Sharon Stone: Wild Thing

Stone has been willful and verbal and flamboyant in her pursuit of a Hollywood career from the start. She's always been a bit of a lightning rod. Perhaps that's why rumors have dogged the town's new blonde, rumors that ranged from the banal (that she was just another generic blonde who couldn't cut acting) to the less so (that she was into drugs, or that she'd slept her way to the top). ""Since I got Basic Instinct, I've heard all sorts of rumors," she says when I bring this up. "But the drugs one--that's new. I'd just like to know how I could be on drugs and make four movies a year, because in those days, I would have been. I'm sure making Police Academy 4 would have been a lot funnier on drugs."

Drugs or no, what is indisputable is that she is such a dish, her mere presence has reduced some mighty moviemakers to acting like cliches out of Hollywood trash novels like Valley of the Dolls. "The first time I turned down a studio executive who wanted to sleep with me," she recalls, stifling guffaws, "he screamed, 'You'll never work in this town again,' and I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. When a well-known producer opened his zipper and went to pull out his thing during a meeting, I thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. I mean, hey, if you're going to act out a movie, couldn't you at least act out a better one? I'm a trophy to a lot of men, but who needs that? When I heard that I was supposedly really promiscuous, I said to my boyfriend: 'Honey, I'm a traaaaammmmpppp. Let's just do it on the hood of the car. Make me live up to my reputation tonight.' He didn't think it was funny, but I do. When I did Year of the Gun, I heard I was sleeping with John Frankenheimer. When I was testing for Basic Instinct, I heard that I was sleeping with Paul. Yesterday, I also heard that I was having an affair with Michael Douglas. I must be legendary in bed. Guess it must be the drugs, huh?"

Touche. But the girl has had her name linked with some legendary stud puppets. Like Warren Beatty and, perhaps, one of his household-name joker cronies. How did Stone and Beatty collide? "One of his friends was pursuant of me and I didn't respond," Stone says, utterly blase, stretching like a pampered exotic pussycat. "Warren called my agent about having a meeting with me--at his house--about some project. I told my agent, 'I'm not going to Warren Beatty's house myself,' and she said, 'Oh, good, I want to go, too.' So we gals went up for a half-hour meeting over tea that lasted almost three hours. He's a bright, interesting, occasionally fascinating man, and it's a crime he doesn't go on screen and play a character full of life, information, savvy, wonder. It turns out all the meeting was about was he wanted to know why I hadn't called his friend back. That helped me learn a little more about living here."

Maybe rumor and innuendo are impossible to duck when, like Stone, you've indulged in such exploits as being detained (and strip-searched) by Japanese customs officials who suspect you and your suave European boyfriend of smuggling cash and Cartier watches. One time Stone let a wealthy moviemaker fly her to Paris on the Concorde, providing he financed her return home with trunkfuls of couturier designs. "I do know how to travel with only a change of G-strings, a passport, something black and an attitude," she purrs, very Holly Golightly.

Cutting up in high style can make you legendary, but it's what happens on screen that makes movie stars. In 1985, represented by Creative Artists Agency, Stone chiseled her own epitaphs with King Solomon's Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, bargain basement knock offs of the Indiana Jones movies, made back-to-back in Africa with Richard Chamberlain. If the first was abysmal, the sequel was so calamitous it was shelved for two years. Can the rumor be true that the crew so despised her that, before she arrived on the set to shoot a bathing scene in a rain barrel, one of them relieved himself in her bathwater? "My [ex-] husband, Michael Greenburg, was producing one of those movies," Stone says, with a touch of frostiness.

"That always sets up an uncomfortable situation for everybody. Making those was incredibly destructive to my marriage because we were both locked in the nightmare of making horrible movies for people who didn't give a shit about what we were doing anyway. I was panic-stricken because I was almost 10 months in Africa making movies I knew were destroying my career. I was constantly trying to push and provoke everybody to make it a good movie." And what about the yellow bath water? "I read that in The Hollywood Kids' column," Stone says, rolling her eyes. "The truth is that they are good friends with an actress whom I'd talked my husband into hiring because I thought she was really funny. She came over and refused to learn her lines and had to read them off cue cards. It got to the point where I wanted to strangle her. I have a co-dependent personality type, where I want to jump out and fix everything. Well, I was trying to save a sinking ship. My marriage was falling apart. The movie was going to be bad. I'm sure I was a bitch."

But Stone's been accused of being a bitch on wheels, and worse, on other movies. She grins slowly, evilly, squares her shoulders, and confesses, "I could do nice, but it's just not as much fun. Being nice isn't my biggest goal in life. I'm trying to be honest about who I am and that's not always nice. I'm not always the world's cheerleader. On a movie, when an actress bitches about wardrobe, food, the director, the hours, the anything, it's because we are insecure about our work. The more trained I get, the more secure I get in my work, the easier I am to get along with on the set." Would she count making Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenneger, among her secure times or her flip-outs? "I worked my ass off on Total Recall," she asserts testily. "Someone said one day, 'You know, Arnold doesn't like you.' After thinking about that, I called this person and said, 'Did anybody bother to wonder if I liked Arnold? Or does only his opinion count because he's a big star?'"

Widening her eyes and stabbing a bowl of cream cheese with her butter knife, she muses, "I've worked with nightmarish people. I've been on a movie with an actor who was so unbelievably vicious it was astonishing to watch. I learned that in this business, there is a 'Plan A,' in which you become successful by living and acting with a lot of integrity. Then, there's 'Plan B,' where you sell your soul to the devil and become successful. In this business, 'Plan A' and 'Plan B' patrons mingle. Because I still find it hard to distinguish one from the other, I sometimes really get burned."

Whichever plan Stone subscribes to, she says that for nearly a year before landing Basic Instinct, she was "starting not to like acting or my work. I was pursuing something that I didn't believe in: being a movie star. I had to reassess my values and when I checked it out, I realized I wanted to be a really good artist, possibly a great artist, though I don't know if that's an option for me. Before I was going to let someone take away from the joy of doing my art, I was prepared to quit. I'd made a decision not to work until I got something I wanted. I wanted Basic Instinct. It was a hard period for my agents and my manager because I was refusing work on the hope that I would get it. I was prepared never to work again if I didn't get something I cared about."

Despite working with Verhoeven, whom she calls "a creative genius" whose tutelage left her "enriched, grown," Stone wonders whether Basic Instinct may be "a stupid movie that becomes wildly successful, or maybe a great movie that people really enjoy. Or not. I know I was the small fry, the kid in such an environment. I was given a really big opportunity. I just hope I've met the challenge in a way that doesn't let down the rest of the people who did their greatest. When I got scared in the beginning, I didn't get 'Oh, God, is she going to pull this off?,' I got 'We're all pros and you're going to pull off this movie if we have to carry you all the way through it.'"

But, with all that camaraderie, did she and Douglas wrangle, as rumors suggest they did? And what about the chatter around town that Verhoeven suffered the odd nosebleed or two caused by his own internal problems or else by Douglas's popping him? "Oh, I don't know about all that," Stone says, drawing herself up. "I find it offensive when people say that Michael hit Paul or that Michael and I were adversaries. People want a good story and want to make things bad. When you work in a situation like that, you're like a family. Sometimes you're a dysfunctional family. You may fight with your family over small or big things, but I'd pulverize someone who said something about Michael or Paul. I can fight with them or they with me because we earned that. We have a respect and intimacy and a common goal that you didn't. So get back."

Stone stops short of pulverizing me because I remind her that I didn't start the rumors, I'm just trying to give her a chance to clear the air. She says she'd like to set the record straight on the subject of her alleged sexual exploits. "Because I obviously don't know as many people as some people are saying," she observes, "lots of stuff gets made up about what I have or haven't done. Some of the stuff that's been made up about me since I've become mini-famous, I wish I had done. Some of the stuff has been hurtful and mean. It's come back to me that I've been with a lot of guys, some that I don't even know, some that I've been on dates with. People have also told me that I've been gay or, Jesus, what, a Martian? Sometimes, I think I'm going to storm up to these guys and say, 'Look, buddy, if you're going to make up stories about me, you're not going to like the stories I'll make up about you.' If you're a woman finding any degree of success, that you could have possibly earned it by having integrity and professionalism seems to escape many of the 'minds' in this environment. That you fucked your way to the top seems to be a more palatable concept. I never thought I was sexy, I don't think anybody else ever thought I was, so, if suddenly people think I'm sexy, that's good. But when they start saying I got my job by fucking somebody, I want to just flatten them."

For the moment, however, Stone is less preoccupied with revenge than with capitalizing on the prerelease buzz about Basic Instinct. She and her manager, Chuck Binder, are huddling over projects that they can package together. Of this urge to merge, she explains, "I don't have the killer instinct when it comes to the finale," then adds: "And Chuck is marvelous at that. I'm fascinated by the crafting of an image, the making of a career. Chuck and I have these managerial discussions where we talk about 'Sharon Stone' like it really wasn't me."

Just now, Sharon Stone wants to fine-tune her "Sharon Stone" image. "After Basic Instinct, I'm looking for a comedy because being the comic relief is my favorite. I've just read one I really like but I don't want to mention what it is because when this article comes out, if Sean Young's doing it, I don't want to be embarrassed." Whether Stone's next moves finally see her fulfilling her screen promise or scrambling to cadge Young's hand-me-downs, she hopes film historians will eventually "see past the staple in the middle of my body" to remember her "as a true artist that touched some people's lives and had integrity in my work." With a wolfish grin, she adds: "And as the girl whose crew peed in her bath water."

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