No longer a street-smart aleck, Bruce Willis is now asking himself the big questions.
Bruce Willis is lying on a peach-colored couch wearing...um, this outfit. There is a white, short-sleeved shirt printed with sailing flags, powder blue jeans, and canvas shoes that have possibly been made out of a flowered Hawaiian shirt. His hair is quite small. He has an almost shaved-head look, except for the top where various light brown tendrils stick up, like something out of Dr. Seuss. Three tiny gold rings adorn his left earlobe. He forgot to shave.
He looks like the morning after the night before.
"Racism gets me angry," says Willis from the couch. "Not just black-white. There's racism in Hollywood. People talk about the Jews, how the Jews clan together out here and they have a lock on Hollywood. There's a lot of hatred, a lot of not accepting other people. And I think it's fucking archaic."
A secretary breezes in with a cardboard container of food. Willis promptly sits up, pries open the box and stares at two slabs of pan-fried chicken on toasted bread and a batch of jumbo fries. "Oh, this looks great," he exclaims. After which he digs in, at one point forgetting his manners and picking up the chicken with his fingers. Catching himself, he says, "Please don't write that I eat with my hands. I did that once in front of somebody and they wrote about me like I was an animal."
At times, Willis acts as if giving an interview were an out-of-body experience. You get the feeling he's always watching himself for misstatements, or behavior that a reporter will seize upon to make him look bad. Reporters want to make him look bad. So he has shown up today in his office at Tri-Star in Century City without, if this is possible, his personality.
This is a bit unsettling considering that most of us got to know Willis as David Addison, the wise-cracking, insouciant goof-off of "Moonlighting," who was supposed to be a detective but seemed more like a party waiting to happen. Willis, at 34, has tamed many of those same impulses, channeling them into a no-nonsense career that has transported him, in only five years, from the streets of New York to the top of Hollywood's klieg lights. Along the way, he stumbled onto a place that David Addison resolutely managed to avoid: adulthood.
"My life right now is not just about me, it's not about being a celebrity or being a big deal or a big shot," he says earnestly. "It's about me trying to be a real person. Once you get all this stuff? All the success and the money and the offices and the cars? Then you've got to answer a really important question. What do I do now?"
In fact, what he is doing now is preparing for an October blitz, a kind of international Bruce Willis month. His newest movie, In Country, has just opened, and shows a more subdued character than Willis has played before, a smalltown Vietnam vet who has failed to readjust. He'll also host a telecast of "Saturday Night live.'' And he will give several concerts in London, promoting his second Motown album, "If It Don't Kill You, It lust Makes You Stronger." One of the songs, called "Turn It Up Louder," was inspired by his former Nichols Canyon neighbors, who summoned the police one night to get Willis to turn it down softer. After that, he will begin filming Die Hard II or, as Willis has drolly suggested it be called, Die Harder.
His future looks just as solidly booked. He will star in a film called Hudson Hawk, a sort of '90s Topkapi or To Catch a Thief, from an idea he had, possibly to co-star Isabella Rossellini. And there is more. He owns the rights to two Elmore Leonard novels, Bandits and Killshot, both of which he plans to make. And he is writing a screenplay called Color Line, which is about racism and about which he is feeling particularly passionate.
"How in a modern world can there exist things like apartheid, like two million white guys telling thirty million blacks that we rule this country and you don't have a say?" says Willis excitedly. "Get 'em out of there. Give 'em an island."
He puts his napkin on the coffee table and lies back down on the couch. On a table nearby is a jar of bubbles and next to it is a slot machine. Twenty quarters if you hit the jackpot. But he is in no mood to be amused, or to be amusing.
"They exterminated fifteen million American Indians in less than a hundred years in this country and you don't hear a peep about that because we've got the land now." Willis makes a growling sound. "Oh, it gets me nuts," he says.
For most actors, the struggle to make it is an arduous hike up a not very dependable ladder. But since Willis blew into town, he seems never to have missed a rung. After auditioning for Desperately Seeking Susan, and not getting the part, he flew out to the Coast and was sent over to the "Moonlighting" people who, after seeing 3,000 David Addisons, were down to their last 15. Willis was blase.
"I knew I had the goods to get an acting job," he says. "I also knew that if it wasn't the job with Glenn Caron, that it would be a job with somebody else."
From out of nowhere, Willis, co-star Cybill Shepherd and their delightfully off-the-wall "Moonlighting" escapades created a stir, providing television with some of the most innovative programming ever seen. And then, just as quickly, the show fell apart. "I think 'Moonlighting' ended in the episode where they had just slept together," Willis says. "For what the show originally was, was them not fucking. As soon as we did that, we knew it would change. It just died a little death then."
The show struggled on for two more seasons, sinking at times to the nearly unwatchable. "It became a burden just to show up," Willis recalls. "I really felt like the desire to act was almost ground out of me. I was very depressed. I felt like I couldn't even open my mouth to say the words anymore, to crack the wisecracks I'd been doing for four years in a row. And I was carrying a much bigger weight than that. It was like the whole country was watching to see what was going on more behind the scenes than what was going on on the show."
Sometimes what was going on behind the scenes was more interesting. At least there was a bit of drama concerning the off-screen lives of Willis and Shepherd. For Willis, it probably culminated the night the police (and two police helicopters, in a sort of prequel to Die Hard) swooped down on his Nichols Canyon home after the neighbors got sick of his loud music. More than two years later, Willis remains angry and unrepentant. "I still don't think I did anything wrong," he says. "I don't think there's a law against enjoying yourself. The only mistake I made was moving into a neighborhood where the houses were three feet apart."
Now he's living in Malibu, where the houses are close together but the roar of the ocean forgives a lot. Ensconced in a beachfront home with wife Demi Moore and 1-year-old daughter Rumer, Willis seems to be a model Malibu citizen. He recently accommodated the local sheriff's department by cheerfully contributing his bit to a video saying goodbye to a retiring sheriff's captain.
A secretary informs Willis that his wife is on the line. He speaks quietly into the phone. "I love you king-size," he signs off and hangs up.
Was that night in Nichols Canyon the turning point for him, to calm down?
"No. I was still living hard after that. I was just living at the Bel-Air Hotel."
Willis, who gave up drinking and his Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler commercials along with it, is asked if he was an alcoholic.
"I'm not going to say," he replies. "But I think it was the lifestyle that goes with it that got in the way. All I'll say is that I don't drink right now. Demi was one of the good reasons."
You were a womanizer then?
Willis, startled, caught off-guard, says: "You expect me to answer that?"
Sure, why not?
"Do you mean did I date different women? Are you asking me off the record did I fuck a lot of women?"
No. On the record.
"You're asking me on the record did I fuck a lot of women?"
Yeah.
Shaking his head, not Liking this at all. "No. I've never been a womanizer in a classic sense of someone who doesn't respect women and takes advantage of them to get in their pants. I think women are the coolest thing on the planet."
The question was asked, he is told, because it seemed that women would have been available to him, as a TV star, in a way they hadn't been before.
"No, no," Willis cuts in. "Women have always been available to me. Here's what I think happened. What people liked about David Addison they also liked about me. That flavor of life, that approach to life is mine. That isn't something I embellished on David Addison. That is something I bring to my life as well. A kind of joy of life. And I think that quality has always made me appealing. I was fun to be around even when I was tending bar."
At any rate, neither his lifestyle nor the demise of "Moonlighting" hurt Willis in the least. By then, he had made Blind Date, which didn't exactly earn him Academy Award nomination, but which showed a promising movie talent. Sunset followed next, a film that was bludgeoned, and only grossed $4.5 million. But the fact that nothing in the movie seemed to work, kept Willis from taking the heat for its failure. And then came Die Hard. Had it bombed, or bad Willis's performance been off, he might have been thrown to the wolves, given his widely reported S5-milIion salary. But the movie did not bomb. It grossed $80 million, and Willis got high marks for his portrayal of the cop John McClane.
For the sequel, he'll get 57 million.
And he no longer, if he ever did, worries about a bomb.
"I don't keep score the way other people do," he says, getting up, moving restlessly around his office. "I don't worry that if I don't do a good film every time, they're not going to want me any more. It's not about that. I'll do films for no money. I chose not to take a salary for In Country [he'll get a hefty piece of the gross, however] because I wanted to do the film and it was low budget. But in order to do films like In Country, I have to give back a commercial vehicle like Die Hard. Or Die Hard II."
Willis excuses himself for a second time. And, in what is perhaps his only attempt at levity, mumbles as he walks out of the office, "She's scribbling notes. He's going to the bathroom again."
In Willis's climb to the top, even his two missteps--Sunset and his first album, "The Return of Bruno"--were cushioned by his safety net of wide popularity. People went to his movies to see him and bought his album to hear him, bought 1.5 million copies in fact. "And it wasn't that good," he admits. "It was a lot of other people's opinions of what I should do and I was really finding my way, searching for how I wanted to present my musical sensibilities. Most of the album didn't cut it for me."
And the new one?
"This album is different. It's much more of my own musical taste. I wrote five of the songs."
Did he work on his voice?
"Naw, I just quit drinking."
Two people enter his office bearing artwork. Several large photographs already adorn one wall and Willis, sitting up on the couch now, consults with the two on where to hang another photograph and a lithograph of a George Bellows painting called "A Stag at Sharkey's." There are no photographs of Willis in his office, though outside, where the secretaries sit, movie posters have been hung. An avid reader, Willis has a collection of books in his office and reports that recently he spent $1,500 during one trip to the book store. Currently, he is reading James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, about the Civil War. At times, you get the feeling you might like to know Willis, under different
circumstances.
But not these.
The picture people exit and now Willis turns the tables, grilling me. Will everything he said be printed? Told no, he begins to fret: "Every interview that I've ever done has been just as earnest and just as frank as I've been with you and I see things get so bastardized. One thing I've said becomes the focal point and they don't say anything about my world view, about the books I read, about my feelings about racism, that's what drives me nuts."
He walks over to the window and stares out. "I'm pissed off now," he says unhappily. "Naw, not at you. But I've said it all. I've poured my heart to you and told you what's really inside of me, what is the real person here. I didn't color it, I didn't hide it, I didn't try to make you like me. It was just it, just me. And half of it's going to be gone and what's going to be in there is the titillating stuff. That's what always goes in there."
He turns back. "Sec, when money's no longer a concern, you have to answer that big question. What are you gonna do that matters' What are you going to do that's right? I'm trying to figure out what I need to be doing as a human being on the planet."
You have a hint of a stutter, I say.
Willis offers a small smile. "My mind works faster than my mouth does," he says.
_______________
Diane K. Shah, who writes frequently about the entertainment industry, has a suspense novel coming out in the spring.