Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  I flew to L.A. to meet with her. “Please trust us,” she said to me. “This part is only for you. And it’s only for twenty days.” For once, there’d be no way for me to start with my usual negative thinking on a film: Drew was begging me to come on board, and my agents were clamoring that this was a great opportunity. It wasn’t the project I’d imagined myself stepping back in to do, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with playing a villain. What really pushed me over the edge, though, was how excited my girls were: they’d seen the first Charlie’s Angels, and the idea of me being in the second had them whipped into a frenzy. We were all ready for some excitement and a change of scene.

  Chapter 18

  I was in New York doing advance press for Charlie’s Angels, which had been a completely different experience for me: really physical, really female, really fun. It was the spring of 2003, and I had just finished shooting the cover of Vogue with Mario Testino. My friend Sara Foster called and asked if I wanted to have dinner with a bunch of friends. She mentioned that Ashton Kutcher was going to be there—an actor who’d been on television for a while in That ’70s Show and whose star was on the rise. He had a surprise hit with a hidden-camera show he’d created himself called Punk’d, and he was having a moment—he was in town to host Saturday Night Live that weekend.

  We all gathered in his hotel room at the start of the evening; he had just finished rehearsal and needed a quick shower. He was prancing around the suite in a towel when I excused myself to call my girls. I was out in the hallway telling them good night when the door opened and Ashton, now fully dressed, leaned out. He looked at me with a serious, almost shy look on his face. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, then quickly closed the door. In that moment he changed from a cute little player into someone deeply interesting.

  That night at dinner, it was like nobody else was there.

  He told me about growing up in the cornfields of Iowa. It was clear right away from the way he talked about his goals that he had a serious work ethic, a kind of small-town belief in putting his nose to the grindstone. He was tall and floppy-haired, and, like me, he’d started out his career modeling. But I liked that his handsomeness had something sort of skewed about it: he’d broken his nose a bunch of times, and it gave his face a quirkiness. He was gregarious and warm and animated, and I just felt so much sparkling joy in his company.

  When everyone else was ready to go home, we still weren’t finished talking. I was staying at my apartment in the San Remo, which I got in the divorce from Bruce. I’d decided to sell it, so there was barely any furniture, just lots of space—three floors!—and stunning views of Central Park. I invited Ashton to come back there with me, and we stayed up the entire night, still talking, telling each other our life stories—and understanding everything the other person was saying. It felt like we were continuing a conversation we’d already been having for years. There was just an ease between us, a deep comfort—and a lot of electricity. It’s not every day you meet someone with whom you feel both totally secure and totally stirred up. Eventually, we fell asleep, side by side.

  The next day, Ashton had to go to rehearsal for SNL, and I had to get back home for a performance Scout was in at school. We continued our conversation digitally: Ashton and I couldn’t stop texting. Between every wardrobe change at rehearsal he was texting me, and I couldn’t resist replying immediately: it was that level of frenzied attentiveness. We were texting back and forth so much it was like that game where you try to keep a balloon in the air and you don’t want to be the one to let it drop.

  It was a beautiful clear day, but when I got to the airport that afternoon, it was completely shut down; they said a massive storm—level four—was coming. It was the strangest thing: the sky was sunny, cloudless, and blue, but I literally couldn’t leave New York City. It felt like the universe was opening up this window for us, demanding that we spend more time together. Of course I texted Ashton immediately. “You’re not going to believe this, but my plane’s not taking off. Do you want to hang out?” That night, he texted me between each sketch while they were taking off his wig and stuffing him into the next one, and he came over as soon as he finished the show.

  After that, we weren’t able to see each other for several weeks. But we were on the phone constantly, totally connected, buzzing with infatuation and excitement. It felt great. When I entered the relationship with Ashton, I had a newfound confidence that my perceptions were clear and strong, and that I knew myself—this was the gift from that very centering period in Hailey, away from the action and distraction of L.A. I didn’t feel insecure around him. It was the way I’d always wished it could be: love that felt pure and simple and profound. I knew what I wanted more explicitly than I ever had before in my life, and it seemed like maybe life was presenting me with just that: real intimacy. A soul mate.

  He was twenty-five. I was forty. But I’m telling you: we couldn’t feel it. We were totally in sync, from our very first conversation. Keep in mind, when I was twenty-five, I became a mom. I skipped straight from being a young adult into motherhood and marriage. When I met Ashton, it almost felt like a do-over, like I could just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young, with him—much more so than I’d ever been able to experience it when I was actually in my twenties.

  And it’s not like he was some flaky kid. He had a very mature approach to life. He had a bigger picture in his mind: at twenty-five, he was already extremely focused on his future. He was—and still is—the hardest worker I’ve ever met. That was uplifting and dynamic to be around.

  A few weeks after that first meeting, Ashton and I finally had a chance to see each other again in Los Angeles. We had spent so much time on the phone talking by then, it was almost overwhelming to see him in person. Just the touch of his hand was electric, because there was already so much emotion behind it. We went to In-N-Out Burger, trying to avoid paparazzi and keep things low key. I knew, from day one, that if Ashton and I got together, it would be a feeding frenzy. It was just too juicy with our age difference, with me having been out of the public eye and Ashton being very much in it at that moment because Punk’d was such a thing. I tried to warn him about what was coming if we became a couple. I told him, “You will be followed. They will be everywhere. That ease of movement you’re used to? It will be a thing of the past.” But he didn’t really take it in. How could he? He later confessed that if he’d fully grasped what it would be like, he might never have gotten involved with me.

  After dinner that night, he took me to see a piece of land he’d bought just below Mulholland Drive in the mountains above Beverly Hills, where he wanted to build his dream house someday. I loved that he was such an expansive thinker who seemed to look at life in its entirety, who wasn’t just reacting to whatever came his way. It was another perfect night, one that I’ll never forget. Maybe because I was older and more self-assured than I’d been in previous relationships, or maybe because I’d finally made peace with my body, or maybe just because of the inherent nature of our dynamic, but for whatever reason, I felt completely safe with Ashton, which made it possible to connect sexually in a way I’d never experienced before.

  That sense of security also enabled me to be emotionally vulnerable and open in a new way. I had completely shut out the memory of that awful experience with Val when I was fifteen; I didn’t even know to file it under “rape” in my own mind. I just knew it haunted me. That whenever I was in a situation where I felt vulnerable, the fifteen-year-old me was who showed up. Ashton was the first person I really talked to about that, and it allowed me to start dealing with that trauma, that shame, and to start healing.

  He had a night off, and he decided to fly back to Idaho with me, to see my life there. Hunter and Sheri-O, who happened to be in L.A., were flying out to Hailey with me, and as we were driving to the airport, I told Sheri, “I have a secret: I’m kind of going out with Ashton Kutcher.” Sheri said, “I have absolutely no idea who that is
.” We pulled over to a newsstand and Hunter jumped out and bought a Rolling Stone, which had Ashton on the cover. When Sheri looked at it, she said, “Well, he’s certainly hot enough!” And I certainly agreed.

  Ashton was very shy when we all met up at the airport and got on the jet that Bruce and I still shared. In fact, he was so nervous he barely spoke a word during the entire flight. I was reminded of the first time I went on a private plane with Bruce early in our relationship, and how thrilling and strange that had been. When we landed in Hailey, we went to go pick up our girls: Scout and Sheri’s daughter Sarah Jane were just getting back from a school trip to a wilderness survival course. Ashton turned to me in the car and said, “I want you to know, I don’t take coming into a kid’s life lightly. I know it’s not something you can just come in and out of.”

  When the girls got off the bus and saw us, they all started whispering, “Is that ASHTON KUTCHER?!?”

  He clicked with Scout and Tallulah right away. Ashton had a wonderful stepfather who meant a lot to him, so I think he innately understood the impact that men could have on the lives of children who weren’t biologically theirs. And he liked that I was a mom: I think the possibility of being someone important to my kids was a part of the relationship that appealed to him. That might sound like an odd thing for a twenty-five-year-old, but again, he wasn’t your average young guy. On the one hand, he was naughty and scampish, but on the other, there was a responsible, sincere, and centered quality to him. He had a very strong sense of the role that a good man should play in the life of a family. And he wanted to be part of our gang.

  The next day, our plane had to return to L.A. to get Bruce, and Ashton went with it to get back to his job. I wanted Bruce to know in case they crossed paths—I told him, “I have a friend who’ll be getting off the plane, Ashton Kutcher.” Bruce’s reaction was: “You are such a good mom.” He assumed I’d brought Ashton as a special treat for the girls, the way we’d once arranged for Aaron Carter to come to Disney World for Scout’s birthday.

  AS IT TURNED out, Ashton and Bruce got along really well. We hung out regularly, playing cards, having dinner, just chilling out. It was lovely. (A funny aside: Ashton first moved to L.A. with January Jones, the actress who played Betty Draper on Mad Men. They were engaged, and they were both just starting out at the time—modeling, taking small parts. As a twenty-three-year-old, January had a tiny role in the movie Bandits, which Bruce starred in when he was forty-six. Ashton was convinced they’d had a fling on set. Years later, I happened to sit next to January at an event, and I mentioned this. “Are you serious?” she said, laughing. “I told him a hundred times, I didn’t want to fuck that old man!”)

  Ashton and I kept our relationship quiet for a little while, but then it just got silly: we were in love, and we wanted to be in each other’s lives for everything, big and small. In June 2003, we made our first public appearance together, at the premiere of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. In a fantastic Missoni minidress, I took on the red carpet, with Ashton on one arm and Bruce on the other, and all three kids front and center. I was saying, You can be a family after divorce, just in a new form. And I was preemptively neutralizing any narrative of conflict between Bruce and Ashton the press might try to drum up. It worked. It was a damn good night.

  But the response to our relationship was every bit as frenzied as I’d anticipated, maybe even more so. We were in the tabloids constantly; we couldn’t leave the house without being photographed. My agents said that my relationship was hurting me: all the focus on me being with a younger man meant that people weren’t taking me seriously. I didn’t care. I’d never been so happy in my life.

  I bought a beautiful house, not far from that piece of land where he wanted to build his dream house, up in the mountains above Beverly Hills. It was like a peaceful Zen tree house, high above the noise and traffic of the city. You could watch the sun set pink over the mountains when you sat out back by the pool, and you could see the trees everywhere you looked through the glass walls. It was going to be our oasis.

  Ashton and I didn’t want to be apart for a minute. When my house was being renovated, he invited my girls and me to stay with him. It just seemed foolish to go rent something separate when we wanted to be together all the time, and the girls loved Ashton. Rumer wanted to come back to L.A.: she missed her family, and boarding school hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be.

  Ashton’s house was one of his first big purchases, high above Beverly Hills, complete with tennis courts and a pool—it was a pretty remarkable place for a twenty-five-year-old to have earned. Ashton had a very different relationship with success than Bruce had. He didn’t spend wildly. He was careful and methodical, and his investments always reflected that, including his first home. Though prior to our arrival, it had been a straight-up L.A. party house—you can read about it in Rolling Stone. (George Bush was president at the time, and somehow his twin daughters ended up doing bong hits at that house at one of Ashton’s parties. He was sure the Secret Service was listening in on his calls from then on.) There were definitely some late-night doorbell rings before word got out about Ashton’s new roommates.

  About a year and a half into our relationship, Ashton hosted SNL for a second time, and we decided to address all the chatter about our age difference head-on, and in the funniest way possible. Unlike the time I’d hosted alone, this time I enjoyed every minute. During his opening monologue, Ashton said, “Magazines focus on our age difference, and all that I focus on is she is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and she’s here tonight. Demi, I love you, baby.” The camera panned to me in the audience—in makeup that made me look about ninety, with a white wig and eyebrows, wearing a frowsy purple dress and holding a pocketbook in my lap like the Queen of England. “You’re doin’ great, baby,” I croaked in my best old-lady voice. “You’re lookin’ hot!”

  Then Ashton called me up to the stage “so we can just enjoy this moment together,” and I shuffled out of my seat and leaned over onto the walker that was waiting for me in the aisle. “She is still the hottest woman in Hollywood,” he announced once I was up onstage, which got a huge laugh because I looked like I had just hobbled out of a nursing home, and I had these massive, hanging boobs the SNL people had made for me. “I wear this medallion as a symbol of our love,” Ashton said, gesturing to his necklace. I followed that up with, “And I’ve got this identification bracelet; it lets the medical technicians know I’ve got the diabetes!” Ashton nodded and said, “She’s got ’em bad.” Then we made out a little and my false teeth came out in his mouth.

  The whole thing was hilarious. I loved that I was at a point in my life where I didn’t care what the tabloids said; I didn’t care what people thought of my choices. I was living the way I wanted to live. And there was no reason to be sensitive about my age: I had just turned forty-two. And I was pregnant.

  Chapter 19

  Ashton and I knew right away that we wanted to have a baby together, it was always just a question of when. I had leapt into having a family with Bruce, and this time, I wanted to build a foundation in the relationship first. I wanted time for us to enjoy each other. But I was also in my forties. To remove the time pressure, less than a year into our relationship, we decided to freeze embryos.

  I was offered a movie called Half Light, which was supposed to be the big follow-up my team had gotten for me on the heels of Charlie’s Angels. I’m sure most of you have never even heard of it, which tells you something. It was an interesting script—a thriller/ghost story about a bestselling crime novelist who is haunted by guilt over the accidental death of her son—but there were issues with money, the director was unknown, and shooting it would mean being away from my girls for a month before they could come see me—longer than we’d ever been apart.

  Ashton told me to do it. “The girls will stay here, and I’ll come home for dinner every night,” he said. “I will hold down family life, as if you’d never left.”

  We filmed
in Wales and Cornwall. Before I left L.A., I had given in and bought all three girls devices, so they could reach me anytime they wanted. Technology had just gotten to the point where everyone was texting photos back and forth, and I missed my girls and Ashton terribly, though they seemed happy in the flow of pictures we exchanged. I was elated when he brought them to see me. We stayed in an amazing house in London, near Mayfair, that had once been a nunnery. There was a pool in the basement—it was like going swimming in an underground cave. It was such an adventure exploring all the back staircases with the girls and figuring out what went where in that crazy house.

  One night, after they’d gone to bed, Ashton and I sat in the great room, cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, and had our first conversation about getting married. We were so comfortable, sitting in that gorgeous firelight, and it was a really mellow, easy conversation about whether we ought to consider it for my girls. Was it something that might be helpful for them, we wondered, as they tried to make sense of this new family, our new household? There was so much press about our relationship not being serious, when, in fact, he had just come from holding down the fort for a month; the girls had started calling him MOD, short for “my other dad.”

  Ashton and I went to a Shabbat service at the Kabbalah Centre in Marylebone. I had begun studying Kabbalah soon after I moved back from Idaho. When I’d first arrived back in L.A., I felt like I didn’t know anyone anymore. But my friend Guy Oseary, who I’ve been close with since the nineties, was there, and he got me back into the social swing of things: he took me to dinner parties; took me to clubs (I didn’t drink, but I loved to dance); reconnected me to Madonna—her husband at the time, Guy Ritchie, gave me a copy of The Power of Kabbalah. Guy Oseary then invited me to come and meet their teacher, Eitan, at the Beverly Hills offices of Maverick, the record label he’d started with Madonna, and it was a deeply calm and insightful hour, hearing Eitan speak about the tenets of Kabbalah and the spiritual side of Judaism. I was curious to know more, so I went home and jumped into reading the book. Madonna was doing a weekly class at her house, and I started to go regularly.