Sharon Stone: Wild Thing

Having read the script of Basic Instinct, I ask Stone if she doesn't think her "Catherine"--sexually predatory, utterly amoral, the hallucinatory film noir mantrap taken to the limit--makes Kathleen Turner's "Matty Walker" in Body Heat seem like Mother Teresa. "Lots of people think my character in the movie is bad," she coos, chiding me for my judgmental nature. "Paul says that she's the devil. I, not having personally met the devil, can't say for sure. To me, Basic Instinct is Pillow Talk, only my character is acting out in a different way. She's just another girl with a broken heart. Maybe that's why I got the part: I have no value judgment about whether she's bad or not. I told Paul that anything he wanted to do with truth I would do. If I put limits on him, I'd have to put them on myself. I decided that the way to make me feel wonderful about myself and my body during those nude scenes was to do a mantra in my head while we did it. At a certain point, I stepped back and became the fantasy of Paul."

Apparently, not every glamorous contender for the role of Catherine was willing to be so malleable. Michael Douglas had allegedly wanted a Grace Kelly type and saw in Michelle Pfeiffer a reasonable facsimile of the cool, ambiguous blondes Kelly played for Hitchcock. But, after what Stone describes as "five angst-ridden months" following her first screen test, which got shot down, and while Pfeiffer's name was still very much on the lips of the moviemakers, Verhoeven called her to test again, this time with Douglas. Stone says, "I bought a Grace Kelly-like suit, called my hairdresser and said, 'I want you to watch Rear Window and give me that hairdo when I come in.' Then, months went by after I tested with Michael when they were saying to me, 'We'll let you know next week,' then 'We'll tell you next week,' and I went back east to shoot a small part in a movie for my acting teacher [Hit Man, directed by Roy London] an hour from where I was born. I came back late one night to find messages from Paul and from my manager. I'm thinking, 'Obviously, I'm getting one of those 'You've been such a good sport' calls that usually ends with '...but we really want a star.' The phone rings. It's Chuck, my manager. 'It's a pass, right?' 'No,' he says, 'you've got it, but you can't tell anyone until we've got the deal set.' I said, 'Chuck, it's been eight months, what do you mean you don't want me to tell anyone?' And he says, 'I don't want Michelle Pfeiffer to change her mind!'"

How exactly did Stone land the movie over such alleged contenders as Pfeiffer, Lena Olin, Joanna Pacula, Amanda Donohoe, Renee Soutendijk, even--why not?--Julia Roberts? "Actually, I just stood in the lobby and--" she breaks off, miming that she's lining up her competitors and gunning them down, "picked the other actresses off as they came out of Paul's office. The truth is, I ask myself the same question." Perhaps, I suggest, Pfeiffer and Roberts, arguably our biggest women stars at the moment, are too control-happy and image-conscious to let it all hang out for the cameras. "Whenever I play something, everybody just thinks that's who I am," Stone says, sounding miffed. "I don't think Julia Roberts is as innocent as her image suggests. You have to be a really smart cookie to create an image as clean and pure and on-the-money as hers. I understand that, in order for Michelle Pfeiffer to have done the piece, it would have had to change."

Change, as in way less skin and kink? In fact, I suggest to Stone, if Eszterhas's script hadn't come Verhoeven's way, couldn't the project have been downright--"Stupid?" she offers, laughing throatily, and adds, "I think Paul and Joe were relieved that they had created a piece that worked as it was and then found someone who could do the piece as it was. I don't think a lot of the other women wanted to do that." So, to the bigger names who are reluctant to take on genuinely controversial roles, Stone leans into my tape recorder and growls a message: "Stay home. Be afraid. Don't turn on the juice. I'll do it."

Stone saw Basic Instinct as a go-for-broke proposition. "For years," she says, sighing in frustration and tossing back her head, "directors have been telling me, 'Baby, you're the next Jessica Lange.' Also, for years, I've been coming in to test for parts with the star. The director would want me, the star would want me. Then, I'd be on hold for, like, 10 to 14 days while, if they could get a bigger name star, I wouldn't get the part. Three times I've had the leading man call me during production and say, 'Just want you to know, I still wish it was you.' Not because the actress wasn't good, but because we had a particular rapport."

Rapport or no, a few pictures Stone didn't land were Batman, Someone to Watch Over Me, Havana and Dick Tracy. "Now, as we've all seen in my recent reviews, I've been doing good work in not so good movies," she says, explaining away the logic of her slow climb to the upper echelons. "So, over the years, I've been devoted to training, studying, working. You're not going to go for brain surgery from somebody who just got their bachelor's. As you train, learn and grow, it's natural that you move into that group of people who are doing the same thing. I've earned my way into the club. Or, at least, into the fringes of the club."

The fringes--a place she seems seldom to forget she came from--are a recurring theme when talking to Stone. One of her best recent memories, she says, is of Oliver Stone's telling her at a party she had "guts, a lot of balls to do Basic Instinct." That was, she proudly asserts, "a really great, very blue-collar thing for him to say." In fact, Sharon Stone comes from what she calls "a very blue-collar, working class background." The daughter of parents who worked together in the family tool and dye company in a rural town, by 15 she was already considered a brainy "outsider" who locked herself in her closet to gorge on books and simultaneously took high school classes and college courses. On a Christmas school break in New York, she was spotted and signed by model agent Eileen Ford and she packed herself off to Europe, where she walked the ramp and posed for haute photographers in Paris and Milan. It wasn't life the way Funny Face might lead one to believe, Stone says, with a sardonic laugh, clamping her eyes shut and resting her hand on her forehead. "I didn't know the depths of the darkness to which I would fall. I made the jump to acting because modeling is so demeaning to the women who do it."

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