From Tom Leonard
His mimicking of Trump is savage. But, in a new book, Alec Baldwin is equally scathing about his fellow stars — and his love-hate relationship with ex-wife Kim Basinger
there was standing room only at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last Sunday night as New Yorkers packed the 2,100- seat theatre to indulge their heartfelt disdain for Donald Trump. Up to £85 a ticket seems steep to listen to a moderately- successful actor plug his memoirs but — in this city, as across much of the U.S. — Alec Baldwin is the man of the moment.
his regular turns on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, waspishly mimicking Trump have become a huge hit with millions of views on the internet. The sketches are a not- so-guilty pleasure for those who see Trump as stupid and ridiculous.
On Sunday, his audience squealed with laughter as he screwed up his face, narrowed his eyes, jutted out his jaw to perform his impression of The Donald. And in the later years of an acting career marred by his truculent attitude, Baldwin’s Trump impressions have been a career godsend.
Now 59, his rugged good looks gone to seed, the star of The hunt For red October, Beetlejuice and the TV sitcom 30 rock would probably prefer to be playing King Lear but he’s grateful for the chance to heap scorn on a President he detests. They say the best mimics can tap into what makes their subject tick — and Baldwin is certainly far more like Trump than he would like to admit.
That is richly confirmed in his rambling, selfindulgent new memoir, titled Nevertheless. It unwittingly reveals the star to be every bit as hot-headed, egotistical and painfully thin-skinned as the President.
The oldest of four actor brothers, Baldwin has only himself to blame that he never achieved his ambition to be regarded as a serious thespian.
Instead, he earned notoriety as a bullet-headed scrapper: fighting drug and drink addiction, challenging studio bosses who ‘failed’ to appreciate his brilliance, battling with actress ex-wife Kim Basinger in their ugly divorce, tussling with the media and even becoming involved in a public row over nasty comments he made to his 11-year-old daughter.
For Trump, who has tweeted his annoyance at Baldwin’s hatchet-job on him, it must be doubly infuriating to be mocked by one of the few celebrities who has almost as bad a record for letting his big mouth get him into trouble.
Still, Trump would surely appreciate Baldwin’s admission that he only wrote his memoir for the money, just as he only went into acting to make a fortune after a childhood spent watching his parents — his father was a schoolteacher — scrabble to support them.
Giving up a possible law career, he headed to hollywood in the eighties. he got a part in the TV soap Knots Landing — a spinoff of Dallas. Aged 26, he almost killed himself with a cocaine overdose, feeling his heart go ‘pop’, while preparing for a day of drug-fuelled debauchery with two female crew members whose husbands were away.
crAwLINGacross the floor of his hotel room, he managed to phone a friend who drove him to hospital. he insists he’s been sober since 1985.
In the best tradition of prickly actor’s memoirs, Baldwin settles some old scores — and most of his venom is directed at fellow movie people.
harrison Ford gets pasted for replacing Baldwin in the role of action hero Jack ryan in the profitable sequels to 1990’s The hunt For red October.
he mocks the Star wars superstar, saying he’s haunted by the fact he’s never won an Oscar: ‘Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.’
Jerry Lee Lewis is an ‘asshole’, says Baldwin, who he met while making Great Balls Of Fire! — a biopic of the rock ’n’ roll icon. Twenty-eight years later, he is still upset that Lewis shoved Baldwin’s outstretched hand away, shouting that he had a ‘cissy handshake’.
As for director Oliver Stone, with whom Baldwin made the film Talk radio, he ‘opened my eyes to the Machiavellian filmmaker who would throw his own mother down a flight of stairs if it would help him get his project financed, get the shot he wanted or simply get his way’.
Baldwin does praise some actors. For example, Anthony hopkins, who he describes as ‘like the French horn solo from Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, he simply opens his mouth to speak and his work is halfway done’.
his feelings are a little more mixed about the gorgeous but temperamental Kim Basinger.
he met the Batman star in 1990 on the set of the prophetically-titled romantic comedy Too hot To handle. She was 37, he was 33.
She had a chequered history — including reported affairs with Prince and richard Gere, her confessed dabbling with cocaine and a string of raunchy film roles, including 9½ weeks.
‘I love men and I love sex,’ she said. Baldwin admits he was warned off her, but he plunged into an affair regardless.
On set, they were one of the most volatile pairings in hollywood history. Skating over the details in his supposedly tell-all memoirs, Baldwin dismisses reports of them behaving like ‘two spoiled, ridiculous children’ as ‘largely fiction’.
he identifies only one accusation — that Basinger insisted on washing her hair with evian water — as being wrong. But that was the least of it.
It was claimed the couple made the director so unwell he had to go hospital with pneumonia and dehydration as a result of their tyrannical demands and volcanic tempers.
what production staff called Basinger’s ‘sexual obsession’ increased the tension. Sound engineers were shocked to overhear, between takes, what she asked her lover to do to her. ‘ Think of the dirtiest things you can think of,’ recalled a crew member.
Others said she didn’t wear underwear on set and sat in the director’s chair with her legs apart, prompting startled assistants to try to cover her modesty with a towel.
For his part, Baldwin was said to have taken offence at the slightest mishap on set, smashing mobile phones against walls and once hurling a chair.
One studio hand said: ‘ Their actions were vile, deplorable, despicable.’ Baldwin never commented on the reports at the time, while Basinger admitted making the film was ‘the worst situation anyone could imagine — ever’.
aSTO their relationship, Baldwin says he was impressed by her unpretentiousness and her image as a ‘pure, uncompromising iconoclast’.
he soon changed his tune. ‘Life with Kim was centered around the narcissistic passions of two childless actors,’ he says now. ‘Kim could be funny. She could be a mess. But, most of all, Kim was about Kim.’
For example, he reveals how, when she was sued for breach of promise by the producers of a film she never made, during the subsequent trial, she would sit on the edge of their bed each morning. She then ‘quietly started sobbing’ as she tried to work out what to wear to project the ‘right’ image to jurors.
‘It was heartbreaking’, says Baldwin, apparently sincerely.
The ‘ slightest criticism could set her off,’ he recalls, and he would join in. Once, he spent a morning ‘ screaming’ at her lawyers about how he wanted to kill a journalist who had said she was capricious, irresponsible and shamelessly extravagant.
Baldwin and Basinger married in 1993. But the relationship inevitably foundered.
Just when it seemed they would break up, she gave birth to a daughter, Ireland. Baldwin says he lit a candle in their bedroom to thank God for the baby and has done so every night since.
But he marriage still ended. he blames Basinger — saying she transferred all her love to their child. his bitter and protracted fight for custody was
‘like fighting cancer’, he says callously. Some years ago, Baldwin wrote an entire book — a
coeur’, he calls it — about that fight. Now, he accuses Basinger of such unscrupulous tactics as blocking his access to their daughter, ignoring court orders and trying to poison the girl against him.
He’s still angry, describing the ‘hateful, rapacious’ lawyers and ‘cowardly’ judges in the case, and Basinger for ‘ glaring and tapping her watch’ to indicate it was time for him to wrap up his precious visits with their daughter.
After seven years of legal fighting, Baldwin — frustrated that Basinger was getting her own way — left an angry voicemail message (which was later leaked) for their daughter in which he called her ‘a rude, thoughtless little pig’ for avoiding his phone calls.
The message — which he doesn’t repeat in the few paragraphs he assigns the scandal in his book — goes on: ‘You don’t have the brains or the decency as a human being . . . I don’t give a damn that you’re 12 years old or 11 years old or that you’re a child or that your mother is a thoughtless pain in the ass.’
He issued an apology later but he doesn’t sound completely repentant now. In his talk on Sunday, he told how Warren Beatty rang him and said ‘if they ever played back what he said to his kids, he’d be in prison now’.
Unconvincingly, Baldwin claims in his new memoir that those who understood the true nature of the situation ‘knew the words on that tape were actually aimed at someone else’ and not Ireland.
Proving self- pity runs in the family, Baldwin likes to recall how his father told him that ‘parenting is a competition between two people where the dad always wins the bronze medal’.
Baldwin says he contemplated suicide over the leaked voicemail but decided against as it would mean his wife’s camp — determined, he is convinced, to destroy him — would relish their victory. It’s all so different since he met Hilaria Thomas, a yoga instructor. They married in 2012 and share their Greenwich Village home with their three young children.
He says Hilaria, who is 26 years younger, never criticises him — which must be helpful given his prickly temperament. He appears pathetically grateful to have a second chance at settled family life.
Baldwin’s autobiography is billed as an ‘honest, affecting memoir’ but holes are already appearing. For a start, where are mentions of all the other women in his life?
Apart from a long relationship post-Basinger with an unnamed girlfriend which ended badly when he refused to marry her, Baldwin doesn’t tell us anything.
Perhaps his silence is damage limitation. For a mutual friend, singer Carly Simon’s second husband, Jim Hart, revealed this week how JFK’s widow Jackie Onassis — then 62 — asked him to set her up on a date with Baldwin in the early Nineties. The actor was almost 30 years her junior but jumped at the chance, said the matchmaker, despite the fact he had just met Kim Basinger.
And what of the string of other female co-stars he’s admitted he’s fallen for, such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Tina Fey and Julia Roberts.
He doesn’t let on whether any of those ever went beyond a crush.
Much like Trump, he seems to get himself headlines for the wrong reasons. In 2011, he was removed from a plane after refusing to stop playing a game on his phone as it prepared for take-off.
There have been numerous incidents of him punching paparazzi — made worse by reportedly making homophobic and racist insults to reporters — one gay and another black — who offended him. Of course, an anti-Trump liberal such as himself would never use such words, he insists.
He has one other, surprising, thing in common with Trump — he, too, has hankered for high office. Baldwin, who devotes a chapter of his book to his Left-wing views, considered running for mayor of New York and state governor. But that would have been just the start, as he says he has toyed with a White House run.
A pathetically insecure, petulant celebrity with terrible judgment and zero experience of public office as President? It’s difficult to imagine the U.S. voters making the same mistake twice.