by Demi Moore
Woody Harrelson was going to play my husband. Woody was one of Bruce’s best friends, and I knew him really well, too, by that point. That seemed like it could be awkward—kissing him would be like kissing my brother. On the other hand, there was a comfort to working with a friend whom I trusted completely. When Adrian got Robert Redford to play the billionaire, it solidified my feeling that this film would be something unique.
I made a deal with Adrian: he would be free to shoot the sex scenes however he wanted, but in the end I could review the footage and if there was anything I felt was too invasive or gratuitous, he would cut it. It was an arrangement that required a lot of trust on both our parts, and I appreciated his willingness to collaborate like that.
Still, I would be on display again, and all I could think about was my body, my body, my body. I doubled down on my already over-the-top exercise routine. I cut out carbs, I ran and I biked and I worked out on every machine imaginable in the gym we’d installed in the house in Hailey. I was actually feeling comfortable with how I looked when I went in to see Adrian about a month later to talk about costumes. I finally had my body where I wanted it.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” Adrian said immediately when I walked in for our meeting.
Initially, I took that as a compliment, and I explained that I didn’t want to feel self-conscious in all the love scenes coming up, so I’d been working hard on my body. I don’t think he listened to a word I was saying. He just kept looking at me with a disturbed expression on his face. Finally, he spat, “I don’t want you looking like a fucking man!”
My head was spinning when I left his office. I completely lost it when my agent called later that night and told me, “Adrian is going to fire you if you don’t gain at least ten pounds.”
We had another meeting, this time with my agent and the head of the studio, as well as Adrian. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I tried to explain to him. “That’s like saying to a heroin addict, ‘Go do drugs.’” I did my best to make him understand my struggle, to see how important it was that I not feel self-conscious during the sex scenes, and that I needed to be slim to be comfortable naked on camera. Very reluctantly, Adrian backed down. In fairness, it was his film, and he wanted the leading lady to have a soft, sensuous look, whereas my ideal for myself was to be delicate and svelte like a ballerina. On the one hand, it was my body. On the other, it was his film. There was a little bit of tension and antagonism between us after that—I didn’t want him to win, but I knew that a seed had been planted and that it was only a matter of time before my need to please was going to do battle with my desire to be thin. In the very first scene we shot for Indecent Proposal, I was rolling around in my underwear on a bed covered with money.
I knew Glenn Close, and she’d warned me that Adrian was an odd guy to work with on love scenes: she told me he was yelling out encouraging obscenities the whole time she was humping away with Michael Douglas all over that loft in Fatal Attraction. Glenn hadn’t exaggerated. Adrian is a true voyeur, which is part of why his films are so interesting and potent. But on set it’s very kooky: he literally didn’t stop talking—practically hollering!—the whole time we were shooting the sex scenes. “Fucking raunchy! Oh God, got a boner on that!” he’d yell. “Come on, grab his dick!” At first it was creepy: here was this guy with this sort of long-haired, British-rocker look, getting all sweaty and worked up, yelling about boners. But once I got used to it, I saw its advantages: having Adrian carry on that way took the focus off my own awkwardness because he was so over the top. Once I knew not to take his outbursts at face value, it was actually pretty hilarious having him yelping on the sidelines while Woody and I tried to simulate lust. And the fact is, when I saw what Adrian had pulled off in the end, I thought it was beautiful. I didn’t have to rely on our deal; there was nothing he’d shot that made me uncomfortable, or that seemed prurient or excessive. His movies are erotic, but they aren’t sleazy.
The filming was a slog, though. The shooting schedule in Vegas was from four a.m. to four p.m., so every morning I got up at one thirty to start training by two. I ran or biked or worked out in the gym at the Mirage. I finished just in time to jump in the shower and go through hair and makeup. At night, I took care of my little girls, who’d come with me, along with their nanny and my trainer. Then I would get up at one thirty the next morning and do the whole thing all over again.
It caught up with me halfway through the shooting when I felt as if I was coming down with the flu. Adrian wanted to call a sick day, but I said no; I didn’t want people talking about how the production had to be stopped because of me—I was still paranoid about being seen as “difficult.” Over my objections, Adrian called a doctor to come and see me, and it turned out it wasn’t the flu: I had walking pneumonia. This time I had no choice, and neither did Adrian. He had to take an insurance day on my behalf, which is something actors never want to have on their records.
A medical crew came and gave me intravenous antibiotics. I felt better right away, but it was a little scary, so I eased up a bit on my workouts—though not enough for Adrian. The look on his face every time he saw me in sneakers or on a bike was disapproving, bordering on disgusted, and as much as I pushed back, it began to get to me. By the time we finished the movie, he had succeeded in getting inside my head—to the point that I had put on all the weight he had wanted me to gain at the beginning. I was almost unbearably uncomfortable about it. I could see it in the last scenes we shot for the film: I was in this cream dress and my belly was a little “poochy,” and I remember Adrian coming over to me while we were watching the takes and noticing it. I told him, “Do not say one more word to me about my body.”
As crazy as Adrian and I made each other, I have to say that I’ve never been shot more beautifully. Everyone looked golden in Indecent Proposal, as if we were lit from within. The DP—director of photography—would do the lighting, but then Adrian would come in and rework it himself. His level of focus in terms of lighting and storytelling was incredible: he paid attention to everything, down to the details of the costumes. I remember I suggested a black shantung silk dress of my own for the first “date” between my character and Redford’s billionaire, and Adrian loved it. He wanted that initial encounter between them to feel elegant, despite the fact that my character had basically turned into a call girl for a night; he wanted to create a situation so romantic, so classy, that it transcended their deal and felt, actually, seductive to the viewer. Adrian even got Herbie Hancock to play piano on the Redford character’s yacht while we slow danced in that scene. (I just kept thinking about that iconic moment in The Way We Were, when Barbra Streisand takes her gloved hand and brushes Redford’s hair out of his eyes. It’s not easy being spontaneous with a screen legend, but he couldn’t have been more gracious throughout the shoot.) Gone was the raunchy Adrian, and in his place was Adrian the Romantic. He was a perfectionist with a clear vision, and while our ideas about my body clashed rather violently, I don’t think he was ever intentionally cruel. He just wanted what he wanted. Good directors always do.
The movie made a whopping $24 million box office in just five days when it opened in April 1993. Though it was universally panned by critics and women’s groups—who objected to my character being used as barter—the movie ended up making over $260 million worldwide.
The controversy with feminists was really interesting. The author Susan Faludi accused Robert Redford’s character of “raping a woman with money.” A critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “In Hollywood it may be the Year of the Woman, but this year every woman has her price.” The Washington Post said, “If a man is sold, it’s called slavery. In Hollywood, if a woman is sold, it’s called romance.” I thought that was an oversimplification of a story told with a lot of nuance, which really strikes at the core of our collective fears about marriage. Whether you’re a man or a woman, no matter how content you are with someone, there’s always that slight anxiety that someone better—ri
cher or prettier or more impressive at whatever it is you are insecure about—will steal your partner’s heart away. It was also a movie about the blunt force of money. It asked, For what amount of money would you sell yourself, your spouse, your life?
I never consciously had this thought while we were making the film, but I’m sure simmering away somewhere in my subconscious was the ugliest question I’d ever been asked: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” That was an indecent proposal. Our film, by contrast, was the story of a woman who was precious. A billionaire would give anything for her. Her own husband was nearly destroyed by the thought of losing her, even for a night. She was beloved and respected and had her own career, and, ultimately, she was the one who decided what she wanted, what she would and wouldn’t allow to happen to her.
I GOT PREGNANT again. But this time was different. I was throwing up every day. I was in my bed and crawling to the bathroom to vomit and then crawling back. It got to where I couldn’t bear to eat because I couldn’t bear to throw up anymore. At one point I ended up subsisting on water for seven days.
Bruce and I always tried to do our movies at the same time so we would have our off time together. While I was sick, Bruce occupied the kids—Rumer was five, and Scout was not quite two—taking them for walks in the woods, splashing around with them in the pond in the backyard. He was a great dad, protective and involved, and he was excited we were having another baby. But he was as relieved as I was when the morning sickness passed just in time to pack up the kids and the nannies and the pets—our family circus—and head to Hawaii, where Bruce was scheduled to shoot a film with Rob Reiner called North.
Though the timing was a little off—I’d felt like I was just starting to get back into my career groove—I didn’t have any second thoughts about having another child. The perfect name for the baby surfaced during an all-girls trip to Fisher Island, off the coast of Miami—the game on that vacation became what to name this new baby. Meg Ryan was there; we had fallen into an easy friendship over the years. I found her open and warm and noncompetitive—a real girl’s girl—and we were about the same age, walking the same path. I loved her work, but I loved getting to know her even more. She suggested Tallulah, because both of my other daughters’ names had “oo” sounds: Rumer, of course, and Scout’s middle name, LaRue. “Tallulah would round out your trio of ‘oos,’” Meg said.
I loved the name. Bruce hated it. And the campaign began to convince him. There was the obvious reference to Tallulah Bankhead, which didn’t sway him. He warmed up a little when I looked it up in a baby name book and found it derived from the Native American word for “leaping water.” And then I pointed out the character Jodie Foster played (at age thirteen) in the musical Bugsy Malone. That pushed him over the edge, and he gave in.
Bruce was in New York making Nobody’s Fool with Paul Newman, and I joined him there with the girls for a visit toward the end of my pregnancy. Scout had come early, so I had lined up doctors in New York just in case, though I was feeling great. But there was a problem, as it turned out. The doctors did an ultrasound and were concerned that the baby seemed awfully small for a February due date. “You can’t exercise,” they told me. “That has to stop.” They wanted to make sure nothing got in the way of her growth. All of a sudden, what had been a standard pregnancy became high risk, and I was afraid to do much more than go to the sink to get a glass of water. I got a little nutty being so confined and stationary. And I grew increasingly concerned because they were scanning me almost every day. All of the baby’s vital signs were good, but they couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t gaining weight.
Back in Hailey after Bruce finished the movie, I immediately consulted my regular OB-GYN. He scanned me and compared the image to the ones I’d brought back from New York. “She really hasn’t grown in five days,” he told me. “You’re full term, and I think you just need to get her out, because there’s something going on, and we don’t know what it is.” He induced labor in our little hospital in Hailey, and Tallulah Belle Bruce Willis entered the world at lightning speed on February 3, 1994—the doctor almost missed the birth because he had gone to change his shoes. She was four pounds, twelve ounces, and looked so much like Bruce I added his name to hers. She was incredibly scrawny—like a little head on a stick—but they gave her oxygen and checked her out, and she was perfectly fine, just underweight.
The truth is, the doctor’s wisdom to say, “Let’s get her out,” probably saved her life. I couldn’t be more grateful to him for giving me my third baby girl, my sweet little Lulah.
Chapter 15
I would have done anything to take care of my girls. I felt an almost primal need to protect them: I would have taken a bullet for them, robbed a bank—you name it. That is what I related to when I read a script based on Carl Hiaasen’s book Strip Tease. I can’t imagine much in this world that would make me more uncomfortable than taking my clothes off and exposing my body and sexuality to an audience of strangers every night, but I would have done it to feed my kids without question, just as the protagonist of that story had. Her name was Erin Grant, and she had worked as a secretary for the FBI before she lost her job and, when she could no longer afford to support her, lost custody of her daughter, too. Erin becomes an exotic dancer because she knows it’s a surefire way of earning enough money to get her kid back.
Speaking of money, I was offered a lot of it for that role: over $12 million. No other woman in Hollywood had ever made that much money for a movie. But as it happened, the producers of Striptease were in a kind of bidding war with the producers of G.I. Jane, another story about a woman who will do whatever it takes to reach her goals, albeit a very different sort of woman with very different goals. (I was actually one of the producers of G.I. Jane—I had brought the script to my dream director, the brilliant Ridley Scott, and he said yes, which almost never happens.) I had already signed on to do G.I. Jane, so the producers of Striptease had to offer more than I’d be paid for G.I. Jane in order to go first. And so they did. Suddenly, I was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.
Bruce was also doing well. He’d been paid over $20 million for the third movie in the Die Hard series. Notice the discrepancy. In Hollywood at that time—and, unfortunately, still—for some reason a man is worth almost double what a woman is. But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimme Moore.
Some of it had to do with Bruce and me being so successful as a couple. But nobody gave him a grabby, greedy nickname. He was just a guy doing what guys were supposed to do: earn as much as possible to take care of his family. Women, for some reason, are supposed to earn less—in every job, from the worst to the best—and never push back. That never made sense to me. I didn’t go to college. I wasn’t raised with money. But I knew enough to know that you want to get paid the most you can for what you do. I had defined myself in opposition to the way my parents supported us through slippery chicanery: I worked hard, and I behaved like a professional. I prided myself on giving my all, not just whatever I could get away with. I had taken part in propelling some big box office hits—my last film, Disclosure with Michael Douglas, had been a huge commercial success—and I wanted to be paid accordingly. That’s all I was guilty of.
In a funny way, the hate that came at me for choosing to do Striptease—and getting paid what I did to star in it—mirrored the disapproval the protagonist, Erin, faced for becoming an erotic dancer. I started going to strip clubs to meet the women working there and hear their stories, and it was a fascinating education. Some of them were dancing to put themselves through school. Some were addicts supporting their habits. There was one really beautiful young single mom who danced all night so she could be with her kids all day—I talked about her when I went on Barbara Walters to promote the film, and said that nobody ought to judge that single mom for working to support her family any more than we’d
judge a waitress or a secretary. And I meant it.
I was, again, dubbed an exhibitionist. On one level, I get it, of course: I was dancing around a pole in a G-string. Fair enough. But the ugliness with which people responded to that movie felt tinged with real malice and misogyny.
One of the best things about doing Striptease was that I got to spend a lot of time with Rumer, who was seven by then, while I was making it. She begged to be allowed to audition for the role of Erin’s daughter, and she nailed it and got the part. I don’t deny this had as much to do with me as it did with her considerable on-camera charisma: the director loved the idea of our real-life bond coming through in his film, and he thought she was just adorable (I’m biased, but I think he was right). I had a great time with her, and I was very proud: she was diligent and devoted and a quick study. My critics decreed that I was a bad mother for letting her see me dance topless. I thought that was insane: she’d seen me a lot more than topless many times throughout her young life. Despite all my issues with my body (or maybe because of them—I didn’t want my girls to inherit my issues), I’d raised them to view nudity as natural and nothing to be ashamed of.
As I said, on a conscious level, what drew me to Striptease was the mother-daughter story. But when I think about how unmistakably both that film and G.I. Jane required me to focus on and dominate my own body, I am forced to recognize that I was working something out through my choices.
When I was making Striptease, for breakfast I would measure out a half cup of oatmeal and prepare it with water, then for the rest of the day I would have only protein and some vegetables—and that was it. And the crazy thing is, even eating like that, even working out six days a week, it was not like I was rail thin. I am convinced that it was a kind of mental and emotional holding on. I was gripping so tight in every way—to my marriage, to my career, to my exercise and diet routines—that my body wouldn’t let go of anything. The only place I felt truly comfortable with myself was as a mom, a role that to me was at the heart of that film.