by Demi Moore
If all this obsessing about my body sounds crazy to you, you’re not wrong: eating disorders are crazy, they are a sickness. But that doesn’t make them less real. When you are afflicted with a disease, you can’t just decide not to have it, no matter how miserable it’s making you.
I THINK VERY few people who aren’t athletes or members of the military themselves can truly grasp what I went through to transform myself to star in G.I. Jane. It is the film I am most proud of, because it was the hardest for me to make—emotionally, physically, and mentally—and I had to commit to the part as much as I imagined my character, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, was committed to becoming the first female Navy SEAL.
I was completely taken with the story: Lt. O’Neil is set up by a female U.S. senator to be the first woman to go through Navy SEAL training, but she has no idea that the senator is using her as a bargaining chip—and fully expects her to fail. O’Neil is beaten up, ridiculed, and nearly drowned, but against all odds she succeeds. That grit, that absolute refusal to go down, despite everything she’s up against, spoke to me.
It was also a timely subject: the issue of women in combat was a hot topic following the Gulf War. By law, women were not allowed in combat, but in contemporary warfare, there was really no such thing as a front line. Women weren’t safe anywhere in war, but neither did they have the same opportunities as men to advance in their respective services. The Navy and the Air Force went “coed” in 1993, but the Army and Marine Corps held firm on the combat exclusion for women, as did elite units like the Navy SEALs, maintaining that women could simply never be as strong as men.
Getting in shape for the Navy’s most punishing physical trial gave a new definition to the word extreme. If I was going to be realistic in the part, I knew I had to go through whatever physical challenges Lt. O’Neil would. They put us through a two-week modified SEAL training, and it was just forty guys and me. On the first morning, I woke up at five a.m., took a handful of vitamins, and then they had us run a timed mile. I promptly threw up. By the end of the day, I had horrendous blisters from my boots and could barely walk. One of our SEAL consultants on the film, Harry Humphries, took me aside and said quietly, “Listen, you don’t have to do all of this.” I thought, I’m playing an officer. A leader. If I stop now, I’ll never get anyone’s respect. I told Harry just to get me some tape for my feet.
It was hard-core. Sam Rockwell was on that film initially, but he didn’t make it through the training—he told Carson Daly years later that he was afraid he was going to get sick filming the scuba scenes at night in the frigid water.
On my second day, I was a few minutes late to the training session. The guys were already in formation, and I tried to sneak in at the back of the line unnoticed. “Jordan! Front and center,” screamed one of our SEAL team commanders. (They never called me by my real name when we were training.) I ran up in front of him, and as I stood there he yelled, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Drop your fucking ass down.” Which means lean and rest: get in a push-up position and hold it. And everyone else was forced to do the same. By the end of that training, though, I was tougher than most of the guys. He’d yell at them, “Are you gonna let yourself get beat by some mother of three?”
The only strength difference between the guys and me by the end was that I could never, ever, get past three pull-ups—four tops. That was the bane of my training existence. No matter how ripped I got, I actually had to cheat on-screen with those. I did my two or three and sometimes I even needed a little help to really nail those.
I finagled a meeting with a high-ranking admiral in Coronado as part of my research, and he confirmed that the only physical difference between men and women candidates for the Navy SEALs would come down to upper-body strength. “Other than that,” he told me, “it’s purely mental.” Our conversation gave me a defining clarity on what I needed to bring to the character of Lt. O’Neil. I could portray her physical strength, but in the end, what was even more important was having the mental resilience to stick with it, no matter what.
I needed that fortitude when we started filming. It was physically and mentally grueling, especially the scene in which O’Neil is one of the SEAL candidates “captured” by a simulated enemy, and, as prisoners of war, they learn SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. In the Resistance segment, the captives are tortured to extract information, and I had to engage in a brutal fight with the master chief, played brilliantly by Viggo Mortensen, who in addition to pretending to be an enemy has always been anti-woman, and is trying to show the male candidates what a liability and a danger a female would be on the battlefield. He forced my head underwater and kept it down almost as long as I could hold my breath, then let me come up for a gulp of air before slamming my head back under. It was so realistic, one of the assistant directors was worried I’d drown. Honestly, there were moments when I was afraid of that myself.
RECENTLY, I CAME across a column the beloved movie critic Roger Ebert wrote after an advance screening of G.I. Jane. It was, he observed, “intriguing to watch her work with the image of her body. The famous pregnant photos on the cover of Vanity Fair can be placed beside her stripper in Striptease, her executive in Disclosure and the woman in Indecent Proposal who has to decide what a million dollars might purchase; all of these women, and now O’Neil, test the tension between a woman’s body and a woman’s ambition and will. G.I. Jane does it most obviously, and effectively.” It was gratifying to see that someone as smart as Ebert got it.
Unfortunately, his thoughtful take on the film was an outlier. Even before the movie came out, people who hadn’t seen it were already slamming it. It felt like a kind of collective decision just to trash me and treat me as the joke I’d always feared I was.
This was really hard because G.I. Jane was a true labor of love, a role that I believed in completely. I was emotionally invested in the story, the message, and the provocative questions it raised. And I thought it was, in fact, a really good film.
Granted, this was the first movie portraying women in combat—or one woman, anyway—and it certainly was pushing the envelope by showing the raw physical dynamic involved and asking the question, If you’ve got the skill, why shouldn’t it be an option? The one-two punch of me being paid more than any woman to date—and equal to many men in my industry—and then playing a woman who was just as strong as a man was just too much for a lot of people.
All the criticism of G.I. Jane and Striptease was a lot to absorb. The takeaway seemed to be that I had betrayed women in Striptease and betrayed men in G.I. Jane and gotten paid a lot to do it—and that nobody could forgive me for that. I absorbed all that negativity without really working through it.
Bruce was working the whole time I was, and we were disconnected from each other emotionally. Our life was all about logistics surrounding the kids. And while Bruce was always proud of me doing well, I don’t know that he was always comfortable with the attention that came with it.
It didn’t occur to me to talk with someone about how I was struggling—in truth, it didn’t even occur to me that I was allowed to struggle. That it was okay for me to have a problem. I just had to figure this shit out on my own.
I HAD BULKED up enormously making G.I. Jane, and I weighed 138 pounds by the time it wrapped. (I don’t think it was Bruce’s favorite look.) My neck was huge. My back was huge. When I finished the movie, there were pants that I could no longer pull up over my thigh muscles. It was heady being that strong and powerful, but it was not a look I intended to stick with, any more than my shaved head.
My usual reaction would have been to start starving myself again, to begin an exercise regime designed to reduce the bulk, but I did neither. I had reached my limit. When I got home to Idaho, I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just want to be my natural size. I didn’t want to starve myself anymore. I didn’t want to assess my success as a human being based on how skinny I could get. I was curious: What would my natural size be with no manip
ulation? And I was finally willing to accept whatever the answer might be. I could barely remember a time when I wasn’t trying to dominate and control my body—for a long time, it was the only thing I could control. I had a realization that holding on to this weight was a way to protect myself. I added into my daily prayer a new mantra: to have the courage to be seen without padding or protection. I couldn’t go on fighting my body and my weight; I had to make peace.
I started by giving up hard exercise. I never went back into the gym in the house. Never. I had spent six painful years in there, starting with Scout’s birth in 1991 and finishing after G.I. Jane in 1997, and I was burned out. I literally couldn’t look at a gym. The room it occupied is now my office.
At the same time, I changed my whole way of dealing with food. Rather than look at it as something to conquer, I decided to try eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full. I made new rules that didn’t include observing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I just ate when I was hungry, and if that meant I didn’t want to eat until lunch, I didn’t have to. Over the course of all the different diets I had been on, I had come to realize what worked for me and what didn’t. I knew that I needed more protein than carbs; I knew that if I ate a little bit at a time, I digested better. I would still sit down with the children when they had their meals, but I wouldn’t necessarily eat just because of the time of day. I no longer had lunch or dinner business meetings. I’d only plan a meal with people I knew well enough to relax with.
The weight came off. It was most apparent in the spring of 1997 when we were starting to prepare for the Cannes Film Festival. Elizabeth Taylor was recovering from brain surgery; she asked me to host her Cinema Against AIDS event in Cannes, and I happily accepted. Bruce’s film The Fifth Element was opening the festival. I was getting the clothes organized for the many days of events, and we picked them out and then did fittings. Without dieting or doing any kind of extreme exercise, I had lost about thirty pounds in just over three months.
I had finally reached a truce with my body. I would need that peace to get through what came next.
I HAD JUST returned from the press tour for G.I. Jane when I got a call from DeAnna: my mother was dying. She had metastatic lung cancer and had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor on top of that.
If I wanted to reach any kind of understanding with her in this lifetime, it was now or never.
Part III
Surrender
Chapter 16
At first, I thought it was a scam. I imagined showing up at the hospital, only to find that my mother was fine and had gotten paid to deliver me to the paparazzi. I didn’t tell her I was coming, and when I arrived in Farmington, New Mexico, there were no cameras. Instead, there was my mom, staying at my aunt Carolyn’s house in a hospital bed she’d had installed in her own bedroom. Ginny was missing all of her hair from chemo, except for one resilient little red tuft. She was gravely ill.
During the eight years we’d been out of touch, Ginny had remarried not once but three times. One of the men had been so abusive she had to be hospitalized after the worst of his beatings. Morgan thought she kept getting married so she could change her name and clean up her credit rating. To this day, DeAnna believes that she and my father never actually divorced, and that all of her subsequent marriages were illegal. One thing seems to be certain: after my dad’s death, no matter who she was married to, Ginny always kept a picture of Danny on her nightstand.
I think that in a messed-up way, my mother’s relationship with my dad had anchored her. I’m not saying it was healthy, but the constant competition to see who could hurt the other one more, who had the most power at any given moment, had channeled a lot of her energy in a specific direction. Without him, she was completely lost and increasingly at the mercy of her addiction and her bipolarity, which had finally been diagnosed. And now her body was giving out.
When she was hurting me, I couldn’t really see past that. I felt unsafe and betrayed and, on the deepest level, devastated that she didn’t love me enough to be a better mother. To not exploit me for money. To behave herself at my wedding. To pick me up from school when she said she would. To protect me from Val. And all the rest of it. I have since come to understand that there is no such thing as someone “loving you enough” to be better. People can only be as good as they are, no matter how much they love you.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that you have the power to hold their actions differently in your own mind and heart. You can choose to believe that your value is inherent, it’s yours, and that the way your mother treated you says something about her, not you. Or you can choose to believe that your mother’s neglect means that you are unlovable and worthless. As long as you keep that wound from closing, you’ll be sore.
When I decided to care for my mother at the end of her life, I began to heal the wound.
THE FIRST TIME I made the trip to Farmington, DeAnna and Morgan came with me to see Ginny at Carolyn’s house, and we were there for a short time. The second time, I got a call that Ginny might not make it through the night, and I rushed back to New Mexico with Bruce and the girls. My mother hadn’t seen Rumer since she was a two-year-old toddler; now she was ten. Scout, who was seven, and Lulah, who was four, she’d never met. I think the influx of all these people and so much energy buoyed her, and between that and the steroids the doctor put her on, she managed to stay alive for another three and a half months.
I stayed for the duration. I lived at my aunt’s. Bruce—who really stepped up and was truly supportive during that period—went back to Idaho with the kids, who had school, and returned with them to visit me many times during the next few months. It was beautiful having the company of my daughters, who were at the beginning of their lives, when I was spending so much time with my mother, who was at the end of hers.
Hunter Reinking, who’d been my assistant since the movie Now and Then, joined me in New Mexico to help out. He took the night shifts with me; we would doze during the day when Aunt Carolyn took over. I still had some of my G.I. Jane muscles, so I was strong enough to lift Ginny into the tub for her baths. My mom was so weak she couldn’t hoist her ever-present Diet Coke, or raise the cigarettes she never gave up, to her lips. There was no reason to deny her the pleasure of smoking at that point: the damage was already done. So I would light her cigarettes and hold them to her mouth while she puffed away. She would take an orgasmic drag and sigh, “Ooh, that was good for me.” I don’t know if it was an act of solidarity or just a way of handling the stress, but I started smoking again myself.
One of the things that had always frustrated me about my mom was her insistence on her own victimhood. When she was dying, for once she really was the victim. In a way, I think that made it easier for her to be her. It certainly made it easier for me to forgive her, to have compassion for her, and to give her the kind of love and attention she’d always craved. She finally got what she’d wanted her whole life: to be taken care of. To be looked after. And really, in our own way, isn’t that what we all want?
I’m sorry that she didn’t get the chance to learn that a feeling of security can come from the inside, from yourself. I know that she never was able to overcome the feeling of being unloved and that she carried the trauma of rejection and blame until the very end. I grasped while I was taking care of her a real sense of the innocence of her soul. And I was able to see that she came into this world like we all do: wanting to find happiness, wanting to feel loved, wanting to feel like she belonged. She didn’t start life with a plan to be hurtful and neglectful. She just didn’t have the tools to navigate out of her own pain. When I consider now how young she was when she had me, I think: My God, she was just a kid. My daughters are older now than Ginny was when she had me—much. And they’re just finding out who they are.
Ginny sounded very much like a kid at the end, lapsing into delusions of being a six-year-old, insisting that she wanted a bicycle for Christmas. Other times she was an adult but didn’t know he
r father had died, and she talked a lot about his taking her “to the party.” When she was clearheaded, sometimes I’d try to talk about real things that I hoped to get some closure on. There was still the little-girl part of me who wanted answers. Ginny was never truly able to hear it, or take responsibility. The most that she could give in acknowledgment was to say, “I wish it could have been different.” Which, in a way, was a lot. It was a hell of a lot more than nothing. Because it told me she knew that it wasn’t okay. That things that had happened to me were wrong.
I started thinking about the good in her. She was so creative. She was resourceful. She could be very loving and generous, always taking people in. She had so much more to her than just what she was able to live out in her fifty-four years. She died on July 2, 1998.
Bruce was there with the kids, so we had all stayed at a hotel the previous night. When the phone rang at six a.m., I sat up in bed, knowing what I was about to be told. “Please hold the phone up to her ear,” I asked Aunt Carolyn. I whispered what I needed to tell my mother into the phone: “I love you.” I did. I still do.
Then I drove back to Carolyn’s house, where Ginny had stopped breathing in her hospital bed, and I took a few minutes alone with her, holding her hand. I didn’t cry then, and I didn’t cry when I went into the little bathroom off her room and closed the door. I had a rush of clarity as I stood absolutely still. All of the emotions that I felt toward Ginny—my anger, my pain, my hurt—were mine. The vessel for them was gone now. Whatever her issues were, and God knows there were plenty, she’d taken them with her. It was a liberating moment. I was flooded with compassion for the pain she had held all her life and had no way to work through or overcome. I felt sad for this wounded child who had never developed beyond the emotional level of a teenager. That understanding freed me to start to be more forgiving toward myself, and to quit working so hard not to be my mother.