When 30 Rock ended in December of 2012, I was about to turn fifty-five years old. The show had provided me with a much-needed stability, not only in terms of work but also in terms of the goodwill that came with it. The consistency of my schedule became more precious to me as I got older. I had made a few movies between 2006 and 2012, while making 30 Rock. Some were worthwhile, like It’s Complicated. Working with Meryl Streep had always seemed like an unattainable wish, almost a dream. When that opportunity came around, I was overjoyed. Meryl is nine years older than me, so when Nancy Meyers offered me the role of Meryl’s ex-husband, I thought about that for a bit. But Nancy pointed out that the leading men in Hollywood have no qualms about casting someone much younger as their love interest. Why should it be any different for the greatest actress of her generation? The notion of age didn’t matter to me. It became clear, and more so once we began shooting, that my character was a man who was once in love with his ex-wife and who discovered that he was still in love with her. My job was to be in love with Meryl. That is not a difficult thing to do.
I made a movie called Lymelife with a wonderful writer-director named Derick Martini. The cast included Jill Hennessy, Cynthia Nixon, and Timothy Hutton, whose career I had long admired in films like Sidney Lumet’s Daniel (see this movie) and The Falcon and the Snowman. The making of the film itself was an ongoing saga, where the cast was told to get ready to go to work, only to have the financing drop out at the last minute. The principal cast, which also included Rory and Kieran Culkin and Emma Roberts, stayed committed to the project through three such rounds of hope and eventual disappointment. When the money finally came through, I realized that this was the direction that much of independent filmmaking was going in. With their dreams of doing the creative work they had set out to do on the line, actors, directors, producers, and writers were calling it a victory simply when the movie got made.
That was no longer enough for me. So much change was brewing in my life. I had dated my share of people since my divorce. I was with one woman in particular for quite some time. But while Ireland was a child, I convinced myself, rightly or not, that remarrying would have sent my daughter a signal that looked like abandonment. With all that had gone on in my relationship with Ireland, all of the unwanted public scrutiny and shame, I was certain that moving on would have only made it worse. When I ultimately told my girlfriend that I couldn’t move forward, that I didn’t want to get married again, she changed, dramatically. The relationship was then overwhelmed by mistrust and friction.
But life only moves forward. And, if we are lucky, someone comes along who reminds us of that. What I wanted in terms of romantic partners, before and after my divorce, always confounded me. A lot of push and pull out of fear, jealousy, and doubt. It’s almost like I needed a sign. Then, on an unusually mild February evening in 2011, my friend Brendan and I were wandering around downtown with no destination in mind. Sarma Melngailis, the now infamous owner of Pure Food and Wine, was a friend of mine, and eventually, I would puzzle over why Brendan and I went into her restaurant, as I wasn’t particularly craving the raw vegan menu. Did God want me to go there, to give me some precious opportunity? Some peace? A cleft in the rock of the world? I don’t know. I do know that on very few occasions in my life I have met a truly extraordinary woman, singular in ways beyond the limitations of attraction, who seemed to have a light shining on her. Typically, there was some wall between her and me. Sometimes that woman was already married to someone else. I would hear God say to me, “Not now. Not this woman. You’re not ready. Besides, I wouldn’t do that to her.” (God laughs.) “Perhaps at some point, when the time is right. I simply want you to see what someone truly special looks like. Not someone without faults or without their own past. But unlike anyone you’ve ever met. Someone who wouldn’t hurt someone out of spite. Someone smart, opinionated, funny, caring, kind, evolved.” The woman I met on Irving Place on February 18 was all of those things and much more. Suddenly, the idea of avoiding commitment, of not moving forward, seemed misguided. A risk-free life is not worth living.
I believe that things change only when we are truly ready for the change. We come to a situation or event that could be a great turning point in our lives having been prepared by both adversity and hope. And then, if you let it, the future just opens like a flower, becoming more beautiful every day. Hilaria and I moved in together in November and things progressed quite quickly after that. We were married on June 30, sixteen months after meeting. In December of 2012, Hilaria told me she was pregnant with our daughter, Carmen, so as we turned out the lights on 30 Rock, an entirely new life was unfolding for me. I had embraced so many different activities and passions throughout my career, springing from not only real beliefs but also boredom and loneliness. I didn’t have a family to come home to, so why not put on a tux, for the third time this week, and raise money for this group or cut this ribbon or perform a reading at this event? Now, my life with Hilaria and Carmen put me on a road that demanded more of my energy, perhaps all of it. The reality that I couldn’t predict, let alone confirm, where I would be in six months became unworkable and foolish. My new family was my commitment, and the primacy of acting was in my rearview mirror.
I probably listen to radio more than any other medium, so I had flirted with doing a radio show for some time. The author Lisa Birnbach was a friend of mine, and after a twenty-minute phone chat with Lisa, I would say to her, “We should be broadcasting these calls.” Lisa possesses a quick wit like Tina, and she could dispense an inexhaustible quantity of it. I approached Scott Greenstein from Sirius to find out what the radio market was like for mere mortals like me who, unlike Howard Stern, could not command tens of millions of dollars. I thought that the hours involved, the New York base, and the relatively simple production demands were what I needed. As not all movie opportunities were going to be as exciting as going to Rome with Woody Allen or as interesting as watching Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett give Oscar-winning performances, radio seemed a viable option even before I had met Hilaria.
I concocted a half-baked Howard Stern–knockoff show, with Lisa and me as hosts. We would have a cast of a couple of comedians, a culture editor, a news anchor, and various guests. I wanted to bring on a young guy we’d call “The Kid.” We’d give him a credit card and some cash (a radio-level expense account), then turn him loose on Manhattan nightlife. The object was for The Kid to spend the night doing everything that Lisa and I were too old to do. Openings, exhibits, theater, galleries, movies, parties, clubs, clubs, clubs. I batted this idea around with a couple of friends who, as I remember it, looked at me in a way that said, “Why do you want to do radio?”
I got a call from Kathie Russo, a veteran radio producer and the widow of the actor Spalding Gray. Kathie listened to my idea and essentially talked me out of it (too much production work to write a daily show à la Stern) and talked me into a podcast with me at a microphone interviewing people. Lorne Michaels would often say, “It’s like that thing . . .” and then go on to make some comparison, so I considered the title It’s Like That Thing. I settled on Here’s the Thing, which everyone says in conversation. We began in 2011. As far as my distributor, WNYC, was concerned, I would use the enormous Show Business Chums directory that I had in my rolltop desk and call all my pals in Hollywood, New York, and London. We did a few test interviews, some by phone. One such “phoner” was with Wyoming senator Alan Simpson. Being unable to see him in person, however, hampered my ability to steer the conversation in any perceptible direction, and Simpson came off like Ross Perot, muttering a lot of non sequitur folksiness. We never did another interview again that wasn’t face-to-face. The first show that we posted online was with Michael Douglas, recorded in his New York home. Douglas is a prince whose career I have long admired, not to mention my worship of his dad. Not a bad start.
Right away, I liked doing the show. People ask me why I do it and the answer is that it’s storytelling in its own right. I want to tell their stories: Peter Frampton, Herb Alpert, Rosie O’Donnell, George Stephanopoulos . . . If, during our talk, my own experiences overlapped theirs, so be it. I also wanted to interview people in the way that I wanted to be interviewed. I wanted a longer format, not like morning talk shows where the guest is on and off in six minutes after a series of prerehearsed exchanges. I wanted spontaneity. I wanted the guests to share what they wanted to share, without feeling pursued or judged. I had sat in interviews with venues like the New York Times where the assumption is always that the Times is doing you a favor. You’re taught to believe that everyone needs the approval of the Times, so you try to win over some smug writer who sits, coiled and unimpressed. Until you don’t. (I thought an effective way the Times could conquer their recent financial troubles would be to charge people a fee to have their name not mentioned in the paper.)
We recorded nearly all of our guests for an hour. Sometimes longer. No one is interested in my guests more than I am. I am, openly, a fan. I could have listened to Thom Yorke all day. We podcasted an interview with Billy Joel that was, I believe, unedited. Just the two of us, bullshitting, for over an hour. I began to think that bullshitting with the likes of Billy Joel was something I could do full-time. The deal with WNYC wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great either. I thought about the straightforwardness of the old Tomorrow show, with Tom Snyder. Perhaps I’d have a “ninja” set, like Charlie Rose, with the perimeter blacked out. No audience. Quiet. Real. Not screaming crowds as if we were on a roller coaster. I pitched the idea to Lorne.
* * *
While I was shooting Rock of Ages in Fort Lauderdale, I was invited to a conference of NBC executives at the Universal theme park in Orlando, Florida. TV executives who are paid a lot of money to run large divisions of broadcast and cable networks have a self-regard normally confined to former presidents. Indeed, their jobs put them in a rarified group. In Orlando, however, it was interesting to watch a gathering of relaxed, confident men talk about the business of television almost entirely devoid of the topic of content. In my brief evening among them, there wasn’t a single question about what I wanted to do or why. The concept that nobody knows anything took on a new meaning. How can you fire an exec over content when the subject never comes up? Executives at this level simply hire people to brief them on the creative worthiness of a project. Many of them didn’t watch or even like TV. Television programming was just a product sold by companies like Comcast, and as with any other network, they couldn’t have cared less what was on TV, to a degree. A time slot was like a piece of real estate. And like retail landlords, they just wanted to collect the highest rent possible.
The proposal was to give me a weekly slot on Friday nights at 12:30. It was explained that every show in the Friday 12:30 slot, on each network, was underperforming in terms of ratings. Once Fallon arrived to replace Leno, and Seth Meyers replaced Jimmy at 12:30, the network would consider giving me a crack at Seth’s Friday slot. Or, if Carson Daly returned for another season of his show Last Call, I might be given Friday nights at 1:30. None of this transpired, of course, because while NBC Entertainment was, understandably, focused on launching Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, I was offered a one-year contract with MSNBC, as a sort of extended pilot series.
Once at MSNBC, I heard some strange and unsettling things about how the place was run. One thing that I think is worth repeating was when a veteran producer, a woman, sat me down to explain how MSNBC actually functioned. I’d been having a tough time communicating to Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, and to Jonathan Larsen, the producer Griffin had assigned to my show, about the style of program I had in mind. I didn’t want the usual MSNBC look, with their harsh lighting and dreary design. I thought their sets looked like a Soviet interrogation room and told them so. Larsen had recently been fired from Steve Kornacki’s show, and he told me that Griffin sent him to “babysit” me. The news division had different standards than the entertainment division, Larsen highlighted, suggesting I might invite Kathy Griffin to be my cohost. His lack of enthusiasm for me and the show was front and center. He had a contract with MSNBC and he was simply showing up for work.
In the midst of this less-than-wonderful environment, the female producer said, “Look. The people who work here are career, professional newspeople. There are not a lot of good jobs with network salaries out there anymore. Some of us have kids in private schools. We have retirement and insurance to think about. This is a good job compared to what’s out there. And, remember, no one is watching.” I squinted my “Come again.” She paused for effect. “No one is watching. The ratings are awful. But because of cable carriage fees, we’re still around. We’ve got a good thing here. So . . .” She put her finger over her mouth and shushed me. “Stop complaining.”
One day, Phil Griffin introduced me to Ronan Farrow. It wouldn’t be long before I was wondering how I could get some of what Ronan had, as he managed to remain on the air even as his ratings plummeted to 11,000 viewers among the desired demographic. My show, entitled Up Late with Alec Baldwin, pulled in low ratings in the demo as well, but our numbers were more than ten times Farrow’s, who was given a year to develop on the air. My show was dropped after five episodes. If the ratings were all of it, I’d understand. But they weren’t.
The MSNBC situation was souring, and my simultaneous efforts to make a peaceful home for my wife and new family were consuming me. In August of 2013, my wife had just given birth to our daughter, Carmen. As Hilaria tried to embrace this remarkable time in her life, a period now filled with an intrusiveness she had never experienced, several tabloid reporters and photographers started to collect around our apartment building. In past exchanges with these people, some of them played by the rules, as I see them. Others walked a line between what they argue is journalism and what I label as harassment. When that line is crossed, sometimes I let it go. Sometimes I don’t. I make the call. I remember the curse Joe Zarza put on me, about learning everything the hard way, whenever I think about November 14, the afternoon Harvey Levin, always prompting my own chronic hatred of the tabloid press, came back to pay me a visit.
When I left that terrible voicemail message for my daughter Ireland in 2007, there was no mistaking what was said and who the recipient was. I spent the subsequent months either in a state of suicidal depression or wanting to find Harvey Levin and my ex-wife’s lawyers and beat them to death. Afterward, I was careful to make a vital distinction between an excuse and an explanation in terms of my behavior. There was no excuse for what I did. But my explanation was that I was completely outmaneuvered by my ex-wife in the gamesmanship of divorce custody. Kim’s attorneys were the most contemptible people I had ever met. I suppose I never had a hope of prevailing in any of the rigged contests that California family law insists you participate in if you simply want to see your child. I had wanted to be a father to Ireland. There had never been a complaint, publicly or privately, about my parenting before my divorce. Everyone knew how much I loved Ireland. Ireland knew, too. That essential fact is dismissed in divorce court, allowing the legal fees to flow. Certainly, protecting innocent children from the shrapnel of divorce combat is an important task. But it is not the only task. Fathers’ rights are among the lowest of priorities in these cases, making it easier for judges to take a side and simplify the matter and, thus, move things along. With the voicemail, I provided the court with the tool it needed in order to disassemble that relationship: the incontrovertible proof that I deserved to lose the custody decision.
* * *
In Westwood, California, in 1983, I pulled up next to a pump at a gas station and got out of my car. Back then, you still had to “pay inside,” and as I walked toward the garage, I heard a man shouting. I turned and saw that a thirty-something white guy was actually shouting at me. A bald and bullet-headed bantam of a guy, a less-interesting-looking Ed Harris, was complaining that I had cut him off at the pump. (Actually, he appeared to be at a different pump and attempted to back into the space I was in line for.) He rushed up to me and was basically spitting as he yelled, now right in my ear. I was, for all intents and purposes, still the Berner High School football team’s Billy Pilgrim when it came to physical confrontation. I entered the store and squared up to the counter, where two short, very powerfully built Iranian guys who ran the place prepared to ring me up. I continued to ignore Typical Southern California White Dude as he said something like, “Why don’t you go back to fucking UCLA, man!” I didn’t actually register that as offensive, but then he put his right hand on my left shoulder and started to spin me around. “You hear me, man?” he shouted. And, in the briefest moment in time, I changed.
I cracked this guy right on the chin. I only weighed 190 then, but he went flying backwards, his arms windmilling, and crashed into a metal rack of candy and gum. The Iranian bodybuilders were right on me, lifting me nearly off the ground and shouting “No to be fighting in zee store” as they escorted me out. The voices of my high school coaches may or may not have been sounding in my head, like in some Alan Sillitoe short story. The last time I experienced that was when, during my college years, Eugene Valentine put fireworks in my mom’s garbage can, waking her up one evening. Eugene, very drunk, virtually walked into four or five punches, and it was over. I was always someone who hated that kind of situation. But it was the LA paparazzi who really turned me.
Walking through the terminal at LAX with Kim and, later, with Ireland, we had a bodyguard/driver, the great Jeff Welles, who would peel off and put Kim and Ireland in the waiting car while I went for the baggage. One day, as we separated, a photographer began his taunting spiel. “What happened to you, Alec? You used to be such a nice guy. Then you met that crazy fucking bitch and—” Bang! I hit him. Another time a guy, walking in front of Jeff, lunged over his shoulder and, single-handed, tried to snap Kim’s picture, his long lens nearly hitting Kim in the face. Bang! I hit him. The day we took Ireland home from the hospital, a photographer named Alan Zanger followed us. In the driveway, Kim was sobbing, asking me to get rid of the guy so he couldn’t get a picture of her with the baby. As I approached him to wave off his camera, he said, “Let me get the picture and I’ll go,” as if we were bargaining. Then he cocked his arm back as if to hit me with the camera. Bang! Zanger had me arrested. That evening, on the local CBS affiliate, their legal correspondent railed against me for my assault of Zanger. The correspondent was a lawyer named Harvey Levin.
On the Internet there are many pictures of me wrestling a paparazzo named Paul Adao. In August of 2013, immediately after the birth of Carmen, Adao was around every lamppost and awning on our block. The pattern was typical. I don’t bother with photographers who keep their distance. Adao not only did not keep his distance; he literally tripped, fell, and sat on a baby in a stroller as he walked backwards, shooting film, on a residential street in Manhattan. The thought that my neighbors now had to contend with the excesses of the tabloid media since I had moved onto their block saddened me. Just a few months later, the tabloids wanted to hound me about a stalker who tried to rush her way into our lobby and, eventually, up to our apartment, insisting she was my jilted girlfriend and had to either explain something to my wife or attack her. (The woman was found guilty at trial and literally chose to accept a sentence of six months at Rikers Island rather than enroll in court-supervised therapy.)
Whenever these eruptions occur, sanctimonious tabloid types get on some bullshit show like Nancy Grace and scoff at celebrities who insist on some degree of privacy, especially for their children. On November 14, in the wake of a verdict in the stalking case, the swarm of bees got close again. I yelled for them to get away from my wife, our car, our lives. And as I turned away, you can hear everything I say quite clearly, every word up until I say “cocksucking . . .” something. In a moment such as that, I don’t jump into a car and write down the dialogue. On subsequent broadcasts of the videotape of the event, viewers also can hear every single word I say—except that word. Harvey Levin, of course, wanted to make sure you didn’t miss a thing. So, on his broadcast, he put a title across the screen, which was the word “faggot.” That was on a Thursday. By Monday, I was fired by MSNBC.
In the wake of that, I wasn’t attacked only by the likes of a CBS affiliate legal correspondent or some screechy hen like Nancy Grace. On CNN, Anderson Cooper, joined by blogger Andrew Sullivan, sounded off about the need for me to be “vilified.” I was condemned by GLAAD spokesperson Rich Ferraro. The response from every corner of the gay community was one of either judgment, condemnation, or a good deal of free psychoanalysis. Over time, I have come to understand the role certain people play inside of the gay community. There is no larger platform and no wider audience for their pontifications than when a famous person is “outed” as a homophobe. It’s the form of outing that they love, the outing that’s right and necessary. The rest of the time, Cooper and Sullivan make due with relatively modest audiences. Unless, in Cooper’s case, it’s New Year’s Eve. Ferraro, no doubt, is on a vigilant watch for the next homophobic outburst that GLAAD can raise money on. And if you’re wondering if I’ve ever used the word “faggot,” I call my gay friends that all the time.
In subsequent litigation (contractually stipulated mediation, actually, which I am prevented from getting into too great a detail about), MSNBC’s lawyers opened up with the TMZ video. I had assumed that a news organization such as NBC would have enlisted an “acoustician” (a word I picked up while at these meetings) to provide incontrovertible evidence that I had said the offending word. That didn’t happen. Their lead attorney, poured into his conservative suit like melted wax and resembling Jabba the Hutt, smirked and sighed at my every utterance. Those years in divorce court with Kim, however, had paid off. Not even this guy’s douchebaggery could distract me. My lawyer Ed Hernstadt was sharp and helpful. Typical exchanges went like this:
HERNSTADT: “Did you fire my client because he said ‘faggot’?”
JABBA: “‘Cocksucker’ is a homophobic slur as well.”
HERNSTADT: “Just to be clear, which word is he being fired for?”
* * *
NBC has a “human resources” problem. When it came time to dismiss or ease into retirement names like Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Ann Curry, David Gregory, and, eventually, Brian Williams and Billy Bush, NBC’s owners, during the GE and Comcast eras, did not view their stars as people who required or deserved any special treatment as they were being fired. Perhaps especially as they were being fired. They were employees, like in any of their other businesses. MSNBC eventually settled on a portion of the unpaid balance of my contract. I believe they did that because they could not prove I said the offending word. The reason they couldn’t prove that is because I didn’t say it.
(When I subsequently offered, online, the word “fathead,” I was joking. Ineffectively.) So long as I know, that is all I have to hold on to. Such battles with the press, tabloid or otherwise, can have lasting and toxifying results. When you lose all perspective, you run the risk of getting in touch with your inner Nixon, a condition marked by a romanticized paranoia, teeming resentments, and a limitless appetite for settling scores.
On an episode of the PBS television program American Masters devoted to the life and career of Woody Allen, the subject of Allen’s personal tribulations and tabloid scandals is touched on. Allen responds with an aplomb I only wish I had, saying: “Everybody had an opinion about my private life, which I felt they were all free to have. And free to respond in any way that made them happy. They could sympathize with me, not sympathize with me. They could dislike me, they could like me. It could have no effect on whether they saw my films. They could never see my films again. None of that mattered to me.”
I wasn’t that self-possessed.
That same year, a photographer from the New York Post, accompanying a Post reporter who attempted to interview me outside my apartment, later told the paper that I had called him a “coon.” Aside from the fact that I wasn’t in the habit of using such racist language, let alone words more commonly found in the Deep South in the 1950s, I thought “Where’s the proof?” The Post is published and edited by people who don’t let the truth stand in the way of a successful smear campaign. But, if the photographer is like every other one I encounter, his camera records video as well as shoots digital pictures. Where was the recording?
Walking down East 9th Street near 5th Avenue one evening, within days of the claims of the Post (whose photographer turned out to be an ex–police officer) I passed by an older couple, a black man and woman. He was dressed in a suit and tie and camel overcoat. This distinguished man looked up at me and, unmistakably, recognized who I was. His face completely changed as he shook his head slightly from side to side. “Et tu, Alec?” was the message I picked up from him. How I wanted to appeal to him, right then and there. “I went to Florida in ’96 to do voter registration work in black communities!” “You don’t believe what you read in the Post, do you?” Whatever work I had done on behalf of progressive causes over the past thirty years was washed away in one act of the nullification that News Corp outlets and their operatives crave. My heart broke.
The memory of that man’s expression was tattooed on me right up until I visited the Hate Crimes office of the Manhattan District Attorney. In the interview they conducted, I asked, point blank, “Is there a video?” The woman running the interview with four others from her staff paused and stared at me, as if to indicate that she was hoping I might incriminate myself in spite of the existence of the video. “There is a video,” she replied, after a long pause. “Let’s play it,” I said. On the video, at no time whatsoever do I use the word “coon” or any other racial epithet. As the photographer rejoins the young reporter, she asks, “What did he say?” He replies, “I think he called me a coon or something.” Of course, that claim, with no substantiation, is enough for the Post.
That day on East 9th Street, as the elegant man in the camel coat came closer and made out who I was, I could have sworn I heard a disgusted “Mmmm” emanate from him, that low sound coming from a shock or disappointment you didn’t see coming.
I wondered how many more African-Americans believed that about me. I had been embraced by many fans in the black community. How many now thought I’d let them down, or worse? Similarly, how many young people who are gay thought that I was judging them or condemning how they lived? I would never be the same after that. It’s remarkable what a few trips to the dunk tank of American media can do for your soul.
A couple of months later, I was approached by the writer Joe Hagan to do a piece for New York magazine. I once loved the magazine, in the days of Nick Pileggi and Robert Sam Anson. I had little use for it once Murdoch took over in the ’80s. But people told me Hagan was a square guy. I was in Madrid in January of 2014 shooting a film and I didn’t have much free time. Hagan interviewed me and, in the style we discussed, sent me a piece that was essentially a transcription. When I got his initial draft, it was an incoherent mess. I wasn’t interested in writing the piece in the first person, but I had no choice. In the article, I speak of being finished with public life. What I should have written was that I was finished with expecting to find any fun or joy out of public life again. And by “public life,” I mean cooperating with the media in any attempt to communicate with an audience. The press is something you develop a relationship with that is, hopefully, polite. It can be pleasant, even playful. But a tabloid mentality seems to have overwhelmed nearly all of that, and the resultant trouble is something you shrink from in order to protect your family.
When I first logged on to Twitter, I thought it was a brilliant means of bypassing the media to speak with your audience directly. Eventually, that idea was crushed by the Internet’s right-wing marauders, who level scorching personal attacks while shielding their identities. The majority of the public you want to communicate with are not on Twitter, though some on Twitter are worth the trouble. It can be an excellent news aggregator, so long as you consider the source. But after a year of unfair charges of racism and homophobia; of hearing that Bill de Blasio had condemned me for the TMZ incident in his never-ending quest to be the most politically correct politician in America; after watching cable news anchors, regardless of their sexuality, take me down based on the testimony of someone like Harvey Levin, I knew that we had entered a new era in terms of the effect the press was having on the country and vice versa.
On social media, people called me a drunk. They said I was abusive toward my daughter. I was a “libtard.” I was a wife beater. I was washed up. Irrelevant. I should stay out of politics. I was un-American. The profiles of these people almost always featured words like “Support the Troops,” “Christian,” “Military,” “I support law enforcement,” “Make America Great Again.” A tsunami of such raw bile, excreted by those Americans with a boundless suspicion of or abject hatred for anything unlike themselves, propelled Donald Trump to be elected president of the United States. Even as I write that, I stare at those words in disbelief.
Throughout my life, I have embraced a lot of causes that I believed in. Eventually I formed a foundation to channel certain sources of my income toward supporting the arts, the environment, and education, to name but a few. Some of the greatest satisfactions of my life have derived from my work with the New York Philharmonic, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and the East Hampton Library. But whatever I have done involving politics, regarding both candidacies and issues, has come at a real cost. The New York Post is not evenhanded in how they treat celebrities, and those labeled as liberals suffer the most by way of the Murdoch machinery. The cauterization of progressive thought, progressive achievement, and progressive history is what fuels the Breitbart–Murdoch–Koch brothers–Roger “Drop Your Pants” Ailes–Sheldon Adelson–Richard Mellon Scaife version of the news. Their goal is the destruction of any emergent leadership that they view as an obstacle to their accumulation of greater wealth and power. I’ve been told, over the years, that my politics have negatively affected my career. Maybe some didn’t realize that speaking out about what was best for the country was also my career. I only wish it were more so.