with its new Baldwin memorial auditorium, sits across the road from the Sunrise Mall, the metaphoric and literal town center of Long Island, kingdom of malls. It rests on a swampy patch of ground once known as "the Hole," where Ron Kovic (a student of Mr. Baldwin's who would go on to write about his Vietnam experiences in Born on the Fourth of July) caught frogs before anyone knew what a mall was. "Future homemaker" Jessica Hahn (who would rise to infamy as Jim Bakker's other woman) hung around Sunrise Mall and ate mini-burgers at the White Castle next door. So did Steve Guttenberg (his neighbors pronounced it Gut-enberg) of Three Men and a Baby fame. So did Jerry Seinfeld (who immortalized another Massapequa High teacher, driver's ed instructor Albert Bevilacqua, on his sitcom).
The Baldwin family saga has an iconic, larger man-life feeling, too. As he stood on the stage at Massapequa High to read the plaque dedicating the auditorium, Baldwin said that his father, after his death, had achieved a "kind of JFK status" in me family. He had been a role model not just to his kids, but to an entire neighborhood—an exemplar of community involvement, of an energetic striving for what you want and what you want for those around you.
"Ultraliberal" is the accusatory phrase usually pointed by the press in the Baldwin clan's direction. Actually, the family espouses the kind of traditional liberal-Democrat views that people were proud of in the '70s. Their public opinions come out of an earnestness that no one felt the need to apologize for when they were growing up: Letting the government experiment blithely with nuclear materials is a bad idea; giving corporations free reign to leak dubious waste into our water is not a clever plan; censorship of the arts by government runs counter to the founding principles of the nation; "freedom of speech" applies to everyone, even if you want to say something loathsome; abortion is a woman's right; Jesse Helms is a cretin.
"Growing up in that community—my family, and particularly my parents—instilled the values that left me with no other choice but to be an activist," Billy Baldwin says. "Long Island is indirectly and directly responsible."
Xander (Zan-duh, as the kids in the neighborhood called young Alec) made good on his father's legacy—and how. He was a little boy who dreamed of riding in Air Force One, who was elected president of his high school class. In the red-white-and-blue year of 1976, he graduated from Berner—known to all as Burn-Out—High and headed to Washington, DC, to major in political science at George Washington University. He was a big man on campus. But then he lost a race for student-government president; disappointed, he listened to his friends' advice and decided to abandon politics altogether. Next stop. New York, and acting school.
"FOR ALEC AT CHRISTMASAlec Baldwin might play in the Heartland—Rosie O'Donncll even Jokes, "I'm thinking of moving back to Long Island so I could vote for him" —but in East Hampton, he catches flak from all sides. His liberal values may flourish in this community, among me ancient elms and vanilla-suited novelists, but locals can't quite forget that he's an outsider, that he comes from UpIsland, like his neighbor Billy Joel (a Harley-riding son of Hicksville who turned a few native stomachs singing about the mournful plight of endangered deep-sea fishermen). He's resented both as a rich Hollywood movie star and as a townie come-lately from Nassau County.
Well here's to Alec Baldwin,
For his happiness we pray,
So in the spirit of this season,
He will kindly go away!"—From one of dozens of letters to the editor of The East Hampton Star (Baldwin's local paper) criticizing his meddlesome civic involvement
To understand the antagonism (and snobbery) hurled in a westerly direction by East Enders—both Bonackers, as native East Hamptonites are known, arid those who proudly let it be known that they've "summered here for twenty years"—you have to understand that the Hamptons are to the rest of Long Island as Newport is to Rhode Island, or, say, Princeton is to New Jersey The classist gap is further exacerbated by two elements: First, there is the accent. UpIslanders talk with a distinctive twisting tongue that leaves off Rs (as in whatevuh) and adds w's to words with As and Os (as m cawfee). The old East End twang (which transformed most vowels into a flat O sound, so "By guy, that's good pie!" came out "Boy goy, that's good poy!"), on the other hand, died off a generation ago, leaving the current populace twang- free. Second, people still like to remember that in colonial times, the East End was tied administratively, legislativelv, to Connecticut and the rest of New England, business being conducted by boat across the Sound. There is even a movement, reinvigorated even' decade or so, to secede from the rest of Suffolk and form a new county, putting up a governmental moat against the fast-food joints and tract houses that menace from the West. So where Bonackers see a picture of Baldwin in the paper, bearded, looking like a contractor, wearing a windbreaker and chomping on a big cheroot as he leaves the local polling place, they shake their fists in the wannabe-local's face.
Baldwin is aware that a warm, fuzzy feeling may not be the automatic response to his public displays of compassion: "If you pull up to your local multiplex and you think Alec Baldwin is a Commie pinko troublemaking pain in the ass," he told a reporter during one of his many run-ins over animal rights (this tussle involved an annual pigeon shoot in a small Pennsylvania town called Hegins), "you're going to go see Daylight instead of Ghosts of Mississippi."
But though a war may rage in his head between tile forces of career and the forces of conscience—and though he is the first to admit that many Americans would like to tell these rich, spoiled Hollywood activists to put a cork in it—Baldwin keeps on keepin' on.
Despite the resentment, despite the denials, despite the jokes about Alec and Kirn's struggles on behalf of our four-legged friends everywhere, Democrats are beguiled by the idea of a Baldwin candidacy. People don't want to take no for an answer, because it's obvious that Baldwin's got the goods: "He's the genuine article," Judith Hope says. "He's passionately driven by his value system. You can't fake that."
"Alec's passion can sometimes take over on an issue, and the Nassau Comity street fighter in him comes out," says Tony Bullock, Senator Moynihan's chief of staff, who has known Baldwin for eight years. "He doesn't mind getting into a verbal or physical brawl. But I think that a lot of that disappears as you get into your forties [Baldwin will turn forty in 1998], and he's still a pretty young guy. I would be surprised if he didn't run. It's really about tuning, and when would be approriate and what level would be appropriate."
It's not exactly a coincidence that both Bullock and Hope were once town supervisors of East Hampton. In New York politics these days (as in media and movies and modeling), the aisles of Dreesen's Market on Newtown Lane often become the corridors of power. Baldwin has not just put down the roots that movie stars so love to yearn for as they "tuck" contemplatively into those steak frites and caesar salads, he has, as a full-time resident, met the requirements for a future in politics— whether he's been welcomed with open arms or not.
"Republicans... appear to view government as some instrument of philosophical corporal punishment: a stick that they want to seize control of and wield with the purpose of teaching some of us a lesson. That view worries me. I always thought that government to be taught a lesson by us, not the other way around. " — From one of Baldwin's many letters to The East Hampton StarUnlike Ronald Reagan or Fred Thompson or even Fred Grandy—or any other celebrity-turned-politician you can think of— Alec Baldwin is alarmingly articulate, even on arcane subjects (like cancer statistics and nuclear-weapons systems) that could tangle me tongue of a professional. Tonight, at the STAR dinner—his usually stiff pompadour mussed and falling in forelocks over his brow— Baldwin is holding his own in a crowd that includes Dr. Helen Caldicott (the renowned antinuclear campaigner and founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility), Jan Schlichtmann (the activist lawyer who will soon be immortalized by John Travolta in A Civil Action), and Randy Snell (a banker who lives in the shadow of Brookhaven lab with a young daughter afflicted by a very rare form of cancer).
Baldwin's pitch to STAR'S well-manicured supporters would give the public-relations crew over at Brookhaven a serious case of agita, if only they could hide behind a potted palm to listen: "I want to know if there is a causal link between the contaminated groundwater here in Long Island and the fact that the highest incidence of breast cancer in the U.S. is here, in Nassau County. I want to know if it's related to [Brookhaven] or aggressive use of pesticides in farming and golf courses and other kinds of turf management that are very common here, on Long Island."
Standing next to a glossy grand piano, he appeals to us conversationally, casually, but with the unexpected rhythmic refrain of a Baptist preacher—a '60s civil rights orator with the volume turned down several notches: "I really just want to get some answers, you know? And the minute I get involved in a cause like this, and I ask some questions, and I want some answers, and they say, 'Oh, don't you worry about that' "— he makes a shushing gesture with his outstretched hands, and we all chuckle—'Don't you worry about that.' ' Well, that is absolutely the wrong thing to say to someone of my political stripe: 'Don't worry about it.' "
When the speeches are over, Baldwin joins a conversation circle in which a state assemblyman, several soldiers from the environmental- ist trenches, Jan Schlichtmann in an aggressively upbeat necktie—and Mark Schiffer, the twentysomething director of a film called Strong Island Boys (about growing up violent on Lawn Guyland), who has somehow gone astray from the film festival down the street—are assess- ing just how far STAR'S fight can go. "The problem is, it's a generational thing," Baldwin puts in. "People of a certain age hear the word nuclear, and they feel concern. Younger people hear the word nuclear, and it means nothing, it means the '80s. There is no fear." The circle nods.
What can Baldwin do to help? This weekend, at least, he is more than a celebrity spokesmodel. He is a man of the people lobbying in his people's cause. He is a suburban everyman. He is a strong island boy.
"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, Without my stir."—Macbeth (I, iii, 143), in which Baldwin play the title role this winter at New York's Public Theater
Every politician has a story. A shorthand biography that runs through voters' minds like a silent movie as they stand behind the curtain and pull the lever: Lincoln was a rail splitter out of the pioneer woods who taught himself to write in a one-room cabin and was never worldly enough to bullshit the people. FDR was anything but an everyman: He was an American aristocrat, and his appeal stemmed from the tingly emotion voters felt as they watched him stoop, cigarette holder clenched between his sharp teeth, to lift the huddled masses out of the gutter. Clinton is a regular-guy's guy, brought up in rural Arkansas—chasing loose women, watching football, getting thick around the middle. He got where he is because he's wilier than the rest of us.
If there's ever a Senator or Governor Baldwin, his supporters' silent movie will feature a middle-class boy born under a good star— fated to rise and rise and rise. The success of Alexander and Carol Baldwin's generation carried them east from New York into the rust- and-avocado shelter of a neighborhood where each tidy house had a rec room, and tiny Zorros and Sleeping Beauties ruled the tidy streets on Halloween; Alec Baldwin's success has carried him eastward, ever eastward, to a neighborhood where financiers and fashion designers gather on beachfront decks for Bridgehampton wine and Peconic oysters and sunset over the Atlantic.
We've never seen a politician with Baldwin's background before. Reagan may have been the Great, Communicator, but you always got the sense that he was artificial, spun from plastic and polyester—like the Technicolor empire that spawned him. Clinton may have been a lower- middle-class kid, but you can't forget that he's called "Bubba," a good- ole-boy trading on memories of a childhood that's long ago and far away: fishin' and coon hounds and boyhood pranks straight out of a Willie Morris novel. Today, America gets teary-eyed about old Steak- Umms jingles and prom makeovers at JCPenney. "Baldwin"—shorthand for the quintessential suburban stud—has more social (and perhaps political) relevance today than "Bubba" does.
And despite having a father who in death achieved the status of a small-town JFK, Baldwin is not an ersatz JFK, Jr. He and his brothers may have blue eyes and look good in suits, but the Kennedys were children of tremendous privilege—the Baldwins most certainly were not.
Alec Baldwin is an Irish-Catholic boy from a blue-collar suburb, with the gifted tongue of a fledgling Jesse Jackson. Shakespeare put the words in his mouth: "I bear a charmed life."
Mirabella,February, 1998