Inside Out(38)

The truth is, the doctor’s wisdom to say, “Let’s get her out,” probably saved her life. I couldn’t be more grateful to him for giving me my third baby girl, my sweet little Lulah.





Chapter 15


I would have done anything to take care of my girls. I felt an almost primal need to protect them: I would have taken a bullet for them, robbed a bank—you name it. That is what I related to when I read a script based on Carl Hiaasen’s book Strip Tease. I can’t imagine much in this world that would make me more uncomfortable than taking my clothes off and exposing my body and sexuality to an audience of strangers every night, but I would have done it to feed my kids without question, just as the protagonist of that story had. Her name was Erin Grant, and she had worked as a secretary for the FBI before she lost her job and, when she could no longer afford to support her, lost custody of her daughter, too. Erin becomes an exotic dancer because she knows it’s a surefire way of earning enough money to get her kid back.

Speaking of money, I was offered a lot of it for that role: over $12 million. No other woman in Hollywood had ever made that much money for a movie. But as it happened, the producers of Striptease were in a kind of bidding war with the producers of G.I. Jane, another story about a woman who will do whatever it takes to reach her goals, albeit a very different sort of woman with very different goals. (I was actually one of the producers of G.I. Jane—I had brought the script to my dream director, the brilliant Ridley Scott, and he said yes, which almost never happens.) I had already signed on to do G.I. Jane, so the producers of Striptease had to offer more than I’d be paid for G.I. Jane in order to go first. And so they did. Suddenly, I was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood.

Bruce was also doing well. He’d been paid over $20 million for the third movie in the Die Hard series. Notice the discrepancy. In Hollywood at that time—and, unfortunately, still—for some reason a man is worth almost double what a woman is. But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimme Moore.

Some of it had to do with Bruce and me being so successful as a couple. But nobody gave him a grabby, greedy nickname. He was just a guy doing what guys were supposed to do: earn as much as possible to take care of his family. Women, for some reason, are supposed to earn less—in every job, from the worst to the best—and never push back. That never made sense to me. I didn’t go to college. I wasn’t raised with money. But I knew enough to know that you want to get paid the most you can for what you do. I had defined myself in opposition to the way my parents supported us through slippery chicanery: I worked hard, and I behaved like a professional. I prided myself on giving my all, not just whatever I could get away with. I had taken part in propelling some big box office hits—my last film, Disclosure with Michael Douglas, had been a huge commercial success—and I wanted to be paid accordingly. That’s all I was guilty of.

In a funny way, the hate that came at me for choosing to do Striptease—and getting paid what I did to star in it—mirrored the disapproval the protagonist, Erin, faced for becoming an erotic dancer. I started going to strip clubs to meet the women working there and hear their stories, and it was a fascinating education. Some of them were dancing to put themselves through school. Some were addicts supporting their habits. There was one really beautiful young single mom who danced all night so she could be with her kids all day—I talked about her when I went on Barbara Walters to promote the film, and said that nobody ought to judge that single mom for working to support her family any more than we’d judge a waitress or a secretary. And I meant it.

I was, again, dubbed an exhibitionist. On one level, I get it, of course: I was dancing around a pole in a G-string. Fair enough. But the ugliness with which people responded to that movie felt tinged with real malice and misogyny.

One of the best things about doing Striptease was that I got to spend a lot of time with Rumer, who was seven by then, while I was making it. She begged to be allowed to audition for the role of Erin’s daughter, and she nailed it and got the part. I don’t deny this had as much to do with me as it did with her considerable on-camera charisma: the director loved the idea of our real-life bond coming through in his film, and he thought she was just adorable (I’m biased, but I think he was right). I had a great time with her, and I was very proud: she was diligent and devoted and a quick study. My critics decreed that I was a bad mother for letting her see me dance topless. I thought that was insane: she’d seen me a lot more than topless many times throughout her young life. Despite all my issues with my body (or maybe because of them—I didn’t want my girls to inherit my issues), I’d raised them to view nudity as natural and nothing to be ashamed of.

As I said, on a conscious level, what drew me to Striptease was the mother-daughter story. But when I think about how unmistakably both that film and G.I. Jane required me to focus on and dominate my own body, I am forced to recognize that I was working something out through my choices.

When I was making Striptease, for breakfast I would measure out a half cup of oatmeal and prepare it with water, then for the rest of the day I would have only protein and some vegetables—and that was it. And the crazy thing is, even eating like that, even working out six days a week, it was not like I was rail thin. I am convinced that it was a kind of mental and emotional holding on. I was gripping so tight in every way—to my marriage, to my career, to my exercise and diet routines—that my body wouldn’t let go of anything. The only place I felt truly comfortable with myself was as a mom, a role that to me was at the heart of that film.