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  I studied acting with Geoffrey Horne and Marcia Haufrecht, both outstanding teachers for young actors. I took a fantastic History of Dramatic Lit course with Bill Bly, one that everyone professed was their favorite. Jim Brown taught a survey on the history of comic performance that I loved. Everyone loved Jim. I slowly began to see that there was a pretty substantial chasm between those who delighted the teachers and those who would actually leave there and work, between those for whom acting was a craft and those for whom it was a potential occupation. “Look in a magazine,” a teacher once said. “Do you see yourself there? Then, maybe you’ll work. Or, if you don’t see yourself there, then the business is simply waiting for you to show up.” I finished my first year at NYU and in the summer of 1980 found myself living as a boarder in the unair-conditioned Yorkville apartment of a friend of Jim Brown, herself a teacher of anthropology with several children. My six-by-six-foot room came with a lot of rules. “You are to confine yourself to your room and the bathroom. Your rent does not include use of the kitchen or living room or any other area of the apartment,” said Mrs. Gleason, who looked like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Rose Sayer, the Katharine Hepburn character in The African Queen. The only thing missing was Noah Claypole calling me “Work’us” as I came in. I suspected that my tiny room had originally been a luggage compartment for storing trunks and suitcases.

  Back home, my parents were spent. They hardly said a word to each other. The financial stress had crushed my dad. My brothers and sisters seemed to be gone whenever I visited. While I basted in this cell in Manhattan in August, I did some simple math. The looming dissolution of my parents’ marriage meant I wouldn’t be able to afford the remaining single semester to finish NYU. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t swing the remaining credits to graduate. And then something strange happened.

  4

  Patchogue by Nightfall

  During the summer of 1980, I got a job at a private health club/restaurant at the top of an apartment building near Lincoln Center. I waited tables at the café during lunch, where a couple of dozen women would snap, gesturing toward their cups, “My cawfee is cold,” every fifteen minutes. They barely ate. They just stirred “cawfee.” In the evening, I lifeguarded at the club’s indoor pool. I was in no hurry to rush back to Mrs. Gleason’s stifling apartment in between shifts, so I headed to the Drama Book Shop, where I rolled the most famous lines of the greatest playwrights around in my mouth. “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers.” “It was a great mistake, my being born a man.” And “You ever heard of the Napoleonic code?”

  One day at the café, a woman who was there as a guest asked me, “Do you have an agent? My friend is casting a soap opera and you seem like just what she’s looking for.” In a moment that would become a pattern in my career, I didn’t bother to ask exactly what that was. I just wanted to work. The role was on a daytime show called The Doctors.

  It was eventually explained to me by the show’s resident historians that The Doctors’s golden years predated the “youth revolution” in daytime drama, when soaps were launched featuring stars and storylines that were younger and the change in demographics pushed more mature actors into the background, into supporting roles. So our cast was an anomaly. The colorful casting director, Roger Sturtevant, along with his partner Pat McCorkle, eschewed hiring models in favor of trained actors for whom the TV gig meant a steady paycheck and medical insurance that allowed them to do theater. Valerie Mahaffey, John Pankow, and Tuck Milligan were among the actors given favorable shooting schedules that allowed them to appear onstage at a Wednesday matinee, and Elizabeth Hubbard and Jim Pritchett, principal players who had been with the show for years, took theater roles during their hiatus from the show. The theater was all they talked about. Hollywood might as well have been the Kimberley diamond mines in terms of their familiarity with or interest in it. Before I had arrived, Kathleen Turner left the show and went to Hollywood to shoot Body Heat. Upon hearing the title, someone in the cast of the soap asked if she had starred in a porn film.

  The show taped at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in a small studio that seemed as if NBC had forgotten it was even there. Some of the aging, battle-weary crew dated back to the days of Dave Garroway and Carson’s early stint in New York. Saturday Night Live was a television sensation that was about to undergo a fallow period coinciding with the brief absence of Lorne Michaels. The building housed the Today show and Tom Snyder and not much else. Each day after work, I walked out of 30 Rock knowing that there were elevator operators who were better known at NBC than I was. No one was watching the show. The scripts were anemic, but David O’Brien, who played my father, explained that it was hard to expect much more from the writers, who had to churn out fresh pages every day. He said it was our job to try our best to bring something to it.

  O’Brien was the first person to greet me and embrace me. He served as my invaluable guide and dear friend during my debut in the business. As elegant as Cary Grant, as witty as Noël Coward, and as quick as Johnny Carson, O’Brien was one of the kindest, most intelligent and urbane men I’ve ever known. Unlike some of the veterans, who seemed wary of the young additions to the cast, as the show became less and less about them, O’Brien loved actors of all ages and extended himself easily. He was playful one moment and instructive the next. He was kind, patient, and funny every day, and his sense of humor about the job, and the business in general, helped me handle what was often a frustrating introduction to acting in front of a camera.

  The show was shot “live to tape,” so we were asked to perform it almost like theater: don’t stop, unless absolutely necessary, as to do so required extra time and money. No wonder theater actors tended to thrive in this venue. The pressure could be tough. Recalling line after line of often trite and repetitive dialogue wasn’t easy. Giving a real performance was elusive. Early on, every day ended with the thought “Better luck tomorrow.” But O’Brien knew every trick in the book and didn’t hesitate to share them with me. His one overarching note? “When you don’t know what to play, I recommend ‘Someone in this room farted and I intend to find out who,’” he cracked.

  As a few months passed, I was given more to do. The producers wanted me to play a self-involved, semiruthless, amoral cad. It didn’t matter if I possessed the personal character of Abraham Lincoln or John Glenn. The audience liked characters who were bad. That’s what the producers wanted me to be. O’Brien would tell me acting is about making the audience believe what I’m saying. Some choose to go to the gym every day, dye their hair, whiten their teeth, and hope they get lucky enough to play some uncomplicated leading man or superhero. But if you learn how to act any role, he said, the options get better. That hit me hard about six months into the job. I had thought about quitting, feeling like an idiot for abandoning my plan to go to law school in order to stand on some moldy old set saying, “But, Greta—I love you!” over and over again. However, having spent hour after hour observing the people around me, younger and older, I realized that what was considered good acting was hard to do. I owe that to O’Brien. He told me to view the soap as a means to an end. “Don’t ever think that this is all you are or could be,” he said. During his breaks from the show, he would go off and perform plays like Light Up the Sky at the John Drew or King John at the McCarter. Val Mahaffey was doing Top Girls downtown. John Pankow had understudied Peter Firth in Amadeus. Tuck, who became a good friend, performed all over the country in Equus, The Crucifer of Blood, Big River, and The Kentucky Cycle. At nearly every turn, it was drilled into me that the goal was to learn how to act and that such learning could best be achieved in the theater.

  After work, which ended at around three or four o’clock, we would go downstairs to Hurley’s, a Rockefeller Center restaurant, where O’Brien and other members of the cast taught me how to drink by following their example. We would order some small plates of food, just substantial enough to prepare the way for the booze that was to follow
. Then it was post time. The sound track of this drinking scene, however, was different. I was no longer in some damp, suburban woods in Massapequa. No one was going to burst in here and order me to take out the garbage or shovel the snow or tell me that my parents’ check had bounced. I didn’t have to cut my neighbors’ grass to pay my bar bill. I’d light another cigarette and think, “Who the fuck cares where I have to be at six thirty? This is where I want to be. This is what home feels like now.” I’d get warmer, sillier, cozier. In this honey-colored state, if there was a woman between the ages of eighteen and fifty nearby, I feigned interest in whatever she was interested in, so long as she let me believe there was genuine hope for some kind of future for us. Sitting at a bar in New York City in 1980, I was falling in love, but not with a woman in a silk dress, her face turned away, her love poured out for someone else. As I learned to drink alongside some of the best actors I would ever meet, I was falling in love with show business and the people in it.

  I also fell in love with alcohol, my most excellent friend. The clinking of the ice, the luminous colored bottles arranged behind the bar, the bartenders and waiters in starched white shirts, the tablecloths, the hors d’oeuvres and Rothman cigarettes (O’Brien’s favorites) made everything seem right. I drank Canadian Club in the winter and Boodles Gin in the summer. All of it combined to relax me for the first time in my twenty-two years. Most important of all, I was with people I liked and whom I believe liked me. No matter how many stupid questions I asked or ill-informed opinions I expressed at the bar on 49th and 6th, I was home. Outside, snow was falling. They were lighting the tree, and skaters were twirling around the famous rink. Somewhere back in Massapequa, my siblings were finding their own forms of escape. At Hurley’s, everything was tranquil and warm. When I went back to my apartment after those gatherings, I was uncomfortable and lonely. At times, I’d do anything not to feel that way. Once you have found some joy, you never want to be without it.

  I lived on 58th between 1st and 2nd. The East 50s were filled with pretty brownstones, little neighborhood shops, and an unusual number of middle-aged gay men. So when O’Brien invited me to join him and some of his fifty-something friends for dinner and drinks, lots of drinks, I merrily rolled along. These were men who hailed from the era of The Boys in the Band, not Stonewall. They were bankers and bosses. They were management. These gents were quiet, pre-AIDS Executive Gays. In Rod Stewart’s song “The Killing of Georgie,” the eponymous male hustler dies on the corner of 53rd and 3rd, the precise coordinates of O’Brien’s favorite stomping grounds: Ambrosia, Rounds, and the East Five Three. Perhaps David’s friends thought I was fucking him. If he wanted them to think it, I never knew. Years later, a mutual friend guffawed and exhorted, “He was in love with you!” Maybe so. I was certainly in love with him. Although I was never interested in men sexually (God, how much better my life might have been if I was!), at that time I would only let relationships with women go so far emotionally. Therefore, while I often practiced my acting on them (and they on me, I’m sure), I only cared about moving my career ahead, whatever that meant at the time. And sitting at the East Five Three with David and a gaggle of flambéed, wickedly funny queens was more fun than anything else. It was more anywhere than anywhere else.

  One Saturday afternoon, walking down 1st Avenue, I ran into Ken Harper, the theater producer who had scored on Broadway with The Wiz. Harper, who was friendly with one of our producers, George Barimo, occasionally lurked around the studio. Muscled up and predatory, he caught me en route to the laundromat. The opposite of O’Brien in the nuance department, Harper made small talk briefly before he said, “May I ask you a question?” I nervously grunted some reply. He seamlessly offered, “Is your ass as hairy as your chest? Because if it is, I’d like you to come up to my place and sit on my face for an hour.” All the blood went down to my ankles. I laughed, but not the affectionate laugh I often had for O’Brien. I coughed up my version of Annie Hall’s “La-di-da,” something like “Ha . . . well . . . ha . . . ok . . . well . . . ha!” and whisked off. Reminding me that gay men are like any other men in their ardor, Harper’s pitch had me wondering how much infidelity there was in the gay world. I resolved to chart my own course among the Sunday afternoon sitting-on-the-face circuit.

  O’Brien eventually invited me to his house on Fire Island. I accepted but asked if I could bring the woman I was dating. Trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and ever the gentleman from Chicago, he seemed to stumble only slightly before replying, “I insist!” That weekend, Chloe or Siobhan or Francesca ferried over with me. She must have wondered herself what she was doing there, as I spent the whole time talking with David. It was as if he and I were on the date and my girlfriend was our queer dear pal. He raised the shades on a window looking out on the water. “I give you Patchogue by nightfall,” he announced. I cackled loudly and thought to myself, “I really am in love with this man.” My date smiled awkwardly.

  The executive producer of The Doctors was a tough old broad named Doris Quinlan. Her associate, Susan Scudder, was the contact that my coffee-klatching guest at the health club had introduced me to. In a meeting that lasted maybe thirty minutes, the producers had signed me to a two-year deal. They asked me my name, as in stage name, and I told them I didn’t have one. “People call me Alex. My family calls me Xander.” They squinted and Barimo said, “Xander Baldwin . . . that doesn’t work.” Thirty minutes in the business and I was already primed to abandon my name of twenty-two years. I told them that my father was called Alec. They lit up, and one of them proclaimed, “That’s it. That’s your name. We’ll put Alec Baldwin on the contract, and from now on that’s your name.” Barimo tensed slightly and leaned in. “So, you can sign this deal here and now, or go out and get an agent. But he’ll only be able to bump it up the ten percent to cover his commission.” I shrugged and said, “OK, sure. I’ll sign right now.” I signed “Alexander R. Baldwin III” and thought about how I was now the third Alec in that line as well, thanks to a trio of flinty TV producers working in off-off-television. “You will need an agent eventually, though,” Susan Scudder said. “I want to send him over to Bloom.” The others, looking at me like a used car they had just bought, murmured their assent. “Bloom,” Doris said with a wry smile. “Sure. Why not?”

  At first glance, J. Michael Bloom looked like Henry VIII as he is depicted in history textbooks. From certain angles, he also resembled a younger version of the actor Charles Laughton. He was slightly bug-eyed, and his face broadened below the nose, giving his mouth a splayed Donald Duck–like mask. With his trimmed and fluffed tufts of hair in blue and silver, his oversized aviator-style prescription glasses and three-piece suits, he sipped a river of Pepsi-Cola poured over ice at his desk, chain-smoking Kent III cigarettes while speaking in a velvety FM radio voice. Bloom might have been a character in a Coen brothers movie, except he was real. Obviously, he’d been an actor at one time. He didn’t ooze theatricality. He gushed it. Hailing from the Ken Harper school, Bloom had a reputation for cruising young male clients, to the point of harassment. Young up-and-coming actors working in film, TV, and commercials would ask me, “How do you put up with that guy?” He massaged this one’s thigh or tried to corner and kiss this one in his office. None of that concerned me. I like people who are smart and funny, and Bloom was one of the smartest and funniest I would ever meet.

  When I started in the business, there were certain arrangements between the actors’ unions and talent agencies. In California, due to some Byzantine rules, a “franchised agency”—one that was vetted by the actors’ unions—could not represent an actor in both commercials and “legit” work (stage, film, TV). So LA agents would send you off to another company, whose agents would rep you for advertising. In New York, that wall did not exist, and Bloom built a successful business exploiting that fact. While he repped great actors in theater, film, and TV, he also had a commercial and voice-over department that earned him a significant amount of money, and allowe
d him to develop up-and-coming theatrical clients. Bloom signed me after our initial meeting, knowing we had to wait out the soap contract before we could book anything under his watch. I kicked around New York during that period from August 1980 to October 1982 and periodically auditioned for films, plays, and voice-over jobs.

  Bloom, while grandiose and self-promoting, was also patient and encouraging. He and his staff wanted their roster of actors, at least the ones they believed had any talent, to work in the theater. There were next to no real stars on their roster, so the flow of sarcasm could be irksome. At one point, Nevin Dolcefino, one of the agents in the theater department, said, “Pass me a roll of Alec’s résumé, I have to go to the bathroom.” It was around then that I think I got the message. I did a couple of showcases in tiny theaters, but serious work onstage in New York would not present itself for a while. Bloom, in an attempt to inspire me, took me to the theater regularly. In the summer of 1981, we drove to the Berkshires to visit Williamstown and the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. At Williamstown, we saw an adaptation of Euripides, Aeschylus, Homer, and Sophocles entitled The Greeks, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos. The remarkable cast included Celeste Holm, Blythe Danner, Donald Moffat, Kate Burton, Edward Herrmann, Roxanne Hart, Jack Wetherall, Roberta Maxwell, Carrie Nye, Dwight Schultz, Josef Sommer, Emery Battis, George Morfogen, Pamela Payton-Wright, Jane Kaczmarek, a young Gwyneth Paltrow, and Christopher Reeve. It was as if Psacharopoulos attempted to put everyone who was great or would be great in the New York theater all in the same show. From there, we drove down to Stockbridge to see Hector Elizondo perform in Miller’s A View from the Bridge.