I also fell in love with alcohol, my most excellent friend. The clinking of the ice, the luminous colored bottles arranged behind the bar, the bartenders and waiters in starched white shirts, the tablecloths, the hors d’oeuvres and Rothman cigarettes (O’Brien’s favorites) made everything seem right. I drank Canadian Club in the winter and Boodles Gin in the summer. All of it combined to relax me for the first time in my twenty-two years. Most important of all, I was with people I liked and whom I believe liked me. No matter how many stupid questions I asked or ill-informed opinions I expressed at the bar on 49th and 6th, I was home. Outside, snow was falling. They were lighting the tree, and skaters were twirling around the famous rink. Somewhere back in Massapequa, my siblings were finding their own forms of escape. At Hurley’s, everything was tranquil and warm. When I went back to my apartment after those gatherings, I was uncomfortable and lonely. At times, I’d do anything not to feel that way. Once you have found some joy, you never want to be without it.
I lived on 58th between 1st and 2nd. The East 50s were filled with pretty brownstones, little neighborhood shops, and an unusual number of middle-aged gay men. So when O’Brien invited me to join him and some of his fifty-something friends for dinner and drinks, lots of drinks, I merrily rolled along. These were men who hailed from the era of The Boys in the Band, not Stonewall. They were bankers and bosses. They were management. These gents were quiet, pre-AIDS Executive Gays. In Rod Stewart’s song “The Killing of Georgie,” the eponymous male hustler dies on the corner of 53rd and 3rd, the precise coordinates of O’Brien’s favorite stomping grounds: Ambrosia, Rounds, and the East Five Three. Perhaps David’s friends thought I was fucking him. If he wanted them to think it, I never knew. Years later, a mutual friend guffawed and exhorted, “He was in love with you!” Maybe so. I was certainly in love with him. Although I was never interested in men sexually (God, how much better my life might have been if I was!), at that time I would only let relationships with women go so far emotionally. Therefore, while I often practiced my acting on them (and they on me, I’m sure), I only cared about moving my career ahead, whatever that meant at the time. And sitting at the East Five Three with David and a gaggle of flambéed, wickedly funny queens was more fun than anything else. It was more anywhere than anywhere else.
One Saturday afternoon, walking down 1st Avenue, I ran into Ken Harper, the theater producer who had scored on Broadway with The Wiz. Harper, who was friendly with one of our producers, George Barimo, occasionally lurked around the studio. Muscled up and predatory, he caught me en route to the laundromat. The opposite of O’Brien in the nuance department, Harper made small talk briefly before he said, “May I ask you a question?” I nervously grunted some reply. He seamlessly offered, “Is your ass as hairy as your chest? Because if it is, I’d like you to come up to my place and sit on my face for an hour.” All the blood went down to my ankles. I laughed, but not the affectionate laugh I often had for O’Brien. I coughed up my version of Annie Hall’s “La-di-da,” something like “Ha . . . well . . . ha . . . ok . . . well . . . ha!” and whisked off. Reminding me that gay men are like any other men in their ardor, Harper’s pitch had me wondering how much infidelity there was in the gay world. I resolved to chart my own course among the Sunday afternoon sitting-on-the-face circuit.
O’Brien eventually invited me to his house on Fire Island. I accepted but asked if I could bring the woman I was dating. Trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and ever the gentleman from Chicago, he seemed to stumble only slightly before replying, “I insist!” That weekend, Chloe or Siobhan or Francesca ferried over with me. She must have wondered herself what she was doing there, as I spent the whole time talking with David. It was as if he and I were on the date and my girlfriend was our queer dear pal. He raised the shades on a window looking out on the water. “I give you Patchogue by nightfall,” he announced. I cackled loudly and thought to myself, “I really am in love with this man.” My date smiled awkwardly.
The executive producer of The Doctors was a tough old broad named Doris Quinlan. Her associate, Susan Scudder, was the contact that my coffee-klatching guest at the health club had introduced me to. In a meeting that lasted maybe thirty minutes, the producers had signed me to a two-year deal. They asked me my name, as in stage name, and I told them I didn’t have one. “People call me Alex. My family calls me Xander.” They squinted and Barimo said, “Xander Baldwin . . . that doesn’t work.” Thirty minutes in the business and I was already primed to abandon my name of twenty-two years. I told them that my father was called Alec. They lit up, and one of them proclaimed, “That’s it. That’s your name. We’ll put Alec Baldwin on the contract, and from now on that’s your name.” Barimo tensed slightly and leaned in. “So, you can sign this deal here and now, or go out and get an agent. But he’ll only be able to bump it up the ten percent to cover his commission.” I shrugged and said, “OK, sure. I’ll sign right now.” I signed “Alexander R. Baldwin III” and thought about how I was now the third Alec in that line as well, thanks to a trio of flinty TV producers working in off-off-television. “You will need an agent eventually, though,” Susan Scudder said. “I want to send him over to Bloom.” The others, looking at me like a used car they had just bought, murmured their assent. “Bloom,” Doris said with a wry smile. “Sure. Why not?”
At first glance, J. Michael Bloom looked like Henry VIII as he is depicted in history textbooks. From certain angles, he also resembled a younger version of the actor Charles Laughton. He was slightly bug-eyed, and his face broadened below the nose, giving his mouth a splayed Donald Duck–like mask. With his trimmed and fluffed tufts of hair in blue and silver, his oversized aviator-style prescription glasses and three-piece suits, he sipped a river of Pepsi-Cola poured over ice at his desk, chain-smoking Kent III cigarettes while speaking in a velvety FM radio voice. Bloom might have been a character in a Coen brothers movie, except he was real. Obviously, he’d been an actor at one time. He didn’t ooze theatricality. He gushed it. Hailing from the Ken Harper school, Bloom had a reputation for cruising young male clients, to the point of harassment. Young up-and-coming actors working in film, TV, and commercials would ask me, “How do you put up with that guy?” He massaged this one’s thigh or tried to corner and kiss this one in his office. None of that concerned me. I like people who are smart and funny, and Bloom was one of the smartest and funniest I would ever meet.