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.

It seems like most of the media has turned the Katie Holmes-Tom Cruise story into one of Scientology being the cause of the divorce, particularly as the cult–as it now called by Rupert Murdoch–affects six year old Suri. But if Cruise insists publicly that Suri be raised as Scientologist, and Katie objects, the group’s leader David Miscavige may tell Cruise to let it go. Why? Holmes, more than anyone, could shine a glaring light on the inner workings of the sect. Once the divorce really gets going, and affidavits are filed, depositions are taken, things could get nasty for the secretive group.

For one thing, Holmes could finally describe what happened when she met Cruise in April 2005, where she was for an unexplained 16 days before surfacing in Rome with him and announcing she was in love. That was on April 27, 2005. Prior to approximately April 12th, Holmes didn’t know Cruise. Her reps sent her to L.A. for a meeting with him about “Mission Impossible 3” that may have taken place at the Scientology Centre in Hollywood.

From then on, Holmes cut off her family and friends. When she finally spoke, she was– as I reported then exclusively–monitored closely by Scientologist Jessica Feshbach Rodriguez, whose family are heavy Scientology donors. Feshbach even spoke for Holmes during a magazine interview that summer. For most of the time until they married in November 2006, Holmes was never alone without someone from Scientology. But all of her prior friends–including actress Rebecca Gayheart, and her ex castmates from “Dawson’s Creek”–were banished.

Inside the world of Tom Cruise, Holmes presumably saw everything there is to know about Scientology. One movie director told me in 2006 how Cruise’s Beverly Hills house–in which his sister, her three children, and Cruise’s mother all lived–was filled with people working through the night on various Scientology projects. “At midnight,” the director said, ” the house was lit up.”

Holmes would also have vital information about Cruise’s two older children, Connor and Isabella, and how they were raised apart from their mother, Nicole Kidman. Years ago, there was a public outcry when Bella Cruise’s name turned up on a list of Scientology “completions” when she was very young. It was obvious she was being indoctrinated. The children were home schooled by Cruise’s sisters, who joined the group, as well as his mother, who left her husband and her life in Marco Island, Florida when Suri was born, at Cruise’s demand, to come watch his new wife and daughter.

Cruise and his lawyers will have to decide if the gamble is worth it–that anything could come out, that all of it could impact Cruise’s career, and is it worth it. It’s probably not. As it is, former Scientologists have written books, and several high profile members have left or openly criticized the group including Lisa Marie Presley, director Paul Haggis, and actor Jason Beghe.

TMZ cooked up a whole story on Sunday about Katie Holmes possibly being under surveillance by Scientology. They denied it, of course, and I kind of believe them. The story of Tom Cruise, private eyes, and lawyers actually has more to do with Cruise and his personal team than with Scientology. Cruise’s two lawyers–Bert Fields and Dennis Wasser–had long histories with currently incarcerated private investigator Anthony Pellicano. The Pellicano stories should be legendary by now, and took in a lot of powerful people.

But when it concerns Cruise, Wasser, Fields and Pellicano the episodes concerned the last Cruise divorce, from Nicole Kidman. She and Cruise were each questioned by the FBI regarding Pellicano, which was reported widely. Pellicano’s in prison, but that doesn’t mean Wasser or Fields isn’t using an investigator in the Holmes case. Read this New York Times story: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/movies/MoviesFeatures/25fields.html?pagewanted=all or Google it yourself. http://tinyurl.com/85b6k57

Another lawyer who works for Cruise and with Fields, Ricardo Cestero, actually used to work for Pellicano.

As I wrote in 2006:

“But what most people don’t know is that before he went to law school and came to work for Fields, Cestero labored in the office of Anthony Pellicano as a private investigator. In fact, he was schooled at Pellicano’s very knee.
Ricardo P. Cestero graduated from Oberlin College in 1991. According to the Greenberg Glusker Web site, he got his law degree in 1997 from the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. This differs from the Martindale.com Web site, which has biographical info for all attorneys. Cestero graduated from law school there in 1999.
Either way, in the years between graduating college and getting his law degree, according to sources and reports, Cestero worked exclusively for Pellicano, who in turn worked for attorney Bert Fields. Fields has maintained throughout the Pellicano investigation that he knew nothing of the private detective’s activities and sanctioned nothing illegal.”

The original St. Patrick’s Chuch in Little Italy is right now having a mass that started at 5:30pm. The public was/is welcome. Then Mike Zimet’s security team will sweep everyone out for the Alec Baldwin wedding to Hilaria Thomas. There are guards everywhere, and metal blockades running up and down the narrow streets in front of the church. There’s a crowd at the back of the church, hoping to see Hilaria Thomas. There’s a small clutch of paparazzi in front, across the street, behind barricades. It’s 92 degrees outside, and threatening to rain. Inside the church there is no air conditioning. It will be the ‘hottest wedding of the year.’ There are nice white flowers in large sort of buckets within the entryway. There’s a box with black and silver laminated wrist bands–de riguer at a celebrity wedding. Maybe some people don’t get to go to the reception. There’s also a little tent inside the lobby, which might used as a ‘will call’ booth. There is no red carpet that is visible. They say two hundred people are expected at the church. The traffic will be backed up for miles on a Saturday night in Little Italy. No one seems to know where the reception is taking place, but it can’t be far away. Local pigeons are installed with video cameras for TMZ. (Just kidding, I think.) Along the street, people are eating gelato and shopping for shoes, unaware that a state event is about to take place. Mazel tov, as we say.