I wondered how many more African-Americans believed that about me. I had been embraced by many fans in the black community. How many now thought I’d let them down, or worse? Similarly, how many young people who are gay thought that I was judging them or condemning how they lived? I would never be the same after that. It’s remarkable what a few trips to the dunk tank of American media can do for your soul.
A couple of months later, I was approached by the writer Joe Hagan to do a piece for New York magazine. I once loved the magazine, in the days of Nick Pileggi and Robert Sam Anson. I had little use for it once Murdoch took over in the ’80s. But people told me Hagan was a square guy. I was in Madrid in January of 2014 shooting a film and I didn’t have much free time. Hagan interviewed me and, in the style we discussed, sent me a piece that was essentially a transcription. When I got his initial draft, it was an incoherent mess. I wasn’t interested in writing the piece in the first person, but I had no choice. In the article, I speak of being finished with public life. What I should have written was that I was finished with expecting to find any fun or joy out of public life again. And by “public life,” I mean cooperating with the media in any attempt to communicate with an audience. The press is something you develop a relationship with that is, hopefully, polite. It can be pleasant, even playful. But a tabloid mentality seems to have overwhelmed nearly all of that, and the resultant trouble is something you shrink from in order to protect your family.
When I first logged on to Twitter, I thought it was a brilliant means of bypassing the media to speak with your audience directly. Eventually, that idea was crushed by the Internet’s right-wing marauders, who level scorching personal attacks while shielding their identities. The majority of the public you want to communicate with are not on Twitter, though some on Twitter are worth the trouble. It can be an excellent news aggregator, so long as you consider the source. But after a year of unfair charges of racism and homophobia; of hearing that Bill de Blasio had condemned me for the TMZ incident in his never-ending quest to be the most politically correct politician in America; after watching cable news anchors, regardless of their sexuality, take me down based on the testimony of someone like Harvey Levin, I knew that we had entered a new era in terms of the effect the press was having on the country and vice versa.
On social media, people called me a drunk. They said I was abusive toward my daughter. I was a “libtard.” I was a wife beater. I was washed up. Irrelevant. I should stay out of politics. I was un-American. The profiles of these people almost always featured words like “Support the Troops,” “Christian,” “Military,” “I support law enforcement,” “Make America Great Again.” A tsunami of such raw bile, excreted by those Americans with a boundless suspicion of or abject hatred for anything unlike themselves, propelled Donald Trump to be elected president of the United States. Even as I write that, I stare at those words in disbelief.
Throughout my life, I have embraced a lot of causes that I believed in. Eventually I formed a foundation to channel certain sources of my income toward supporting the arts, the environment, and education, to name but a few. Some of the greatest satisfactions of my life have derived from my work with the New York Philharmonic, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and the East Hampton Library. But whatever I have done involving politics, regarding both candidacies and issues, has come at a real cost. The New York Post is not evenhanded in how they treat celebrities, and those labeled as liberals suffer the most by way of the Murdoch machinery. The cauterization of progressive thought, progressive achievement, and progressive history is what fuels the Breitbart–Murdoch–Koch brothers–Roger “Drop Your Pants” Ailes–Sheldon Adelson–Richard Mellon Scaife version of the news. Their goal is the destruction of any emergent leadership that they view as an obstacle to their accumulation of greater wealth and power. I’ve been told, over the years, that my politics have negatively affected my career. Maybe some didn’t realize that speaking out about what was best for the country was also my career. I only wish it were more so.
15
The Interests of the Great Mass
If I ran for president of the United States, you’d be lucky. Just as if you ran for president, I would be lucky. This country needs to see some new faces in that arena. American politics needs some new blood, because the problem in our country today is one of choice. We don’t have enough men and women who would make good public servants who are willing to run for elective office as well as submerge themselves in the immorality of our current campaign system. You really do have to sell your soul, or a significant portion of it, to corporations, super PACs, and rich donors in order to win most statewide elections today. And that transaction is a big part of what is killing this country.