Inside Out(31)

One of the things that connected people to my performance in Ghost, I think, was the level of vulnerability that I managed to reveal—and actually feel. My whole experience making that film was great, not least because we shot in L.A., so there was no conflict with Bruce about me being away. And there was good chemistry between the cast and crew. Sometimes on a set, you feel like nothing’s working and you’re just struggling to get through every scene. But Ghost was the kind of set where there was just an overall ease of alignment and you could feel it all coming together. Not too long ago I was interviewed for a documentary about Patrick. They showed me some behind-the-scenes footage I’d never seen before, and I was struck by the comfortable, open sweetness between us. That’s just who he was.

At the first screening of the movie, everybody from my agents to the studio executives were ecstatic—and so was I. I took their experienced assessments to heart: if they felt it was going to do great, then I did, too. We were all so excited to read the reviews, but when the first one appeared, it was horrible. The reviewer just hated Ghost, which marked a turning point for me: better not to read reviews, I decided, because if you attribute weight and power to the good, then you have to do it for the bad, too, and you’re always going to be at someone else’s mercy.

Meanwhile, the movie was a smash hit at the box office when it opened in the summer of 1990: it brought in over $200 million. And it had a lasting impact. To this day, I hear from people all over the world about what a profound effect that film had on them, particularly people who have lost someone, and felt the movie had given them hope.

Ghost was also my first “grown-up” movie. By that I mean I was included in every aspect of the creative process, from the production design to the music. We would look at the dailies at lunch every day, and there was a clear sense of thoroughness and total professionalism about the whole endeavor. There was some of that on About Last Night, of course—maybe Ghost felt different for me because I was a little bit older and less insecure. But I also think it had a certain magic, and audiences could feel that on a visceral level.

The naysayers were proven wrong about Ghost when it was nominated for five Academy Awards. I was delighted when Bruce Joel Rubin won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Whoopi got hers for Best Supporting Actress. I did okay myself, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress; Julia Roberts won for Pretty Woman, another movie that has stood the test of time. Today, if you happen upon either Ghost or Pretty Woman on cable, they may seem like period pieces. But chances are you will find it surprisingly difficult to change the channel, nonetheless. Because both of those films, dated though they may be, have the most important thing in a feel-good movie: heart.


MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE was soaring. My personal life was painful. Right before Rumer’s second birthday, Bruce was getting ready to go do a film that was shooting in Europe, Hudson Hawk. There was a lot of buzz around it: it had a huge budget; Bruce had worked on the story and cowritten some of the songs, and he had a lot riding on the film. Just before he left, he dropped a bombshell: “I don’t know if I want to be married.”

I felt like I had been sucker punched. “Well, you are married, and you have a kid,” I pointed out. “So what do you want to do?”

Bruce and I had met, married, had a baby, and just done a lot, very quickly—it was as if he woke up a few years later and thought, Whoa, is this what I want? Or do I really want to be free? I think that as a true Pisces, he was struggling to resolve a conflict within himself: he wanted family and grounding, but he also craved excitement and novelty. Basically, he wanted to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Not so unusual in men that age—he was thirty-six at the time—and throw in celebrity and money? You do the math.

The strong, tough part of me thought, If this isn’t 100 percent what you want, then you should get out. I need a husband who I don’t have to convince to be in this marriage. But Bruce didn’t want to be the guy who walked out on his family, who did that to his kid. Even though I was terrified and finding it difficult to wrap my head around the enormity of what was happening, I kept saying over and over, “Then go.” But he couldn’t quite commit to that any more than he could fully commit to me. When he left to do Hudson Hawk, things were in a very precarious state. I went over to visit once, and, frankly, I had the feeling that he had screwed around. It was tense and it was weird and there was just stuff that didn’t seem kosher.

I was wrestling with a sense of rejection and uncertainty I just couldn’t shake when I was offered a movie called The Butcher’s Wife. I shouldn’t have done that film, but for reasons that had nothing to do with Bruce. My agent at the time talked me into doing The Butcher’s Wife for the money, to get my price up. I’ve never done a movie just for money again. It was never how I’d worked, and it was a disaster of an experience that I didn’t want to repeat. I didn’t feel confident going into it, I didn’t feel confident while I was there, and I didn’t trust the director. The movie rested on me, but I didn’t have half the experience of the other actors, Jeff Daniels, Frances McDormand, and Mary Steenburgen. I was intimidated, and I didn’t have the confidence to ask them for help. Instead, I assumed that everyone was judging me to be a fraud, and that I was letting them down. I had to employ a southern accent, and I worried I sounded ridiculous.

I played a clairvoyant woman who visualizes her future husband—a butcher from New York—and to help us all understand psychics better, the producers brought one on the set. The very first thing she said to me during our session was, “Your daughter’s really beckoning for you to have another child.” She wasn’t wrong: Rumer had been clamoring for a sibling; she was dying for a baby brother.