by Demi Moore
I took Philip’s pictures and some headshots to Elite Model Management, and they signed me. I was thrilled, even though at first I didn’t get any major assignments, just little local jobs like newspaper ads for department stores and the poster for the cult horror movie I Spit on Your Grave. I earned just enough to squeak by.
It’s funny: modeling was the first thing in my life that gave me a tiny taste of success, that stirred a sense of pride and professionalism in me, which was empowering. But at the same time, it threw me into a world that seemed tailor-made to lower my self-esteem. I had landed in a profession that focused entirely on how I looked, and what size I wore, which reinforced the idea I’d absorbed that my value lay solely in my attractiveness.
I dropped out of acting class. It was awkward seeing Tom there, and I think on some level I was terrified that they’d tell me, “You’re not good enough; you can’t be an actor.” For most people, auditioning is the scary part. For me, not measuring up in class was more terrifying. The way I was raised, always bailing before I had to follow through, was also a factor—I had no experience with perseverance. Today I would without question tell someone trying to make it as an actor, “Go put yourself in class! Go learn, go boost your confidence, get to know the tools you can use, get to know yourself.”
MY DAD WAS now living with Morgan, who’d turned twelve, in Oceanside, California. Freddy and I went to see them for Christmas. Pulling up to the building where they were living in a small, depressing, nondescript apartment, my heart sank. My father looked terrible, as bad as the setting. There are some people you can look at and not really see their pain. On my dad it was unmistakable—in his bloated face, his slumped posture, and his vacant eyes.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table on Christmas Day feeling the emptiness of us spending the holiday with just my dad and my little brother, split off from the rest of the family. Freddy—who, I realize now, was only a few years younger than my dad—was socially awkward in general, and this setting was no exception. He was a classic quiet Minnesotan with Scandinavian roots: taciturn, pragmatic, recessive. It’s not like he didn’t care about me, he was just inexpressive. I was the only one at that table scrambling to connect.
As a present, my dad gave me a random poster—something completely impersonal that had nothing to do with me or, for that matter, him. He was drinking heavily and so was fairly out of it, and I worried about what kind of care my dad, in his defeated state, could be providing for Morgan. I chatted nervously about the different things I had going on, self-consciously aware that it was uncomfortable for my dad to look at me, that he didn’t know what to say.
The most painful thing for me had not been finding out that Danny wasn’t my biological father, but finding that he was incapable of reaching out to reassure me that he loved me regardless. Now, I wish that I had reached out to him—grabbed him, looked him in the eyes, told him that he was my dad from the start and would be my dad till the end, and that I loved him.
Not long after I returned to Los Angeles, I got a call that Danny was in the hospital. His liver had ruptured. He tried to drive himself to the emergency room but didn’t quite make it; they found him passed out in the car—leaning on the horn, fortunately—at the entrance to the hospital, and rushed him inside. He recovered from that episode, but a doctor informed him that he was an alcoholic with pancreatitis and needed to stop drinking immediately. My dad was so furious at that doctor he threatened to use everything in his power to ruin him if the doctor put that in his medical record. He must have been pretty intimidating, because the doctor rescinded his diagnosis. The doctor also said he couldn’t eat red meat anymore, so Dad immediately opened an account at the local butcher shop, Morgan later told me, and he started eating triple the amount of red meat he had before. Everything he was told not to do, he did it in spades. He was slowly trying to kill himself. He told me many times that he wanted to die. When I think of what it must have been like for Morgan as a twelve-year-old hearing from his own father how much he wanted his life to end, it breaks my heart.
Back in New Mexico a year later, it was Morgan who found Dad in his garage, slumped over the steering wheel of his car with the engine running, after he committed suicide. He was thirty-six.
When I got the call, I burst into tears. I was sitting at the dining room table with Freddy. He didn’t come over to hold me or comfort me. He didn’t tell me that he loved me and that everything would be okay. He sat still in his seat and said calmly, “There’s no point in crying; there’s nothing you can do now. It’s not going to change anything.”
THE FUNERAL IN Roswell was a nightmare. Instead of shared grief, there were warring camps—my dad’s family and my mom. My parents had spent the weekend before Dad died together, and my dad’s eight siblings were convinced that Ginny was somehow to blame for his death. There were various theories, ranging from speculation that she had driven him to it, to the idea that she’d left him drunk in his car knowing what would happen, all the way up to the suspicion of out-and-out foul play, with my dad’s family threatening to turn Ginny in to the police. It got very, very ugly. DeAnna remembers that even her husband, my uncle George, was convinced that Ginny was responsible.
The truth is that my dad had probably planned his own death to the last detail. His blood alcohol level was so high that his death had to be ruled an accident—he was too drunk for the insurance company to label it a suicide. Consequently, they were obliged to make a small payout, which Dad left to Morgan. I guarantee you my dad had done his research and knew precisely how much he had to drink for all of that to happen. It was his final scam, one for the road. But it was also, obviously, a way of ending the pain he was carrying, which had become too much to bear. He felt he had failed us all, and I think that, on some level, he really believed he was doing the best thing for everyone.
Meanwhile, over at my grandmother’s house, my mother’s sisters half-heartedly rallied around Ginny, trying to show some solidarity. But my mom was in full-blown victim mode, crying uncontrollably and inserting herself into the center of the unfolding drama. She tried to insist that Danny be dressed in the suit she picked out for the wake, but my dad’s sister Margie wanted him in the brown suit she’d selected. It escalated from there: Margie went over to my dad’s house and took everything of value and hid it from Ginny. The funeral home was providing cars for the family, and my mother demanded to be in one. His siblings were furious that she’d even ask: She wasn’t his wife anymore, what was she even doing there? And so on. It felt like my dad’s family’s anger at my mother was spilling over onto me, as if I was an extension of Ginny. (In fact, the only substantial interaction I remember having with her the whole time I was there was a fight about what I was going to wear.) Everybody knew that Danny wasn’t my biological father, and suddenly it felt like that mattered enormously. Do I even belong in this family? Maybe I was being hypersensitive, but I felt unwelcome and uncomfortable. Is it okay that I’m here? Not here here, at this funeral, but here on this earth. Is it okay that I was even born?
MY DAD DIED in October. I turned eighteen in November. I got married to Freddy the following February. It was obviously a confusing and fraught time, and our wedding reflected the scattershot nature of the decision. DeAnna and George were the only members of my family who came. I wore a vintage dress, with flowers tucked behind my veil. It was at some little Spanish church in L.A. I can’t remember where.
Part II
Success
Chapter 8
As my family was disintegrating, my career was picking up. A bunch of breaks came my way in rapid succession. First, John Casablancas, the legendary owner of Elite, picked me to go with a handful of other girls to New York City. It was incredibly exciting. They flew me there and put me up, paid for new headshots geared toward New York’s high fashion market, and sent me on “go-sees”: interviews with potential clients. The city was overwhelming—and intimidating. And it smelled! I still remember the first time I saw steam billowin
g up from a manhole in Manhattan—it was like there was an underworld of fire just below the city’s surface, burning night and day.
Freddy came with me, and I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I would have been anxious about going to Manhattan for the first time by myself, but on the other, I worried his band couldn’t keep going without him, and sure enough, once he told the rest of The Kats of his plan to spend some time in New York, they all got other gigs. I was nervous that Freddy was putting all his eggs in my basket. I, meanwhile, was beyond driven—hell-bent on getting out of the dysfunctional place I’d come from and into the bright world of success, where I imagined people lived happy, normal lives. (Ha.) Freddy and I were going in different directions, and I began to pull away from him.
I was in New York for several months. I got cast in a commercial, and Freddy and I moved into a tiny little apartment on the Upper West Side. On the last day of shooting, I felt that familiar tightness in my body that signaled a kidney flare-up, but I told myself it was just the hot lights.
We were scheduled to return to Los Angeles the next day. By the time we landed, I had blown up like a balloon; I was swollen from head to toe. Freddy had no idea what to do, but fortunately I had called DeAnna, who was waiting for us at the airport and took me straight to the emergency room at UCLA. I was retaining so much fluid at that point, I still have stretch marks up and down my legs.
This attack was different. By now, a lot more was known about the disease—they didn’t have to keep me at the hospital for months; once I was stabilized they sent me home on a high dose of Prednisone.
There was another difference. In the past, my flare-ups had always followed one of my dad’s infidelities. This time, the infidelity was mine. I had tried to repress it, but my body wouldn’t let me.
The night before we got married, instead of working on my vows, I was calling a guy I’d met on a movie set. I snuck out of my own bachelorette party and went to his apartment.
Why did I do that? Why didn’t I go and see the man I was committing to spend the rest of my life with to express my doubts? Because I couldn’t face the fact that I was getting married to distract myself from grieving the death of my father. Because I felt there was no room to question what I’d already put in motion. I couldn’t get out of the marriage, but I could sabotage it.
Only it’s not much of a sabotage when it’s a secret. You just end up sabotaging yourself.
A FEW MONTHS later, I got my second big break: an audition for General Hospital. I’d never watched a soap opera, but I knew this was a huge deal. For one thing, it was the number one show on daytime television. For another, GH was in the press a lot right then, because the actress Genie Francis, who played Laura Spencer—of the famous Luke and Laura—was retiring, and no less a celebrity than Elizabeth Taylor was doing a kind of extended cameo on the show. I was extremely nervous when I went in to read for this classic soap, which had been on the air for two decades. But I tried to picture myself back by the swimming pool on Kings Road, reading scripts to Nastassja. That helped get me through it. Also, I loved the part: Jackie Templeton, a sharp, no-nonsense, plucky young reporter. They wanted a “Margot Kidder type,” someone like the actress who played Lois Lane in Superman, which had been wildly popular in theaters a few years earlier. I had Kidder’s dark hair and green eyes, and we had something else in common: a husky voice. There’s something about that slight rasp that people find compelling—I guess because it suggests toughness and vulnerability at the same time. I got the part.
It was intoxicating and terrifying. Jackie Templeton turned out to be a really big role. And in general, soaps are just hard work—different from other television, and definitely different from film; there is no other medium where an actor is given thirty pages to memorize and film in a day. We’d get a script maybe a couple of days in advance, but there was a limit to how much dialogue one could really manage beyond the day ahead. On the weekend you might get a couple scripts at once so you could see where the story was going, but the daily thrust was always: here are your scenes; deal with them!
The rewards of this scramble were huge. For the first time in my life, I was in control of whether I could make rent, eat, afford new clothes, pay the utility bill. When I started the show, I was so embarrassed by my beat-up Volkswagen that I wouldn’t drive onto the studio lot; I’d park it on the street and then walk in the gate. I remember feeling mortified one day when one of the guards said, “You know you can park on the lot, right?,” and I realized he’d seen me in the car. The first thing I bought when I saved up enough money was a brand-new silver Honda Accord. I was so proud as I drove it past the guards and into my reserved parking spot.
In many ways General Hospital was like another new school I had to figure out, but the stakes were much higher. While I saw soaps as a stepping-stone, I realized the show had the power to change my life for the better, and I didn’t want people to see my weaknesses or sense my insecurity. On the surface I was hitting all my marks, but my internal compass sought outlets for my self-doubt. I started drinking.
There was often free time during the day when someone else’s character was being taped, but not enough time to leave the building and go anywhere, so I hung out with Tony Geary, who played Luke, in his dressing room when we weren’t needed on the set. Tony always had some kind of liquor on hand, which he disguised by mixing it with Coke. I never turned down his offer of a drink. He was the star of the show, after all, and if that’s how the star behaved, then it must be okay.
Freddy and I didn’t have more than the occasional beer at home. The problem was, when I did have a drink, I couldn’t stop; there was no little voice in my head saying, That’s enough, Demi. There were no brakes. One night, Freddy and I went to hear an up-and-coming New Wave band. As they moved through their set, I had one drink, then another, then another. Backstage, after the gig, I was talking to somebody from the band when I blacked out. The next thing I remember is him yelling at me in a heavy English accent. I have no idea what I said to him, but it must have been pretty bad. “Get out!” he screamed. “Get the fuck out!” That sobered me up quickly. Heads turned to look as Freddy rushed me to the door. That was my first major booze-related humiliation.
It’s one thing to get wasted at a club late at night. It’s another to get drunk while you’re working.
I was invited with several of the stars of General Hospital to fly somewhere to do a live panel for a dedicated soap audience. My unraveling began on the plane when I started ordering drinks from the stewardess, and accelerated when I got to the hotel and cleared out the minibar. I was so intoxicated by the time the panel began that I couldn’t stay upright in my seat.
The next day, I was horrified. It felt too out of control, too much like my parents. I knew that alcohol was moving me in their direction, back to where I came from, instead of forward into the future I envisioned for myself. I quit drinking, cold turkey.
BREAK NUMBER THREE came just after I turned twenty, in 1982, when I auditioned for a part in my first real movie and got it. My dream had always been movies, and everything about this one, Blame It on Rio, was intoxicating. It was shooting in a foreign country, and so for the first time in my life, I got a passport. It was with a big studio, directed by the legendary Stanley Donen, who’d made classics like Singin’ in the Rain, Damn Yankees!, and Charade. Valerie Harper was playing my mother—I’d grown up watching her on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. And Michael Caine was playing my father. I didn’t truly understand what that meant at the time, what a unique opportunity this was to work with one of the world’s great actors, I just knew that I was excited to be in a movie. I negotiated three months off from my General Hospital contract to do the film.
I went to Brazil feeling—as I had many times in my life—like this was a new start: a whole new ball game. It was a pattern I’d gotten used to. If something wasn’t working, I knew in a short while we’d be gone, so I didn’t have to try to fix whatever it was. And if it
was working? Well, enjoy it, because it’ll be over before you know it.
We were staying in a big hotel on Ipanema Beach, and the first night we all met for dinner. There was Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira, who was so elegant, exotic, and sophisticated—really something to behold for a grubby kid from New Mexico. Joe Bologna, the other male lead, was a total mensch, extremely warm; in truth, everyone went out of their way to make me feel comfortable. I was in awe, soaking it all up but trying to act cool. I wanted them to see whatever they wanted to see. I told myself, Don’t fuck this up. Sit still, watch, and learn.
The film itself was really a dirty old man’s fantasy—it could never be made today—but at that time, it seemed perfectly normal. I played a seventeen-year-old on vacation in Rio with my best friend, who basically seduces my father against his will. Joe Bologna played the friend’s father, and I was the supporting actress. The lead, Michelle Johnson, was a young model who’d been plucked out of obscurity in Phoenix, Arizona, and I think her breasts were a major factor in the casting—which also seemed par for the course in those days. She struck me as quite innocent. Even though I was not much older than she was, I felt like a veteran by comparison.
On set, I met a very cool local girl named Zezé, who had signed up to be an extra in the movie just for fun. Zezé came from a wealthy family; she was well educated and spoke perfect English. We became friends and quickly got a great little groove going. In our free time, she showed me around Rio, took me to restaurants, and introduced me to her friends. We all started going to lots of parties together, and it was a blast.
Freddy wasn’t there, and I was just me in a place where I had no history, so I could experiment with figuring out the me I wanted to be, without any encumbrances. It was an awakening in so many expansive and positive ways, offset, unfortunately, by a lot of cocaine. I nearly burned a hole through my nostrils while I was in Brazil.