Hollywood’s Mr & Mrs toxic
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
‘like fighting cancer’, he says callously. Some years ago, Baldwin wrote an entire book — a ‘cri de
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.