by Demi Moore
Bruce flipped his baseball cap off to salute me when our eyes met, and I guess he’d forgotten he’d stashed a joint behind each ear because they went flying into the night.
HE CALLED ME first thing the next morning. He asked what I was doing that day, and I told him I was driving to Orange County to see George and DeAnna. “I’ll go with you,” he told me, to my surprise. I wasn’t entirely sure this was a good idea. My dad’s sister Mary was visiting them, and she was a true character. “My kooky aunt is going to be there, and it’s a very small house,” I said. “Are you sure?” He was sure.
Again, I was impressed. This was a guy who was going to spend two hours in a car just for the dubious pleasure of meeting my weird relatives. He was willing to put himself out of his comfort zone, and he was doing something that was purely for me. Honestly, I found it shocking.
His house, which was right on the beach, was on the way, so I went by to pick him up. All of his buddies were still there from the night before—they traveled as a pack around Los Angeles, partying, hanging out, and meeting girls. They were like the eighties version of Entourage, but they were good-spirited and fun: they used to call themselves the New Rat Pack. I met John Goodman that morning, and Woody Harrelson, who was on Cheers at the time, both of whom would become good friends. Bruce waved goodbye to his posse, and off we went.
It was a fun ride. It’s hard not to feel good when someone showers you with that much attention. I think Bruce saw me as some kind of angelic savior when we first met, I don’t really know why—maybe partly because I was sober and not a party girl. He hung on my words and didn’t bat an eye once we got to Orange County and he met my nutty aunt. “We’re from Neeeeeew Mexico!” was the first thing out of her mouth. Bruce just rolled with it. George and DeAnna got a kick out of him; he was cut from the same cloth as the men in our family: charismatic, mischievous, with a little twinkle in his eye. A charming ladies’ man with a great sense of humor, like my father and my granddaddy (much more so than I realized at the time).
The next night he took me downtown to see a Shakespeare play that John Goodman was in (if I remember correctly, most of the New Rat Pack were with us on that date). Basically, from that first meeting on, Bruce and I were rarely apart. He made me feel like a princess; he lived large—and soon I did, too. Bruce came from nothing, and now that he’d made it, he wanted the best of everything, and plenty of it. We would go to a restaurant, and he would order three entrées and have a few bites of each, just because he could. He loved to gamble. He relished the power that money has to wipe away obstacles. Years later, at three in the morning, when one of the babies was crying, he would lean over and whisper, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you change that diaper.”
Bruce, having worked in Manhattan at Café Centro, which was a real hot spot at the time, knew all the “in” restaurants and clubs, and he enjoyed exposing me to a world of perks that was totally new. Not long after we met we flew on a private plane to see his band perform at a fairground—it was my first time on a small jet. A girl could get used to this, I thought.
A few weeks later, he took me to London. It was a whirlwind, my first time in Europe. I’d never had jet lag before, and when we went to dinner our first night, I felt like I’d been run over by a truck and didn’t understand what was wrong with me. And the paparazzi in London were on a whole different level—for one thing, they were allowed in the airport. They were waiting for us when we landed, and they didn’t let up the entire time we were in England. I’d never experienced anything like it before. We were stalked, hounded—I remember one time a photographer literally ran down the street after Bruce. He had the ability to just barrel on, but I would have been happier to stay at the hotel. I was totally unprepared for that creepy, besieged feeling. It gets a little easier when you know what to expect, but then? I was shell-shocked. To be honest, when we got on the plane to go home, I was relieved.
It was a taste of what was to come. One day not long after we returned from London, we were hanging out by the beach at Bruce’s house with his friends, and I took his Jet Ski out for a spin. Someone with a long lens got pictures of me in a bathing suit—looking fat—which then, of course, became a major topic in the tabloids, confirming all my worst fears and stoking the excruciating fire of my eating disorder. I was miserable, but Bruce insisted that he thought everything about me was beautiful: he wrapped my fear and anxiety in his love.
When Bruce and I got together, our traumas met. Bruce had had a difficult childhood: he was a stutterer, which had the positive side effect of getting him into acting. For some reason, kids who stutter often find themselves freed of their speech impediment when they are onstage, reciting lines instead of coming up with words in real time. So Bruce and I had both grown up performing, role-playing for survival.
He was the oldest of four, the son of a very hardworking immigrant mother who was never appreciated by her husband. They divorced, and years later, the dad mellowed, as men tend to when they get older. (You know the kind: they’re assholes when they’re young, then they get sweet when they age; it’s the mother who seems bitter and unpleasant by comparison, but he’s the one who made her that way.)
I imagine it would be difficult to see the wounded kid under Bruce’s roguish exterior if you didn’t know him. But believe me, it’s there. I understood that about him immediately. We went all in, right away—talking about how badly we both wanted to have kids, our own family. We had a shared vision for our future. I think we were both longing to fill the emptiness, that sense we’d both always had that something big was missing.
Bruce was on hiatus from Moonlighting when we first met, and I had just finished making The Seventh Sign. We were able to spend almost all our time together until he started shooting an action movie he was really excited about: Die Hard. There was a lot of buzz about the film, in large part because it was reported that Bruce got paid $5 million to star in it. I went to see him on set, which turned out to be terrifying. He nearly died jumping off a five-story garage, just making it onto the airbag below when he was blown off course by a scripted explosion. (He laughed about it. I didn’t.)
When he got a weekend off from filming, he took me to Vegas on another private jet to see a fight—he loved boxing. It was Chavez versus Rosario, and it was hideous. Rosario’s trainer had to stop the fight. I don’t mind boxing, but I don’t like a bloodbath.
We were moving to the gambling tables when Bruce said, “I think we should get married.” We’d been joking about it on the flight there, but suddenly it didn’t seem like he was kidding. “I think we should get married,” he said again. I was speechless. He, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop talking: “Come on, let’s do it! Let’s do it.” I took a deep breath and said, “Okay let’s do it.”
I got pregnant on my wedding night, November 21, 1987, at the Golden Nugget. (Yes: Vegas. Pregnant. You can take the girl out of Roswell, but apparently you can’t take Roswell out of the girl.)
We decided to have a real wedding about a month later, and that became a huge production. It was TriStar’s gift to us: they understood the once-in-a-lifetime publicity opportunity they had on their hands. Bruce was on the verge of transforming from TV heartthrob into full-on international movie star, and they had high hopes for me, too, after About Last Night was a major hit. Our second wedding was as lavish and over the top as our first one was ad hoc. It was held on the soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot, and they borrowed a staircase from Designing Women so I could make a grand entrance into the “chapel,” where we had set up traditional church-style seating. Little Richard performed the ceremony. (“DahMEE, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, whether he live in a big mansion on the hill or a little tiny apartment?”) Annie Leibovitz was the photographer. The bridesmaids wore black and entered with the groomsmen singing “Bruno’s Getting Married,” written for the occasion by Bruce’s good friend Robert Kraft. Afterward, we went to a second soundstage for the reception, which had been don
e up with palm trees in the style of the Copacabana. It should have been a blast, one of the great, shining days of my life. But in truth it was overwhelming. Both of Bruce’s parents came—the first time they’d been in the same room since they’d divorced—George and DeAnna were there, of course, and my grandmother flew in from New Mexico with her beau, Harold (though when I first told her I had gotten together with Bruce, she was worried because she’d read in the tabloids he was a wild party boy). My mom came, too, for better or worse.
Ginny made a scene, of course, while she was in town for the wedding. She was staying at my house, and Bruce and I were at his place on our (second) wedding night, when the phone rang at two a.m. It was the police, calling to report a disturbance. I honestly can’t recall the details—there were so many incidents like this they all blur together in my memory—but suffice it to say that Ginny was wasted and had managed to start a fight with my neighbors, a fight dramatic enough to require cops to intervene. I was furious at her for failing, just this once, to hold it together for my sake.
Bruce grasped the deal with my mom right away, and understood that where Ginny was concerned, the more boundaries we put in place, the better. Very soon, I would need a model for how to be a mother, and while I continued to hold out false hope that someday, somehow, she’d step up, that obviously wasn’t something I could count on.
RUMER GLENN WILLIS was born on her due date, August 16, 1988, in Paducah, Kentucky, where Bruce was shooting a movie called In Country. I wanted the exact opposite experience to the one my mom had: I wanted to feel every sensation, to be completely present and conscious for every moment of the delivery, no matter how painful. I had to switch doctors at the last minute to find one who appreciated my approach: “Same with my cows,” he assured me. “They never need episiotomies.” Rumer spent the first half hour of her life alone with just Bruce and me in the hospital bed, as we both fell madly in love with our daughter. Then I got up, took a shower, and we left the hospital.
She was named after the British author Rumer Godden, whose name I came upon in a bookstore one day while I was having trouble coming up with the perfect, one-of-a-kind name for my first baby. I had loved being pregnant. The whole experience was wonderful from beginning to end. It didn’t hurt that Bruce was constantly telling me how beautiful I looked for nine months.
Being a mother felt totally natural. It’s one of the few things I can confidently say I was innately good at. Nurturing Rumer, having someone to love who loved and needed me right back, unconditionally, exactly as I was, without any kind of performance, was euphoric. It would be over two years before I left Rumer for even a single night—two years of breastfeeding her.
Even my messed-up relationship with my own mother seemed transformed by the birth of my daughter: Ginny came and spent a week with us after Rumer was born, and I can’t remember ever having a nicer time together. It was almost like she, too, was able to shut out all the outside things in her life that weren’t working and devote herself totally to this experience. She fussed over the baby and took lots of photographs—did all the things a normal grandmother would do. By the time she left, I felt more like Ginny and I were mother and daughter than I had since I was very small. Sometimes I wonder if I should have invited her to live with us and take on the role of full-time grandmother—if it would have redirected her life and given her the sense of purpose, security, and fulfillment that she needed so badly.
I was twenty-five. I had a lot more maturity under my belt than Ginny did when she had me at eighteen, but I was still young. Life had bounced from one enormous event to the next in a very rapid succession. One minute I was planning my wedding; the next I was shopping for baby clothes. Bruce and I were becoming the “It” couple; we had the blessing of a beautiful, healthy little girl, and we had more money than either of us knew to wish for as kids.
I know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.
Chapter 12
Soon after we met, Bruce had bought a property in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, in a town called Hailey. He’d broken his collarbone in a skiing accident in nearby Sun Valley, and while he was hanging around recuperating, he fell in love with the quiet, the big sky, and the indifference the locals seemed to display toward anything Hollywood-related. I loved it there right away, too. We completely renovated the original house—only the front door remains—and ever since I’ve spent as much time in Idaho as possible, especially with my kids. It became my oasis, the place where I felt more at home than I ever have anywhere else—I still do. There is something about being surrounded by the Sawtooth Mountains, where the air is clear and cool, and there’s almost no noise at all except for the fast current of the Big Wood River, that soothes me and gives me a sense of peace. Rumer was only twelve days old when we took her to Hailey for the first time. The early weeks and months of her life there were wondrous for me.
But four months after that great visit with my mother and the baby, I got a call from the police: Ginny had overdosed on pills and had been rushed to the hospital. She was okay, but a few months after that, I got another call: she had been arrested for drunk driving. She was obviously coming apart, so I checked her into rehab.
The first thing she did when she got out was to sell a story to a tabloid about her recovery . . . and our troubled relationship.
I was furious. Understand, I hated the tabloids. Having paparazzi chase you around probably doesn’t sound like that big a deal. Before they were a part of my life, I’m sure I would have shrugged and said, “So what?,” if I read about the combination of horror, terror, and rage an actress felt just because a bunch of guys were always taking her picture. But try to think of it like this: You know that wonderful feeling you get once in a while when you have an hour to yourself and none of your kids or clients or parents need anything from you and you don’t have to answer the phone and you can just walk out your front door—or pull out of your driveway—and blend into the world? When the tabloids are stalking you, those moments never, ever happen. Having paparazzi always waiting to pounce on you like wild dogs—unreasonable, menacing, solely interested in what they can take—can start to feel invasive on an almost existential level.
That’s a long way of saying I asked Ginny not to do that again. I tried to explain what a violation it was to share details (and falsehoods) about my childhood with publications that are in the business of lying, sensationalizing, and exploiting. Ginny agreed, but then she started selling pictures of me instead. Obviously, she didn’t quite get the larger point. I have a copy of one of the letters from her “agent,” pitching the rights to some pictures of me to magazines in Italy, Australia, Germany, Spain, Britain, and France: “Demi Moore’s mother has finally opened the family album to uncover her superstar daughter’s photo secrets!” it says, and then describes eighteen never-before-published pictures, including one from my wedding to Freddy, which the letter claims I had “tried to hide.” It also mentions a photo from my wedding with Bruce, a snapshot of Bruce and me in a Jacuzzi, and a picture of me as a kid in a hospital bed, captioned “the day she nearly died.” Ginny and her agent were asking for ten thousand dollars per country.
I persuaded her to hold back a picture of Rumer she was going to send in, and the photo of Bruce in the hot tub, but I couldn’t talk her out of selling the rest of them, which gutted me. What she was doing for money was feeding something I spent a tremendous amount of time and energy keeping out of our lives. To this day, I still make extra efforts to think about where I’m going and what access the paparazzi will have and what my comfort level with that is. If I take that caution and multiply it a hundredfold, that’s how I felt when Rumer—and later her sisters—were little. I wanted to protect my daughters from everything invasive and ugly; it was one of the main reasons we ended up raising our girls in Idaho, not California. I think it’s one of the best de
cisions Bruce and I ever made.
The fact that Ginny wouldn’t recognize that what she was doing was a complete betrayal; she knew full well how I felt about those magazines and the lies they had printed about me in the past.
I know: the only thing that’s surprising about all this is that I was—yet again—surprised. Children are hardwired to trust their parents. It’s amazing just how long it can take to override that wiring.
I HAD DECIDED that after my pregnancy, my body would be better than ever. I looked at it as an opportunity to hit the reset button. Within three months, I’d lost all the pregnancy weight, plus another eight pounds. I was invited to host Saturday Night Live right around then, and the writers actually got me to base my whole opening monologue around the line, “I had a baby just twelve weeks ago, and look at me!” I was never comfortable with that conceit, but at that time I didn’t have the confidence to push back. They were like, “Trust us, it’s going to work!” And it could have, if I’d really been able to own it and commit to the bit. I just didn’t know how to embrace saying “Don’t I look great?” enough for it to be funny. Performing that monologue was torture. It was terrifying enough getting in front of a live audience and essentially doing stand-up comedy, and honestly, I was afraid the joke was on me. All the negative talk in my head really stole that experience from me, and I didn’t fully inhabit my time with the amazing performers who were in the cast that season: Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Nora Dunn, and Al Franken. SNL moves fast—I remember at the end of the show, when we were saying good night to the audience, that’s when I finally felt, Okay, I got this now. Let’s do the whole thing over again for real!
