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It was hard to imagine that happening right then. Bruce was in Europe shooting, and he was furious with me for going back to work, on top of all the mixed feelings he already had about our marriage. We had made a pact never to be apart from each other for more than two weeks, and then to spend at least four days together, but I had made that impossible by doing this film. I had a very rebellious reaction to Bruce in general. I just didn’t buy the “You’re the king” kind of thing, which he thrived on. Plus, telling me “I don’t know if I want to be married” is not exactly the way to my heart.

But when he got back, the very first time we had sex, I got pregnant again. And he was over the moon. Suddenly, it was like we’d never had that conversation about his ambivalence.





Chapter 13


In the midst of all this, I was offered the cover of Vanity Fair. My publicist and I were ecstatic: I had received a swell of media attention following Ghost, but this was the ultimate get for an actress at that time. Annie Leibovitz and I set up a photo session, but the pictures we took didn’t work out—I’d had to dye my hair blond for The Butcher’s Wife, and the editors at Vanity Fair said the photographs didn’t look like me and they weren’t going to use them. We’d have to reshoot.

I was hugely pregnant by the time I was able to do the reshoots with Annie. “If we’re shooting me as I am, I want the images to show that I feel sexy and beautiful as a pregnant woman,” I told her. It seemed ludicrous to me that, at that time, pregnant women were invariably portrayed as sexless. Women hid their pregnancies under tentlike clothes instead of flaunting their new curves the way you often see today. There may have been celebration at the news of a woman’s pregnancy, and a celebration at the birth of the baby, of course, but when you looked at pop culture, it was like there was nothing in between. I wanted to change that and do something that glamorized pregnancy instead of playing it down, and that was very much the tone of what Annie and I set out to accomplish with the photographs. They were wonderfully sensual, provocative photos of me all done up—hair, makeup, jewelry—as if it were a fashion shoot that just happened to feature an enormously pregnant model. In one image I wore a green satin robe that fell open to expose my stomach; in another I was in a black bra and high heels holding my swollen belly.

The very pregnant, very nude picture of me on the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair was actually one Annie thought she was taking just to give as a present to Bruce and me. It was understated, soulful, without the glitz of the photos we assumed the magazine would want. Annie shot it at the very end, when we were already “finished,” or so we thought at the time. In what became an iconic image, I had one arm draped across my breasts, the other cupping my belly, and that’s it. I remember saying to her, “It would be amazing if they had the courage to use this for the cover.” And, amazingly, they did.


SOMETHING ELSE MOMENTOUS happened during that pregnancy. My agent called to say I was a “person of interest” for a part in A Few Good Men, which would star Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. “But you’ll have to audition for it,” he told me. “Would you be willing to do that?” We both knew that the director, Rob Reiner, could have simply cast me without an audition: I had done enough work at that point for him to see what I was like on-screen, and I had reached a certain level of success—once you’ve been in some big movies, you don’t usually get asked to audition. At the same time, I’d never had a problem with having to earn a part: it helped quiet the insecure voice in my head asking, Is it okay that I’m here?

I was seven months pregnant—enormous—when I waddled in to read with Tom Cruise for the part of Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway in front of Rob Reiner. I was nervous: Rob Reiner was a very well-respected director; Aaron Sorkin had written a great script; and I thought the world of Jack Nicholson and Tom—whom I’d read with four years earlier for the part of his love interest in Top Gun. I’d botched that screen test out of nerves, and the part went to Kelly McGillis. I was determined to do better this time, and I must have, because soon after that audition they offered me the part.

The first thing in my head was, I’m going to have to get in shape really fast. On paper, it worked: The baby was due in August. Rehearsals for A Few Good Men were to start in September. It would be tight, but I’d have a month to get myself back into movie shape after the baby was born.

I knew I needed to get—and stay—fit, even while I was pregnant, for this to work, so I hired a trainer. He actually ended up moving his family into our guesthouse in Idaho; he had a little boy around Rumer’s age, and they spent all summer playing together. My thirteen-year-old nephew Nathan, George and DeAnna’s oldest son, came, too, along with Morgan, who was carving out a career for himself in special effects, after completing his tour as a Marine in Desert Storm. We had some really nice time as a family that July, and I worked out with my trainer every day. First it was walks, then the walks turned into hikes. We started biking together in the mountains, and I must have been a sight, pumping away with my knees completely splayed out to make room for my belly.

We were at a Carole King charity concert the night my water broke, almost a month before the baby was due. It was only a partial break—enough to make a puddle around my feet. Everyone around me panicked, but the hospital was a short hop away and the doctor there turned out to be just as wonderful as the one who’d delivered Rumer in Kentucky. He had done a lot of volunteer work in South America and Africa and had dealt with plenty of emergency situations, enough to know that this wasn’t one. “I think you’re fine,” he said. “You should go on home.” Very few doctors would have allowed that because they would have been afraid of infection, but he was calm and told me, “Just watch out for a temperature and don’t take a bath.”