OK, your wife has just pulled a public exit, and taken your six year old daughter with her to a new apartment. Do you a) fly directly to New York from where you are –Iceland–to see the child or b) fly 3000 miles past New York to Los Angeles, to talk to your lawyers and your Scientology pals? Tom Cruise chose b)  yesterday even though he’s not actually divorced, has full parental rights, and many places to stay in New York. It’s not like he needs a friend’s couch to sleep on. Cruise owns an 8,000 square foot home here on West 12th St. He also is a regular customer at the Hotel Carlyle.

Cruise,too,  just stayed at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca when he was promoting “Rock of Ages.” There’s also a big Scientology center in the theater district. Plus, he not only needs lawyers in New York, but his own lawyers could have met him here. So what gives? Cruise hasn’t even seen Suri in almost three weeks (unless they Skype or do Face Time on iPhones).

But the press are lemmings. They pick up one story with no sources–usually from TMZ–and run with it. So today’s headlines are ‘Cruise flies home to LA alone on his 50th birthday.’ They’re also more worried about Katie Holmes being ‘stalked’ by mysterious, unknown spies– on Seventh Avenue, in building with a large supermarket, next to a big school, with two or three news vans parked outside and many other press people sitting on the sidewalk at the entrance–than ask any questions of their own.

It’s very depressing. So far neither Tom nor Katie has said a word, Holmes’s parents haven’t spoken, and not a single person is on the record about anything. But tons of “stories” have been launched. Not a single shred of fact has been included in any of them, including whether or not Katie will get any money from Tom in the divorce. (Harvey Levin of TMZ, who Alec Baldwin has fantasies of gutting like a fish, changes position on these things like a weathervane, or a puppet with unseen strings. Hilarious.)

Alec Baldwin’s on the cover of Vanity Fair this month and it’s a doozy. Anger-enhanced Alec doesn’t come off very well. One day after his wedding, his already harshly damaged image gets worse. Todd Purdum wrote the story and these are the extracts:

Baldwin’s friend and 30 Rock co-star Tina Fey describes what she’s dubbed his “Irish Negotiating Technique,” which, as she sees it, usually boils down to his saying, “They offered me more money and I told them to go fuck themselves.”

Lorne Michaels, a longtime friend and one of the producers of 30 Rock, puts it this way: “Most people find a way to get to do the thing that is better for them. He doesn’t.”

Baldwin, who recently got into an altercation with a Daily News photographer, is the first to admit he’s had a volatile past, acknowledging that he often “gave the Heisman” to people in Hollywood, sometimes “unreasonably” and “childishly.” When Purdum asks Baldwin where he thinks his anger comes from, the actor launches into a long description of the perversity of the industry he works in: “You know, Hollywood does draw some very strange characters, and then the power of Hollywood and what they can do with it becomes like a blood sport to them.”

Then he returned to the frustrations and injustices of his child-custody case. He outlined vivid fantasies of the gruesome ways in which he might have murdered his wife’s lawyer (“with a baseball bat”) or Harvey Levin, the TMZ producer who posted the embarrassing voice mail Baldwin left for his daughter: “I wanted to stick a knife in him and gut him and kill him and I wanted him to die breathing his last breath looking into my eyes..”

PS: You may think Baldwin’s anger is a new thing. But in 1990, he told writer Ryan Murph–yes, Ryan Murphy who now produces “Glee,” etc– for an article I commissioned, that Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg was “the eighth dwarf.” Baldwin was angry at Disney about the way he and Kim Basinger had been treated, he thought, on the movie “The Marrying Man.” Twenty two years later, not much has changed.