We like to think of Baldwin as the
intense, handsome actor and senior member of the Baldwin clan of
performers, which includes brothers Stephen, Daniel and William. He
also has local ties. Baldwin’s mother Carol lives in Camillus; she is
the founder and director of Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research
Fund; her oldest son, Alec, is a member of the advisory board. He also
penned the forward to local restaurateur Joey DeCuffa’s new cookbook, Joey’s Italian (DeCuffa Publishing, 2008).
Baldwin is one of the best-known, most
successful actors in the world, currently most visible for his comedic
stints on NBC’s Emmy Award-winning show 30 Rock. The actor has
racked up nominations for Academy Awards and Tony Awards, and is a
recipient of several Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild and Television
Critics Association honors. Further, he has always had an opinion about
the national political scene, and has considered entering the political
arena himself.
No one ever accused Baldwin of being a
shrinking violet, so it comes as no surprise that he decided to vent
his rage following his recent grueling divorce in A Promise to Ourselves.
His take-no-prisoners account of a perilous journey through the system
dealing with what he calls the “family law industry” has made him the
poster boy for fathers who fight an uphill battle throughout the entire
divorce process, especially when it comes to custody and visitation
rights concerning their children.
Along with fighting the legal system,
Baldwin had to play out every nasty turn of events in front of the
whole world, although he doesn’t delve into unfortunate divorce
experiences with fellow actors. Throughout the book he refers to his
ex-wife only as Kim, but he spares nothing in citing his hateful
opinion of her.
Baldwin comments ruefully that divorcing
couples with little income have an easier time of it since there is no
incentive for lawyers to drain their scant resources through long,
drawn-out procedures. By contrast, he argues that American family law
is a system of attorneys and judges who prey upon wealthy divorcing
couples, along with the cottage industries that the system has created,
including forensic accountants, appraisers, custody evaluators, mental
health professionals, law guardians and mediators.
“When illness afflicts a marriage,
however, the professionals who arrive on the scene often are there to
prolong the bleeding, not to stop it,” writes Baldwin. “To be pulled
into the American family law system in most states is like being tied
to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a gravel road late at
night. No one can hear your cries and complaints, and it is not over
until they say it’s over.”
There were flags Baldwin didn’t address
early on during his 12-year relationship with Basinger, namely his
discovery that she rarely did anything without the advice of a team of
highly paid professionals, which continued through the contentious
divorce. Losing a breach-of-contract trial after dropping out of the
1993 movie Boxing Helena left Basinger financially and
emotionally bankrupt, but she subsequently regained her financial
status with a string of successful films, even winning an Academy Award
as Best Supporting Actress in 1997’s L.A. Confidential. (Incidentally, Alec was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor for 2003’s The Cooler.)
Baldwin and Basinger married in 1993 and starred together in the movies The Marrying Man (1991) and The Getaway
(1994), but it was not an entirely happy union. At one point Kim
appeared with her assistant and announced—in the bathroom of her Los
Angeles home—that she was pregnant, according to Baldwin. “A cause for
unprecedented joy was more like someone telling you that they had
wrecked your car,” he remembers. Their daughter Ireland was born Oct.
23, 1995. Seven years after they married, Baldwin was served with
separation papers and, in 2002, the couple divorced.
The actor talks about filming the 2003 Mike Myers comedy The Cat in the Hat
at the same time he was trying to fulfill his court-ordered obligation
of shuttling back and forth to anger-management therapy, parenting
classes and custody-evaluation sessions, as well as a court order
mandating him to submit to humiliating videotaped depositions.
Basinger’s lawyers “alternately tittered and snorted, out of the
camera’s view, after most of my answers,” Baldwin recalls.
The nasty phone message of 2007 in which
Baldwin called his then 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless
little pig” did not bode well for the actor. He claims that more often
than not he was kept away from her by rigid visitation rules, but he
would try to call his daughter during court-ordered access hours. On
the night of the call in question, April 11, Baldwin ducked out of a
Manhattan restaurant to call Ireland, only to find out that her phone
was turned off.
“I had dialed that phone for more than a
week and only gotten a voice mail. This had happened for years now, and
for no good reason,” he notes. “Finally, when the beep came, I
snapped.” His defense was that the isolation from Ireland and a system
that creates a situation where mothers encourage their children to
dislike their father led to his emotional outburst.
Baldwin dwells on what is called PAS,
Parental Alienation Syndrome, a term coined by Columbia University
clinical professor psychiatry Richard A. Gardner, who, before his death
in 2003, was an advocate for fathers in custody battles. Gardner cited
a psychological brainwashing by the parent with primary custody to
alienate the relationship with the non-custodial parent, usually the
father.
“Since Gardner started the discussion on
PAS, debate has swirled over whether it is a real syndrome or junk
science.” The definition itself of the syndrome is fraught with
pitfalls. According to Gardner, the term refers to a psychological
disturbance “in which children are obsessed with deprecation and
criticism of a parent—denigration that is unjustified and/or
exaggerated.” PAS, Gardner contends, goes beyond what would be
considered normal acting out and emotional responses to the trauma of
divorce. In PAS, the child’s rejection or denigration of a parent
reaches the level of a campaign.
From his longstanding wrenching
experience through the divorce process, Baldwin’s deepest stab at the
legal system is his claim that “most lawyers {are} men and women who
were not sufficiently smart enough to become doctors or engineers.”
Wow; maybe Baldwin should tell us how he really feels.
