More people who should not be paid for
their opinions
Must… stop… clicking… on articles… on the MSN… front page…
In Defense of Alec Baldwin
By Martha Brockenbrough
Special to MSNIt’s hard to think of a man in Hollywood with a scarier reputation than Alec Baldwin.
Baldwin’s divorce from Kim Basinger has been a protracted slugfest. A co-star reportedly quit working on a play with him because he slammed his fist through the wall when the air-conditioning wasn’t working to his satisfaction. And just last week, word got out that he’d left his 11-year-old daughter a voicemail message calling her “a rude, thoughtless little pig.”
After this, does he have any fans left?
Despite his faults, he does: me.
Despite the fact that this article came out 23 years too late, I still think it’s what inspired Dylan to write “Idiot Wind.”
And it’s not just because he’s perfect as the menacing but soft-hearted Jack Donaghy in TV’s funniest sitcom, “30 Rock.”
It’s because, as a parent, I understand his demons.
Unlike so many celebrities in Hollywood, whose struggle with excesses of drugs, alcohol and wild spending is completely foreign to me, Alec Baldwin is a man with a broken heart. He’s lost his child, the person in the world he loves the most.
And how did he express his affection to the person he loved the most? He called her a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” Congratulations, Martha, you’ve just become an apologist for “I-abuse-you-because-I-love-you” fathers everywhere!
Perhaps it’s his own fault.
Perhaps. Indeed.
He seems impossible to live with. But just because he’s a hard guy to love doesn’t mean he’s incapable of love. In fact, I’d say the man’s suffering in part because he loves so much and is devastated that it’s not returned.
It’s obviously the girl’s fault that she doesn’t love a father who calls her a pig. Boo-hoo-hoo.
Here’s part of his voicemail to his daughter, as reported by the Associated Press: “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 who doesn’t care about what you do as far as I’m concerned. You have humiliated me for the last time with this phone.”
He then said he would fly from New York to Los Angeles “for the day just to straighten you out on this issue.”
When I first read the voicemail transcript, I shuddered. What kind of parent calls his child a pig? I later listened to the tape itself and was appalled at the uncorked rage it contains.
The man clearly needs help.
Ah, but he did it out of love, so that makes it understandable.
Even so, I had a moment of recognition — one that I don’t like, but one I’d be a total hypocrite to deny. Just last week, I told my beloved 6-year-old to stop eating like a pig. At the time, she was using her dress as a napkin, something I’ve asked her not to do literally dozens of times. I even told her that, as a 6-year-old, she was too big to be making such a mess at mealtime.
I just don’t know how to react to this.
Martha. Martha. Good God.
Telling your child to “stop eating like a pig” in an effort to get her to stop making messes is not at all the same as calling her up on the phone, yelling abusively at her and telling her that she doesn’t “have the brains or the decency as a human being” and you “don’t give a damn” if she’s six years old, and then calling her father “a pain in the ass who doesn’t care about what you do.” C’mon. Don’t make me break out my trusty ol’ chart here.
I didn’t have quite the rage that Baldwin expressed, but if someone passed around a transcript from our dinner table, I wouldn’t sound all that much better. And I know I hurt my sweet child’s feelings.
The truth is that very few parents can go a lifetime without saying something regrettable to their children. To the ones who do, I offer my congratulations and admiration.
Yeah, but, but… Martha. There’s a big, big difference between saying something regrettable to your kids and verbally abusing them at length over the phone. Again, take it away, Mr. Baldwin: “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 who doesn’t care about what you do as far as I’m concerned. You have humiliated me for the last time with this phone.”
Again, take it away, Trusty Ol’ Chart:
For the rest of us, though, who are sometimes worn down by life’s stresses, disappointments and apparent exercises in futility, we don’t always say the right things to our kids. Sometimes, we even say the exact wrong things — words we may regret for the rest of our days.
Baldwin revealed a lot about his emotional fragility when he said, “You have humiliated me for the last time with this phone.”
I lost my cool when my child didn’t use a napkin, but at least I get to see her every day. Baldwin doesn’t, and this apparently wasn’t the first scheduled call she missed. How devastating for a parent who does not have custody to not be able to count even on phone calls.
I know if I were in his situation, I would be crushed and frustrated, and very likely to lash out. I suspect I’d be furious with my ex, and I’d be mortally wounded by the apparent indifference of my child. I’d also want to go to wherever she was to explain how much she was hurting me.
If I had to make a guess based on Mr. Baldwin’s telephone transcript, I’d say that it’s very likely because he’s an asshole.
I like to think I’d choose words that expressed my pain and not come across as threatening.
You’d hope so.
But how do we know how we’d react if we felt we’d lost the one person we loved most in the world? How many of us, in our darkest moments, can express such humbling need with perfect clarity?
He definitely screwed up here. There’s no way what he said was OK, even if his daughter at least has a sad piece of proof that her father wants to be part of her life.
I can understand his emotion more than I understand what could have possessed Kim Basinger’s people from leaking a tape that would publicize their child’s pain and make it part of the permanent tabloid record.
Uh, they wanted to ensure they got custody?
In this darkness, though, I think there’s a potential bright moment, for Baldwin and other imperfect parents.
When we screw up, we have an opportunity to teach our children that humans make mistakes. We can ask for forgiveness. We can do better in the future and hope that, when our children become parents themselves, they will have learned that we don’t have to be perfect to be lovable and that forgiveness is a gift that heals.
Meanwhile, I will be thinking of that shattered family, understanding their pain and wishing them well.
I’ll be having a life.*
*Though since I did take the time to write a lengthy reply to Martha’s piece, my claims of having a life are shaky at best.
This is exactly why the Great Gazoogle is by web browser home page.
s/by/my/
kthxbye.
**realizes why people mutter obscenities about the lack of a preview button**
This is exactly why the Great Gazoogle is by web browser home page.
This is exactly why I’m too lazy to change my preferred homepage.
She’s obviously one of those scary fans who will do anything to excuse horrible behavior of her idol.
Meanwhile, can Baldwin have hidden this behavior so well from Basinger while they were dating … or even more seriously when “they” were trying to get pregnant? Why do women love men who are horrible, instead of me? Kim, you’d be much better off with me. I mean really, babe — call me, ok? (Does call me hand signal.)
I read that story about Baldwin and had a flashback to my own divorce, though thankfully my daughter was a bit older and maybe a little better able to deal with the verbal abuse. But to this day she needs counseling (she’s 21 now and will continue to suffer with this until she can come to terms with it). As for my son, who is severely disabled and non-verbal and was becoming physically violent with me (presumably because of the tirades he was suffering during visitations with his father) – well, I just moved with him across this big body of water called “The Pond” to the UK with my new partner. Amazing what a great deal of distance will do – he’s like a different person now that he’s away from his dad and also has a strong but caring male figure in the house.
For men like this, their anger is always, ALWAYS somebody else’s fault. They just can’t take any responsibility for it. As for Alec – GET COUNSELING NOW, YOU FUCKING PRICK. And pray that your daughter will allow you to be part of her life in the future – but don’t hold your breath.
Oh, and as for Martha: There is NO justification for this kind of behavior. Zip, nada, none. And your pathetic little defense just makes you look like an enabler and total loon. But I guess that goes without saying…
Wait — everyone is piling on Alec about this whole thing, but there is one other component. The whole reason we even know about this story is that Kim Basinger was so concerned about the voice mail that… she called the cops? No. She called her attorney? No. She sent it to TMZ.com!! Nice — way to make sure that the entire world gets to hear more of your dirty laundry, and drag a private squabble out into the light!
Alec Baldwin was kind of mean in those messages, but we don’t know 95% of the backstory, either. Maybe his daughter is rude, and thoughtless. A pig? I don’t know about that. No brains? Kind of harsh. But then again, my grandfather, who raised me, continually referred to me as ‘That Goddamned Dirty Sonofabitch’ from the time I was about 7, so maybe I have a twisted view of this.
Regardless, there was NO excuse for sending this kind of message to the media. That kind of thing will put the kid in eternal therapy way more than the verbal abuse.
I am feeling dizzy. I consider Sadly No! to be brilliant. Then I come to find out that Dr. Rocket has msn as his homepage and this leads me to the conclusion that he still uses Internet Explorer. Sadly Yes!
Brad, I realize it’s hard for us old people to wrap our minds around this concept, but the 70s were thirty years ago, not twenty. Blood On The Tracks came out in 1975, so “Idiot Wind” was written about 33 years ago, not 23.
Beats the hell out of a Mark Steyn column!
Beat the hell out of Mark Steyn …
That’s better …
Olaz: I came to the same conclusion but I didn’t want to be a technosnob so I said nothing.
Sadly, No! is indeed brilliant.
So she looks up to people who, when the pressure’s on and the chips are down, still finds it within themselves to do exactly the wrong thing.
I’m seriously disappointed with this post since there’s not one mention of Alyssa Milano…
Hey Martha. I need somebody to help me with my autobiography – er, my Memoirs. It’s kind of hard to present some of the crap I’ve done in a sympathetic light, and it appears you are just the one who could do that, no matter how foolish it would look. Let’s take a meeting…
mikey
Ooopss, I’m not eve anymore. Never mind…
mikey
Did somebody say Frickin Frackin Preview Button?
mikey
The only comment I have about Baldwin’s personal life, or any celeb’s personal life, is “I don’t want to know.”
Baldwin can be good in the right roles, so why would I not watch him just because he’s an asshole in his personal life?
You know what second prize is ? A set of steak knives …
Jay- Baldwin is a good character actor, and it’s fine to appreciate him without caring about his personal life. The prob with Martha’s piece was that she was basically taking her enjoyment of Baldwin as an actor and conflating it with his worth as a person.
Also- yeah, Kim Bassinger leaking the tape out was a shit move too. Kinda makes you understand why the two of them were attracted to each other in the first place…
Also: I have no idea when I decided to turn this blog into Celebritology. Must be a weekend thing.
But how do we know how we’d react if we felt we’d lost the one person we loved most in the world?
Obvious, to Martha the right response is to thell the one person we loved most in the world that she didn’t have the brains or decency to be a human being.
The mind boggles.
Well, Jay, the problem with watching his movies and television shows is that it means that he gets money and you might not want to give money to a guy who verbally abuses his daughter. I’m not sure where I stand on the “boycott asshole actors/directors” thing, but I understand it. The problem is that a lot of actors and directors are assholes.
So a guy who’s paid to lie for a living turns out to have a dark side?
Inconceivable!
I’d feel for the kid, but I went to school with a few famous people spawn, and odds are that the daughter is the worst of this lot, even accounting for age. For one thing, she’s the offspring of Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin. That’s not a good start.
It does seem to show that Alec really is a Baldwin, tho. So now it’ll be what, 2-3 years until he does a movie or a show with his daughter in some kind of bs dance for the public to move back up to an A-lister?
Baldwin’s comments sound exactly like my mom talking to my seventeen-year old sister. I have heard my mom, who is too old to be having a seventeen-year-old daughter, say things to my sister that would just blow your mind. It’s destroying my sister’s life– she has no self-esteem and has become quite a hardened, mean little girl herself. It’s tragically sad. I’m sure this incident with Baldwin wasn’t isolated. I’ll bet you he’s been tearing his little girl down for years.
Pathetic.
Alec Baldwin was kind of mean in those messages, but we don’t know 95% of the backstory, either. Maybe his daughter is rude, and thoughtless.
Hello? “Kind of mean?” A parent to say that to a child isn’t “kind of mean” it’s verbal abuse. It would be verbal abuse between two adults in a relationship.
Prepubescent kids are often rude and thoughtless. A firm response is appropriate, but upping the ante in rudeness and thoughtlessness isn’t the best choice.
Oh. Um. So, marsupial, *saying your daughter has no decency or humanity* is not as bad as *telling people someone said that*? Oh, yes, the good old days when if he hit you, you sucked it up because to say anything was just airing your dirty laundry.
Releasing the tape may have been tacky, but as you say, we don’t know 95% of the backstory, either. Maybe he’s *always* a complete asshole to his eleven year old daughter. Maybe his eleven year old daughter is so tired of it that she wanted to humiliate him publicly.
For the record, if that’s the case, I’ll happily cheer her on. If that was the only thing my father had ever done to me, I still would have never spoken to him again. I wouldn’t be shocked to discover the girl has the same attitude.
Oh yeah, n Martha is clearly making her pitch to Alec to help him heal this pain. She’s been there, Alec baby, let her make it allllll better.
If this had been, I dunno, John Goodman, she’d be screaming for execution.
When we screw up, we have an opportunity to teach our children that humans make mistakes. We can ask for forgiveness. We can do better in the future and hope that, when our children become parents themselves, they will have learned that we don’t have to be perfect to be lovable and that forgiveness is a gift that heals.
Isn’ that nice? Baldwin’s little girl has been given a great opportunity to learn the virtue of forgiveness. She will learn that her dad isn’t perfect, and that she can forgive him for calling her a pig.
Him forgive his 12 year old child for missing a phone call? Well, geez, people, don’t overreach here.
I like to think I’d choose words that expressed my pain and not come across as threatening.
Well, here’s kind of the crux of the matter. Why’s it so important for the parent to “express the pain” it causes him when a child behaves badly?”
See, for a parent, when responding to a behavior transgression of a child, the first priority should be to correct and instruct about the behavior, NOT to express the personal pain it caused YOU.
As a parent, you’re supposed to be teaching them how to be well-adjusted human beings in society. So, yeah, your kid’s failure to take my phone call hurt my feelings, but the teachable moment should be about how human beings don’t miss appointments because it hurts and inconveniences the people who were depending on it. Oh, and secondarily, it really made me feel bad, because I love you and I was looking forward to talking to you.
NOT – You little shit, look how you made me FEEEEEEEEEELLLL!
Damn preview button.
According to last week’s insightful recommendations from the right wing’s newest stars, maybe if Baldwin’s kid was packin’ heat she mighta taught him a thinger two.
I think we know who’s to blame here in this matter.
Liberals
Alec Baldwin just became the poster man for the millions of parents who cross the line, who are abusive every day.
Releasing that tape to the media was a shit move. Sure, play it for the judge in the custody trial, but the media?! You know, it was bad enough that the poor girl had to hear it once, but now she gets to hear it time and again on TV, see it on the front of magazines, and worst of all, she has to hear what David Fucking Spade has to say on the subject.
So, the father is distant and abusive, and the mother is conniving, spiteful, and willing to use her own daughter’s emotional trauma to score media points against her ex. That kid is fucked, but she does have a bright future in Hollywood.
It’s incredible that there are so many people who fail to find Baldwin’s treatment of his daughter anything other than abusive.
Makes you wonder how many other people out there are screaming at their children and calling them “pigs.”
And of course, it’s all about HIM, and his poor widdle hurt feelings.
to JK47: I hope you tell your sister her mom is full of S**T, and she (sister) is a fine person. Speaking from personal experience, having just one person on your side can make a huge difference.
Your link to the rest of the story here doesn’t open anything…
To paraphrase John Bender: “Maybe her old man and my old man should get together and go bowling.”
If Baldwin weren’t a celebrity, no one would have even heard about this. And, while it’s a pretty poor example of parenting, there are far, far worse things happening to children in America today. And, no doubt, worse things will happen in future generations.
I won’t bore you or creep you out with the details, but Alec Baldwin has nothing on my late Father. A good man, in most respects, but we never quite clicked as parent and child.
So, I’m of two minds about this story. On the one hand, Alec is an ass and should probably get some family counseling. On the other, if this is the worst his daughter receives, she’ll grow up and find herself, and realize that her Father was simply an ass. Let’s hope that’s the case.
No, I don’t think his message was appropriate. Believe me, my childhood gave me more than enough perspective to always stand up for the weak and defenseless – children, animals, the elderly, whomever. I don’t tolerate cruelty. But this shouldn’t be ‘news’, celebrity or not.
There are hundreds and thousands of kids out there living through worse than a nasty voicemail, but you don’t hear about it on Entertainment Tonight. Get out there and do something for them.
hooboy.
So both this kid’s parents are seriously dysfunctional to the point where they can’t behave like civilized human beings for the sake of their child – and the tape already got his visitation rights suspended, there was no reason to release it except to get revenge. Which now the kid is implicated in. And is going to feel like crap about even if she hates his guts right now. Which she’s also going to feel like crap about. Way to handle conflict, kids. You two have over a century between you. Maybe the person in this family who hasn’t had a century of behaving like a fucking child should get a shot at it, ya think?
That said, what was on that tape was not anger. It was rage. It was all the shit he had built up inside from everything he’s pissed off about, and he poured it all out on an eleven year old child as if it were in some way an appropriate or a proportionate response to missing a fucking phone call. Like she deserved to be spoken to with that kind of contempt.
Like her father thought she was a pig and was flying across the country the next day to “straighten her out”
I don’t know if this woman is actually emotionally disturbed enough to relate to that or even understand it, but you know what? If she is, she shouldn’t be raising children either.
Amazing how so many people are ignoring Kim Basinger’s part in this. She’s has been doing her damndest ever since the divorce to keep him from ever seeing his daughter again. There are always two people in a nasty custody battle, and who is the one that violated a court order to stick it to him? Kim Basinger. You think that kind of toxic behavior is not part of all of her dealings with him or her daughter? She’s probably doing every thing she can to poison that relationship, including keeping her from scheduled, court ordered phone calls.
They shut down production of 30 Rock for him to make those phone calls, and she, or Kim can’t be bothered to do what little the court has mandated? That’s what the “you’ve humiliated me for the last time” thing was about.
I’m not saying Baldwin is a good parent, since that child would probably be better off taken from both of them. And obviously, he should have directed that invective at Basinger, not his daughter.
she, or Kim can’t be bothered to do what little the court has mandated
Mmm, I don’t think its fair to stick the kid with this. Think back to when you were twelve. Tell me you had an awareness of what went on at your dad’s work; at the politics of his work situation. C’mon.
Yeah, Kim and Alec, they both deserve a lot of condemnation. but the kid – no.
That’s the whole point. Shitty parents who deceive themselves into equating their emotional world with the emotional world of a kid. Kids do not live in their parents’ emotional work, and propelling them there doesn’t work; it’s not fair; it’s abusive.
a different brad said,
So a guy who’s paid to lie for a living turns out to have a dark side?
Way to slander an entire profession with your cocky and dismissive attitude, brad. Tell us what you do for a living, so I can get one of my actor friends to explain how that job makes you a bad person.
Also: I have no idea when I decided to turn this blog into Celebritology. Must be a weekend thing.
Maybe joo are just channeling jour inner Dowd, no?
so.
So a guy who’s paid to lie for a living turns out to have a dark side?
Inconceivable!
Well. Yeah. I guess. I mean, maybe Picasso said it best when he said that art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. Metaphor is the basis of art and metaphor is not literally true, so I guess you can use that word “lie” . . . but I don’t think the pejorative connotation is really what ol’ Pablo had in mind.
Feel free to pile on here if you must, y’all, ’cause I think I’m in a distinct minority here, but I really think you have to separate the art from the artist. Is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” a shitty poem because Eliot was an anti-Semite? Or maybe it’s a good poem but we shouldn’t teach it or buy books that contain it because digging on the artistry of the poem somehow validates Eliot’s nasty opinions?
I admit I don’t have TV, so maybe this is a bigger deal than it seems to me. I don’t follow celebrity gossip, so maybe this is yet another knot in a long string of ugly that actually has some sort of public application. I suspect Baldwin is a prick from a family of pricks and he’s dumping on his ex-wife by way of his kid. That’s what I suspect. What I know is that he was brilliant in Glengarry Glen Ross, and that’s as close as I’ll ever get to him as a person.
Morty, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is one of the saddest pieces of work ever. And this is a cat speaking, and we’re not known for our sentiment.
It could do with more references to cats, however.
He sucked on “Walking With Cavemen”, though. And National Geographic Channel must be kicking themselves, as he’s narrating a major miniseries they’re doing, two new episodes this week. It was fairly distracting. Not as bad as Ben Stiller or Christian Slater doing dinosaur documentaries, though.
I’m probably going to have to vow revenge if I turn on the TV one night and catch Will Farrell narrating a show about caribou. “But he was in Elf! Reindeer! It’s perfect!”
The part of this whole story that speaks the most to me is that Baldwin did not seem to know his daughter’s correct age.
That tidbit tells me a lot on its own.
“Way to slander an entire profession with your cocky and dismissive attitude, brad. Tell us what you do for a living, so I can get one of my actor friends to explain how that job makes you a bad person.”
“There’s a reason the phrase is ‘dumb as an actor’.”
Yup, that awful Kim Basinger — no one has pointed out her role in this. I mean, she’s been trying to prevent Baldwin from having any visitation rights at all — can’t imagine why.
Quite possible Basinger has learned the hard way that you don’t get justice in America without a crowbar. Anyone here a stranger to that concept? Anyone else here a parent? What would you do to keep an ex-spouse away who spoke to your child in that way?
Am I the only person who is completely uninterested in speculating on the child-rearing abilities of a couple of celebrities? Can we talk about politics now?
I love that apple/orange pic.
I give this round to Baldwin. Basinger was completely out of line here, because she brought her daughter into the public view in pursuance of her court fight.
Bad Kim!!
As far as what Baldwin said: if that’s the worst he’s said, boo-fucking-hoo.
People get angry and say things they regret later. That’s life. I’m not going to judge Baldwin based on this one short tape.
Am I the only person who is completely uninterested in speculating on the child-rearing abilities of a couple of celebrities?
Sadly, no. I thought when this “story” first appeared, it really isn’t any of my business.
Bing Crosby was an asshole father too. So was Ronald Reagan.
And on and on and on.
None o’ my bid-ness.
Lets pick up the shattered pieces of our lives and move on.
Perhaps you can help me. In Defense of Alec Baldwin on MSN.com caused me to “respond” for nearly the first time ever. In just three hours all re to this article and the “response” to it have disappeared. I wrote a response and would like to follow it. Can you help me get to that article on MSN.com and to the appropriate response board.
Thank you, A. P.
virginotter@hotmail.com
virginotter@hotmail.com
Perhaps you require some muskrat love.
I clicked Subimt and got ERROR, Plese type a response. I am getting tired here. Like no one really wants me to respond.
I said: For the first time ever, I responded to a article on MSN.com’s front page. That piece was, In Defense of Alec Baldwin. After just three hours, all/anything to do with this piece is gone.
Can you help me find this MSN article and the appropriate response board to which I wrote?
Please/thank you, A. Packard
I think you go here.
Wait, someone got pissed I called acting lying for a living?
Jebus. It wasn’t a value judgment. It was just a description.
On the other hand, what’s with the sore spot?
I meant lie in the silly sense, as in Baldwin wasn’t really Howard Hughes rival in the 50s, despite having played that role in the Aviator.
Sheesh.
I miss the preview button.
Ok, adb, the difference between acting and lying is quite simple. The actor has an audience that doesn’t actually believe the character is a real person and does know that the words being spoken is fiction. Speaking of apples and oranges…
I should stop checking this thread.
Robbie, baby?
When you have to explain something that simple, the joke, such as it may be, has a decent chance of being on you.