Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  The studio was putting me up in a very nice hotel and giving me a per diem allowance as well, so the living was easy. It became even easier when Zezé pointed out that I could rent a furnished apartment, and she helped me find a great one, overlooking the beach. We’d befriended Peter, a young guy who was running the second unit camera on the movie, and he became my roommate. Peter and I split the rent, and I pocketed the extra money from my allowance and put it toward cocaine. My Brazilian friends would get it for me, and they got very good stuff. Everybody in Rio seemed to be doing coke—and drinking, except, ironically, for me. I didn’t drink because I knew, I can’t handle that. It’s not safe for me. I didn’t give a second thought to the effects of cocaine. In my mind, I’d found this thing that made me feel up and productive and creative, so what could be wrong with it? I had the cash to keep myself well supplied, and because I had a relatively small part in the movie, I had a fair amount of time off to enjoy it.

  It was a delicious few months. I had made a lifelong friend in Zezé—we’re still close to this day. We hung out with Peter and Zezé’s friend Paolo, a beautiful Brazilian boy, all the time, partying at our apartment, going to the beach, and exploring the city. It was easy to forget I was married—to the point that one night Peter and I ended up in bed. (We both recognized it was a mistake right away; it only happened that once.) I was having an adventure. I was gaining momentum in my career. And I had never felt so free.

  All that freedom—combined with my youth, not to mention the extra boost of bravado and heedlessness that cocaine gives you—led me to push the envelope. My character was supposed to hang glide in the movie, but because of an insurance issue the producers were insisting on a stunt double. But Peter was the second unit director, and I told him, “Come on, just let me do it.”

  It could have cost him his job; it could have put the movie at risk. It was an idea borne of drug-fueled recklessness, but it happened to work out. I slipped on the harness and ran right off the edge of a cliff over the Atlantic Ocean. The view was unbelievable.

  Chapter 9

  Even as I was acting out in Brazil, I was having a kind of epiphany about honesty. The person I wanted to be didn’t lie. When I got back from Rio, I was determined to be completely truthful with Freddy, to take responsibility for what I’d done and what I wanted. I came clean with my husband about what had happened with Peter and told him I thought our marriage wasn’t working.

  He was angry. And I understood. I had failed him in our marriage; I wanted to do the right thing in our divorce, so I agreed to pay him alimony for a year. He wasn’t alone for long, though. Early in our relationship, he’d given guitar lessons to make extra money, and one of his students was a friend’s fourteen-year-old sister. I noticed right away that Freddy and Renee had a connection—despite his being more than twice her age—and one afternoon I told them, “If anything ever happened to Freddy and me, I bet you two would get together.” Renee was embarrassed, and he was furious with me for upsetting her at the time, but as soon as Freddy and I broke up, they got together, and they’re still a couple to this day.

  The divorce had been my idea, but I still felt adrift after we split. A friend lent me his apartment in Marina del Rey until I found a place of my own, and that’s where I camped out. I turned twenty-one in that apartment, alone.

  I wasn’t really close with anyone from General Hospital, where I’d returned to work off the remainder of my contract after I got back from Brazil. I took a second leave from my job there to do another movie, but it fell through. By then, General Hospital had already written me out of the upcoming story line. Suddenly, I didn’t have anything to distract me from myself.

  I started drinking again. It was a really dark time for me. The self I presented to the world was the same it had always been—upbeat, confident, daring. I bought a Kawasaki motorcycle and sped around Los Angeles without a helmet. I didn’t even have a license for the bike.

  My appetite for cocaine had escalated into a dependency, and though I would never have called myself an addict, that’s what I had become. I got some of my cocaine from a dentist, so it was really good stuff, and when that was unavailable, I got my coke through my business manager. It seems incredible to me now that the person advising me on my finances never once drew my attention to all the money I was spending on drugs, but then again, he was using them, too. I got out of that arrangement with him eventually, but not before I’d blown through most my money.

  Fortunately, I landed a lead part in No Small Affair, a romantic teen comedy Columbia Pictures was distributing. I played a young nightclub singer, and Jon Cryer played the nineteen-year-old photographer who falls in love with her, in his first movie role. Jon fell for me in real life, too, and lost his virginity to me while we were making that movie. It pains me to think of how callous I was with his feelings—that I stole what could have been such an important and beautiful moment from him. I was sort of losing it right then, and I was definitely not in a place to take care of someone else’s feelings. I started to do some seriously self-destructive things during that period—I remember waking up not knowing where I was, thinking, Am I supposed to be at work in an hour?, and then having to call someone and ask to be picked up. It’s all a blur.

  Craig Baumgarten, a studio executive at Columbia, took me under his wing while we were making No Small Affair. He was going away for a while, and he offered to let me stay in his house. I was very wary when he invited me to come see the place, but in a great step forward for me, I didn’t sleep with him, and he didn’t push me to. I think he was genuinely fond of me, but he was crazy to let me stay in his very grown-up house in Beverly Hills in my state, and even crazier to give me the keys to his wife’s Jaguar. “Use the car,” he said. “It’s just sitting there.” And so I did, excited to be cruising around Los Angeles in style. Somehow, I didn’t wreck it, thank God.

  I went hunting for my own place. Moving from house to house in rapid succession had felt familiar in the worst way, and I wanted a real home. I found the perfect tiny two-bedroom on Willoughby with a black-and-white linoleum floor in the kitchen. The front of the house was completely hidden by a fence covered with winding vines, so it was very private, and the inside was immaculate. I loved it there. I never got a couch for the living room, and the second bedroom had just a mattress on the floor, but the house gave me something to put my energy into, as well as a sense of independence and grounding. It was the first place I ever owned.

  True to form, within weeks of my move, my mother showed up at my doorstep with her new young boyfriend and Morgan. She needed a place for them to stay while she looked for an apartment, she told me. She seemed worse than ever. They crashed in my tiny house for a few weeks; I knew if I let them stay any longer, I’d never get them out. I wouldn’t have minded if it was just Morgan. (And neither would my girlfriends: he was sixteen and growing into his looks.) But he was a teenager now, no longer a fragile little boy. In fact, he was in military school back in Roswell; he had decided he needed some structure and sanity in his life—which I understood too well.

  Time’s up, I told Ginny: you’ve got to go.

  I GOT A call from my agent, Hildy Gottlieb, saying Sony wanted me to audition for a new movie by John Hughes, who had made a big name for himself directing a series of hits about teenagers: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science. The morning of the audition, I got on my motorcycle and took off for the studio, where Hughes was holding a general casting session. I did all right in the audition, but it seemed like Hughes wasn’t impressed, and I didn’t think I’d get a part.

  I was walking down the hall after the audition when I heard footsteps hurrying after me. “Miss, miss,” a voice was calling, but I didn’t stop, assuming there had to be some other “miss” this guy was pursuing. I was halfway down the stairs when he caught up to me, panting.

  “Are you an actress?” he asked.

  “Who wants to know?” I said.

  “Joel Schumacher,” he replied
, “my boss.”

  Joel would recount this story over and over again for years to come. Vanity Fair quoted him in a 1991 article as saying he’d seen “this flash running down the stairs—she had long black hair down to the waist, she was incredible-looking, like a young Arabian racehorse.” So he sent his assistant after me and had me come in to read for the part of Jules, in his new film with Columbia Pictures, St. Elmo’s Fire.

  Jules was, fittingly, a party girl who was developing a cocaine habit. She was one of seven recent graduates of Georgetown University who were trying to find their way in the adult world and would meet regularly at a bar called St. Elmo’s. It had that dynamic energy about it, like it was really going to be something. And, in the wake of the John Hughes movies that were so popular, it felt like a whole new generation was coming into focus on-screen. St. Elmo’s Fire would star Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Mare Winningham, Andrew McCarthy, and me.

  Memory—especially memory clouded by drugs—is a funny thing. In his own memoir, Rob suggests that we had some kind of hot-and-heavy romance; I can vaguely recall one ill-advised late night together, but I’m grateful to him for the complimentary descriptions of our youth. In truth, I liked all my costars and remain close to some of them today, but the person who stands out from this period is, of course, Emilio.

  I met Emilio the day we were each having our screen tests, and we started talking right away. He had a quiet confidence, which was very attractive to me—he seemed so grounded—and he had a great sense of humor, too. I loved his looks: his sand-colored hair and piercing blue eyes, the lovely structure of his face and his chiseled features. As rehearsals got under way, we began to hang out.

  But Emilio was a very disciplined person; he consumed alcohol like a normal person, and he didn’t smoke or take drugs. I kept that side of myself out of his sight. Zezé had moved to L.A. and was living with me now, and we did a lot of coke together. Actually, I did a lot more than she did: at my peak I was going through an eighth of an ounce every two days by myself.

  I guess there were rumors about my partying, because one day when I was at the studio having a fitting in wardrobe, Joel Schumacher suddenly appeared in the room. “If I hear of you having even one beer, you’re fired,” he announced in a loud voice in front of all the others. Then he turned on his heel and walked out. I felt like I had been punched. For him to dress me down in front of other people was demeaning and released such an immediate flood of shame that I felt physically sick.

  Soon after that incident, I got a call from Craig Baumgarten, who had lent me his house and was still kind of keeping an eye on me, at least partly because he had vested professional interest in St. Elmo’s working out. “This is what you’re going to do,” he instructed me mysteriously but firmly. “There’s a place in Redondo Beach, and unless you’re dead or dying, you’re going to show up there tomorrow. They’re expecting you.” I wasn’t sure exactly what this place was, but he gave me the address. I knew he was serious when the assistant I’d just hired told me I had an appointment scheduled for the next morning and that she was going to take me there herself; he’d called her, too.

  I had already planned dinner that night with my friend Tim Van Patten, whom I’d met shooting the pilot for a TV show that never went anywhere, and a friend of his at a sushi restaurant on Melrose. At first I was careful with my drinking—no hard alcohol, that was my rule—but as I watched Timmy and his friend doing shots, I thought, What the hell.

  One drink led to another, and then another at the next bar. I was joking with Tim about the effects of alcohol versus cocaine when I laughingly heard myself say, “I’m a drug addict,” as if it were a big joke. But it didn’t feel like a joke. I had never said those words before or admitted that to myself and suddenly I stopped laughing and started to cry. “No, I really am,” I told him. It was the truth.

  He must have gotten me home because I ended up on the bathroom floor, where Zezé found me drunk and writhing like a crazy person. “There’s a demon inside me, and I have to get it out!” I told her. Zezé managed to talk me down and get me safely into bed, but she must have been terrified.

  When I woke up the next morning, I remembered the appointment. Without even thinking, I went straight to look for whatever cocaine was left, and that’s what I had for breakfast. My assistant picked me up and took me to the address in Redondo Beach, which turned out to be a hospital. I clearly remember going up in the elevator and walking down a long corridor toward a sign that read: ALCOHOL REHABILITATION CENTER.

  My gut reaction was, “No. That’s for my mom. I’m a drug addict.” But I’d been ordered to report to rehab unless I was dying, and though I might have wanted to be at that moment, what I wanted even more was to protect my career.

  REHAB WAS STILL very fringe in 1984. The Betty Ford clinic, in many ways the prototype for the industry, had opened only two years before. Many of the people in my rehab in Redondo Beach had been drinking their whole lives and had decades of horror stories to share. I didn’t have that long a track record: I was only twenty-one, and had been wrestling with alcohol issues off and on for three years, and with cocaine for maybe two. That didn’t mean my dependency was minor, though. When the head of admission told me their program lasted thirty days I was aghast. Thirty days! That was just impossible.

  “We’re starting to shoot a movie in sixteen days,” I said.

  She asked me, “What’s more important? The film or your life?”

  “The film!” I told her, and I meant it.

  “There is no film if you have no life,” she pointed out. “I’d like to put you in a bed right now.” I felt like I might jump out of my skin. I told her I had to go to the bathroom. Inside the stall, I rummaged through my pockets for a used vial of coke to scavenge one last hit. Then I went back to the counselor’s office and told her, “I cannot not do this film. It’s all that I’ve got.”

  I don’t know if there was something in the way I said it, but she studied my face for a minute and then said, “Let me make a call. But at least stay tonight.”

  The clinic staff clearly assumed I was going to be admitted for the duration because there was already a bag waiting for me, filled with all the stuff I could possibly need to move in for a month, which I guess they’d had my assistant pull together. Their approach was very clever: you couldn’t say, “I can’t start right now because I need such and such” because anything you could think of had already been provided. So you were kind of backed into a corner.

  The next day I was called back to the admissions office, where I found Joel Schumacher and the two producers of the movie. It hadn’t occurred to me that they were behind all this. What could it matter to them if they had me in their film? First of all, I was nobody. This was only my third studio movie. And, what’s more, there were seven of us in the cast—what difference did I really make? But they had apparently met to discuss the situation because there was a negotiated plan in place. I could start the film with just fifteen days of sobriety if I completed the list of requirements that are usually done in thirty. When I left, there had to be a counselor with me 24/7 for the duration of the filming.

  To this day, I see this as some version of divine intervention. If I’d had to give up the movie and go through the program to get sober for myself, I doubt I would have done it. I just didn’t value myself enough for that. But with the film at stake, and this enormous show of support from Craig Baumgarten, Joel Schumacher, and his colleagues, who I didn’t want to let down, I had something much bigger than me to fight for. And so I did.

  I did absolutely everything that was asked of me. I checked every requirement off the list. I cooperated. I worked hard. I went to group counseling and one-on-one counseling, and I went to AA meetings and accepted the twelve steps into my life. There was even a family session, which my mother and brother attended. I got to vent my grievances at Ginny, but even in this environment it was clear she wasn’t capable of mothering me. So I just went through th
e motions and got it over with. It’s sort of funny to think about me apologizing for any problems I might have caused her because of my addiction.

  Fifteen days later, I walked out with my wonderful, caring counselor and went straight to rehearsal. True to the conditions of my release from the rehab, she stayed with me day and night while we filmed at various locations in Washington, D.C., and around the campus at the University of Maryland, which we pretended was Georgetown. She was a lovely woman, a maternal presence that I hadn’t had since I’d lived with my grandmother in Roswell. Once again, I had that precious, reassuring feeling that someone was looking out for me, that someone cared about how I was doing. Schumacher—to his credit—just moved on, focusing on me as a professional, which was the most helpful thing he could possibly have done. Obviously, both Craig and Joel did an amazingly generous thing by supporting me while I got sober.

  Sobriety was still anonymous back then—no one was admitting to, let alone trumpeting, going to rehab, and I did my best to keep a low profile and just be part of the group as we were shooting. Besides the seven of us, there were other young actors—around that set and at the parties we had when we finished shooting—who had been in films with different members of the cast: Molly Ringwald, Matt Dillon, Sean Penn and his brother Chris. We were dubbed the Brat Pack in the press, a term I hated, because it implied we were all a bunch of spoiled, partying, entitled juvenile delinquents. I’d never been anything even close to spoiled, and I certainly wasn’t partying.

  Once I made the decision to get clean and sober, staying that way was actually easy. The negotiation was over: I never wanted to experience that moment of waking up and trying to remember what I had done the night before again. I didn’t want any more of that embarrassment. I wanted to be present, not dulled by alcohol or sped up by cocaine, and I dedicated myself fully to the process. I’d always been interested in spirituality but felt uninspired by organized religion. Once I saw that the principles of AA were centered on trusting God “as we understand Him,” I knew I had found a point of connection.