Inside Out(34)

A lot of ill will would come my way from that one story, but it was also a humbling reality check. If I was somehow conveying a persona that was totally at odds with how I saw myself and who I wanted to be, then something needed to change. And Collins did get one thing right. I remember being struck by this passage:

Willis, who has accused the tabloids of trying to break up his marriage, smolders over any suggestion that the relationship is troubled. As for the tabs’ ongoing battle to link Willis with other women, Moore is unfazed. “Do I get jealous? Sure. But he doesn’t do anything to provoke it, so if I do feel that way, it’s something going on in my own head.”

Does she trust her husband? “Do I trust anybody?” she asks after a long pause. “That’s the question. Along the way I’ve been shown it’s O.K. to trust, so I usually go ahead and take the chance. But deep down do I really trust? I don’t think so.” Moore says she trusts her husband “probably more than I do anybody. But the only person I really trust is my child.”


GINNY MADE MATTERS worse, as she so often managed to. Nude pictures of her began to surface in the tabloids. Her need for attention was so desperate she’d let these rags convince her to pose naked, mimicking the shots I’d done for magazines, including the cover of Vanity Fair. It was pitiful. “You’re embarrassing yourself!” I told her, but to no avail. In her delusional mind, she believed the people paying her were her friends. I tried to explain to her that these so-called friends were taking advantage of her, but she wouldn’t hear me. “You made money modeling,” she said. “You just don’t want me to.”

I’d hit my limit. It probably seems strange, after all the truly ugly things she’d put me through, that Ginny’s behavior with the tabloids was what put me over the edge. I think it’s because I saw the potential this particular brand of lunacy had to hurt my kids. Honestly, if it had just been me, I probably would have let her continue the cycle of betrayal and disappointment ad infinitum. But there was no way I was going to let her hurt my family.

I broke off all contact with my mother soon after Scout was born. Some of our family members were critical of my choice. But I knew it was the healthiest thing I could do for myself, my girls, and maybe even for Ginny. All the money I’d spent on rehab, the plane tickets I’d bought when she’d called me stranded for some insane reason or other—none of it was actually helping her. It was enabling her. No longer would I hold a futile expectation of her being a mother; no longer would I feel that I bore the responsibility of being her mother.

I didn’t speak to her again for eight years.





Chapter 14


The day after Scout was born, I strapped her into a baby carrier and walked the long loop past the few houses in our neighborhood in Hailey, which is mostly populated by trees and elk. Within a week, I was back to biking, hiking, and working out at the gym five days a week. I nursed Scout as I did Rumer, but where Rumer began to plump up right away, Scout stayed tiny. One day, when she was around five weeks old, a wash of fear came flooding over me that something was really wrong. I rushed her to the doctor, and my concern turned to panic when he weighed her and found she was barely above her birth weight—which had been low to begin with because she had been early.

The doctor stepped out of the examination room and came back with a bottle of formula, and I watched as he nudged the nipple into her mouth and she gulped the liquid down. The problem with her weight was my fault. The doctor didn’t say it in those words, but it was the only conclusion I could reach when he explained that my excessive exercising was creating a surplus of lipase, an enzyme that breaks down fat, in my breast milk. Even though Scout was nursing for hours, she wasn’t growing. We would have to add formula to her diet. I was crushed. Nursing for me was such a joyous part of being a mother.

And yet I didn’t feel like I could stop exercising. It was my job to fit into that unforgiving military uniform I’d be wearing in two months in A Few Good Men. Getting in shape for that movie launched the obsession with working out that would consume me over the next five years. I never dared let up.

We went back to L.A., where A Few Good Men was filming and Bruce was soon to be shooting Death Becomes Her with Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. In a stroke of good fortune, both films were being shot on the same lot at a studio in Culver City—which quickly started resembling a day care center. Meryl had just had a baby. I’d just had a baby. Rob Reiner and his wife had a baby. So did the British comedian Tracey Ullman, who was shooting her television show on that lot. We would all wander from one trailer to another with our kids. There’s a picture on the wall at my house in Idaho of all the members of what we jokingly called the All-Star Baby Group in that Culver City studio. As it happened, three of those babies—Scout, Jake Reiner, and Tracey Ullman’s son, Johnny—grew up to go to the same high school in L.A.

When we started rehearsals for A Few Good Men, I managed to fit into that tight uniform, but not without herculean effort. I’d get up early, go for a long run, go to the set, hit the gym, and then feed the baby through the night. It was punishing. I’d gained only twenty-eight pounds with Scout, and I was slowly sloughing it off with my fanatical routine, but one part of my anatomy stayed stubbornly huge: I was alternately nursing Scout and giving her a bottle, so my breasts were painfully full half the time, and I was outrageously busty as a result. (Though often one boob would be much bigger than the other, and the wardrobe people would have to add padding to make them look even.)