Demi Moore: More, More, Moore

Demi Moore would seem happy to have it all--her health, those looks, a happy marriage, a growing family, and starring roles in two talked-about new films, A Few Good Men and Indecent Proposal--but she wants more; in fact, she says, "I want everything."

Demi Moore, swathed in silk, sits draped on a couch in her trailer on the Paramount lot. Although she's between shots on Adrian Lyne's new movie, Indecent Proposal, she's as vivid and present and here with me as if she'd just awoke from an 18-hour nap. There's plenty on her mind at the moment, including not just this movie, in which she and Woody Harrelson play financially strapped marrieds offered $1 million by Robert Redford if Moore will spend a night with him, but also her current release, A Few Good Men, Rob Reiner's movie version of the Broadway hit in which she and Tom Cruise are lawyers investigating a military murder cover-up that involves Jack Nicholson. If Ghost ($500 million worldwide, at last count) had positioned Moore to ascend to the rarified ranks inhabited only by Julia Roberts, Geena Davis and Sharon Stone, these two new movies--after the anticlimax of The Butcher's Wife--bid fair to put her precisely where she belongs. Which means that the girl who is, arguably, the most beautiful in town and certainly the savviest at manipulating publicity, could one day rival the Toms, Kevins and Arnolds of this world.

Born in New Mexico to teenage parents, Moore survived a tumultuous, nomadic childhood to shine through a stint on the TV soap "General Hospital," and in such better-left-forgotten movies as Choices, Parasite and Blame It On Rio. During her Brat-Pack era, marked by such emblematic epics as St. Elmo's Fire, About Last Night . . . and Wisdom, Moore detoured into fast-lane Hollywood excesses that nearly snuffed her promise. Just as quickly, she came to, cleaned up, marshaled her resources, and promoted some standout reviews into a deal at TriStar, which birthed only The Seventh Sign, a would-be Rosemary's Baby for the '80s. If that one lost her points because she wasn't ready to carry solo the weight of a bad script and clueless direction, We're No Angels gained her points because she almost withstood the sheer dead weight of Robert De Niro and Sean Penn congratulating themselves on how side-splitting they weren't.

Critics and audiences forgave her everything with Ghost, and, overnight, she became a "household name" by appearing nude and pregnant on a magazine cover with her second child by husband Bruce Willis. However, the inevitable backlash set in: word went out that Moore does not suffer fools gladly, that she's been accused of terminal entouragitis, that she's the most image-wise actress now plying her trade. Ironically, much of this chatter got started by another magazine story--same magazine--when she appeared nude and painted on the cover.

I expected steel from Moore. Self-enchantment. The gosh-I-wish-I-didn't-have-to-do-this blah-blah. I get the steel, all right, but much more. Greeting me with a friendly handshake and a glacier-melting smile, she spends hours with me being open, frisky, thoughtful and passionate. When the demands of shooting Indecent Proposal while publicizing A Few Good Men cramp our style, Moore simply barrels me with her down onto the set, which Paramount has declared strictly off-limits to the press. Her response? "Fuck 'em," she growls, introducing me to Lyne, her Indecent Proposal director. "Hello, darling," he chirps. "Remember, whatever mess you see here, it'll all come out in the wash." Later, when studio publicists get wind of her indiscretion and materialize on the set, Moore apologizes to all concerned with abject sincerity.

"I only want," she tells me again and again, "everything." If Moore chooses right--she has a deal these days at Columbia-- this 30-year-old, who masterfully reinvents her looks and her style from movie to movie, even from cover to cover, may reinvent for the movie-star-starved '90s the real thing.

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