Inside Out(33)

I didn’t go into full labor for two more days, and even then, the contractions were intermittent. I went to the hospital when they became steady, and the whole household came with me: Bruce, my nephew, my brother, Rumer, a babysitter, plus a friend of ours from Hailey. While I tried to kick-start things by pedaling away on the stationary bike in the physical therapy room, my cheering section was setting up camp, ordering pizza, and playing board games. The doctor finally said he didn’t think my water was going to break on its own—it hadn’t with Rumer, either—and at the very instant he broke the water, I went into hard labor.

Scout LaRue Willis was born on the 20th of July 1991, three and a half weeks early. I had read To Kill a Mockingbird while I was pregnant, and I named her after its brave young heroine.


VANITY FAIR HIT the stands soon after Scout was born, and it set off a firestorm. I was shocked, though the magazine’s editor, Tina Brown, evidently was not: anticipating the controversy the cover story would ignite, she had tucked the magazine in a white sleeve, which concealed my pregnant body from the neck down. Only my face showed, along with the cover line “More Demi Moore.”

Even with the sleeve, some newsstands refused to carry the magazine. People went insane about it. One camp called it disgusting pornography and accused me of exhibitionism. Another saw it as a liberating breakthrough for women. All I had meant to accomplish was to show that a pregnant woman could be beautiful and glamorous—that there didn’t have to be a disconnect between “sexy” and “mother,” especially when you consider that sex is what makes you a mother in the first place! I didn’t think I was making a political statement, I just thought I was portraying pregnancy the way I experienced it: as something lovely, natural, and empowering.

I received a lot of letters from women, many of whom identified themselves as feminists, thanking me for taking pregnancy out of the closet and showing it as a glorious part of being female. It’s hard to believe now when every celebrity proudly gets her picture taken with her “baby bump,” but at that point it really seemed revolutionary to a lot of people, and the reaction was overwhelming, both pro and con. To this day, I am probably more closely identified with that photograph than with any movie I’ve ever made. I’m very proud of it, truthfully, because it’s something I’ve done that really moved the needle culturally, whether I intended it to or not. The American Society of Magazine Editors voted it the second-best cover in half a century, the top spot going to another one of Annie’s photographs, picturing a nude John Lennon snuggling up to a fully clothed Yoko Ono and taken just five hours before Lennon was shot.

In 2011, on the twentieth anniversary of my pregnant cover, the art director George Lois, who designed all those legendary Esquire covers in the sixties—Muhammad Ali as the martyred Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows, Andy Warhol sinking into a tomato vortex in a Campbell’s Soup can—posted this on Vanity Fair’s website:

A truly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nanosecond. A glance at the image by photographer Annie Leibovitz that graced the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, depicting a famous movie star beautifully bursting with life and proudly flaunting her body, was an instant culture buster—and damn the expected primal screams of those constipated critics, cranky subscribers, and fidgety newsstand buyers, who the editors and publishers surely knew would regard a pregnant female body as “grotesque and obscene.” Demi Moore’s hand bra helped to elegantly frame the focal point of this startlingly dramatic symbol of female empowerment. To me, quite simply, it was a brave image on the cover of a great magazine—a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.

To help women love themselves and their natural shapes—that’s a remarkable and gratifying thing to have accomplished, particularly for someone like me who spent years doing battle with her body.


IF THE COVER and its repercussions exceeded my dreams, the article that accompanied it inside the magazine was my nightmare. The smart and strong cover photo was completely at odds with the devastating representation of me in that story: I was portrayed as selfish, egotistical, and pampered. A series of anonymous quotes claimed that I had gotten Ghost because I’d “married well,” and said that “being Mrs. Bruce Willis” had gone to my head—“Swelling it unmercifully.” There were complaints about the “entourage factor,” assertions that I was “catered to” on the set of The Butcher’s Wife, where the interview had transpired. I was a prima donna surrounded by sycophants, among whom was listed Rumer’s nanny—I was still nursing! “You try shooting a movie without help while you’re breastfeeding!,” I wanted to scream. Nancy Collins, the journalist who wrote the story, also claimed I “was catered” to by a psychic consultant, when the clairvoyant on set had been brought there by the producers for everyone’s benefit, not for me in particular. I told Collins during our interview, “It’s a lot more interesting to write about me being a bitch than being a nice woman,” regardless of what was actually true. Unfortunately, she proved me right.

Perhaps I overreacted to the negativity in the story. But it did a lot of damage, and became the benchmark on which all subsequent interviews would be based. The distorted portrayal of me as a diva would follow me for years, because anybody doing a story on me or a new movie I was in would first read the Vanity Fair piece, and then interview me based on its assertions. The article would also have a subtle negative impact on my career, introducing the myth that I was “difficult.”