Inside Out(29)

I persuaded her to hold back a picture of Rumer she was going to send in, and the photo of Bruce in the hot tub, but I couldn’t talk her out of selling the rest of them, which gutted me. What she was doing for money was feeding something I spent a tremendous amount of time and energy keeping out of our lives. To this day, I still make extra efforts to think about where I’m going and what access the paparazzi will have and what my comfort level with that is. If I take that caution and multiply it a hundredfold, that’s how I felt when Rumer—and later her sisters—were little. I wanted to protect my daughters from everything invasive and ugly; it was one of the main reasons we ended up raising our girls in Idaho, not California. I think it’s one of the best decisions Bruce and I ever made.

The fact that Ginny wouldn’t recognize that what she was doing was a complete betrayal; she knew full well how I felt about those magazines and the lies they had printed about me in the past.

I know: the only thing that’s surprising about all this is that I was—yet again—surprised. Children are hardwired to trust their parents. It’s amazing just how long it can take to override that wiring.


I HAD DECIDED that after my pregnancy, my body would be better than ever. I looked at it as an opportunity to hit the reset button. Within three months, I’d lost all the pregnancy weight, plus another eight pounds. I was invited to host Saturday Night Live right around then, and the writers actually got me to base my whole opening monologue around the line, “I had a baby just twelve weeks ago, and look at me!” I was never comfortable with that conceit, but at that time I didn’t have the confidence to push back. They were like, “Trust us, it’s going to work!” And it could have, if I’d really been able to own it and commit to the bit. I just didn’t know how to embrace saying “Don’t I look great?” enough for it to be funny. Performing that monologue was torture. It was terrifying enough getting in front of a live audience and essentially doing stand-up comedy, and honestly, I was afraid the joke was on me. All the negative talk in my head really stole that experience from me, and I didn’t fully inhabit my time with the amazing performers who were in the cast that season: Dana Carvey, Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Nora Dunn, and Al Franken. SNL moves fast—I remember at the end of the show, when we were saying good night to the audience, that’s when I finally felt, Okay, I got this now. Let’s do the whole thing over again for real!

Not long after I did SNL, I was offered a movie with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn called We’re No Angels, a comedy. It would be directed by Neil Jordan, an Irishman whose films Mona Lisa and High Spirits I’d admired, and the idea that I might be in a film with those actors was exhilarating. If I was good enough to work with people of that caliber, I told myself, how bad could I be?

It felt like a turning point, an indication that maybe it was time to trust myself more as an actor. Bruce’s reaction to the opportunity was not what I would have hoped, however. I remember distinctly being in the bedroom, changing Rumer’s diaper and telling Bruce what an amazing project this was going to be, how excited I was to shoot a film in Canada with the Robert De Niro. Bruce’s expression was stony as he said: “This will never work.”

I was baffled. “What do you mean, this won’t work?” I genuinely didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“This is never going to work,” he continued, “if you’re off shooting a film.” What he meant was that our life wouldn’t work if I was engrossed in something outside of our family.

I was taken aback. It’s not like it was a secret what we both did for a living before we started a family—Bruce understood from the inside what my job entailed, and I assumed that he expected me to keep on doing it. But in the very short time we’d known each other before getting married, I’d only been doing press and other ancillary aspects of my job, not actually working full time on a movie: my work hadn’t involved any demands that took me away from prioritizing him. In that moment, while I was changing that diaper, it was like a whole other side of his perspective and mine met for the very first time. I felt panic mounting. “Well, we’ll make it work,” I told him, and shifted into solution-oriented mode. I assured him that the schedule had been set up so I could easily bring Rumer with me, and I’d go back and forth to spend time with him. I felt way too much anxiety to have a real conversation with Bruce about our assumptions regarding work, gender roles, and parenting—the deep stuff we obviously needed to start figuring out together to have a successful marriage. Instead, I jumped right into “How can I fix this?” and started frantically figuring out what it would take to accommodate Bruce’s work schedule—and his expectations.

Rumer was five months old when I took her with me to shoot We’re No Angels, and I flew home with her every weekend. I think Bruce came to us once. It was difficult. I was not my most confident with the work, and I did not have the support of somebody saying “Of course you can do this.” I had to cheerlead for myself, and for the relationship.

It was inspiring acting alongside Penn and De Niro, but there was bad chemistry on the set—Sean and the director didn’t exactly see eye to eye. The film wasn’t a commercial success. But my next movie, thank goodness, would make up for that.


GHOST WAS AN unusual script. There was the romance between the protagonists, so deep that it transcended even death. There was a murder and the quest for the killer’s real motivation. And then there was a whole funny side story involving a shady psychic hustler. Really, it was three movies in one: a love story, a thriller, and a comedy. And with an unknown commodity attached, the director Jerry Zucker. He’d had a hit with the hilarious classic Airplane! but had never attempted anything quite like this.