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Sometimes you expect a diva. Demi Moore certainly seemed to be displaying the
wilfulness of Hollywood royalty. As I got off the plane in Los Angeles, I
had a message to say my interview with her had been cancelled. The following
afternoon, after a flurry of calls and e-mails, I am waiting, at barely an
hour’s notice, outside Moore’s home in Beverly Hills. A large black 4x4
sweeps into the driveway, disgorging a driver and a woman with shiny black
hair and massive, face-obscuring, movie-star sunglasses. Moore, I presume.
Sometimes you expect a diva. But you can be disappointed. As Demi Moore, for
it is she, leads the way into her large, modern, canyon-top home - which she
shares with Ashton Kutcher, her third and much younger husband, and her
three daughters by her former husband Bruce Willis - she’s breathlessly
apologetic. “I’m so sorry. Everything’s been so rushed and crazy.”
She has just flown in, she explains, from New Mexico, where she’s shooting a
new film. She’s in LA for one night, for the premiere of the first film
she’s ever directed, one of three socially conscious short films sponsored
by Glamour magazine each year. She’s obviously anxious. “I invited Ridley
Scott and Paul Haggis,” she says. “What was I thinking?” And she had worried
that she wouldn’t have the time or focus for an interview. She was also,
touchingly, concerned about disappointing someone expecting to meet a major
movie star, perhaps even a diva. “Is it okay if I’m not looking my most
stellar?" she says she asked her publicist.
“So, anyway,” she tells me, “you’re getting me at my, you know,
throw-on-my-clothes, drove-my-kid-to-school-this-morning, no-make-up,
regular, everyday self.”
What’s really flattering, though, is that she’s squeezing me in between what
I’m sure are much more pressing appointments for her today: with her
pedicurist, from where she has just returned, and her stylist, who’s coming
over later.
So that’s how I come to be in Moore’s high-ceilinged, glass-walled living
room. The actress herself, slight and fragile, with surprisingly delicate
features, is sitting crosslegged on a cushion on the floor. She’s in faded
jeans, turned up at the ankles, a tight tartan sweater, barefoot, her
toenails a newly shiny black. And she’s giving me her full attention. She
has a very direct gaze, which is pretty disarming. She looks astonishingly -
and naturally - young, considering she’s 46. Which I can’t help blurting out
after a few minutes.
“Well, that’s very kind of you,” she says, giggling and blushing like an
adolescent girl. Even beautiful Hollywood actresses, it seems, are not
immune to a little well-directed flattery.
I’m thinking about her age for a couple of reasons. First, it is really tough
in Hollywood for actresses in their late forties.
“Yes, that’s an absolute truth,” she acknowledges. “And, yet, it’s like all
things in life: it’s a challenge that you have to find ways to make
interesting for yourself. But I do have moments of frustration.”
It must be particularly hard for Moore, because after she had been Hollywood’s
biggest actress for a number of years, she decamped to Idaho when her
marriage to Willis fell apart in the late 1990s, devoting herself to raising
their three children.
“But I don’t feel bitter or angry,” she wants to make clear. “At the time, I
wasn’t thinking whether it was bad for my career.
It just didn’t matter. Recognising what my brother and I went through as
children, I just knew my children needed to be grounded. And, really, it was
a tremendous gift for myself. I wouldn’t trade what I have with my children,
who they are today, for having a bigger pay cheque and a bigger career. But,
yes, I did take a long period off, at what really would be have been my
prime time for leading-lady roles.”
I’m also thinking about her age because the first shot of Moore in her latest
film shows her aged to look as if she’s in her mid-seventies. In Flawless, a
diverting thriller set in 1960s London, directed by Michael Radford - who
made Il Postino and 1984 - Moore plays an executive in a large diamond
company whose career, in the very male business world of those times, is
thwarted by the glass ceiling. In cahoots with a janitor, played by Michael
Caine, Moore’s character helps orchestrate the theft of a fortune in
diamonds. But the film opens in the present day, as a journalist sits down
with Moore’s now much older character and says, offhandedly, “I want to know
your story.” The journalist gets a great deal more than she bargained for.
Which is how it is with Demi Moore, I feel. Perhaps inadvertently, she has
been the most surprisingly intriguing and consistently controversial female
American star of the past 25 years. At different times and for different
reasons, her roles and her body have become social and cultural touchstones,
focal points for often intense debates about women’s status in a
postfeminist America, and also about women’s relationships to their own
bodies.
Before there was Julia Roberts, before Nicole Kidman or Reese Witherspoon,
there was Demi Moore. It’s hard to believe, but she has been a star since
the early 1980s, when she made Blame It on Rio and St Elmo’s Fire. That
earned her a spot as a founder member of the so-called Brat Pack, young
stars, including Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald, who appeared
in a string of coming-of-age movies in the mid1980s. Over the next decade
Moore, beautiful and driven, left her contemporaries in the dust. By the
early 1990s, she had become the top female star in Hollywood, appearing in a
run of hugely successful films, including Ghost, A Few Good Men and Indecent
Proposal. She excelled at playing women striving for a place in a male
world, but still vulnerable and feminine.
Her big moment of cultural notoriety came away from the screen when, in 1991,
she appeared naked and extremely pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, just
her arm covering her breast. There was a huge fuss in America, with some
stores selling the magazine wrapped in brown paper, as if it were porn. “The
whole shoot was geared around expressing how I felt about myself as a
pregnant woman,” she says. “So I didn’t even think about it being
provocative. I never imagined the impact it would have, and still has.”
The Vanity Fair cover, though, started a focus on Moore’s body that
culminated, pretty disastrously, in two movies that all but capsized her
career in the mid1990s, Striptease and GI Jane. Moore was paid $12.5m for
Striptease, then the highest fee ever paid to an actress. Feminists were
furious that she was being paid that record amount for playing a stripper,
particularly as it seemed she was showing off breasts that had been
surgically enhanced.
Overcompensating perhaps, Moore then played, in GI Jane, a Navy Seal trainee,
a woman so aggressively masculine that her hair was shaved and she could do
one-armed push-ups without breaking a sweat. Moore agrees that the focus on
her body became obsessive and unhealthy. She believes it stemmed from a
yearning for approval caused by her traumatic childhood. “Dysfunction or
difficulty in childhood really creates such an enormous lack of self-esteem
and confidence,” she says. “You have to find a sense of value that comes
from within, not, as it was at times for me, from ego, from external things
like success in my career. But that’s hard when you grow up without a sense
of self-worth.”
Moore was born Demetria Gene Guynes in Roswell, New Mexico. Guynes was her
stepfather’s name, her biological father having left her mother after just
two months of marriage. It wasn’t until she was in her teens that Moore
discovered who her real father was. By then the family had moved more than
40 times as her stepfather, who later committed suicide, sought work. Her
home life was shambolic, destabilised by constant fights between her
alcoholic parents. Moore also suffered serious medical problems as a child.
She was cross-eyed and for a while wore an eye patch, until an operation
corrected the problem. She also nearly died from a kidney disease. But these
feelings of childhood inadequacy created a powerful ambition in her, which
found a focus when a friend, the actress Nastassja Kinski, suggested she
should try acting.
“It creates an incredible sense of drive towards overcoming, proving you’re
valuable, that you have a purpose and a sense of worth,” she says. “The
problem comes when you can’t let go of the child in you
that still needs that approval. But I think the difficult times I had in my
childhood also gave me the strength to cope with many other things in my
life. Those are the things that give us the colours that make us who we
are.”
For Moore, the approval she had always yearned for, the years of critical
acclaim and public admiration, were ripped away with Striptease and GI Jane.
I wonder how that felt. “It didn’t feel good at all, and it’s very tough
feeling like a victim. It felt like it was out of my control. There were
things that came out months before Striptease was even released, tearing it
apart; and nobody had seen it. The biggest problem came from the public
reporting of my fee. It was tough. It was frustrating.
“But if you look at a lot of people’s careers, there tends to be a cycle,” she
adds. “And I guess it was just my turn. But it definitely didn’t encourage
me to want to step back into the game. It was my children who finally said,
‘Hey, are you ever going to work again?’”
The road back hasn’t been easy. “The reality is that there are a lot of parts
I would like that just don’t come to me,” she says. “And that’s not how it
used to be. But I have tried to make that a good thing, as opposed to
feeling sorry for myself.” She has found some interesting roles, including a
really impressive turn as an alcoholic lounge singer in Bobby, about the day
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
Despite her admitted frustrations, Moore really does seem very content in the
life she now has. It surely helps that she’s no longer the biggest star in
the Hollywood firmament. If she does have concerns in her life these days,
it’s about her children, and how they are treated by the tabloid media.
“Straight-out cruelty,” she says. “Things just mean and cruel, like saying
they’re fugly. I’m talking about my 14-year-old, my 17-year-old, who aren’t
choosing to be in the public eye. It’s very painful, as it would be for any
parent, to have anybody say unkind or hurtful things about your children.”
Yet the truth is the press remains as fascinated by Moore and her family as it
ever was. Of course, she added to the mystique, and created another social
scandal, when she married the actor Ashton Kutcher in 2005, in a Kabbalah
ceremony. He’s 16 years younger. “I’m certainly not the first woman to be
with a younger man. So, once again, I had to wonder, ‘Is there something
about me that seems to be making it such a big deal?’ I can’t answer that. I
have no idea.”
She’s also surprised that the press seems shocked that she, Kutcher and Willis
all seem to get along so swimmingly.
“Look, nobody goes into a marriage, particularly where you have children,
thinking you’re going to end up divorced. So, being a child of divorced
parents, I really wanted us to keep a close relationship. And having female
children, I feel that the relationship they have with their father will
affect every relationship they have with every man in their future. So I
really wanted that to be a positive, loving relationship. Because we’re
still a family. We’re just a family in a different form. And I’ll tell you,
it’s a lot less work than being angry and bitter.”
Which is not, I thought as I said goodbye, the kind of grounded,
well-meditated sentiment about life that your everyday Hollywood diva would
have.
