Inside Out(40)

Unfortunately, his thoughtful take on the film was an outlier. Even before the movie came out, people who hadn’t seen it were already slamming it. It felt like a kind of collective decision just to trash me and treat me as the joke I’d always feared I was.

This was really hard because G.I. Jane was a true labor of love, a role that I believed in completely. I was emotionally invested in the story, the message, and the provocative questions it raised. And I thought it was, in fact, a really good film.

Granted, this was the first movie portraying women in combat—or one woman, anyway—and it certainly was pushing the envelope by showing the raw physical dynamic involved and asking the question, If you’ve got the skill, why shouldn’t it be an option? The one-two punch of me being paid more than any woman to date—and equal to many men in my industry—and then playing a woman who was just as strong as a man was just too much for a lot of people.

All the criticism of G.I. Jane and Striptease was a lot to absorb. The takeaway seemed to be that I had betrayed women in Striptease and betrayed men in G.I. Jane and gotten paid a lot to do it—and that nobody could forgive me for that. I absorbed all that negativity without really working through it.

Bruce was working the whole time I was, and we were disconnected from each other emotionally. Our life was all about logistics surrounding the kids. And while Bruce was always proud of me doing well, I don’t know that he was always comfortable with the attention that came with it.

It didn’t occur to me to talk with someone about how I was struggling—in truth, it didn’t even occur to me that I was allowed to struggle. That it was okay for me to have a problem. I just had to figure this shit out on my own.


I HAD BULKED up enormously making G.I. Jane, and I weighed 138 pounds by the time it wrapped. (I don’t think it was Bruce’s favorite look.) My neck was huge. My back was huge. When I finished the movie, there were pants that I could no longer pull up over my thigh muscles. It was heady being that strong and powerful, but it was not a look I intended to stick with, any more than my shaved head.

My usual reaction would have been to start starving myself again, to begin an exercise regime designed to reduce the bulk, but I did neither. I had reached my limit. When I got home to Idaho, I had an epiphany in the shower one day: I just want to be my natural size. I didn’t want to starve myself anymore. I didn’t want to assess my success as a human being based on how skinny I could get. I was curious: What would my natural size be with no manipulation? And I was finally willing to accept whatever the answer might be. I could barely remember a time when I wasn’t trying to dominate and control my body—for a long time, it was the only thing I could control. I had a realization that holding on to this weight was a way to protect myself. I added into my daily prayer a new mantra: to have the courage to be seen without padding or protection. I couldn’t go on fighting my body and my weight; I had to make peace.

I started by giving up hard exercise. I never went back into the gym in the house. Never. I had spent six painful years in there, starting with Scout’s birth in 1991 and finishing after G.I. Jane in 1997, and I was burned out. I literally couldn’t look at a gym. The room it occupied is now my office.

At the same time, I changed my whole way of dealing with food. Rather than look at it as something to conquer, I decided to try eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full. I made new rules that didn’t include observing breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I just ate when I was hungry, and if that meant I didn’t want to eat until lunch, I didn’t have to. Over the course of all the different diets I had been on, I had come to realize what worked for me and what didn’t. I knew that I needed more protein than carbs; I knew that if I ate a little bit at a time, I digested better. I would still sit down with the children when they had their meals, but I wouldn’t necessarily eat just because of the time of day. I no longer had lunch or dinner business meetings. I’d only plan a meal with people I knew well enough to relax with.

The weight came off. It was most apparent in the spring of 1997 when we were starting to prepare for the Cannes Film Festival. Elizabeth Taylor was recovering from brain surgery; she asked me to host her Cinema Against AIDS event in Cannes, and I happily accepted. Bruce’s film The Fifth Element was opening the festival. I was getting the clothes organized for the many days of events, and we picked them out and then did fittings. Without dieting or doing any kind of extreme exercise, I had lost about thirty pounds in just over three months.

I had finally reached a truce with my body. I would need that peace to get through what came next.


I HAD JUST returned from the press tour for G.I. Jane when I got a call from DeAnna: my mother was dying. She had metastatic lung cancer and had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor on top of that.

If I wanted to reach any kind of understanding with her in this lifetime, it was now or never.





Part III


Surrender





Chapter 16


At first, I thought it was a scam. I imagined showing up at the hospital, only to find that my mother was fine and had gotten paid to deliver me to the paparazzi. I didn’t tell her I was coming, and when I arrived in Farmington, New Mexico, there were no cameras. Instead, there was my mom, staying at my aunt Carolyn’s house in a hospital bed she’d had installed in her own bedroom. Ginny was missing all of her hair from chemo, except for one resilient little red tuft. She was gravely ill.