I follow Page 6 in the New York Post pretty devotedly. I’ve never been one for the supermarket tabloids & gossip mags, with their overriding fixation with pregnancy, but Page 6 usually gets is just right, with embarrassing celebrity stories, blind items that Amy & I occasionally suss out, and a seeming moratorium on Paris Hilton items.
I don’t link to the items because they go dead within a week, and it always makes me sad to look over blog-archives and find dead links. I’ve got issues.
Anyway, in the past week, Page 6 raised an interesting question in the VM household. See, a few months ago, there was an item about Stephen Baldwin’s residence in near(ish)by Nyack, NY. Baldwin, a born-again Christian, so objected to a local porno store, he began writing down the license plates of cars in its parking lot, for publication in the local paper.
Last week, the column reported that Baldwin’s moving out of Nyack for another town in Westchester. The thing is, the item referred to him as “the least-famous Baldwin.”
Well, we thought, it’s pretty easy to say that Alec‘s the best known, but what about the rest? I know Daniel Baldwin best from his crack-binge blowout a few years ago, but Amy sez he’s pretty well known from being on Homicide.
But Billy? More famous than Stephen? Sure, he’s married to Chynna Phillips, but could we really say that Billy’s Dagwood Bumstead haircut in Sliver outranked the “Oswald was a pussy” line from The Usual Suspects?
Fortunately, a week later, they followed up with an item referring to Stephen as “[t]he third-most famous of the acting Baldwin brothers,” which sounds better. Unfortunately, the item was about how Baldwin’s actually moving because he’s stuck for cash.
All of which gets me to this weekend’s movie revelation: The Cooler. Sure, William H. Macy was great as a down-on-everybody’s-luck casino jinx, and Maria Bello was flat-out great to look at, but Alec Baldwin was absolutely fantastic as the casino owner. I was amazed at how he devoured the role without playing up the “Look at me! I’m Alec Baldwin!” face. He seemed to revel in the past-his-prime-ness of the character.
He’ll always be the most famous of the Baldwins to me. Even if Page 6 reports more terrible details of his custody fights with Kim Basinger.
