The Hollywood Democrats
LABASH, MATT
The Hollywood Democrats Billy Baldwin is leader of the pack. BY MATT LABASH Los Angeles Of all the good things to be, there is nothing so good as a Baldwin brother. And of all the Baldwin...
...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, beaming...
...Billy himself seems exuberant, as he bums cigarettes and relishes the musicality of Italian swear words, which he lets fly with abandon...
...No,” says one, “but I have been on the ride at the Universal theme park...
...I don’t, actually...
...Yeah, they don’t care,” he says, “which is kind of refreshing...
...Reeve is released, and the panel gets underway...
...That’s such a p.c...
...But Baldwin exhibits a command of the issue...
...He asks to be let in, without success...
...Many celebrities go about their business unmolested, but the main attraction at the celebrity zoo is the exhibit called The Billy Baldwin...
...That’s a bunch of bulls—,” he chortles, as there don’t seem to be any Republicans in sight...
...James Baldwin,” several people yell out...
...A pained expression crosses Billy’s face: “Double Trouble Spice,” he says...
...We sip our Frappuccinos...
...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...
...Not satisfied, I ask the man which Baldwin is his wife’s favorite...
...He must take a break from noshing (Creative Coalitionists don’t eat, they nosh) to troubleshoot a scheduling conflict...
...But one notices a certain distractedness, especially among the female contingent in the room...
...In the back of the bus, the underdressed Arnold teases Baldwin...
...she says flirtatiously, no longer a member of the country’s fiercest police force, but suddenly a woman...
...The panelists talk about the arts, and say something about public financing...
...The Creative Coalition is off to the Democratic Convention...
...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...
...Billy is not related to the black writer, but is a fan of his work...
...The Baldwins are to acting what the Kennedys are to politics, the Wallendas to the flying trapeze...
...There’s Joey Pants reclining on a couch, spitting blood about the Screen Actors Guild labor dispute...
...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-girlfriend...
...William is the obvious choice: cooler than Stephen, cleaner than the occasionally drugaddicted Daniel, less water-retentive than Alec...
...So impeded is our progress that Billy and I resign ourselves to conducting our interview while being jostled around the hall...
...When the evening finally concludes, Billy tells me to stay put...
...Billy approaches two library security guards standing sentinel in front of the room...
...But for anyone who has ever wanted to be a Baldwin brother (and which of us hasn’t...
...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...
...James,” he mistakenly replies...
...When you’re a Baldwin, everybody is...
...Billy, as I now call him (our rapport is immediate), has no time for niceties...
...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...
...the officer asks...
...The guards can resist the Baldwin charm no longer, and relent...
...My faith in this ?ber-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...
...She eyes Billy’s pass...
...The simple act of entering a Democratic convention is a wholly unique experience when you’re riding with a Baldwin...
...Inside the auditorium, Crystal Geyser water bottles sit next to ergonomically correct panelists’ chairs...
...Many celebrity activists have demonstrated themselves idiots (think Marlon Brando on Sacheen Little Feather, Cybill Shepherd on anything...
...talk-show-host calisthenics: the running-start down the aisle, the punctuated armfold, the sitting-to-standing halfgainer, etc...
...All of them,” he says sheepishly...
...After the panel, he is surrounded by issue-talking admirers, a mosh pit of batting lashes and over-familiar arm touches...
...Cuomo is not content simply to moderate, but rather is in constant motion, performing Matt Labash is a staff writer at THEWEEKLY STANDARD...
...answer,” says Billy, playfully punching the guard in the shoulder (Stephen is generally considered the playful Baldwin, but all Baldwins are good-humored...
...F— the whales, save the actors,” he says...
...This is not the crowd you would see attending a roundtable on electricity deregulation at the Brookings Institution...
...I suggest maybe we start with William, then as we become friends over the course of the day, we can switch to Billy...
...He deplores reducing the debate on arts funding to horror stories about “kiddie porn and Piss Christ...
...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...
...It’s part of the Revolution...
...She’s a friend,” he explains, though there’s no need to...
...A college girl spills her Miller Lite in anticipation of an encounter...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Want my take on the violence-in-themedia debate...
...When he joins in the Q&A, one can almost feel the mangier male journalists hoping he’ll prove a himbo...
...He has to run upstairs to see Al Gore’s daughter Karenna...
...The women all have tasteful highlights, strappy sandals, and firm haunches...
...Down on the concourse, during one of Baldwin’s onthefly 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I better hold my gun,” she jokes, “this one doesn’t look any good...
...they’ve been ordered to admit no one...
...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...
...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...
...He wrote Black Like Me,” says Joey Pants...
...He’s not...
...As he walks the convention halls, Billy passes about as fast as a kidney stone...
...The place resembles a celebrity ant farm under the gaze of the sky suite balconies...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Perhaps he is just happy to be a Baldwin brother...
...I ask the gentleman who his favorite Baldwin is...
...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 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...
...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...
...Like Alec, Billy is a student of politics...
...He’s dreamy,” she says...
...I ask him about Daniel, renowned for his bouts with drugs...
...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...
...But there are harder things than acclimating yourself to the royal treatment...
...Baldwin takes center stage in the aisle, eyeing his troops like a proud father...
...But he has little time to make new friends...
...He looks at me, stumped, and I ask him if they know who he is...
...We hold up our lammies, but Baldwin has some difficulty wriggling his out of his coat...
...They’re Prada,” he says, pointing down to a pair of silver kicks that look like they’re covered in aluminum foil...
...The officer doesn’t seem to know her Baldwins or to be a big reader...
...Billy rejects the premise...
...I’ve got thirty pairs of them...
...You want me to come back there...
...And of all the Baldwin brothers to be, there is none so good as William...
...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...
...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...
...Now which brother are you...
...You look nice,” Arnold says, “Got a wedding later...
...We laugh a hearty laugh when Tom Arnold mentions that the Creative Coalition is ostensibly nonpartisan...
...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...
...There’s former Seinfeld starlet Julia Louis-Dreyfus eating (or rather, noshing) blue-corn tortilla chips...
...Says Baldwin, “We’ll see how it goes...
...I’d rather head to the buffet and open bar in the VIP lounge with Billy Baldwin...
...A Coalition spokeswoman says he often goes by William, but his friends call him Billy...
...Perhaps he is happy to be going to the convention...
...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...
...He correctly deploys four-syllable words...
Vol. 5 • August 2000 • No. 47
