Our intrepid reporter has a second encounter with the silver screen's best bad girl, and finds that although she's working and playing in Hollywood's fastest lane, the fastest thing about her is her way with a smart remark.
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The late afternoon solitary drinkers in the St. James's Club bar lounge are agog. Sharon Stone, clad completely in black, slithers across the top of the baby grand while Jim, the pianist, teases out the vamp in her with his silkiest chops. "Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it," she croons huskily. "Let's do it, let's fall in love." Just moments ago, we were chatting at a table, when suddenly, Stone rose, crooked her finger for me to follow, and snaked her way over to the piano man, whispering to me on the way what everyone in the room--what everyone everywhere--is absolutely sure about: "I know how to be a movie star."
Word of Stone's impromptu performance spreads like wildfire. Waiters and club members stream in to ogle. Before I know it, she has us trading off verses, competing to see which of us knows more of Cole Porter's racier double entendres. When it's my turn, she tries to distract me from the task at hand by mentioning, "I'm a game fanatic. Did you know I was the answer on 'Jeopardy' last week?" It looks--for a second--like she might be trounced by my "Electric eels, I might add, do it, though it shocks 'em, I know," but then she shoots up a gam like a flare, cocks it atop her knee, lowers her blouse over her shoulder and growls, "Why ask if shads do it? Waiter, bring me shad roe." A balding, dumbstruck businessman mops his forehead and nearly swallows his martini olive.
Stone purrs the number to a finish, accepts her applause, and busses Jim's cheek. When a bar-tender asks whether her assistant, who's perched nearby at the bar, is her sister, Stone rasps, "No, darling, my lover." The piano man, mad for her, twinkles, "Sharon's always so up." "Good drugs," she shoots back, saluting him with her cup of decaf.
"Oh, honey," she says to me, feigning sudden exhaustion, "it's like my acting teacher tells me, 'I know it's lonely at the top, but it's so crowded at the bottom.'" She decides not to get off the piano, and suggests we continue talking over Jim's hit list of torrid torch songs. Why not? The gal who turned the simple act of parting her legs into the screen's greatest special effect since Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea is, today, in rare form. "Maybe I should play a singer," she muses in that Southern Comfort-and-raw-honey voice, adding, "I mean, these days, they'll pay me to play anything I want--they'd pay me to play Lassie."
All Hollywood does seem to be hounding her. She bagged $2.5 million plus 10 percent of the gross to act scared in Sliver, the $30 million thriller about a spooky Manhattan high-rise. Within hours, she's due to begin collecting over $3 million for acting wifely toward accident victim Richard Gere in the romantic drama Intersection. For tons more than the half-mil she got for the original, she's committed to another Basic Instinct, aside from several other Joe Eszterhas projects. And that's not even counting the $6 million-plus Dino De Laurentiis offered her to star in The Immortals, providing the script gets rewritten so that she winds up playing not Marilyn Monroe, as in the novel of the same name, but one of those countless, ahem, hypothetical '60s sex queens who bedded presidents and their senator brothers. Not to mention the intriguing romantic thriller Manhattan Ghost Story, originally tailored for Julia Roberts by Rain Man Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Bass. And she's turned down overtures from several studios proferring multipicture deals, including an offer from Mike Nichols to play opposite Jack Nicholson, and one from Clint Eastwood to co-star with him. Hot enough for you?
"There have been a lot of flashbulbs since I last saw you," she observes, belly-down on the Steinway, twirling her ankles in the air. She's grown so bloody famous she's forced to plaster an alias on her mailbox and her travel reservations just to minimize hassling. More later on how playing an ice pick killer has gotten her spied on, dogged, trashed, followed and nearly attacked. For now, I just ask whether she is recognized everywhere she goes.
"I'm soooooo recognizable," she laughs, "that I reported to work on my new movie one morning at 5:30--wet hair, sunglasses, in a coma--buzzed down my black-coated window and announced to the guards at the gate, 'Shaaaaron Stone,' and they said, 'No, you're not.' I went, 'Yeah, I am.' I looked in the rearview mirror and checked: 'Un-hunh, that's me.' And they're still going, 'No, you're not,' so I say, 'What the hell would I be doing here at 5:30? Do I look like the kind of girl who gets up early for fun?' and they say, 'Sharon Stone was here the other day, you look nothing like her. So, back it up!'" She throws back her head and adds, mock-evilly, "Now I've got an electric gate key all my own so I never have to talk with any of them anymore!"
I remind Stone that she was at a crossroads when we last met, which was on the occasion of an earlier Movieline cover story. Despite over a decade of such barkers as King Solomon's Mines and Action Jackson, she had been chosen by Paul Verhoeven, her Total Recall director, to partner Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. "When I was young, all I wanted to be was a movie star," she recalls. "At a certain point, I started to grow up and really care about what I did. Once I'd studied acting with Roy London for years, I lost all the pretense about movie stars. When I got Total Recall, I realized, 'Gee, here's an opportunity. If I can get famous, I can get better parts.'" Hollywood, however, was skeptical. Sharon Stone, when Verhoeven had considered Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts and Geena Davis? Stone herself told me at the time that if Basic Instinct punked, she was going to consider job retraining. "Which I meant," she asserts now. "I thought I might go to law school. Do some writing. Maybe teach acting." Instead, Basic Instinct became a gold mine, and she wound up Hollywood's hot thang.
We leave the club now to repair to her house, where she strips herself of makeup and shoes. Settling us down into her overstuffed couch before a wall of glass offering a view of the entire San Fernando Valley, she asks her assistant to turn off the young Elvis on the crackling stereo. "The speakers are strobing like they're possessed," she complains, "and the volume switch in the bedroom still doesn't work and you know how I like the music to strobe while I'm having sex." She adds, smiling but not laughing, "One thing I find since becoming famous is that I get to torture a higher class of men than I used to. My favorite line in Paris Is Burning is when one of the drag queens says, 'I think all men are dogs, I honestly do. You know, every man starts barking sooner or later.' So, you know, in my boudoir, I keep one hand on the light switch and the other on the stereo controls. It's an E-ticket Disneyland ride, honey. Ya-hoo!"
As Stone pours us champagne and we clink glasses, a handsome, unruly hound named Jake vies for her attention by shredding an expensive pair of shoes, then, when caught, making irresistible puppy eyes at her. "I'm dog-sitting," she explains, "and learning oh, so very much about myself in the process. Namely, that I'm a cat." At this point she addresses herself to the dog. "We're doing 'movie star,' here, Jake, which means your cute 'boy stuff is not going to cut it. Do you see yourself as a big, dead pile of blond hair? Next week, you're gonna be the answer on 'Jeopardy.' You know, 'The girl who was the killer in Basic Instinct had a dog. What was his name?' Answer: Jake." Refusing to be ignored, Jake is soon exiled to the backyard.
Since Stone is Movieline's women's-issue cover woman, I point out, why don't I sound her out on a few women's issues? "Like what kind of tampons I use?" she shoots back. "I always cut straight to the vulgarity." Actually, I was wondering what she thinks about other women dogging her for resurrecting the movie image of the Barbie go-go doll. Suppressing a sneer, she observes, "I'm not very interested in that kind of energy. I let it pass. I don't take myself very seriously. I like to make people laugh. You know, it's like, if a woman can't be happy for another woman's work, they have to go work on that." Could she see her self towing a more politically correct line by lending her presence to any of Hollywood's many in-the-works movies about sexual harassment? "If they ever make a movie where a man is sexually harassed, I'm their gal," she says.
Now that she mentions it, I tell Stone that Ellen Barkin once told me how she's pulling for stone to become our female Terminator, if only so she can be the first woman whose salary bulges to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions. Is Stone ready to go head-to-head on salary with the Schwarzeneggers and Cruises of the business?
"Believe me, when people say, 'We want to pay you X-million to do this movie,' I won't be the girl who hangs back saying, 'Oh, I really don't deserve it,'" she says. "I'll be, 'Un-hunh, hand it right over.' In fact, referring to what Ellen Barkin said, I may make Pin Cushion, which isn't The Terminator, but a big action picture that has a woman's purpose to it. The script isn't completed, it has huge gaps, but it'll come about when it's ready."
What does Stone make of Hollywood's newfound fascination with lesbians? "You've certainly come to the wrong girl for details on this score, haven't you?" she volleys with a wry look. "Nevertheless, before I answer, I want details that support your theory." I first cite the upsurge in scripts in development featuring lesbian characters. "A short-lived trend," Stone predicts. "To prove it, want to go read those scripts with me? They're probably waiting for me in the next room." Then I bring up that highly publicized, in-the-works book by Julia Phillips which deals with Hollywood lesbians. "A Hollywood idiot," Stone growls, of Phillips. And how about that paean to "lipstick lesbians" that William Baldwin, her Sliver co-star, unleashed in a recent interview? "Well, he may be a lesbian," she says with a laugh.
When I encourage Stone to let fly on what she really thinks of Baldwin, who plays one of her mysterious suitors in Sliver (the other is Tom Berenger), she sighs and remarks, "I mean, Billy's 29 and seems so young. I come from Pennsylvania, where guys are just sort of regular. No bullshit. They're the guy, you're the girl. In Hollywood, it seems to me, the lines are a lot fuzzier. I like most people I've worked with in the business. My vote's out on Billy. I never really quite got his trip. He plays a character that was very weird, but I never got up to speed on his deal, like whether he was, 'I'm in character' or, 'I'm out of character,' know what I mean?" Tom Berenger, on the other hand, is, to Stone, "a complete gas, a seasoned professional. Once during rehearsal when I was moaning, 'Tom, I don't know what to do,' he said, 'You're a soldier of the cinema, march on!' He's a good, old-fashioned guy, happily married, kids. Regular, you know. I like regular."
Berenger may be the only thing regular about the movie, in which Stone plays an unshowy, troubled woman. Catherine Tramell would probably never give her a second thought. Or a second look. "I play someone fragile, damaged, vulnerable, insecure about sex," Stone says. "I have this scene where I masturbate in a bathtub. What my character doesn't know is that the whole building is wired so that there's a camera in every room in every apartment, and she's being watched. [Director] Phil Noyce was mind-bogglingly supportive, he provided a space where I could try stuff, let this kind of honest female behavior be filmed. The cameraman, Vilmos Zsigmond, told me that I reminded him of Liv Ullmann.
"Anyway, the sex scenes are very unusual because those guys let the truth of how some women feel about sex, privately and with a partner, really be seen. It didn't become an exhibitionistic sort of male fantasy of what a moment like that means to a woman. You know--" she breaks off, and demonstrates what she means by assuming a porn magazine parody of breast-rubbing, back-arching, tongue-flicking ecstasy. "I suppose something so sexually direct, yet so nonexhibitionistic, is going to unsettle people, but you know how it is with sexuality. My mom said it best when she said that the shocking thing about Basic Instinct was that people were more concerned whether or not I was homosexual than whether or not I was a psychotic killer."
Knowing that Stone waited months before committing to another movie after Basic Instinct, I ask why she chose Sliver.
"Well, let's see," she says, thinking back, "I wanted to play both the parts in So I Married An Axe Murderer, the wife and her sister. [TriStar] didn't want that, so it didn't feel worth it. I got a firm offer to do In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood, who is divine, but there was nothing to the part. I told them it would be cool if they wanted to change the villain to a villainess, but the truth is, the script, as it existed, was perfect. I met Mike Nichols a year ago on Wolf when it was about a man who so disliked people, he became a wolf so he didn't have to deal with them anymore. And he had this veterinarian girlfriend. Then, I read a more recent [version of the] script that lost its source of humor, where she was sort of a weird hippie kind of chick." After a moment, Stone tosses out, "Isn't Michelle Pfeiffer playing the part now? That'd be good," casually referring to the actress who, a mere few seasons ago, passed up playing Stone's role in Basic Instinct. Did she ever feel stymied by how to follow a monster hit? "I never felt like 'the project' came along after Basic Instinct," she confides. "Still, I just decided to go back to work. It finally came down to, 'Look, you're gonna do many projects and some of them will be good and some of them won't.'"
Hearing Stone review her career options, one wonders where her smart comedies are, the latter-day Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert stuff that she seems so clearly born to play. "Well you might ask," she comments. "Apparently, it's very difficult for Hollywood people to get that I'm funny. Or that I can be. I suppose if I agreed to be funny and nude, they'd suddenly get it." What if sexy, wicked woman roles became her franchise? She shrugs, saying, "And I become a caricature of myself like half of the rest of Hollywood? I'm not gonna fight it, but it sure wouldn't keep my interest all day every day.
"Stone barely has a free day before starting Intersection, though she tells me that this one's less stressful because she'll shoot 25 days of work over four months. "That way," she explains, "I can still believe that I'm in my workaholic mode while actually having a life." Everyone concerned, from Paramount and director Mark Rydell to Gere and screenwriter Marshall Brickman, reportedly envisioned Stone in the juicy "other woman" role. Everyone except Stone, who pictured herself as the wife and mother. "They didn't think I had the depth to play the wife and mother.' Stone says, with the candor that can unsettle those who don't prefer things straight, no chaser. "I was offered the other part. Several times. Apparently, 'important' actresses had read for the role I wanted," she says, letting the important dangle in the air just the right number of beats, before adding, "but, apparently, they wouldn't test. So I said, 'Great, I'll test.' They were like, 'Oh, no, no,' but I said, 'No, no, no, I'll test.'"
She got the role she wanted, and word around town has it that she couldn't have been more generous to women who went up for the sexier role. One candidate told me that when she asked Stone why she wasn't after the meatier role, she answered, "It's someone else's time to get noticed for being the sex-pot." Score one for Hollywood sisterhood? "I don't believe in Hollywood sisterhood," Stone asserts. "I believe in world sisterhood. It's like what that feminist writer once wrote: if one woman told the truth about herself, the whole world would crack open. If there's one thing my career is going to be about, it's telling the truth. It's a kinder, gentler me this year."
Stone turns somber when I ask her to describe the sudden rush of fame that caught her up when Basic Instinct became a sensation. "It felt like I'd been playing second-string football for a long time, when, suddenly, I was playing in the Super Bowl. Even when Basic Instinct was a hit, I still felt like I was running with that ball toward the end zone. It took awhile for me to realize that I was already in the end zone with the ball down and the crowd screaming on its feet. I didn't know enough to just sit down and vomit."
But American fan and press frenzy was small potatoes compared with what happened when she publicized the movie throughout Europe, including at the Cannes Film Festival. "I had been there before with Total Recall," she says, "so I thought it might be dicey. But it was overwhelming. I had said, 'I need two bodyguards,' but in fact I needed 10. I couldn't leave my hotel room without many people flanking me, pushing back hundreds of people clawing at me, grabbing me, chanting my name. It was that way wherever I went. It was very, very scary because Sharon Stone wasn't me anymore, it was her. And they wanted her. I thought, if they're gonna have her, who am I gonna have?
"I really had to sit down after that, and think about separating 'Sharon Stone' from me because she couldn't be me anymore. Or I would go insane. So, they want her to be big, they want her to be fabulous, to say and do this or that? Then, she has to be that. I make plans based on it. I try to keep my real self very close to me now."
Which translates, she says, into her needing to watch her back nearly all the time. "People follow me," she explains. "People, I won't call them journalists, go to my parents' little hometown and move into motels to write trashy stories and 'A Current Affair' documentaries. They interview people who claim they've dated me whom I've never met. Tacky, thoughtless stuff. Once again, because it's her, 'Sharon Stone,' they forget that I'm a person with a mom and dad, a sister and two brothers who are all very affected by this stuff."
Gathering her knees up to her chest, she says quietly, "I once had a limo come to pick up my friend Mimi [Craven] and me at the airport--I was so exhausted, I got in the car while Mimi went with the driver to get the luggage and, suddenly, a flashbulb goes off and this guy jumps in the car and wouldn't get out. Horrifying. This whole weirdness is so not my world that, at first, I got myself in some real jams by not knowing the rules. I've had to completely change the way I travel. I thought I could go alone to the supermarket or the gas station. I miss not going to the 7-Eleven if I feel like it. I know that, for now, I can't do that."
The whole thing is so freakishly reminiscent of The Bodyguard, I ask whether she nails transgressors who try to mess with her. "Believe me when I tell you," she says, dead serious, "when people go over the boundaries of their legal rights, I take them all the way to the mat. I don't care if they're six countries away and I have to get Interpol to do it. Right to the mat."
Stone isn't a girl to paint any day gray for very long. Slowly, she sits up, throws back her head and arms, shakes off the blues, shoots me her best sex goddess look and cries, "But what care I about such problems? Why let such trivial things bother me? I'm a millionaire!" A mutual acquaintance of ours had told me that Stone makes this cry from time to time but even so, you've got to hear it, in person, to believe it: she's so comical and on-purpose campy, it's hard not to smile. Clearly no one knows better than she that she's on a roll.
I ask how her burgeoning fame affects her romantic life, a quest for excellence that has involved her over the years with producer Michael Greenburg (her former husband; their divorce left scars), or, more recently with Dwight Yoakam, with a young Los Angeles blue blood, with this director, that producer, and Christopher Peters, the offspring of the long-divorced Jon Peters and Lesley Ann Warren. Obviously, being famous can't hurt--lately, she's become engaged to Bill MacDonald, one of her Sliver producers. "One thing I've learned," she agrees, "is that any man in Hollywood will meet me if I want that. Make that any man anywhere. Happily, the upside of all this 'famous' malarkey is that it gives you an enormous opportunity to meet people--for whatever reason. Not just so you can settle down and have kids, which I do want to do, but so you can become involved in the worldwide scheme, like social politics, where you can help causes and effectively push for changes."
Stone's lately been making just such a push, hosting a woman's comedy special on Lifetime to benefit rape crisis centers, and seducing bidders to cut loose with $185,000 in an auction of a Ferrari, the proceeds of which benefited The Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Just now, Stone's assistant floats back in, hands over a sheaf of messages, and quips, in pure Thelma Ritter-ese, "Everybody's trying to get next to you. I'm the only one trying to get away from you." Stone flips through these, muttering, "Roland Joffe, someone at Paramount, Michael someone, who's this?" and it's apparent that she's blase by now about how many on Hollywood's A list, the ones she dreamed one day might take her calls, now phone her. Suddenly, she jumps up off the sofa, and decides to sashay around the living room in a knockout pair of black-and-white-and-gold faux leopard-print high heels that have just been delivered at her door. "I had to have these," she croons, strutting her stuff. "When I asked somebody, 'What do I wear them with?' they paused, looked me up and down and said, 'Lipstick.'"
The whole scene strikes me as so funny, so "big Hollywood star of the '90s" that I suggest Stone and I play some more, this time by doing a Photoplay-style interview, vintage '50s screen queen stuff. Her face lights up when I suggest we make the topic "Sharon Stone's Advice to Sharon-wannabes Who Come to Big, Bad Hollywood." I explain, "I'll begin some sentences, you finish them."
"Shoot!" she says.
"When you step off the bus," I say, "be aware ..."
"That it should be the last time you ever take public transportation."
"The first place you should open a charge account..."
"... is at Sears, absolutely, because a gal always needs clean underwear."
"Everybody dumps the agent who gave them their first break..."
"Because they're stupid, greedy, foolish and making a mistake."
"Your publicist will tell you..."
"That your ideas are too dangerous and that you should stop. Everybody here wants to tame you! I behave like any wild animal-- I just pretend I'm tame until I get dinner."
"The closing of the Polo Lounge for a couple years impinges on a movie star's life..."
"Because there's nowhere else to go in good conscience to look at hookers."
"The real reason you'll need 8X10 glossy photographs is..."
"That they make the best wallet-sized photos for the man of your dreams."
"Here's something that I wish someone really had told me ..."
"Don't do King Solomon's Mines." She breaks up laughing. "I mean, it's on TV more often now than 'Gilligan's Island.' At least Ginger had better outfits."
"Why do we so worship gossip in this town?" I ask her.
"Because nothing really good ever happens."
Checking out those shoes, this whole scene, in fact, reminds me of how much Stone conjures up one of those gorgeous-girls-run-mad-in-Hollywood out of a steamy Jackie Collins or Jacqueline Susann novel. "It's my destiny that I'll write my own Valley of the Dolls-type Hollywood novel," she confesses. "My life is actually quite like Valley of the Dolls, except that I have better clothes and hairdos. I don't know what I'll call my expose about Hollywood, but I already have my opening sentence: 'The sex change operation wasn't nearly as painful as I had anticipated.'"
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Johnny Depp for the April Movieline.