162
films). Not the work of starting Thorn, an organization that uses
technology to prevent sexual abuse of children online (she’s done
that too). The work I speak of is digging deep into her own history
and psyche to make sense of a past that has too often been reduced
to headlines. (“Ashton Kutcher didn’t eat for a week after Demi
Moore divorce!” Poor thing.)
“Everything that occurs in our individual lives informs us. Shift-
ing, molding, presenting the opportunities for the exact purpose
to get us where we are in the present time. Whatever that may be.”
She twists and retwists her epic ponytail, like your favorite art
teacher or Ariana Grande. “All the projecting of who they think
I am [were] the very things that were pushing me out of two
elements: my comfort zone, and my control. [They were] trying
to get me to let go and really be who I am. And I don’t think that
I knew how to do that.”I
n one particularly nostalgic passage in the book (she’s
not overly nostalgic; more of a poetic been there, done
that), she describes watching a beautiful neighbor at the
West Hollywood apartments that her mother dragged
her to in a bid to escape her father’s alcoholism. This
young woman, so self-assured, present, and ambitious,
was Nastassja Kinski, and they would while away after-
noons running lines for Nastassja’s auditions. Demi wasn’t drawn
to acting by Shakespeare or the French Nouvelle Vague. Just an
older teenager who was raring to go. “She had this sense of herself
that I so wanted. Even though I didn’t know what it was. To me,
she represented a sense of freedom that I couldn’t even fathom. It
was a sense of belonging. [And I felt] if I could fit there, then it
would mean it’s okay that I’m here...that it’s okay that I was born.”
But when you’re raised by people who define themselves by each
other, it’s hard to imagine a life where you rule your own kingdom.
In the book, Demi describes herself, age 16 , seeing her first husband,
Freddy Moore, up onstage with his band. “Watching Freddy, I was
blown away: if I could be with someone that captivating, then maybe
I would be captivating too.”
When she married Bruce Willis, we made sure to remind her that
she could do anything she wanted, push as much as she dared, and
she would still somehow be Die Hard’s wife. (The Vanity Fair profile
devoted a good portion of its word count to an interview with Bruce
in which he evaded questions about his wife, because a man’s evasion
is always more interesting than a woman’s honesty.) Then the wife of a
man 16 years her junior. (That ’70s Show wife.) Then wife of no one.
Demi loves dolls—dolls and toys. She collects them by the room-
ful, a hobby she describes as becoming an obsession in the wake of
her divorce from Willis. “I love figurative art,” she says. “And when
I look at the little faces of things that I have, whether they’re like
little animals or little something or others. I’ve always got little faces
looking at me. If you go up and look at my carry-on bag, I have alittle bear, and I have a little Dil Pickles, you know, from Rugrats?”
Wait, wait, wait. Did the star of Striptease just tell me that she
travels with a tiny stuffed Rugrats doll? She takes me upstairs and
unveils him in her suitcase, cleaning his knobbly little head before
holding him up for me to examine. “I usually have a monkey in my
purse too. It started with one I call purse monkey.” Little faces
everywhere. What a metaphor for our stares.
But, no, she tells me, rupturing my determined but clumsy met-
aphor. The doll faces are funny faces, “reminding you not to take
your life too seriously and to remember the importance of play.”
“The other faces are the ones of people trying to take from you,”
she says with a nod. They were there when her second marriage
ended. They stalked her third. But she did manage to hide some of
her life from prying eyes, including the late miscarriage at about the
same time that she was accused of being a grandma-aged bride at
42 (40 freaking 2). She hid her private reaction to public humiliation,
saying simply, “As a woman, a mother, and a wife, there are certain
values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have
chosen to move forward with my life.”
And she managed to keep her children sacred. When she talks
about Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah (she was doing offbeat celeb baby
names before all you Kardashians were a twinkle in your mothers’
eyes), she softens. Becomes some other substance; no longer that
granite monument to deflected pain. “My daughters offered me an
opportunity to start to change the generational pattern. To be able
to break the cycles...” Motherhood, she says, was her only absolute
goal and the only destiny she can be sure she’s fulfilled, and that
includes “mothering myself.”W
e have early call times. Tomorrow
is her first day on set in Cardiff
shooting a television series based
on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World, in which she plays a woman
banished from a society where
people control their emotions with
a drug called soma. Now she sells her body because she’s never
learned to experience it as her own.
She says she has to study her lines, that we should get to bed.
But then she’s dressing me up, tying a vintage Yves Saint Laurent
scarf around my head and explaining where I can get the cocktail
dress I want. (Stella McCartney, though will anything look as good
as the custom dress Stella made her for Princess Eugenie’s wedding
that made Instagram users go crazy calling her “mother” in the
good way? Nope.) Now she’s describing how not to panic on a
forthcoming date. (“It’s just a chance to connect!”) Now she has
her character teeth in to test them for tomorrow, and how does
she still look so good with these jagged fake teeth in?
She feels my head. She says I feel hot.“I have zero interest in being a victim.”
Continued on page 192Come into bloom. Dress, Giambattista Valli Haute Couture. Necklace, Van Cleef & Arpels. See Where to Buy for shopping details.
Hair: Gregory Russell for Christophe Robin; makeup: Jo Strettell for IT Cosmetics; manicure: Emi Kudo for Chanel Le Vernis;
production: Joey Battaglia for AIR. Productions; prop styling: Steven Valdez. Special thanks to the Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades.