by Demi Moore
SOMETHING ELSE MOMENTOUS happened during that pregnancy. My agent called to say I was a “person of interest” for a part in A Few Good Men, which would star Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. “But you’ll have to audition for it,” he told me. “Would you be willing to do that?” We both knew that the director, Rob Reiner, could have simply cast me without an audition: I had done enough work at that point for him to see what I was like on-screen, and I had reached a certain level of success—once you’ve been in some big movies, you don’t usually get asked to audition. At the same time, I’d never had a problem with having to earn a part: it helped quiet the insecure voice in my head asking, Is it okay that I’m here?
I was seven months pregnant—enormous—when I waddled in to read with Tom Cruise for the part of Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway in front of Rob Reiner. I was nervous: Rob Reiner was a very well-respected director; Aaron Sorkin had written a great script; and I thought the world of Jack Nicholson and Tom—whom I’d read with four years earlier for the part of his love interest in Top Gun. I’d botched that screen test out of nerves, and the part went to Kelly McGillis. I was determined to do better this time, and I must have, because soon after that audition they offered me the part.
The first thing in my head was, I’m going to have to get in shape really fast. On paper, it worked: The baby was due in August. Rehearsals for A Few Good Men were to start in September. It would be tight, but I’d have a month to get myself back into movie shape after the baby was born.
I knew I needed to get—and stay—fit, even while I was pregnant, for this to work, so I hired a trainer. He actually ended up moving his family into our guesthouse in Idaho; he had a little boy around Rumer’s age, and they spent all summer playing together. My thirteen-year-old nephew Nathan, George and DeAnna’s oldest son, came, too, along with Morgan, who was carving out a career for himself in special effects, after completing his tour as a Marine in Desert Storm. We had some really nice time as a family that July, and I worked out with my trainer every day. First it was walks, then the walks turned into hikes. We started biking together in the mountains, and I must have been a sight, pumping away with my knees completely splayed out to make room for my belly.
We were at a Carole King charity concert the night my water broke, almost a month before the baby was due. It was only a partial break—enough to make a puddle around my feet. Everyone around me panicked, but the hospital was a short hop away and the doctor there turned out to be just as wonderful as the one who’d delivered Rumer in Kentucky. He had done a lot of volunteer work in South America and Africa and had dealt with plenty of emergency situations, enough to know that this wasn’t one. “I think you’re fine,” he said. “You should go on home.” Very few doctors would have allowed that because they would have been afraid of infection, but he was calm and told me, “Just watch out for a temperature and don’t take a bath.”
I didn’t go into full labor for two more days, and even then, the contractions were intermittent. I went to the hospital when they became steady, and the whole household came with me: Bruce, my nephew, my brother, Rumer, a babysitter, plus a friend of ours from Hailey. While I tried to kick-start things by pedaling away on the stationary bike in the physical therapy room, my cheering section was setting up camp, ordering pizza, and playing board games. The doctor finally said he didn’t think my water was going to break on its own—it hadn’t with Rumer, either—and at the very instant he broke the water, I went into hard labor.
Scout LaRue Willis was born on the 20th of July 1991, three and a half weeks early. I had read To Kill a Mockingbird while I was pregnant, and I named her after its brave young heroine.
VANITY FAIR HIT the stands soon after Scout was born, and it set off a firestorm. I was shocked, though the magazine’s editor, Tina Brown, evidently was not: anticipating the controversy the cover story would ignite, she had tucked the magazine in a white sleeve, which concealed my pregnant body from the neck down. Only my face showed, along with the cover line “More Demi Moore.”
Even with the sleeve, some newsstands refused to carry the magazine. People went insane about it. One camp called it disgusting pornography and accused me of exhibitionism. Another saw it as a liberating breakthrough for women. All I had meant to accomplish was to show that a pregnant woman could be beautiful and glamorous—that there didn’t have to be a disconnect between “sexy” and “mother,” especially when you consider that sex is what makes you a mother in the first place! I didn’t think I was making a political statement, I just thought I was portraying pregnancy the way I experienced it: as something lovely, natural, and empowering.
I received a lot of letters from women, many of whom identified themselves as feminists, thanking me for taking pregnancy out of the closet and showing it as a glorious part of being female. It’s hard to believe now when every celebrity proudly gets her picture taken with her “baby bump,” but at that point it really seemed revolutionary to a lot of people, and the reaction was overwhelming, both pro and con. To this day, I am probably more closely identified with that photograph than with any movie I’ve ever made. I’m very proud of it, truthfully, because it’s something I’ve done that really moved the needle culturally, whether I intended it to or not. The American Society of Magazine Editors voted it the second-best cover in half a century, the top spot going to another one of Annie’s photographs, picturing a nude John Lennon snuggling up to a fully clothed Yoko Ono and taken just five hours before Lennon was shot.
In 2011, on the twentieth anniversary of my pregnant cover, the art director George Lois, who designed all those legendary Esquire covers in the sixties—Muhammad Ali as the martyred Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows, Andy Warhol sinking into a tomato vortex in a Campbell’s Soup can—posted this on Vanity Fair’s website:
A truly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nanosecond. A glance at the image by photographer Annie Leibovitz that graced the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, depicting a famous movie star beautifully bursting with life and proudly flaunting her body, was an instant culture buster—and damn the expected primal screams of those constipated critics, cranky subscribers, and fidgety newsstand buyers, who the editors and publishers surely knew would regard a pregnant female body as “grotesque and obscene.” Demi Moore’s hand bra helped to elegantly frame the focal point of this startlingly dramatic symbol of female empowerment. To me, quite simply, it was a brave image on the cover of a great magazine—a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.
To help women love themselves and their natural shapes—that’s a remarkable and gratifying thing to have accomplished, particularly for someone like me who spent years doing battle with her body.
IF THE COVER and its repercussions exceeded my dreams, the article that accompanied it inside the magazine was my nightmare. The smart and strong cover photo was completely at odds with the devastating representation of me in that story: I was portrayed as selfish, egotistical, and pampered. A series of anonymous quotes claimed that I had gotten Ghost because I’d “married well,” and said that “being Mrs. Bruce Willis” had gone to my head—“Swelling it unmercifully.” There were complaints about the “entourage factor,” assertions that I was “catered to” on the set of The Butcher’s Wife, where the interview had transpired. I was a prima donna surrounded by sycophants, among whom was listed Rumer’s nanny—I was still nursing! “You try shooting a movie without help while you’re breastfeeding!,” I wanted to scream. Nancy Collins, the journalist who wrote the story, also claimed I “was catered” to by a psychic consultant, when the clairvoyant on set had been brought there by the producers for everyone’s benefit, not for me in particular. I told Collins during our interview, “It’s a lot more interesting to write about me being a bitch than being a nice woman,” regardless of what was actually true. Unfortunately, she proved me right.
Perhaps I overreacted to the negativity in the story. But it did a lot
of damage, and became the benchmark on which all subsequent interviews would be based. The distorted portrayal of me as a diva would follow me for years, because anybody doing a story on me or a new movie I was in would first read the Vanity Fair piece, and then interview me based on its assertions. The article would also have a subtle negative impact on my career, introducing the myth that I was “difficult.”
A lot of ill will would come my way from that one story, but it was also a humbling reality check. If I was somehow conveying a persona that was totally at odds with how I saw myself and who I wanted to be, then something needed to change. And Collins did get one thing right. I remember being struck by this passage:
Willis, who has accused the tabloids of trying to break up his marriage, smolders over any suggestion that the relationship is troubled. As for the tabs’ ongoing battle to link Willis with other women, Moore is unfazed. “Do I get jealous? Sure. But he doesn’t do anything to provoke it, so if I do feel that way, it’s something going on in my own head.”
Does she trust her husband? “Do I trust anybody?” she asks after a long pause. “That’s the question. Along the way I’ve been shown it’s O.K. to trust, so I usually go ahead and take the chance. But deep down do I really trust? I don’t think so.” Moore says she trusts her husband “probably more than I do anybody. But the only person I really trust is my child.”
GINNY MADE MATTERS worse, as she so often managed to. Nude pictures of her began to surface in the tabloids. Her need for attention was so desperate she’d let these rags convince her to pose naked, mimicking the shots I’d done for magazines, including the cover of Vanity Fair. It was pitiful. “You’re embarrassing yourself!” I told her, but to no avail. In her delusional mind, she believed the people paying her were her friends. I tried to explain to her that these so-called friends were taking advantage of her, but she wouldn’t hear me. “You made money modeling,” she said. “You just don’t want me to.”
I’d hit my limit. It probably seems strange, after all the truly ugly things she’d put me through, that Ginny’s behavior with the tabloids was what put me over the edge. I think it’s because I saw the potential this particular brand of lunacy had to hurt my kids. Honestly, if it had just been me, I probably would have let her continue the cycle of betrayal and disappointment ad infinitum. But there was no way I was going to let her hurt my family.
I broke off all contact with my mother soon after Scout was born. Some of our family members were critical of my choice. But I knew it was the healthiest thing I could do for myself, my girls, and maybe even for Ginny. All the money I’d spent on rehab, the plane tickets I’d bought when she’d called me stranded for some insane reason or other—none of it was actually helping her. It was enabling her. No longer would I hold a futile expectation of her being a mother; no longer would I feel that I bore the responsibility of being her mother.
I didn’t speak to her again for eight years.
Chapter 14
The day after Scout was born, I strapped her into a baby carrier and walked the long loop past the few houses in our neighborhood in Hailey, which is mostly populated by trees and elk. Within a week, I was back to biking, hiking, and working out at the gym five days a week. I nursed Scout as I did Rumer, but where Rumer began to plump up right away, Scout stayed tiny. One day, when she was around five weeks old, a wash of fear came flooding over me that something was really wrong. I rushed her to the doctor, and my concern turned to panic when he weighed her and found she was barely above her birth weight—which had been low to begin with because she had been early.
The doctor stepped out of the examination room and came back with a bottle of formula, and I watched as he nudged the nipple into her mouth and she gulped the liquid down. The problem with her weight was my fault. The doctor didn’t say it in those words, but it was the only conclusion I could reach when he explained that my excessive exercising was creating a surplus of lipase, an enzyme that breaks down fat, in my breast milk. Even though Scout was nursing for hours, she wasn’t growing. We would have to add formula to her diet. I was crushed. Nursing for me was such a joyous part of being a mother.
And yet I didn’t feel like I could stop exercising. It was my job to fit into that unforgiving military uniform I’d be wearing in two months in A Few Good Men. Getting in shape for that movie launched the obsession with working out that would consume me over the next five years. I never dared let up.
We went back to L.A., where A Few Good Men was filming and Bruce was soon to be shooting Death Becomes Her with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. In a stroke of good fortune, both films were being shot on the same lot at a studio in Culver City—which quickly started resembling a day care center. Meryl had just had a baby. I’d just had a baby. Rob Reiner and his wife had a baby. So did the British comedian Tracey Ullman, who was shooting her television show on that lot. We would all wander from one trailer to another with our kids. There’s a picture on the wall at my house in Idaho of all the members of what we jokingly called the All-Star Baby Group in that Culver City studio. As it happened, three of those babies—Scout, Jake Reiner, and Tracey Ullman’s son, Johnny—grew up to go to the same high school in L.A.
When we started rehearsals for A Few Good Men, I managed to fit into that tight uniform, but not without herculean effort. I’d get up early, go for a long run, go to the set, hit the gym, and then feed the baby through the night. It was punishing. I’d gained only twenty-eight pounds with Scout, and I was slowly sloughing it off with my fanatical routine, but one part of my anatomy stayed stubbornly huge: I was alternately nursing Scout and giving her a bottle, so my breasts were painfully full half the time, and I was outrageously busty as a result. (Though often one boob would be much bigger than the other, and the wardrobe people would have to add padding to make them look even.)
I’d always been in awe of Jack Nicholson, and working with him only magnified that feeling. The now-classic payoff line in the movie, which is about two young Marines being court-martialed for murder, comes at the end of what was a long day of shooting the court scene: Jack, playing a Marine colonel, turns on my legal partner, played by Tom Cruise, and snarls, “You can’t handle the truth.” We had to be on the set all day while they shot the “reverse side,” meaning the camera was always on Tom in the courtroom. But Jack delivered that speech all day long, for everybody. You often hear about actors who hold back on their lines when they’re not on camera, and save it for their close-ups, but not Jack. I was sitting at the legal table on the set, looking straight at him, and I watched him give 100 percent to his performance all day, to the point where I thought he was going to lose his voice. I was so impressed with that level of generosity: he was giving to his fellow actors at the same level that he gave for the camera when it was on him—which is especially hard to keep doing over and over again in a big, emotional scene.
He was not as gracious a few days later, as we waited and waited for him to show up to shoot a scene at a location that doubled for Guantánamo, where the story takes place. The light needed to be in a certain spot for the shot to work, and the sun was getting lower and lower in the sky. Rob Reiner was muttering that it was going to be a disaster and no one could understand why we couldn’t just get Jack out of his trailer. Jack appeared at the last moment of light: he is a serious Lakers fan, and he’d been glued to the television set waiting for Magic Johnson to make the announcement that he was HIV positive. Jack knew the announcement was coming, though nobody else did.
What I admired most about A Few Good Men was the originality Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner showed by not having my character and Tom’s get involved in anything romantic, or even unprofessional. There was an expectation at that time on the part of studios and audiences that if an attractive woman showed up on film, it was only a matter of time before you saw her in bed with the leading man, or at least half naked. But Rob and Aaron had the nerve to buck that convention: they thought this story was about something else, and they were right. Years later
Aaron told a film school class: “The whole idea of the movie was that these young lawyers were in way over their heads and two Marines were on trial for their lives, so if Tom Cruise and Demi Moore take time out to roll in the hay, I just didn’t think we would like them as much for doing that.” Sorkin said he wrote to an exec who had been lobbying hard for a sex scene. “I’ll never forget what the executive wrote back, which was, ‘Well if Tom and Demi aren’t going to sleep together why is Demi a woman?’ and that completely stumped me.”
I loved that my character didn’t rely on her sex appeal, which was certainly something I hadn’t encountered very often in my roles. They presented a woman who was valuable to her colleagues—and to the story itself—because of her competence. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards and five Golden Globes.
MY HEART SANK as I read the script for my next picture and noted the number of sex scenes I had ahead of me. I wanted to do the movie because it was a great story: a young couple go to Las Vegas in the hope of winning enough money to finance their dream home, which the husband, an architect, wants to build. Instead, they lose all their savings. But the wife, Diana, catches the eye of a billionaire, who makes them an offer: he’ll give them a million bucks to spend one night with her. They are conflicted, but they accept, and the story goes on from there.
It was called Indecent Proposal, and a great director was making it. Adrian Lyne was known for his moody, sexually charged films—Fatal Attraction, Flashdance, Jacob’s Ladder. He insisted on every one of his actors auditioning, no matter what. I had actually met with him on almost every film he’d done, including one called Foxes when I was still underage—Jodie Foster got the part—but he had never cast me. This time, I made the cut.
