Who Is Whoopi Goldberg’s Baby Daddy?

Alvin just seemed to have dropped out of sight after the divorce. And neither Whoopi nor Alex has much, if anything, to say about him.

Born in the New York City projects, Whoopi struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and had a really tough time at school. She eventually dropped out of high school.

Then came the drugs. She tried many times to “get clean”, but she always backslid.

Then one day, she checked into a New York City rehabilitation center. She was assigned a counselor named Alvin Martin. They worked closely together. Whoopi finally got clean and sober, and a relationship reportedly developed between Alvin and Whoopi. They married in 1973.

But who is Alvin Martin and what part did he play in Whoopi’s life?

Getting Clean

In the early 1970s, the teenage Whoopi decided enough was enough. Addiction was ruining her life.

She said on The Howard Stern Show: “All of my friends from that time are dead. I cleaned subways… [and] all the money went to drugs, heroin, acid, whatever was there.”

Whoopi was young, homeless, and a hardcore addict. Some of her friends staged an intervention and pointed her in the direction of a rehab center and a counselor by the name of Alvin Martin.

After Whoopi checked into the rehab center, Alvin Martin became her counselor.

Next, she had to detox. It was a long hard process. Supervised by Martin, it took her 10 days to sober up, including several days just sitting on a bed. Martin was there with her every step of the way.

Together with her friends, Alvin Martin became Whoopi’s support system. She relied on him. She trusted him.

She and Alvin had long sessions, talking about her problems and doubts. He was, by all accounts, a funny and kind man. He was, for a time, her rock, her support system.

No one knows quite when it started. But at some point Whoopi and Alvin became lovers. One thing led to another and in 1972, a clean and sober Whoopi reportedly discovered she was pregnant. Alvin, ever the decent and responsible man, was determined to do right by his former patient. They were married and their daughter Alexandrea was born in May of 1973. Whoopi was 18-years-old when Alex came into this world. While Alvin continued to work at the rehab center, Whoopi reportedly was a stay-at-home mom.

A Failed Marriage

By 1979, the couple was assumingely divorced. Whoopi puts her hand up and admits she was to blame for the split. She has said she simply didn’t love Alvin, that she didn’t love any of her three husbands. Her number one priority was her daughter Alex.

Whoopi has admitted: “Look, people expect you to have a boyfriend. They expect you to get married. So I kept trying to do that, but I didn’t want to share information with somebody else. I didn’t want anybody asking me why I was doing what I was doing, or to have to make the other person feel better. But if you’re in a relationship, you have to do those things, and it took me a while to figure out that I didn’t want to.”

It is very telling that, while Whoopi’s mom Emma is pictured with baby Alex, there are no pictures of Alvin with the baby to be found. It’s funny because Alex bears more of a resemblance to her father than her mother.

Alvin seems not to have loomed very large in Whoopi’s life. There are precious few pictures of Alvin and Whoopi around!

Alex, by the way, followed her mom into show business and is an actress and film producer.

Apparently, neither she nor Whoopi had much, if any contact with Alvin after the divorce. By that time, Whoopi, with Alex in tow, had moved to California to pursue her long-suppressed passion for stand up comedy and acting. She was living in poverty, scraping by on food stamps. She worked menial jobs, including gigs as a bricklayer and mortuary cosmetologist. It is clear that she received no help from Martin. That probably had more to do with her pride than anything else.

Whoopi eventually got into doing theater. That was where she was noticed by Steven Spielberg who ended up casting her in 1985’s The Color Purple. It was her break out role.

Alvin just seemed to have dropped out of sight after the divorce. And neither Whoopi nor Alex has much, if anything, to say about him.