The Life and Times of an American Icon—take one.
High over New York City, Demi Moore leans against the rail of a penthouse pool, her eyes half-closed against the dying sun. She is wearing a meltdown gown—an hourglass halter in blood-red silk-satin—that cascades over her feet in a liquid train. It s a very deliberately sexy dress, a vamp dress. And when she s in pose, with head flung imperiously back and white neck and arms outstretched, she stops everyone s breath. She looks luminous, powerful; she looks like Madame X in the Sargent painting; she looks like Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame.” Mario Testino growls, “Gorr-geous, Demi! Like that, like that. Gorr-geous! Like that! Gorrrr! Jess!”
Posing beside Moore is an awestruck kid with a shock of wild hair who can t take his eyes off her. His grin splits his face in a mixture of bliss and nervous rictus, and he keeps dropping to his knees to rearrange her hem. Demi holds her pose concentratedly while he fiddles at her feet with the puddle of silk, but when she catches a sidelong glimpse of his hero-worshiping face, she loses it completely. Giggles start rippling, then shuddering, through her, until she doubles up, choking with throaty laughter, and howls aloud. “OK,” says Testino. “More film.”
The fan is Zac Posen, the wunderkind, 22 years old and Designer of the Year five minutes out of fashion college. The dress is his, designed for her, and he s so excited he can t get over himself. Or her: “Demi Moore? Are you kidding? She s my idol, she s so sensual and strong, I loved that she took on all of those empowering roles.” He sketched and resketched the dress, finally settling on “this visceral color because there s something Romanesque about her, and I think she looks great when there s fluid lines.” We gaze at Ms. Moore s fluid lines, which are a sight to see. “Ghost,” says Posen dreamily. “I loved Ghost. I grew up in SoHo, and they filmed it around my neighborhood.” That movie came out in 1990. What year was Posen born, exactly? “Nineteen-eighty. I was ten years old. The pottery scene made me cry and cry.”
Here s take two.
Demi Moore is lying on a dressmaker s table, surrounded by scraps of fabric, scissors, yarns, sketches, and bobbins of thread, some of which are digging into her. “Like that, Demi. Gorgeous.” She is gorgeous—the lovely body tricked out in a tough/tender pencil skirt with the gleam of anthracite, and a punky rubber-sequined vest. She stretches a languorous leg and points a killer Jimmy Choo toward the table edge. Today s hero-worshipers are the design duo Proenza Schouler (actually Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough), who made the outfit for her. Again, both are wunderkinds (aged 24), both godlike beauties, both left Parsons last summer (and immediately made the front page of Women s Wear Daily), and both gaze adoringly at Moore as if she were a goddess. “She s an American icon!” they tell me, speaking together. And—since both of them are boys who clearly love their mothers (Proenza and Schouler are their mothers maiden names)—they admire Moore unreservedly for “getting her priorities right,” for being “a wonderful mother,” for “making the choice to walk away and spend time with her family.”
And here s take three—a very quick paparazzi shot, snatched as Moore was leaving the studio in between these two pictures. Makeup scrubbed off, dressed down, holding her two little dogs, cell phone strung over her shoulder, she is aiming for her car, looking abstracted, and nobody is shouting, “Gorr! Jess!” The New York Post ran the picture next day, above a rude and mocking caption, which I will paraphrase from memory. In sum, it said, “Ooh, here s Demi and the dogs—and we re not looking much like a goddess. Now we ve hit 40, we re not wearing too well, are we, dear?”
Ouch! How about that for a life in the day of Demi Moore? One moment they build you up; the next they knock you down.
“So now I look like a bag lady,” she says faux-ruefully, 48 hours later, and I only just manage not to laugh out loud. Moore looks beautiful and fragile, way too young to have a daughter (Rumer Willis, her eldest, nearly fifteen) just over her first prom. She s dressed to meet me at New York s Four Seasons Hotel in a chic black sweater and pants, with a knockout tweed coat slung over. Vintage? “Yes—I thought it looked very Chanel.” Moore has been collecting vintage since she was sixteen and loves truffling around for special pieces. “It feels like you re finding treasure,” she says. “Whenever you see a woman who dresses right, who dresses organic to herself, there s always a little vintage in the mix.”
Shopping retail is harder, she says. She does do it, I m amazed to learn (“Um, you know—Barneys. Um—Neiman s”), and not necessarily with a personal shopper in tow. “But it can be overwhelming.” Why? Because there is too much choice in the stores—or too many people gawking and whispering, “There s Demi Moore . . . Demi . . . Demi”? “A little bit of both,” she says. “Being watched makes you have a secondary awareness. But if I m there when it s not about me, if I m looking for somebody else, it s a breeze.”
Everything about Demi Moore is surprising. It s a surprise to find her so tiny and delicate, because her roles—and her paychecks—were so towering and vast. It s a surprise to find her so girlishly pretty, without any discernible makeup. (“Um—maybe I put some lip gloss on this morning?”) It s a surprise—after I leave her for a minute to take a message—to come back and find her sitting cross-legged on the overstuffed banquette playing with a Game Boy like a young model between shows. She turns it toward me, and I see it s not in fact a Game Boy but a state-of-the-art PDA on which she s busy E-mailing, fingers flying over the keyboard. “You d love it, being a writer,” she says, “because it s like old typing.” The other toy she s never without is the smallest Sony cell phone I ever saw. (She laughs when I goggle at it. “I m such a gadget dork.”)
It s a real surprise to find her unstarrily human, warm, and funny. She seems to have been blessed with an instant-intimacy gene—leans close, giggles huskily, touches your arm to press a point—which makes her compellingly attractive. (And oddly huggable, when you think back to those abrasive, ball-breaking roles of the nineties.) I guess her troubling, vagabond childhood—her father worked in the news paper-advertising business and constantly uprooted his family—honed her “Let s be friends” approach.
The biggest surprise of all, of course, is why Demi Moore is back in harness, on the billboards, up on the big screen again, after six years of what her clippings file insists was a “retreat from Hollywood” in a little town in Sun Valley. We ll get to her own private Idaho in a minute, but first: The reason she s back is obvious from the appetite of audiences for Charlie s Angels: Full Throttle, the best audiences anybody could want—mass America, including the young and hip. Moore received an offer she couldn t refuse: the role of Madison Lee, fallen Angel and villainess supreme. “We wrote the part for her and wouldn t accept no for an answer,” says Angels star and coproducer Drew Barrymore. “We were willing to do whatever it took. Demi was a huge battle for me that I had to win.” “She played very, very hard to get. She was very protective of her personal life,” says director McG, who adds that “if she had chosen not to do it, we would have dropped the character and changed the movie.”
“I was tempted and lured,” says Moore. “They were so sweet! They all left messages on my answerphone: ‘Oh, we want you to do this so-oo much! ” She had not been thinking of “making a comeback” (if it is “a comeback”; she won t exactly say). And if she had been, she might not have chosen a Charlie s Angels sequel as her reentry vehicle. “Which shows that it s a good thing we re not always in charge. Anyway—where else can you do martial arts in high heels and lip gloss where it s all about having good hair?”
I ask McG if Moore had been worth the titanic efforts of persuasion. He says, “When you ve seen her go toe-to-toe with Cameron Diaz—and both in a bikini—you tell me! She s beautiful. She s all things Angel. It was a pleasure to be in the editing room.”
So that s why she s back on-screen. (She says enigmatically that she s looking forward to “the right thing coming my way, but with no preconceived ideas about what that should be in any way, shape, or form.”) But why did she go away? She s pretty clear on that one: She wanted to devote time to Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah, who were then aged around eight, five, and three. “For me, I wasn t ‘turning my back on Hollywood. I wasn t ‘retiring or ‘becoming a recluse. I just was doing something else. I probably stepped into the most traditional role I ve ever experienced—mother—in the sense of its being an exclusive focus. I think it s interesting that the motivation was for them and I think the gift—really—was for me.”
For the last six years, the woman who was once the best-paid actress in the industry has been living the life of a soccer mom. At home in the tiny town of Hailey, she takes Scout and Tallulah to school, drops in as classroom assistant, works the PTA. (Rumer is now away at a performing-arts school, where she s showing “real talent” at music.) Moore likes her small-community life. Hailey is “beautiful. There are rapids and river rafting and hiking and camping. You re surrounded by nature. And a simple existence.” She d thought of it as a getaway until “Rumer was at the age she started school. And it just evolved as a place that made more sense. There s something comforting about being in a small town, a neighborhood feel. People don t lock their cars there; people don t necessarily lock their doors at night.” Somewhat wistfully, she says that her own crazily peripatetic childhood gave her no sense of “belonging, of groundedness. I didn t have any reference to gauge where I was at. There was nothing I could go back to and say, ‘OK, I get it. This is where I am. Not with my schoolwork, not with my personal growth, not physically or emotionally. I think that s why I had a very close relationship with my grandmother.” I reckon that, once Moore had children of her own, having got them to Hailey she was determined to keep them there, no matter what else was going on in her life (marriage crumbling, career bombing).
Even so, wasn t it extremely difficult for Moore to walk away at the time she did? She was 35—at the height of her beauty, her celebrity, and her earning power. I can t think of a current top-billing actress in her mid-30s who could dream of walking away from those crucial years leading up to the fortieth birthday. Nicole Kidman (36)? Renée Zellweger (34)? Perish the thought. You get the impression they daren t stop work (and Kidman has young children, as Moore had). “It just didn t matter,” says Moore. “It wasn t like I had any big struggle contemplating what was the right thing to do or what I was giving up. I think happiness and being happy is something that makes a huge difference.”
This is such a bland remark that I jump on it immediately. Why is she “happy”? I want to know. She s not in love, is she? There s no guy in her life now? (She ended a three-year relationship with her trainer, Oliver Whitcomb, last year.) She says, “No!” but she gets on “really, really well” with ex-husband Bruce Willis. “We are a family, and we ll always be a family. In—just a different form.” Oh, come on, Demi, I chide her. You know how bad separation can be. . . . “It can be bad. But if your priorities are clear—which is if your children are your priorities—it s amazing how you can put aside your own selfishness. I didn t become a parent to not share it with the father,” she says firmly. “It isn t how I imagined it, but—you know? We give our children a wonderful thing, which is authentic love. We share our lives.” Oh, really? “In that way.”
Well, you know—friendly ex-husbands who are great fathers and who are very happy to share their lives “in that way” are all very well . . . but I m sure America would love to know that there is some nice guy out there who wants to share her life in every other way. She shakes her head and says, “Being OK with being with—just me—is not a bad thing.”
It s easy to overlook the fact that Moore has worked in movies for so long (her first, forgettable film was Choices, in 1981) that the quintessential “Brat Pack” picture St. Elmo s Fire actually came from her middle period. She did not shoot suddenly to fame, she slogged her way up; and Ghost, which we think of as her breakout, was actually her twelfth movie. After which, of course, she became the hottest thing in Hollywood. She married Willis in 1987 (when he still had all his hair, and the blockbuster Die Hard was about to explode). When actors fall in love, the world looks on with interest, wondering whether or not they re going to break up. When top-billing actors actually marry each other, the world goes plumb crazy because the two spliced together are greater than the sum of their parts (like Taylor and Burton). So from that moment on, you couldn t pick up a paper without finding a Moore story. At which point, the world turned. Against her.
In both her personal and professional life, Moore was pretty much attacked as she climbed—higher than any woman had climbed before. Her clutch of hot-button hits after Ghost (A Few Good Men, Disclosure, and Indecent Proposal) raised her salary to a then-unprecedented $12.5 million for Striptease in 1996, which tanked at the box office, and G.I. Jane in 1997, which also made disappointing numbers. Me, I liked G.I. Jane and thought her performance was terrific. But you have to wonder why people stayed away. Perhaps audiences—especially male audiences—didn t want to see this luscious, beautiful creature going through induction hell, being beaten half to death, and eventually hardening up into a cut, muscled, shaven-headed, hermaphrodite grunt doing one-armed press-ups better than the boys.
By the time Moore reached the mid-nineties she seemed to be both the most-wanted and least-loved actress in Hollywood. Why? Because she was tough, steely, and ambitious, I guess. These are characteristics that are pretty much admired in twenty-first-century working women (Condoleezza Rice for one; Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard for another). But business and politics are light-years ahead of the movie industry in terms of equality. (When was it that Sharon Stone gave that rueful sound bite about how Hollywood had no room for anyone with a vagina and a point of view?) Does Moore feel that she was got at because she was a woman? “Definitely! My feelings were, I felt betrayed, I felt attacked, I felt I seemed to have pushed a button and triggered something, particularly with men. But oddly enough, also with women,” she says, pointing out that some of the snippier pieces about her “were written by women.”
Personally, she was attacked for what was deemed to be vanity and utter self-obsession. The infamous naked-and-pregnant Vanity Fair cover caused national outrage in this country. I was in London when the issue hit the newsstands (no Bible Belt in Britain, so no need for brown-paper modesty packs), and by and large, there was, in Europe, none of the fury that swept America. “I wasn t—naive,” says Moore now. “Or unaware that it would have an impact.” But was she aware that the impact would be so huge? That people would be so outraged? “Not at all!” she says, a mite testily. She thought times had changed since her grandmother s day, when women “after four or five months of pregnancy simply did not go out. Not even to church.”
“That picture said it all: I am a woman, and this is where it s at,” says Donna Karan, Moore s longtime friend, shouting above the traffic on her car phone. “She set a statement larger than life when she did that.” And she did: There was a seismic shift in the representation of pregnancy once the picture was published. Today s blithe mothers-to-be, who dress through the third trimester in stretch Lycra instead of hiding their bulges in smocked polyester burqas, owe their freedom in large part to Moore. “I was photographing my daughter last night [Gabby Karan DeFelice was about to give birth] and thinking of that picture,” says Karan, when suddenly her other line rings, and she breaks off. For an exciting minute or two, I hear her yelling, “Gabby! Are you dilating? Are you dilating?” but she comes back to say, “That s my daughter on the other line; I m telling her I m just doing an interview about Demi, and she s yelling, ‘Oh, she s my idol! she s sexy, she s talented, she s beautiful, she s hot, she reinvents herself, she s a great role model for women. . . . Demi really captures the age span,” Karan concludes. Which is true—it s the reason Moore is adored by fashion designers barely out of high school; it s the reason the 28-year-old Barrymore just couldn t get Moore out of her head for the Angels role. And it s the reason the canny McG, with his finger on the pulse of pop culture and current music and teenage trends, coaxed her out of Idaho and back into Hollywood.
As to narcissism: The truth is that many actresses are “obsessed” by their body image. How can they not be? An actress s body is a tool of her trade, like her face. Sometimes a role requires her to bulk up or shrink down in order to portray the character. Renée Zellweger packed 20 pounds onto her tiny frame for the role of Bridget Jones by dint of eating Snickers bars and drinking alcohol. “It had to be done, to authenticate the character physically,” she told me chirpily (once she d run and worked and starved it off again). Courtney Love had to lose 40 pounds for her role as a heroin addict in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Director Milos Forman told her, she reported, “You re playing a junkie. You have to lose weight.”
But Moore seems more troubled than many actresses by the difference between the woman and the role. As I sit looking at her slender physique, I find it hard to understand that for all those years, when she seemed to vie with Madonna for the title of poster girl for the body-conscious nineties, posing for her nude pictures and stripping off for her movies, she was obsessed by her size. “People assumed it was me trying to be provocative, or trying to help my career, when really it was an effort to overcome huge, huge insecurities with my body, and having had huge struggles with my weight,” she says. After whipping herself through her maniacal exercise regimens for Striptease and G.I. Jane, she decided that enough was enough. “I realized one thing. I d proved to myself that I had the will to transform my body. I also realized that it didn t bring me the peace within that I was hoping it would.”
So—after G.I. Jane—“I knew I had to stop. I had to stop not just exercising, not just overfocusing on my diet; I needed to stop trying to find the answer—an external answer. I literally stopped doing anything. It was time to put down the measuring stick. I knew that my intention needed to be not about a number on a scale or an amount of food or the hours put into physical exercise. I had to work toward what would be an emotional haven.”
Oh, dear. Your reporter is a bit of a shallow, unspiritual person, now realizing that she is in the presence of a deeply spiritual person. (Everyone says Moore is “deeply spiritual”—it s one of the things her friends admire most.) She studies Cabala, she tells me. (And I remember that before they started flinging sexy gowns over her head, the Vogue stylists questioned the little red cotton string on her wrist, which I believe is a Cabala token.) “Do you want to be good enough?” she asks rhetorically. “Or do you want to know the value of your worth? Because you will never be good enough. But you can know the value of your worth. The value of my worth is not in whether they print the shitty pictures and call me a bag lady, or whether I have beautiful pictures in Vogue. One certainly feels nicer than the other. But that s not the value of my worth.” So—while I was rather hoping for some quick tips about how you, too, can have a body like a goddess s without doing three hours hard biking a day—I am forced to understand that you may need to put in quite a bit of spiritual energy before you can look like Demi Moore.