by Demi Moore
Ultimately, I assumed that our bond was safe no matter what. When your kids stop looking like kids—they look big and they act big—it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that they will forever see you through the eyes of a child. I think that in my pain, I may have lost sight of how much mothering they still needed.
ASHTON WAS GETTING ready to do a movie called Spread. It was clear from the script it would be very sexual—even graphic. Jennifer Jason Leigh was slated to play the female lead, and one day Ashton came home from the office and told me, “Jennifer is concerned about you being on set.” He seemed really uneasy and told me how much it could hurt his career if she was displeased: she was married at the time to the director Noah Baumbach, who had a big movie just out. “I might want to work with him someday,” Ashton said. “He might not ever cast me because of this.” I was mortified. Jennifer and I had the same manager, and I called him, frantic, and said, “Please let her know I’d never do anything to compromise the film, and I’d never want to make another actor uncomfortable while she’s working!”
My manager called her, then called me back. “Jennifer has absolutely no problem with any of this—she has no issue, and she had no idea what I was talking about.”
I was baffled. And talking to Ashton didn’t exactly clear things up. He chalked it up to miscommunication, but something didn’t feel right. The bottom line was that she wasn’t worried about me being on set, he was.
I was devastated. Bruce always felt that he wasn’t needed, that I gave him too much space. I’d been trying not to repeat that mistake. I thought I was being supportive, there for Ashton in whatever he needed—I had gone to stay with him on location in Louisiana while he was shooting The Guardian a few months earlier, just to be there for him—but, in fact, what he’d needed was space. And he hadn’t told me. He’d only been able to communicate what he wanted by dissembling.
He wasn’t honest. That’s on him. But I had made him the focus of all my attention and was putting too much pressure on him. I was losing myself. And that’s on me.
UNLIKE WHAT PEOPLE imagine about addicts—that you have one drink and everything comes crashing down—in my case it was a gradual downward spiral. The decline in my sense of confidence mirrored my substance abuse.
My agent had recommended renting Joe Francis’s house in Puerto Vallarta for my forty-fifth birthday. It’s an unbelievable place, run like a six-star hotel. (There’s an “anything” button on the phone.) Ashton and I chartered a plane and flew a dozen friends down for the weekend.
Everyone was having a great time and really cutting loose. We had a huge dinner at the long banquet table; waiters were coming around with trays of tequila shots, and people were getting up on the table and strutting down the middle—our friend Eric did it in nothing but underpants and a pair of pointy-toed boots.
But when you don’t have an off switch, you go until you can’t go anymore. Late that night, we all ended up in the hot tub, and I started passing out and slipping under the water. If other people hadn’t been there, I would have drowned.
Ashton carried me back to our bed, and he was furious. To some extent, I understand his reaction. If this had been the first time something like this had happened, that would have been one thing, but it wasn’t.
But it was also confusing: Ashton had encouraged me to go in this direction. When I went too far, though, he let me know how he felt by showing a picture he’d taken of me resting my head on the toilet the night before. It seemed like a good-natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming.
I WENT IN for dental surgery. I left with a prescription for Vicodin. I took it as I needed it, when I was in bad pain. At first. Then, sometimes, when I wasn’t really in pain, I’d think, Hmm, maybe I’ll just take half a pill. I had back pain at the time, too, and I managed to get another prescription to deal with that. Initially, the pills took the edge off, made life feel just a little bit easier. Whereas alcohol felt risky—I never knew how much was too much—with pills I was in control. They gave me energy to jump in and get things done. Over time, though, they stopped having the same effect, and I needed more and more of them to feel the way I wanted. I got to the point where I was taking twelve a day.
I stopped after I scared myself one weekend when the whole family was together and I lost track of how many pills I’d taken. All of a sudden, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I told no one. But the next day I had a conversation with Ashton about it, and he asked me if I needed help. I told him I would take care of it myself—and I did.
He was in Europe the following week, and the girls were with their dad. I used that time to detox. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. Going off of opiates is agony—it’s unimaginably excruciating. You can’t sleep because your body hurts too much. It’s an effort just to get to the toilet. Your whole body is screaming, “I’m dying: if you just took a little, all this pain would go away!” It is like the worst flu you’ve ever had times a hundred. I gutted through that week.
When Ashton returned home, I felt like I’d lived through a war. He did not offer me any reinforcement or compassion. I felt like he was angry with me for having this problem in the first place: you made your bed; now you have to lie in it.
Chapter 21
Ashton was less and less present. He was focused on other things: his work; his growing involvement in the tech world; his fantasy football league. He couldn’t have been clearer that whatever he was doing was really important—and I don’t fault him for that. But I do wish I’d been able to value myself in the same way.
Instead, I went into contortions to try to fit the mold of the woman he wanted his wife to be. I put him first. He didn’t ask me to do that. It’s just what I did—what I’d learned to do from my mother, and her mother before her. I wanted this marriage to work, and I was willing to do whatever it took, to jump through any hoop. So when he expressed his fantasy of bringing a third person into our bed, I didn’t say no. I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be.
Having other people in our marriage presented a totally false sense of power, and an absolutely temporary sense of excitement. There were two different people we opened our relationship to, and they didn’t have bad intentions; they held it in the right space. To this day, I know I could reach out to either of them at any time for friendship; one is now married and has a kid. They were good people, but it was still a mistake. Part of the point of monogamy is the energy of somebody making the sacrifice or the choice for you, and that you thereby hold this special place that no one else can have. As soon as another person is brought in you are no longer being held in that sacred spot.
I WAS WORKING in New York on a film with Ellen Barkin called Another Happy Day when the story broke. Ashton had slept with a twenty-one-year-old, in our home, while I was out of town.
I remember the night they met. We were at a bowling alley with Rumer, and when he went to switch out our shoes, she gave him her number on a napkin. Or that’s what he told me at the time. When we got home that night and he showed it to me, I said, “That is just gross. We were there with our kid, and she was there with her mother and her sister!” I had a visceral response—it was revulsion. So the fact that he then pursued her felt like a real “fuck you.”
Suddenly, his infidelity was all over the celebrity gossip circuit—the young woman even tried to sell a sweater of his on eBay for five hundred dollars.
When the news came out in the press, we were already scheduled to do an event at the Clinton Global Initiative, launching our foundation to fight human trafficking. We had put in over a year researching the issue and setting up the infrastructure. Ashton is a really gifted big-picture thinker; to me, of course, the issue was personal. There was no question of postponing this event.
I went into lockdown mode. I knew how I reacted would be the benchmark for how the tabloid stories would be received. If we had a united front, maybe they would dismiss the whole incident as a
shakedown. Maybe the best call was simply to absorb what had happened and ignore it.
So he came to New York and I put on a brave face and we gave our presentation on September 23, 2010—the day before our anniversary. Ashton spoke about how there are more slaves on earth now than in any other time in human history, and detailed our efforts to get Twitter and other Internet platforms to avoid being used as marketplaces for the selling of human beings. I talked about the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign we were launching, to try to alter the culture that enables men to feel okay about paying for sex with underage girls. “One in five men have engaged in the commercial sex trade,” I announced to that room full of important people, standing next to my husband of five years who’d just cheated on me with a girl about the age of my oldest daughter. “Real men protect, respect, love, and care for girls.” But I did not feel protected, respected, loved, or cared for myself.
Rumer, who’d moved out on her own by this point and was working as an actor, came with Ashton, which we’d planned long before any of this happened, and then the three of us went to Providence, Rhode Island, to visit Scout, who had recently started at Brown University. I felt strongly that we shouldn’t lie to them—and, technically, I didn’t—but I allowed them to assume that all the chatter in the tabloids was baseless. My intention was to protect them, but now I see that was a mistake. I cheated them out of the opportunity to process this upset with me, as a family. They deserved to know the truth.
Ashton and I decided to drive back to L.A. so we could have the time together, alone. I was strangely flooded with shame; I couldn’t shake the feeling that this whole thing was somehow my fault. Because we had brought a third party into our relationship, Ashton said, that blurred the lines and, to some extent, justified what he’d done. I think he felt remorse, but he was also looking for a way to deflect blame, to maintain his own perception of himself as a decent family guy.
Ashton did not compensate for his behavior by being extra solicitous and kind. In retrospect, I think all of this was his way of trying to get out of our marriage. He didn’t know how to do that in a loving way, or maybe he was too conflicted. I think part of him cherished what we had; part of him couldn’t wait to move on. You can’t blame someone for not having the skills or the level of awareness it takes to behave compassionately. That was the best that he could do. Every one of his actions was saying, Please don’t love me. But, unfortunately for both of us, I did.
TALLULAH, MY ONLY kid still at home with us, had just turned seventeen and was going through an age-appropriate rebellious phase. One evening in the spring of 2011, she told me she was going to spend the evening with some friends studying for a practice SAT, and I went out to a movie. My phone started ringing in the middle of it: it was another parent I knew. Tallulah and some of her friends had been busted for underage drinking. They were walking into a friend’s house carrying a water bottle full of vodka, and it was past curfew in that area, and they’d drawn the attention of the police. I needed to go and pick her up from the station in Hollywood.
When I got there, I made a beeline to the officer in charge and said, “Look: this is obviously not okay, but it’s a first offense. Can they get off with just a warning here, and we will make sure this never happens again?” His response was: “It’ll be off her record when she turns eighteen.” But it would never come off of her “record” in the public eye in the same way it would for her friends: she would be forever associated with this incident; potential employers would see it the first time they googled her. I’ve said to my kids for years: it doesn’t matter who you’re with or what the circumstances are. It will always come out in the press as “Tallulah Willis, busted.” Because of who your parents are, you will be subjected to a different kind of scrutiny than your peers; any mistake you make will become news. And that’s exactly what happened with the drinking incident. It was all over TMZ the next day—just as I feared it would be.
I didn’t hug Tallulah when I first saw her at the station, and maybe I should have. I was upset that she had lied to me about where she was going to be that night, and I was focused on trying to convince the cops to keep this quiet. I was trying to protect her. She interpreted that as me caring only about how the whole thing looked.
Teenagers do stupid stuff. But what I saw was that how we handled the incident was going to affect her use of drugs and alcohol going forward. I was a bit tough on her. Bruce wasn’t around that weekend; Ashton was away, too. I was the only one there, and I had to leave for a charity event in New York two days later.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have gone. I should have stayed and worked through what had happened with Tallulah. But I went, and she stayed with Emma, who had married Bruce a couple of years earlier. When I returned, I came home to a note that Tallulah didn’t want to come back ever and would not talk to me.
She was a teenager, pushing boundaries, seeing what she could get away with. That’s normal. What wasn’t normal at all was that from that point on, it was like everyone in the family was siding with her. Suddenly, Scout didn’t want to talk to me, either. Mysteriously, she too “needed space.” Bruce refused to discuss the situation with me or to negotiate an appropriate way of addressing what had happened with Tallulah. I was being treated like the one who’d had to be picked up in Hollywood from the police! It was baffling.
Of course, everyone had their own reason. Scout was trying to separate, grow up, start a new life at college, and I guess this felt like an opportunity to assert her independence. Bruce was starting a new life with Emma and was not in the mood to deal with his old one. Tallulah was angry about being told what to do. She was just being a kid, but her opinion became everyone’s opinion: that I was to blame for a rapidly widening rift.
I think the part that was real was that the girls were angry I’d become so dependent on Ashton—I was addicted to him, is the best way I can put it. And I did all the things that addicts do. I prioritized my addiction over my needs and the needs of my family. I made strange, unconvincing justifications for my behavior—and his. I had held the family together as a pillar, and the pillar was crumbling.
Having two of my daughters not speaking to me was new and unprecedented and awful. It threatened the thing I was proudest of, my role as a mom. And I just plain missed my kids. Ashton was angry; he felt that I had hurt his relationship with the girls. But he still seemed to be trying really hard to be supportive. He sent me a beautiful, reassuring email that summer, saying that he felt like the luckiest man on earth, that when God made me, He had created a safety net for him.
Ashton’s incident with that girl had been a major wake-up call. For the past year, I had been trying to right the ship—any issue he’d raised I was actively addressing. I hadn’t been drinking for ten months. I was focusing more on my own projects: I was producing a show; I had a wonderful film, Margin Call, due out in the fall; and my television directorial debut was scheduled to air the same month. Ashton, meanwhile, was starting a new sitcom, Two and a Half Men, which alleviated some of his financial anxiety after the 2008 crash. (He was replacing Charlie Sheen, and would be starring with Jon Cryer. Small world.) I believed we were both working toward protecting what we had.
I was still desperate to have a baby with him. I had finally overcome the huge obstacle of my resistance to using an egg donor. I started scouring the agency lists for the right fit, sharing the most promising prospects with Ashton, and hearing his thoughts. We were in Idaho for the Fourth of July holiday when I found a donor who was a perfect match. I showed Ashton her picture. He said we should go for it.
That was on Tuesday. On Thursday we started filling out the paperwork. On Sunday, we were out walking by the river when Ashton told me, “I don’t think I can do this, and I don’t know if this is working.”
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I asked him why he’d let me research a donor, go through this very painful, prolonged process, and make myself vulnerable in this way if he wasn’t up for it
. His response was simple: “I never thought you’d go through with it.”
THE NEXT DAY I went to New York for work. I was producing an interview series called The Conversation, hosted by my friend Amanda de Cadenet. I had personally enlisted Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Donna Karan, among others, and I needed to be there. I was frozen. Waiting for Ashton to reach out and make things right.
I flew back to L.A. a week later; we hadn’t been speaking. When I got home, our weekly Kabbalah class was in session in the den. I looked at Ashton as I entered the room, and I felt a chill go through me. His eyes were icy, dead. It was like I was seeing the coldest person I’d ever encountered—nothing like the man I fell in love with years earlier. And it was certainly not like looking into the eyes of someone who loved me.
That night, he said, “I think I should move out.”
“Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” was all I could say. “We’re married. That’s not how we do things. How did this go from us having issues we need to work on to ‘I’m moving out’?” I could feel that he was withholding something. I was grasping. “We need to go and talk to somebody,” I insisted.
And we did. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t really want to work on our relationship. He didn’t want us to have sex or be at all physical anymore. He was done. I was still very much in our marriage, but I was in it alone now. I was still trying to make sense of somebody who two weeks before had sent me an email saying that he was the luckiest man alive. I craved some kind of understanding of what was happening—if it made sense, then I’d be able to let go, if that was the right thing, but as it stood? It was all just too bewildering. I told him that I didn’t think he should move out, that I wanted us to work through this privately, together. We agreed: let’s keep this between us; let’s not be with anyone else until we sort this out—one way or the other.
