Inside Out(37)

The movie made a whopping $24 million box office in just five days when it opened in April 1993. Though it was universally panned by critics and women’s groups—who objected to my character being used as barter—the movie ended up making over $260 million worldwide.

The controversy with feminists was really interesting. The author Susan Faludi accused Robert Redford’s character of “raping a woman with money.” A critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “In Hollywood it may be the Year of the Woman, but this year every woman has her price.” The Washington Post said, “If a man is sold, it’s called slavery. In Hollywood, if a woman is sold, it’s called romance.” I thought that was an oversimplification of a story told with a lot of nuance, which really strikes at the core of our collective fears about marriage. Whether you’re a man or a woman, no matter how content you are with someone, there’s always that slight anxiety that someone better—richer or prettier or more impressive at whatever it is you are insecure about—will steal your partner’s heart away. It was also a movie about the blunt force of money. It asked, For what amount of money would you sell yourself, your spouse, your life?

I never consciously had this thought while we were making the film, but I’m sure simmering away somewhere in my subconscious was the ugliest question I’d ever been asked: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” That was an indecent proposal. Our film, by contrast, was the story of a woman who was precious. A billionaire would give anything for her. Her own husband was nearly destroyed by the thought of losing her, even for a night. She was beloved and respected and had her own career, and, ultimately, she was the one who decided what she wanted, what she would and wouldn’t allow to happen to her.


I GOT PREGNANT again. But this time was different. I was throwing up every day. I was in my bed and crawling to the bathroom to vomit and then crawling back. It got to where I couldn’t bear to eat because I couldn’t bear to throw up anymore. At one point I ended up subsisting on water for seven days.

Bruce and I always tried to do our movies at the same time so we would have our off time together. While I was sick, Bruce occupied the kids—Rumer was five, and Scout was not quite two—taking them for walks in the woods, splashing around with them in the pond in the backyard. He was a great dad, protective and involved, and he was excited we were having another baby. But he was as relieved as I was when the morning sickness passed just in time to pack up the kids and the nannies and the pets—our family circus—and head to Hawaii, where Bruce was scheduled to shoot a film with Rob Reiner called North.

Though the timing was a little off—I’d felt like I was just starting to get back into my career groove—I didn’t have any second thoughts about having another child. The perfect name for the baby surfaced during an all-girls trip to Fisher Island, off the coast of Miami—the game on that vacation became what to name this new baby. Meg Ryan was there; we had fallen into an easy friendship over the years. I found her open and warm and noncompetitive—a real girl’s girl—and we were about the same age, walking the same path. I loved her work, but I loved getting to know her even more. She suggested Tallulah, because both of my other daughters’ names had “oo” sounds: Rumer, of course, and Scout’s middle name, LaRue. “Tallulah would round out your trio of ‘oos,’” Meg said.

I loved the name. Bruce hated it. And the campaign began to convince him. There was the obvious reference to Tallulah Bankhead, which didn’t sway him. He warmed up a little when I looked it up in a baby name book and found it derived from the Native American word for “leaping water.” And then I pointed out the character Jodie Foster played (at age thirteen) in the musical Bugsy Malone. That pushed him over the edge, and he gave in.

Bruce was in New York making Nobody’s Fool with Paul Newman, and I joined him there with the girls for a visit toward the end of my pregnancy. Scout had come early, so I had lined up doctors in New York just in case, though I was feeling great. But there was a problem, as it turned out. The doctors did an ultrasound and were concerned that the baby seemed awfully small for a February due date. “You can’t exercise,” they told me. “That has to stop.” They wanted to make sure nothing got in the way of her growth. All of a sudden, what had been a standard pregnancy became high risk, and I was afraid to do much more than go to the sink to get a glass of water. I got a little nutty being so confined and stationary. And I grew increasingly concerned because they were scanning me almost every day. All of the baby’s vital signs were good, but they couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t gaining weight.

Back in Hailey after Bruce finished the movie, I immediately consulted my regular OB-GYN. He scanned me and compared the image to the ones I’d brought back from New York. “She really hasn’t grown in five days,” he told me. “You’re full term, and I think you just need to get her out, because there’s something going on, and we don’t know what it is.” He induced labor in our little hospital in Hailey, and Tallulah Belle Bruce Willis entered the world at lightning speed on February 3, 1994—the doctor almost missed the birth because he had gone to change his shoes. She was four pounds, twelve ounces, and looked so much like Bruce I added his name to hers. She was incredibly scrawny—like a little head on a stick—but they gave her oxygen and checked her out, and she was perfectly fine, just underweight.