by Demi Moore
Not long after I did SNL, I was offered a movie with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn called We’re No Angels, a comedy. It would be directed by Neil Jordan, an Irishman whose films Mona Lisa and High Spirits I’d admired, and the idea that I might be in a film with those actors was exhilarating. If I was good enough to work with people of that caliber, I told myself, how bad could I be?
It felt like a turning point, an indication that maybe it was time to trust myself more as an actor. Bruce’s reaction to the opportunity was not what I would have hoped, however. I remember distinctly being in the bedroom, changing Rumer’s diaper and telling Bruce what an amazing project this was going to be, how excited I was to shoot a film in Canada with the Robert De Niro. Bruce’s expression was stony as he said: “This will never work.”
I was baffled. “What do you mean, this won’t work?” I genuinely didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“This is never going to work,” he continued, “if you’re off shooting a film.” What he meant was that our life wouldn’t work if I was engrossed in something outside of our family.
I was taken aback. It’s not like it was a secret what we both did for a living before we started a family—Bruce understood from the inside what my job entailed, and I assumed that he expected me to keep on doing it. But in the very short time we’d known each other before getting married, I’d only been doing press and other ancillary aspects of my job, not actually working full time on a movie: my work hadn’t involved any demands that took me away from prioritizing him. In that moment, while I was changing that diaper, it was like a whole other side of his perspective and mine met for the very first time. I felt panic mounting. “Well, we’ll make it work,” I told him, and shifted into solution-oriented mode. I assured him that the schedule had been set up so I could easily bring Rumer with me, and I’d go back and forth to spend time with him. I felt way too much anxiety to have a real conversation with Bruce about our assumptions regarding work, gender roles, and parenting—the deep stuff we obviously needed to start figuring out together to have a successful marriage. Instead, I jumped right into “How can I fix this?” and started frantically figuring out what it would take to accommodate Bruce’s work schedule—and his expectations.
Rumer was five months old when I took her with me to shoot We’re No Angels, and I flew home with her every weekend. I think Bruce came to us once. It was difficult. I was not my most confident with the work, and I did not have the support of somebody saying “Of course you can do this.” I had to cheerlead for myself, and for the relationship.
It was inspiring acting alongside Penn and De Niro, but there was bad chemistry on the set—Sean and the director didn’t exactly see eye to eye. The film wasn’t a commercial success. But my next movie, thank goodness, would make up for that.
GHOST WAS AN unusual script. There was the romance between the protagonists, so deep that it transcended even death. There was a murder and the quest for the killer’s real motivation. And then there was a whole funny side story involving a shady psychic hustler. Really, it was three movies in one: a love story, a thriller, and a comedy. And with an unknown commodity attached, the director Jerry Zucker. He’d had a hit with the hilarious classic Airplane! but had never attempted anything quite like this.
I had a deep interest in the spiritual aspect of the story, the connection we all have with what is beyond our ordinary senses, so I was over the moon about that aspect of the script. But I knew that with so many elements in play, it was a risky film to do. When I read Ghost I thought, This could be either an absolute disaster or it could be amazing.
I didn’t have to audition for the part of Molly Jensen, the female lead; they’d seen my other movies and they wanted me for this one, which was flattering. I met with Jerry and the producers, once in L.A. and once when Bruce, Rumer, and I stopped in New York on our way to Paris, where we were going for our first real vacation as a family. I was determined to get my hair cut short while I was there—I had a picture of Isabella Rossellini looking boyishly chic in my wallet to show my fantasy Parisian stylist. I still hadn’t made up my mind whether to do Ghost, so I felt free to do whatever I wanted with my look.
I’d never been to Paris before, and I didn’t speak a word of French. But I was a woman with a mission: I walked around the corner from the apartment we were renting on the Left Bank to the first salon I saw, and showed them the picture of Isabella in all her sophisticated, short-haired glory. This was Paris, after all, I figured—they knew about style, of course they could do it.
Turns out they couldn’t. The cut, though short, was not at all what I had in mind. Funnily enough, when we got home, I went to see a hairdresser a friend recommended: he took one look at the picture of Isabella Rossellini and said, “I did that haircut.” And then he fixed me right up. I loved it. That haircut did exactly what I’d hoped: it gave me a whole new look and made me feel revived and emboldened. There was something fresh and unexpected about it.
Jerry Zucker was shocked—and, I’m pretty sure, horrified—when I met up with him after we got back and told him I had decided to make the movie. He had cast Patrick Swayze to play the protagonist Sam Wheat, and as his girlfriend he’d chosen an actress with long, flowing dark hair: instead, he suddenly had someone with practically no hair at all. But Jerry went with it and didn’t make me wear a wig, and personally I think the short hair suited the character perfectly.
Molly was supposed to be an artist, living a bohemian life in Tribeca—the old Tribeca of the eighties, a land of artists scraping by in lofts, though, presciently, her boyfriend, Sam, was in finance, as so many of Tribeca’s inhabitants are today. Jerry had a very particular vision in mind. He took Patrick and me to see the loft he was picturing in New York; he felt it said everything about this couple’s relationship and their style. The set designers at Paramount re-created that loft down to the last detail for us back in L.A. To me this has always been one of the most miraculous parts of the movie industry: that a director can show his team his mom’s kitchen, for instance, and tell them “This is what I want,” and then off they go and create its double as if by magic. When we got to the set and saw the “loft” they had constructed, it was exactly like the one Jerry had found in Tribeca, from the creaky floorboards to the tall windows.
Molly’s primary art form was ceramics, and they hired a potter to teach me how to use a wheel. I went quite a few times to practice throwing these teeny, tiny little pots, which I still have. They are very amateurish, of course, but they remind me of what a singular experience it was, meeting the artist whose work we used in the movie as Molly’s. She had such passion about her craft, and a real ease with the clay. I soon discovered that the smallest pressure could transform—and destroy—the shape you were making on the wheel, and there I was, faking it on film. It was especially challenging pulling off the scene when Patrick joined me behind the potter’s wheel, and both of our hands were molding the clay as it grew taller and taller, until it was basically a giant clay erection—in danger of collapsing.
The other anxiety-inducing aspect of that movie was much more profound. Reading the script, I’d recognized the level of emotion that was going to be required: not hysterical sobbing kinds of scenes, but rather scenes that were quietly intense, the hardest kind. I remembered Emilio and his family talking about actors crying, and how they often scrunched up their faces, which made their tears seem forced and fake. But I didn’t know if I could cry at all—and I don’t mean just as an actor. I didn’t cry off-screen, either. Ever. I had learned to bottle myself up to get by, and I wasn’t sure I could suddenly uncork that kind of emotion. How could I access tears on demand when I didn’t even know how to muster them for myself? I had a lot of anxiety about whether I’d be able to do it, the kind of anxiety that tells you: I need to conquer this.
That was the gem that film gave me—it pushed me to figure out how to access my emotions, particularly my pain. I worked with an acting coach named Harold Guskin, who star
ted by talking to me about breathing, and how we use breath to control our feelings. He walked me through an exercise that mimicked what we tend to do naturally when we start to feel emotional—which is, basically, to hold our breath. The goal of the exercise was to help me understand how to take whatever emotion was in the scene and connect it with my physical being. As I was sitting there with him, I became aware of how much I held my breath. A quick breath out, then in, and hold it: I’d been doing that for years whenever I was pricked by fear or sorrow or rage. I’d shut down my emotions by using my breath to literally keep my feelings inside.
That information alone was liberating. That flash of awareness was so simple and yet so revelatory, knowing that those emotions were there, in me, that I wasn’t missing a chip. Because of Ghost, I learned how to breathe, and that helped me begin to unlock my feelings, to connect to them in a healthier way. It had a huge impact on me, and how I looked at myself. There were definitely some blocks (and there still are), but it was one of those great moments that not only opened things up for me personally but also was very powerful in the film. I was amused, recently, when I was at Sundance promoting the movie Corporate Animals, and a young journalist told me his favorite moment from any movie was when a single tear rolled down my cheek in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle as I said, “I was never good: I was great.” Then he mentioned Ghost, and asked, “How does it feel to be the most iconic crier in cinema history?” That tickled me: to think I went from not crying ever to being known for my weeping.
One of the things that connected people to my performance in Ghost, I think, was the level of vulnerability that I managed to reveal—and actually feel. My whole experience making that film was great, not least because we shot in L.A., so there was no conflict with Bruce about me being away. And there was good chemistry between the cast and crew. Sometimes on a set, you feel like nothing’s working and you’re just struggling to get through every scene. But Ghost was the kind of set where there was just an overall ease of alignment and you could feel it all coming together. Not too long ago I was interviewed for a documentary about Patrick. They showed me some behind-the-scenes footage I’d never seen before, and I was struck by the comfortable, open sweetness between us. That’s just who he was.
At the first screening of the movie, everybody from my agents to the studio executives were ecstatic—and so was I. I took their experienced assessments to heart: if they felt it was going to do great, then I did, too. We were all so excited to read the reviews, but when the first one appeared, it was horrible. The reviewer just hated Ghost, which marked a turning point for me: better not to read reviews, I decided, because if you attribute weight and power to the good, then you have to do it for the bad, too, and you’re always going to be at someone else’s mercy.
Meanwhile, the movie was a smash hit at the box office when it opened in the summer of 1990: it brought in over $200 million. And it had a lasting impact. To this day, I hear from people all over the world about what a profound effect that film had on them, particularly people who have lost someone, and felt the movie had given them hope.
Ghost was also my first “grown-up” movie. By that I mean I was included in every aspect of the creative process, from the production design to the music. We would look at the dailies at lunch every day, and there was a clear sense of thoroughness and total professionalism about the whole endeavor. There was some of that on About Last Night, of course—maybe Ghost felt different for me because I was a little bit older and less insecure. But I also think it had a certain magic, and audiences could feel that on a visceral level.
The naysayers were proven wrong about Ghost when it was nominated for five Academy Awards. I was delighted when Bruce Joel Rubin won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Whoopi got hers for Best Supporting Actress. I did okay myself, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress; Julia Roberts won for Pretty Woman, another movie that has stood the test of time. Today, if you happen upon either Ghost or Pretty Woman on cable, they may seem like period pieces. But chances are you will find it surprisingly difficult to change the channel, nonetheless. Because both of those films, dated though they may be, have the most important thing in a feel-good movie: heart.
MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE was soaring. My personal life was painful. Right before Rumer’s second birthday, Bruce was getting ready to go do a film that was shooting in Europe, Hudson Hawk. There was a lot of buzz around it: it had a huge budget; Bruce had worked on the story and cowritten some of the songs, and he had a lot riding on the film. Just before he left, he dropped a bombshell: “I don’t know if I want to be married.”
I felt like I had been sucker punched. “Well, you are married, and you have a kid,” I pointed out. “So what do you want to do?”
Bruce and I had met, married, had a baby, and just done a lot, very quickly—it was as if he woke up a few years later and thought, Whoa, is this what I want? Or do I really want to be free? I think that as a true Pisces, he was struggling to resolve a conflict within himself: he wanted family and grounding, but he also craved excitement and novelty. Basically, he wanted to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Not so unusual in men that age—he was thirty-six at the time—and throw in celebrity and money? You do the math.
The strong, tough part of me thought, If this isn’t 100 percent what you want, then you should get out. I need a husband who I don’t have to convince to be in this marriage. But Bruce didn’t want to be the guy who walked out on his family, who did that to his kid. Even though I was terrified and finding it difficult to wrap my head around the enormity of what was happening, I kept saying over and over, “Then go.” But he couldn’t quite commit to that any more than he could fully commit to me. When he left to do Hudson Hawk, things were in a very precarious state. I went over to visit once, and, frankly, I had the feeling that he had screwed around. It was tense and it was weird and there was just stuff that didn’t seem kosher.
I was wrestling with a sense of rejection and uncertainty I just couldn’t shake when I was offered a movie called The Butcher’s Wife. I shouldn’t have done that film, but for reasons that had nothing to do with Bruce. My agent at the time talked me into doing The Butcher’s Wife for the money, to get my price up. I’ve never done a movie just for money again. It was never how I’d worked, and it was a disaster of an experience that I didn’t want to repeat. I didn’t feel confident going into it, I didn’t feel confident while I was there, and I didn’t trust the director. The movie rested on me, but I didn’t have half the experience of the other actors, Jeff Daniels, Frances McDormand, and Mary Steenburgen. I was intimidated, and I didn’t have the confidence to ask them for help. Instead, I assumed that everyone was judging me to be a fraud, and that I was letting them down. I had to employ a southern accent, and I worried I sounded ridiculous.
I played a clairvoyant woman who visualizes her future husband—a butcher from New York—and to help us all understand psychics better, the producers brought one on the set. The very first thing she said to me during our session was, “Your daughter’s really beckoning for you to have another child.” She wasn’t wrong: Rumer had been clamoring for a sibling; she was dying for a baby brother.
It was hard to imagine that happening right then. Bruce was in Europe shooting, and he was furious with me for going back to work, on top of all the mixed feelings he already had about our marriage. We had made a pact never to be apart from each other for more than two weeks, and then to spend at least four days together, but I had made that impossible by doing this film. I had a very rebellious reaction to Bruce in general. I just didn’t buy the “You’re the king” kind of thing, which he thrived on. Plus, telling me “I don’t know if I want to be married” is not exactly the way to my heart.
But when he got back, the very first time we had sex, I got pregnant again. And he was over the moon. Suddenly, it was like we’d never had that conversation about his ambivalence.
Chapter 13
In the midst of all this, I was offere
d the cover of Vanity Fair. My publicist and I were ecstatic: I had received a swell of media attention following Ghost, but this was the ultimate get for an actress at that time. Annie Leibovitz and I set up a photo session, but the pictures we took didn’t work out—I’d had to dye my hair blond for The Butcher’s Wife, and the editors at Vanity Fair said the photographs didn’t look like me and they weren’t going to use them. We’d have to reshoot.
I was hugely pregnant by the time I was able to do the reshoots with Annie. “If we’re shooting me as I am, I want the images to show that I feel sexy and beautiful as a pregnant woman,” I told her. It seemed ludicrous to me that, at that time, pregnant women were invariably portrayed as sexless. Women hid their pregnancies under tentlike clothes instead of flaunting their new curves the way you often see today. There may have been celebration at the news of a woman’s pregnancy, and a celebration at the birth of the baby, of course, but when you looked at pop culture, it was like there was nothing in between. I wanted to change that and do something that glamorized pregnancy instead of playing it down, and that was very much the tone of what Annie and I set out to accomplish with the photographs. They were wonderfully sensual, provocative photos of me all done up—hair, makeup, jewelry—as if it were a fashion shoot that just happened to feature an enormously pregnant model. In one image I wore a green satin robe that fell open to expose my stomach; in another I was in a black bra and high heels holding my swollen belly.
The very pregnant, very nude picture of me on the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair was actually one Annie thought she was taking just to give as a present to Bruce and me. It was understated, soulful, without the glitz of the photos we assumed the magazine would want. Annie shot it at the very end, when we were already “finished,” or so we thought at the time. In what became an iconic image, I had one arm draped across my breasts, the other cupping my belly, and that’s it. I remember saying to her, “It would be amazing if they had the courage to use this for the cover.” And, amazingly, they did.