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Tribune News Service


Nevertheless
by Alec Baldwin
Harper
3.5/5 stars
If you happen to like Alec Baldwin, why do you like him? There are plenty of reasons. Baldwin came up with that jolly, fantastic line reading in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed – “Patriot Act! I love it I love it I love it!” – and that alone is enough for many people.
For many admirers of his work, it starts and ends with Baldwin’s uniquely commanding, medium-grade-sandpaper voice, conveying a hint of authoritarian bastard. Certainly he has played his share of such intimidating men. And on 30 Rock, where Baldwin soared for seven seasons as network kingpin Jack Donaghy, Tina Fey’s exquisite foil, he reminded everybody how funny he was. As Donaghy, he killed, reliably, treading a fine line between deadly understatement and blithe disengagement regarding the petty problems of mere mortals.
From Trump to Boss Baby, Alec Baldwin is America’s comedy commander-in-chief
In his ruminative new memoir, Nevertheless, Baldwin reveals bits and pieces of a life and career full of switchbacks, some handled more wisely than others. The forlorn, faraway look in Baldwin’s eyes on the book cover suggests a personality with a lot on his mind. The actor, New York Philharmonic orchestra announcer, radio and television personality and combustible activist, “addicted to solitude” by the time he was nine, may be 30-plus years sober, but some addictions are tougher to shake than the chemical ones.
This is Baldwin’s second book. The first, A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce, came out in 2008. It ground through the many years of Baldwin’s wearying custody travails regarding the now-adult daughter Baldwin shares, uneasily, with his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. Aspects of that legal battle royal come up for further review in Nevertheless, which takes its title from an old, raunchy theatre joke. But mostly the leading man concerns himself here with a tricky childhood and his years as a performer on the rise.
The first half of the book is swift, eloquent, witty; the later chapters are more diffuse and tend to end up listing stops on his resumé, as well as his tangles with various agents, managers and publicists.

“Six kids and no help,” is how Baldwin describes his mother’s existence, as young Alexander (who went by Xander) and his five siblings grew up in Massapequa, New York. His father died young, at 53, in 1983 and the family never had enough money.
“Acting,” Baldwin writes, “was a way to ease, though never eliminate, the financial anxieties of the boy from South Shore Long Island who remains inside me today.” He goes on: “I’m not actually writing this book to discuss my work, my opinions, or my life. I’m not writing it to explain some of the painful situations I’ve either landed in or thrown myself into. I’m writing it because I was paid to write it.”
Baldwin says a lot in three words. He describes his childhood school bus as “a rolling jailhouse”. High school, he says, was “a blur of wanting things I couldn’t have and missing the wonderful moments right in front of me”.

We learn of Baldwin’s decision to attend George Washington University in Washington, then New York University. He lands a role on the soap opera The Doctors, before he “snorted and drank my way to Hollywood”. His relationships with women consisted, he writes, of practising his acting on them. He had a “nagging need for attention that would fill the holes my parents were too enervated to address”.
Soon he washed up, happily, on the shores of Knots Landing, on which he played Lisa Hartman’s love interest. It was worth it, he writes, to get to know the actress Julie Harris. A brief engagement to Janine Turner, later of Northern Exposure, gets a nod. In each actor’s life, there are the roads not taken, the acting offers debated and juggled, decisions regretted.
When Baldwin declined to join the original off-Broadway cast of Craig Lucas’ play Prelude to a Kiss in its transfer to Broadway, he had his reasons: a million-dollar payday for the male lead in the ill-fated Neil Simon-scripted romantic comedy The Marrying Man, opposite Basinger. It was “a devastating mistake”, he writes, one that “changed my career and my life forever”.

Today Baldwin has three young children with his wife, Hilaria, and while he daydreams of going on a “sleep cruise”, he sounds genuinely grateful and happy for what he has. He has chips on both shoulders, however. The star he never quite became, as opposed to the star he is, eats at him. His political preoccupations are many, and now that Baldwin is best known for doing Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, other facets of his career have been pushed to the background.
Film review: The Boss Baby – Alec Baldwin voices officious infant in animated comedy
His memoir concludes with an A-to-Z compendium of actors he admires (Gary Oldman, in his view, is the best film actor of his generation). If navigating a challenging childhood feeds the hungry young performer’s soul, Baldwin wonders if his eldest daughter, Ireland, is destined for success in that direction.
“She’s eclectic and funny,” he writes. “But most important of all, she is in no hurry for you to know her. Which compels you to come to her. In acting, that may be the most important quality of all.”
Her father has the same quality.


Book review: Alec Baldwin on the paths not taken and his nagging need for attention

Alec Baldwin as President Donald Trump, the TV role for which he’s currently best known.

Promo pic of Alec Baldwin. No Credit

FILE - In this July 22, 2013 file photo, actor Alec Baldwin and pregnant wife Hilaria attend the premiere of Sony Pictures Classics' "Blue Jasmine" hosted by SK-II and Quintessentially Lifestyle at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Baldwin and his wife have given birth to a baby girl in New York. Hilaria Baldwin tweeted the news from her verified Twitter account Friday night, Aug. 23, 2013. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

Best Supporting Actress Winner Kim Basinger, for "L.A. Confidential", and her husband actor Alec Baldwin arrive at the 70th Annual Academy Awards ceremony 23 March at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. AFP PHOTO Vince BUCCI

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The actor’s second memoir is best when he reflects on a tricky and impoverished childhood, and his early career, but the latter sections read like a checklist of his resumé
