Los Angeles
Of all the good things to be, there is nothing so good as a Baldwin brother. And of all the Baldwin brothers to be, there is none so good as William. The Baldwins are to acting what the Kennedys are to politics, the Wallendas to the flying trapeze. But for anyone who has ever wanted to be a Baldwin brother (and which of us hasn’t?), William is the obvious choice: cooler than Stephen, cleaner than the occasionally drug-addicted Daniel, less water-retentive than Alec.
My faith in this uber-Baldwin, if you will, is reinforced when I meet him in his role as president of the Creative Coalition, the celebrity-riddled, arts-related political advocacy organization. The Coalition is sponsoring a panel discussion at the cavernous Los Angeles Public Library, and when I first encounter Baldwin, I’m uncertain how to address him. A Coalition spokeswoman says he often goes by William, but his friends call him Billy. I suggest maybe we start with William, then as we become friends over the course of the day, we can switch to Billy. Says Baldwin, “We’ll see how it goes.”
Billy, as I now call him (our rapport is immediate), has no time for niceties. He must take a break from noshing (Creative Coalitionists don’t eat, they nosh) to trouble-shoot a scheduling conflict. It seems that paralyzed actor/panelist Christopher Reeve is sequestered in a side room with an MSNBC interlocutor, and the panel is scheduled to begin.
Billy approaches two library security guards standing sentinel in front of the room; they’ve been ordered to admit no one. He asks to be let in, without success. He looks at me, stumped, and I ask him if they know who he is. “Yeah, they don’t care,” he says, “which is kind of refreshing.” As one who’s not a Baldwin brother, I don’t find it nearly as refreshing, so I ask the guards if they have ever seen Billy’s career-making vehicle, Backdraft. “No,” says one, “but I have been on the ride at the Universal theme park.” I ask the gentleman who his favorite Baldwin is. “All of them,” he says sheepishly. “That’s such a p.c. answer,” says Billy, playfully punching the guard in the shoulder (Stephen is generally considered the playful Baldwin, but all Baldwins are good-humored). Not satisfied, I ask the man which Baldwin is his wife’s favorite. “James,” he mistakenly replies. Billy is not related to the black writer, but is a fan of his work.
The guards can resist the Baldwin charm no longer, and relent. Reeve is released, and the panel gets underway. Inside the auditorium, Crystal Geyser water bottles sit next to ergonomically correct panelists’ chairs. The crowd is well-heeled: Many of the gentlemen sport monochrome shirt/tie combos, which they were wearing well before Regis Philbin popularized the look among proletarian arrivistes. The women all have tasteful highlights, strappy sandals, and firm haunches. This is not the crowd you would see attending a roundtable on electricity deregulation at the Brookings Institution.
The panel is moderated by Christopher Cuomo (son of Mario, brother of Andrew), a television talking-head and, more important, an alum of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list. Cuomo is not content simply to moderate, but rather is in constant motion, performing talk-show-host calisthenics: the running-start down the aisle, the punctuated armfold, the sitting-to-standing half-gainer, etc. The discussion, which features low-grade celebrities like Hector Elizondo, as well as sugar-free party hacks like secretary of education Richard Riley, concerns arts education and public financing. The panelists talk about the arts, and say something about public financing. But one notices a certain distractedness, especially among the female contingent in the room. Many Baldwinologists insist Billy is the handsome Baldwin, and today he is suited up in slimming three-button black with a cobalt tie, which plays off his jet-black mane complete with factory-issued forelock. During the discussion, Baldwin bounces all over the room with an athlete’s lope, shushing cell phones, having sotto voce conversations, generally serving as the object of the female gaze.
When he joins in the Q&A, one can almost feel the mangier male journalists hoping he’ll prove a himbo. He’s not. Many celebrity activists have demonstrated themselves idiots (think Marlon Brando on Sacheen Little Feather, Cybill Shepherd on anything). But Baldwin exhibits a command of the issue. He deplores reducing the debate on arts funding to horror stories about “kiddie porn and Piss Christ.” He correctly deploys four-syllable words. After the panel, he is surrounded by issue-talking admirers, a mosh pit of batting lashes and over-familiar arm touches. But he has little time to make new friends. The Creative Coalition is off to the Democratic Convention.
Ken Kesey once said that you are either on the bus or off it. Today I am on the bus with a Baldwin brother, along with celebrities like beret-wearing actor Joe Pantoliano (nicknamed “Joey Pants”) and Tom Arnold, the perpetually antsy former husband of Roseanne, who alternates between smoking Cohibas and chewing gum as if he is trying to break it. Billy himself seems exuberant, as he bums cigarettes and relishes the musicality of Italian swear words, which he lets fly with abandon. Perhaps he is happy to be going to the convention. Perhaps he is just happy to be a Baldwin brother.
A Coalition staffer presents us with a knotty dilemma of the kind these bus denizens must encounter every day: What kind of chilled designer coffee do we want? Baldwin takes center stage in the aisle, eyeing his troops like a proud father. “I’m just glad the Creative Coalition can finally afford Starbucks’ iced cappuccinos,” he jokes, as if he helmed some down-at-the-heels 501 (c)(3). In the back of the bus, the underdressed Arnold teases Baldwin. “You look nice,” Arnold says, “Got a wedding later?” We sip our Frappuccinos. We talk a little shop (Joey says you know your career is in trouble when the movie set informs you, “We want the clothes back”). We laugh a hearty laugh when Tom Arnold mentions that the Creative Coalition is ostensibly nonpartisan. “That’s a bunch of bulls –,” he chortles, as there don’t seem to be any Republicans in sight.
The bus wheels into the convention parking lot at the Staples Center, and a blonde LAPD officer boards to check all our laminated “honored guest” passes. We hold up our lammies, but Baldwin has some difficulty wriggling his out of his coat. The female officer is willing to give the celebrities the benefit of the doubt and starts to deboard before she can see the credentials. “Hey,” Baldwin shouts, “you didn’t check mine.”
“You want me to come back there?” she says flirtatiously, no longer a member of the country’s fiercest police force, but suddenly a woman. She eyes Billy’s pass. “I better hold my gun,” she jokes, “this one doesn’t look any good.” The whole scene is starting to play like the beginning of a bad movie, but it’s innocent enough (Baldwin is married to Chynna Phillips, co-founder of early ’90s supergroup Wilson Phillips, and he whips out pictures of his wife and baby daughter at the slightest provocation).
“Now which brother are you?” the officer asks. “James Baldwin,” several people yell out. The officer doesn’t seem to know her Baldwins or to be a big reader. “He wrote Black Like Me,” says Joey Pants.
The simple act of entering a Democratic convention is a wholly unique experience when you’re riding with a Baldwin. As we stand in line, I brace for the invasive, laborious security search of my bag, but an escort instructs us to come with her, and we bypass the metal detector. (It is discomfiting to know that had I been an assassin, our country’s future could have been forever altered because I came in with Cindy Crawford’s co-star from Fair Game.) But there are harder things than acclimating yourself to the royal treatment. As we file to our seats somewhere above the Guam delegation (“You notice the Texas delegation is sitting in the parking lot,” cracks Joey Pants), I talk shoes with Max Keiser, who heads an Internet company called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. “They’re Prada,” he says, pointing down to a pair of silver kicks that look like they’re covered in aluminum foil. “I’ve got thirty pairs of them.” When I ask him why on earth he’d own one pair of them, let alone thirty, he says, “Silver represents the quicksilver new economy. It’s part of the Revolution. Want my take on the violence-in-the-media debate?”
I don’t, actually. I’d rather head to the buffet and open bar in the VIP lounge with Billy Baldwin. The place resembles a celebrity ant farm under the gaze of the sky suite balconies. There’s former Seinfeld starlet Julia Louis-Dreyfus eating (or rather, noshing) blue-corn tortilla chips. Here’s actor Chris Lawford (son of Peter) confirming my suspicions about what it was like to make out with his All My Children co-star Susan Lucci: “It was great,” he says, bearning. There’s Joey Pants reclining on a couch, spitting blood about the Screen Actors Guild labor dispute. “F — the whales, save the actors,” he says.
Many celebrities go about their business unmolested, but the main attraction at the celebrity zoo is the exhibit called The Billy Baldwin. As he walks the convention halls, Billy passes about as fast as a kidney stone. A college girl spills her Miller Lite in anticipation of an encounter. “He’s dreamy,” she says. Baldwin bums a cigarette off a guy talking on a cell phone, who hands the phone to Baldwin and makes him rub it in to his disbelieving ex-girl-friend. Everywhere Billy goes, he is mobbed and tugged, and he’s darn near killed in the media stack-up as the Warren Beatty entourage crosses paths with the Baldwin party (there are no journalistic fatalities, and we all live to suck up to more celebrities).
So impeded is our progress that Billy and I resign ourselves to conducting our interview while being jostled around the hall. Now seems as good a time as any to ask Billy to provide a taxonomy of the Baldwin brothers. So I ask him to break it down using boy-band archetypes (The Funny One, The Brooder, etc). Billy rejects the premise. He sees his family through the prism of the Spice Girls, and chooses his definitions thus: His oldest brother, Alec, is “Smart Spice,” while rowdy Stephen is “Boy Toy Spice.” I ask him about Daniel, renowned for his bouts with drugs. A pained expression crosses Billy’s face: “Double Trouble Spice,” he says.
Down on the concourse, during one of Baldwin’s on-the-fly television interviews, a middle-aged second cousin of the Gore family, afraid to interrupt, has a photo snapped of her face side by side with the back of Baldwin’s head. It’s a wonder Billy has time to see the speeches, but he makes a point of getting back for Ted Kennedy’s (the Baldwins are Kennedy Democrats — and, in the Kennedy manner, fairly interchangeable: Several fans can’t believe their good fortune in running into Alec).
Like Alec, Billy is a student of politics. He proves this not just by sitting through Kennedy’s speech, but by enduring, with no apparent loss of consciousness, Bill Bradley’s campaign retread. When the evening finally concludes, Billy tells me to stay put. He has to run upstairs to see Al Gore’s daughter Karenna. “She’s a friend,” he explains, though there’s no need to. When you’re a Baldwin, everybody is.
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
