Inside Out(28)

RUMER GLENN WILLIS was born on her due date, August 16, 1988, in Paducah, Kentucky, where Bruce was shooting a movie called In Country. I wanted the exact opposite experience to the one my mom had: I wanted to feel every sensation, to be completely present and conscious for every moment of the delivery, no matter how painful. I had to switch doctors at the last minute to find one who appreciated my approach: “Same with my cows,” he assured me. “They never need episiotomies.” Rumer spent the first half hour of her life alone with just Bruce and me in the hospital bed, as we both fell madly in love with our daughter. Then I got up, took a shower, and we left the hospital.

She was named after the British author Rumer Godden, whose name I came upon in a bookstore one day while I was having trouble coming up with the perfect, one-of-a-kind name for my first baby. I had loved being pregnant. The whole experience was wonderful from beginning to end. It didn’t hurt that Bruce was constantly telling me how beautiful I looked for nine months.

Being a mother felt totally natural. It’s one of the few things I can confidently say I was innately good at. Nurturing Rumer, having someone to love who loved and needed me right back, unconditionally, exactly as I was, without any kind of performance, was euphoric. It would be over two years before I left Rumer for even a single night—two years of breastfeeding her.

Even my messed-up relationship with my own mother seemed transformed by the birth of my daughter: Ginny came and spent a week with us after Rumer was born, and I can’t remember ever having a nicer time together. It was almost like she, too, was able to shut out all the outside things in her life that weren’t working and devote herself totally to this experience. She fussed over the baby and took lots of photographs—did all the things a normal grandmother would do. By the time she left, I felt more like Ginny and I were mother and daughter than I had since I was very small. Sometimes I wonder if I should have invited her to live with us and take on the role of full-time grandmother—if it would have redirected her life and given her the sense of purpose, security, and fulfillment that she needed so badly.

I was twenty-five. I had a lot more maturity under my belt than Ginny did when she had me at eighteen, but I was still young. Life had bounced from one enormous event to the next in a very rapid succession. One minute I was planning my wedding; the next I was shopping for baby clothes. Bruce and I were becoming the “It” couple; we had the blessing of a beautiful, healthy little girl, and we had more money than either of us knew to wish for as kids.

I know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.





Chapter 12


Soon after we met, Bruce had bought a property in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, in a town called Hailey. He’d broken his collarbone in a skiing accident in nearby Sun Valley, and while he was hanging around recuperating, he fell in love with the quiet, the big sky, and the indifference the locals seemed to display toward anything Hollywood-related. I loved it there right away, too. We completely renovated the original house—only the front door remains—and ever since I’ve spent as much time in Idaho as possible, especially with my kids. It became my oasis, the place where I felt more at home than I ever have anywhere else—I still do. There is something about being surrounded by the Sawtooth Mountains, where the air is clear and cool, and there’s almost no noise at all except for the fast current of the Big Wood River, that soothes me and gives me a sense of peace. Rumer was only twelve days old when we took her to Hailey for the first time. The early weeks and months of her life there were wondrous for me.

But four months after that great visit with my mother and the baby, I got a call from the police: Ginny had overdosed on pills and had been rushed to the hospital. She was okay, but a few months after that, I got another call: she had been arrested for drunk driving. She was obviously coming apart, so I checked her into rehab.

The first thing she did when she got out was to sell a story to a tabloid about her recovery . . . and our troubled relationship.

I was furious. Understand, I hated the tabloids. Having paparazzi chase you around probably doesn’t sound like that big a deal. Before they were a part of my life, I’m sure I would have shrugged and said, “So what?,” if I read about the combination of horror, terror, and rage an actress felt just because a bunch of guys were always taking her picture. But try to think of it like this: You know that wonderful feeling you get once in a while when you have an hour to yourself and none of your kids or clients or parents need anything from you and you don’t have to answer the phone and you can just walk out your front door—or pull out of your driveway—and blend into the world? When the tabloids are stalking you, those moments never, ever happen. Having paparazzi always waiting to pounce on you like wild dogs—unreasonable, menacing, solely interested in what they can take—can start to feel invasive on an almost existential level.

That’s a long way of saying I asked Ginny not to do that again. I tried to explain what a violation it was to share details (and falsehoods) about my childhood with publications that are in the business of lying, sensationalizing, and exploiting. Ginny agreed, but then she started selling pictures of me instead. Obviously, she didn’t quite get the larger point. I have a copy of one of the letters from her “agent,” pitching the rights to some pictures of me to magazines in Italy, Australia, Germany, Spain, Britain, and France: “Demi Moore’s mother has finally opened the family album to uncover her superstar daughter’s photo secrets!” it says, and then describes eighteen never-before-published pictures, including one from my wedding to Freddy, which the letter claims I had “tried to hide.” It also mentions a photo from my wedding with Bruce, a snapshot of Bruce and me in a Jacuzzi, and a picture of me as a kid in a hospital bed, captioned “the day she nearly died.” Ginny and her agent were asking for ten thousand dollars per country.