Inside Out(27)

It was a taste of what was to come. One day not long after we returned from London, we were hanging out by the beach at Bruce’s house with his friends, and I took his Jet Ski out for a spin. Someone with a long lens got pictures of me in a bathing suit—looking fat—which then, of course, became a major topic in the tabloids, confirming all my worst fears and stoking the excruciating fire of my eating disorder. I was miserable, but Bruce insisted that he thought everything about me was beautiful: he wrapped my fear and anxiety in his love.

When Bruce and I got together, our traumas met. Bruce had had a difficult childhood: he was a stutterer, which had the positive side effect of getting him into acting. For some reason, kids who stutter often find themselves freed of their speech impediment when they are onstage, reciting lines instead of coming up with words in real time. So Bruce and I had both grown up performing, role-playing for survival.

He was the oldest of four, the son of a very hardworking immigrant mother who was never appreciated by her husband. They divorced, and years later, the dad mellowed, as men tend to when they get older. (You know the kind: they’re assholes when they’re young, then they get sweet when they age; it’s the mother who seems bitter and unpleasant by comparison, but he’s the one who made her that way.)

I imagine it would be difficult to see the wounded kid under Bruce’s roguish exterior if you didn’t know him. But believe me, it’s there. I understood that about him immediately. We went all in, right away—talking about how badly we both wanted to have kids, our own family. We had a shared vision for our future. I think we were both longing to fill the emptiness, that sense we’d both always had that something big was missing.

Bruce was on hiatus from Moonlighting when we first met, and I had just finished making The Seventh Sign. We were able to spend almost all our time together until he started shooting an action movie he was really excited about: Die Hard. There was a lot of buzz about the film, in large part because it was reported that Bruce got paid $5 million to star in it. I went to see him on set, which turned out to be terrifying. He nearly died jumping off a five-story garage, just making it onto the airbag below when he was blown off course by a scripted explosion. (He laughed about it. I didn’t.)

When he got a weekend off from filming, he took me to Vegas on another private jet to see a fight—he loved boxing. It was Chavez versus Rosario, and it was hideous. Rosario’s trainer had to stop the fight. I don’t mind boxing, but I don’t like a bloodbath.

We were moving to the gambling tables when Bruce said, “I think we should get married.” We’d been joking about it on the flight there, but suddenly it didn’t seem like he was kidding. “I think we should get married,” he said again. I was speechless. He, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop talking: “Come on, let’s do it! Let’s do it.” I took a deep breath and said, “Okay let’s do it.”

I got pregnant on my wedding night, November 21, 1987, at the Golden Nugget. (Yes: Vegas. Pregnant. You can take the girl out of Roswell, but apparently you can’t take Roswell out of the girl.)

We decided to have a real wedding about a month later, and that became a huge production. It was TriStar’s gift to us: they understood the once-in-a-lifetime publicity opportunity they had on their hands. Bruce was on the verge of transforming from TV heartthrob into full-on international movie star, and they had high hopes for me, too, after About Last Night was a major hit. Our second wedding was as lavish and over the top as our first one was ad hoc. It was held on the soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot, and they borrowed a staircase from Designing Women so I could make a grand entrance into the “chapel,” where we had set up traditional church-style seating. Little Richard performed the ceremony. (“DahMEE, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, whether he live in a big mansion on the hill or a little tiny apartment?”) Annie Leibovitz was the photographer. The bridesmaids wore black and entered with the groomsmen singing “Bruno’s Getting Married,” written for the occasion by Bruce’s good friend Robert Kraft. Afterward, we went to a second soundstage for the reception, which had been done up with palm trees in the style of the Copacabana. It should have been a blast, one of the great, shining days of my life. But in truth it was overwhelming. Both of Bruce’s parents came—the first time they’d been in the same room since they’d divorced—George and DeAnna were there, of course, and my grandmother flew in from New Mexico with her beau, Harold (though when I first told her I had gotten together with Bruce, she was worried because she’d read in the tabloids he was a wild party boy). My mom came, too, for better or worse.

Ginny made a scene, of course, while she was in town for the wedding. She was staying at my house, and Bruce and I were at his place on our (second) wedding night, when the phone rang at two a.m. It was the police, calling to report a disturbance. I honestly can’t recall the details—there were so many incidents like this they all blur together in my memory—but suffice it to say that Ginny was wasted and had managed to start a fight with my neighbors, a fight dramatic enough to require cops to intervene. I was furious at her for failing, just this once, to hold it together for my sake.

Bruce grasped the deal with my mom right away, and understood that where Ginny was concerned, the more boundaries we put in place, the better. Very soon, I would need a model for how to be a mother, and while I continued to hold out false hope that someday, somehow, she’d step up, that obviously wasn’t something I could count on.