Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, on Taylor and Your Taxes)

“Please supply the following information and materials:

“1. Your income from last year.

“2. Taylor Swift’s income from last year.

“3. Instagram post of Taylor Swift laughing uproariously.”— Paul Rudnick, “Your Taxes,” The New Yorker, Feb. 2, 2015

Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, on Preschool Alec Baldwin)

“As Alec’s teacher, I can report that Alec pays careful attention to his personal cleanliness and grooming, especially regarding his hair, which he has repeatedly asked me to touch. For October’s show-and-tell, Alec brought in what he referred to as his ‘steely blue eyes.’ He stood in front of the entire class in silence for three minutes, and then asked, in his already surprisingly deep and raspy voice, ‘Am I turning you on?’ All the other children, including the boys, raised their hands. After another long pause, Alec smiled and said, ‘I thought so.’”—“Miss Kelli Schoopheimer,” Massapequa Elementary School teacher, as channeled in Paul Rudnick, “Shouts and Murmurs: Alec Baldwin’s Preschool Report Card,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2014

The second I saw the headline of this article on my Kindle, I began to laugh. As I read the rest of the piece, I had to stifle my guffawing in a doctor’s office. I wanted to use almost any passage from it in my “Quote of the Day,” but the piece appeared two months ago. When would I have the opportunity to write about Alec Baldwin again?

Not to worry. Whenever he gets around to writing his memoir (and that day can’t be that far off), the actor could do worse than use a play on words on a past Raymond Chandler title: “Trouble Was My Business.” The man with the “deep and raspy voice” never seems to have a problem finding trouble—it always finds him.

If you read his tweets, or his periodic pronouncements that he’s absolutely, finally done with someplace (America, under George W. Bush; New York, under whoever’s mayor), you get this image of one of those reluctant gunslingers (Gregory Peck, in The Gunfighter, or John Wayne, in The Shootist) forced to deal with someone again, whether he likes it or not. But, whereas Peck and Wayne rolled their eyes at yet one more young gun out to prove his manhood, Baldwin has to deal with another form of ambush: the 21^st century paparazzi.

That, or the police, as recounted in this blog post at The Gothamist. In the latest incident involving the actor, he was stopped by New York’s Finest for driving his bike against traffic on Fifth Avenue. Unable to produce ID upon request (and surely apoplectic that the officers, after all these years, had to even ask who he was), he appears to have gone into a rage, then been taken into custody for disorderly conduct.

Like millions, I’ve seen Baldwin’s superb comic turns on 30 Rock as well as his upteen guest-hosting appearances on Saturday Night Live—and, like a far more select audience, I’ve been lucky enough to see him onstage, in a 2006 Roundabout Theatre production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

I really wish, though, that he would save that vermouth-sounding voice of his for where it can do the most good: not just his acting gigs, but his “New York Philharmonic This Week” radio show. His self-regard has passed the point of being healthy, or even of Rudnick’s inspired satire. It’s now led him repeatedly and squarely into Anger Management Territory—and no good can come of that.

Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, Imagining Gwyneth’s Explanation for 2 Recent Titles)

“Did I campaign for my titles? Yes, I’ll be honest, because, as anyone who’s ever read my blog, Goop, which is a combination of ‘good’ and ‘poop,’ will tell you, I’m a firm believer in hard work and discipline. So, when I first heard rumors about the possibility of a People cover, I did start a whispering campaign. At parties and premières, I’d murmur to strangers, ‘Doesn’t Halle Berry look gorgeous? For her age?,’ or ‘Don’t you love Charlize Theron’s cropped, boyish hairdo? Wouldn’t she be popular in prison?,’ or ‘I applaud Kate Middleton for not worrying about gaining a few extra pounds during her pregnancy. Wait, what did you say? She’s only having one baby?’”—Paul Rudnick, channeling Gwyneth Paltrow’s explanation for being named “Most Beautiful” woman by People and “Most Hated” Celeb by Star Magazine, in “Shouts and Murmurs: Most Gwyneth!”, The New Yorker, May 13, 2013

Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, on Computer Passwords’ Security Questions)

“They should go negative. What’s your least favorite color, who’s your least favorite relative and who’s the last person on earth you would date? People would remember those questions, and they’d enjoy answering them far more.”—Writer Paul Rudnick, on security questions for those increasingly aggravating computer passwords, quoted in Jacob Bernstein, “It’s as Easy As 123!@S,” The New York Times, June 24, 2012

Quote of the Day (Nicol Williamson, Exerting Fatal Thespian Charm)

“Dear fellow, I know you’ve heard tattle, but don’t believe a word. I’m in top, fighting form. And I haven’t touched a drop in over a year.”—Actor Nicol Williamson, misleading playwright Paul Rudnick about his widely rumored misbehavior and all-around insanity, quoted in Paul Rudnick, “Personal History: I Hit Hamlet—Behind the Scenes at a Broadway Fiasco,” The New Yorker, Dec. 24, 2007

I think we can all guess what happens next—Paul Rudnick looks back at the table and notices “a brandy snifter, a wine bottle, and a beer mug, all of which had been recently emptied into Nicol.”

The unexpectedly painful—literally so—1991 collaboration between the playwright and the contemporary of fellow actor-hellraisers Burton, Harris, and O’Toole, I Hate Hamlet, was supposed to be a comedy, but staging it became a horror show. Reading Rudnick’s account of the proceedings, you almost want to grab him and yell, the way you might at one of the criminally stupid teens in Halloween and its increasingly formulaic ripoffs, “Run! Run for your life! Run now!”

Omnivorous reader that I am, I don’t always get around to reading everything I want. For years, I’ve clipped articles out of magazines and newspapers, promising myself to read them eventually. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

My rediscovery of Rudnick’s hilarious reminiscence came at an opportune point, giving me some much-needed chuckles at a time when I could use them. I’ve linked to the article in the hope that you, faithful reader, might also avail yourself of this humor-layaway plan.

“Crazy ain’t criminal,” Bob Bernhoft, one of Wesley Snipes’ attorneys, advised a jury during the actor’s trial on income-tax evasion charges. “If it were, half of Hollywood would be in prison.” The jurors evidently bought that concept, since they acquitted Snipes on felony charges, despite the fact that he paid no income tax on $38 million in income. (Don’t try the latter too-clever-by-half maneuver at home, folks.)

You can extend the range of the territory envisioned by Bernhoft across the continent to Broadway, and its essential truth remains. (Latest case in point: Megan Mullally’s self-destructive exit from the Roundabout’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart.) But Nicol Williamson—I’m not sure, outside of John Wilkes Booth, that you’re going to find a nuttier actor than this one.

Whenever film aficionados speak of George Cukor’s A Double Life—the 1947 drama that finally won the beloved matinee idol Ronald Colman a well-deserved Oscar—there’s a lingering feeling that its premise of an actor getting a wee bit too much into his role in Othello might be a tad…exaggerated.

Stuff and nonsense. The Bard represents a kind of Bermuda Triangle for the unwary actor—Hamlet, particularly so. Daniel Day-Lewis has concentrated on film rather than theater over the last two decades, especially after he walked off a National Theatre stage in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, convinced that, in place of the ghost of Hamlet's father, he was talking to his real father, Cecil Day-Lewis, who had been dead at that point for 17 years already.

But Williamson’s variety of madness leaves that far in its wake, like an ocean liner charging away from a huffing-and-puffing tugboat. And, no matter how intensely Winona Ryder, Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, or whatever other media-flavor-of-the-month might be covered, the British actor can regard them with a lofty disdain.

Theater fans will remember—admittedly, more and more vaguely, with the passage of the years—how Williamson, as the ghost of John Barrymore, in the attire of his most famous role, had literally stabbed co-star Evan Handler during swordplay.

Yet Rudnick’s retrospective will, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father might say, “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/ Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,” etc. with these other incidents:

* To get into the mood for the comedy’s séance scene, the cast held a real séance in Rudnick’s apartment—at the end of which the door opened a crack. Did “some cackling, chaos-seeking, heedless Barrymore imp” make an appearance, as Rudnick speculates? Well, do you have a better explanation for everything that happened afterward?

* The star allegedly propositioned the stage manager, then launched a campaign to get her fired.

* Williamson drove everyone insane with other inappropriate actions, this time affecting the performance-in-progress—e.g., sometimes offering audible advice to other actors while still onstage, other times slipping off when, as Barrymore’s ghost, he was supposed to be eavesdropping on the proceedings.

But one question has always troubled me: What on earth could have provoked to the incident that forced poor Handler from the show? I think I found the clue in one of Williamson’s brainstorms (delivered, of course, in a 3 am phone call to Rudnick): Why not eliminate Handler altogether and let Williamson handle his lines, too?

“Oh, I know just what you’re thinking,” Williamson tells the astonished Rudnick.“Of course I could play both parts easily, but Andrew [Handler’s character] is intended to be what, twenty-six years old? And you’re wondering, Will the audience accept me as twenty-six?”

Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, on New Jersey as Legal Defense)

“Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, It’s okay, I’m from New Jersey. I love New Jersey, because it’s not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in ‘Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I’m from New Jersey.”—Paul Rudnick, I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey (2009)