A hurricane of protest surrounded the filming of Basic Instinct. Will 1992's sexy, controversial, and talked-about thriller launch the sexy, controversial, talked-about Sharon Stone into the front ranks of Hollywood's femmes fatales?
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Dodging traffic on the ritzy end of Sunset Boulevard as I rush to meet bombshell Sharon Stone at the "members only" St. James's Club, I'm thinking: 18 months can sure make a difference in Hollywood. About that long ago, a Playboy photographer snapped Stone working this same strip, dressed in a bustier, a killer pair of heels, silk lingerie and a raincoat.
She stopped traffic cold--we brake even in this town for a "900" sex-line whack fantasy made flesh--blowing kisses, snaking her hips like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, hell, practically ramming it in the faces of the Mercedes and Beemer boys who hung out their windows and put their calls on hold. Later that same day, she dangled in her undies from a ladder on the rooftop of the very same faux tony club at which we're about to rendezvous. Later still, in one of the club's deluxe suites, she thrashed around on satin sheets and thrust out her silk clad nether parts for all the world to ogle. It was all in a day's work back then, all part of Sharon Stone's brand of image-manufacture.
Yessirree bob, plenty can happen fast to a gal as drop-dead gorgeous and calculatedly inhibition-free as Stone. Since she played the devious, karate chopping Schwarzenfrau in Total Recall--the raison d'etre for her Playboy spree--we've seen Stone spoof herself on Spy's cover as "That Cynically Exploited Sex Object," we've seen her presented as one of "America's 10 Most Beautiful Women" in Harper's Bazaar, and we've seen and heard her heat up Arsenio, Letterman and Leno. Of course, you'd expect limelight to splash all over a girl for whom Big Things have been predicted since she jumped from modeling and being the "Charlie" girl to acting.
"I know exactly where I'm heading: I'm going to be a movie star," she declared to pals after her debut as Woody Allen's shimmery wet dream in Stardust Memories, which she topped with a delectable Cybill Shepherd lampoon in Irreconcilable Differences and a knowing turn as Robert Mitchum's wayward daughter-in-law in the "War and Remembrance" miniseries. Casting agents called her then "the most beautiful girl in town." Critics predicted she might become that once-in-a-blue-moon screen phenom: the gorgeous madcap. But Stone's grand entrance did not lead to instantaneous acceptance by the party at large. In such hits as Action Jackson and Above the Law, she emerged as a gorgeous action toy, before burying herself alive in flicks for which even she wouldn't be caught dead cruising the bargain video racks: King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Police Academy 4, Personal Choice, Blood and Sand. In record time, the snappy looker bound for stardom looked like a bimbo bound for the cornfield on "Hee Haw."
Yet, just when the town that had so quickly heralded her arrival was on the verge of zipping up the body bag over her career, Stone turned up in Total Recall and proved a sexy, campy adversary to the serious Arnold. Heads turned again. And now she's about to show up in Basic Instinct, playing an omnisexual suspected thrill killer who enthralls a kinky cop hot on her trail. Jam-packed with gleaming ice picks, geysers of blood and more raunch than you're likely to see this side of a Pussycat Theatre, it may sound like another here-today, gone-tomorrow, steaming gob of Velveeta. But because this racy horror show cost over $30 million--hell, Joe Eszterhas's script alone cost $3 million--and because it's Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall) guiding Stone and Michael Douglas between the sheets and the red herrings, this time the cheese may be Camembert.
And this may be the movie that finally pushes Stone over the top to a more secure spot among the screen beauties who get offered choice parts. It isn't like other knockouts haven't lived down their missteps. Check out Jessica Lange circa How to Beat the High Co$t of Living and King Kong, Melanie Griffith in Cherry 2000 and Fear City, and Michelle Pfeiffer in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen and Grease 2. It remains to be seen whether Stone can pull off a career salvage job to equal those, but her phone is already ringing with offers that prove there's life after Steve Guttenberg and Steven Seagal.
One thing is for certain: Sharon Stone is no longer on the outside looking in at the St. James's Club. A member now of that private preserve (whose very walls echo with the witticisms of fellow members Liza Minnelli and Michael Caine), Stone breezes us into its airy dining room, looking subtly spectacular in tailored silks and Kim Novak's peroxide job from Vertigo. Every neck in the place cranes, every eye tracks this creature who glides across the room, smiling to herself, looking every inch a movie star. A maitre d' shows us to the best table, where he beckons her to sit in a power spot beneath a huge, framed photograph of Marlene Dietrich. Stone coolly checks out the portrait, looking confident that she won't wither under the heat of a screen legend, and slides out the chair--which literally falls apart on contact. All bows and apologies, the maitre d' replaces the broken chair--Lord only knows whose famous rump sat in it last--and, when he's vanished, Stone observes in a wry, limpid voice that conjures up finishing school and Napoleon brandy, "Since I started Basic Instinct, I've been breaking up lots of furniture."
Ah, yes, here's a girl known far and wide as the fastest mouth in town, quick with a quip in any situation, especially good at self-deprecation. I'm going to enjoy this one. Crossing her legs and leaning into the back of her chair, Stone requests from our server a cup of coffee, black--"Also something I've been doing since Basic Instinct," she notes. I ask why the movie has sent her seeking a regular jolt of Java. Arching a brow and then leaning forward, she explains in stage whisper: "Paul Verhoeven is a bit violence-crazed. Being a healthy person forced to hit the depth of violence and sickness that this part required, my psyche rebelled. I felt like I was going to snap. It took me weeks to be able to sleep through the night."
Sleepless nights apparently weren't uncommon on this movie. Screenwriter Eszterhas and producer Irwin Winkler, for instance, quit the project when Verhoeven decided to push the sex and violence stuff way beyond the script. (Later, Verhoeven and Eszterhas supposedly buried the hatchet.) But only a few weeks into the shooting in and around San Francisco, the movie became the center of a firestorm when protesters from Queer Nation and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation raised hell over the purportedly homophobic depiction of Stone's bisexual character. Eszterhas proposed changing lines and scenes; Verhoeven refused. Stone, busy playing the part in question, steered clear of the fracas. Meanwhile, rumors flew that Stone and Douglas were barely speaking by the time they returned to L.A. to shoot their full-frontal sex scenes. Talk from the set alleged that the production ended up running way over schedule partly because it had to be shut down for days when mysterious nosebleeds felled Verhoeven--twice.
Well aware that Stone is unlikely to mince words about these and other hot topics, I nevertheless decide to ease into our talk by casually telling her that I can't wait to see how the movie turned out. "I can," she says, chortling. "And I couldn't wait for the movie to be over." Well, okay, let's strap in and cut to the chase: Just how crazed did the shooting get? Laughing and saying she'd like to do "an interview my parents can read," Stone begins detailing the mechanics of shooting the oral sex number she and Oscar-winner Douglas do in the movie. This is your daughter talking, Mr. and Mrs. Stone of Meadville, Pennsylvania. "You see a closeup of my head here," she says, matter-of-factly wagging a sterling spoon to represent herself miming fellatio on the groin of a fork, Douglas's stand-in, "with my eyes looking up at him. Then you see him, like, between my legs. So, it's definitely us, not body doubles. We did everything but anal intercourse, and I don't know why that isn't in there because, with so much violence in the characters' sexuality, that absence seems odd. Michael Douglas and I went as far as anyone could go. So far, in fact, that I don't know how they'll ever get a rating."
And, just to keep the MPAA sex police on the case, Stone and Leilani Sarelle, who plays Stone's lesbian lover, French kiss in a passionate scene. "Too many times, homosexual love scenes in film or theater are done in safe, unrealistic ways," explains Stone, looking earnest and sounding politically correct. "I wanted a scene that wasn't some sick male fantasy, but an example of people who live together and are in love, as in, 'I want to smell your skin, look into your eyes, taste the way you taste.' So, when Paul said he'd test anybody I thought would be good, I sent in my best friend, Mimi Craven. If you're going to do a lesbian love scene, why not have it be with your best friend? Later, when Paul showed me tapes of three other girls and I saw Leilani, I said: 'That girl's hot.' The first day we were supposed to shoot the scene, every crew member I had never seen before showed up on the set. Leilani's boyfriend came, too, so I went up to him and said, 'Any special tips you'd like to impart before we roll?' And he did. Leilani and I had a very personal bond, very deep trust. I mean, I really love that girl and I feel that girl really loves me."
Speaking of personal bonds, Stone and Verhoeven certainly must have struck some to get her to go as far as she says she has. "Since the script had all these nude scenes and sex scenes," she muses, coolly rearranging the tableware, then casually folding her hands like Miss Prim, "I said to Paul: 'If this is going to be Evian water on various body parts under blue light in slow motion, I can't do it. I'd feel like an asshole. If we're going to do real sex--exciting, voyeuristic, funny, stupid, clumsy, thrilling--I'm willing to take that risk with you, for you, because I believe in you.'" But all that exposure of flesh, all that heavy breathing, even if it is synchronized with that of a Best Actor Oscar-winner? "I don't thrive on the concept of being naked at every possible moment, but it's not the biggest deal in the world to me," Stone says, with a dazzling smile, then adds sotto voce: "Well, the butt's not as young as it used to be, so that's pretty scary, but I had to show some psychological stuff that's a lot scarier."
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."
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."