Inside Out(50)

WITH EACH PREGNANCY, a woman tends to look bigger faster, and when I was pregnant with Chaplin I became colossal. We kept it totally hidden; only Bruce and the girls and our closest inner circle knew that I was pregnant. I didn’t want my youngest daughter to come into the world as tabloid fodder.

And thank God.

Almost six months into my pregnancy, right at the moment when we were going to start telling everyone, we went to the doctor’s office. He did his usual ultrasound, but this time, there was no heartbeat. I registered that deadly silence—instead of the now-familiar thumpthump! thumpthump! of Chaplin’s little heart—and saw the look on my doctor’s face.

If you have never lost a baby, you may think of a miscarriage as not that big a deal. It’s hard to remember, but I’m sure I used to feel that way, too: like it was a bit of medical misfortune, a disappointing but not devastating setback. But when it is your baby, who you already love and think of as a member of your immediate family, it doesn’t feel like a minor defeat. It feels like your child has died.

I was decimated. I shifted into survival mode. I tried to allow myself to mourn, but it was so confusing. How could I grieve a person who’d never been in the world? I didn’t even know who she was. I just knew that I wanted her back with every molecule of my being.

Ashton did his best to connect with me in my grief. He tried to be there for me during the miscarriage, but he couldn’t really understand what I was feeling. First of all, he hadn’t carried this baby. And second, he was in his twenties at the time: he wasn’t remotely late to the game of fatherhood. His possibilities were not running out, far from it. I was suddenly acutely aware that mine were. I had been very lucky to get pregnant naturally in my forties. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I had literally failed to deliver, and my grief felt bottomless. I went through the motions of life, but I don’t know that I was fully in it.

I recently came across a note that Tallulah wrote me at the time. It said, “I’m really sorry you lost the baby. But I’m still here. And I love you.”


IT WAS MY fault, I felt sure: if only I hadn’t opened the door to drinking, I never would have lost the baby. Even worse, I was still smoking when I found out I was pregnant, and it took me a few weeks to quit completely. I was wracked with guilt and convinced what had happened was my doing.

Drinking became interwoven in my pain. I’ve had a devastating experience, I’m drinking, that’s okay. That’s what I told myself. But somewhere inside of me, I knew that there was nothing okay about the way I related to alcohol.

Ashton, meanwhile, was back in his empire-building mode. I was just with myself—not working, replaying over and over again what I did and what I missed during my pregnancy that could have made this happen.

But I still had a glimmer of hope. I could try again. Now we know we want this, it’s really clear, let’s get on with it!

We decided to get married. Our Kabbalah teacher suggested it would be healing—that it would deepen our connection, uniting two souls as one. I threw myself into planning the wedding.


THERE WAS CHATTER early on that our relationship was just an elaborate publicity stunt. It was ridiculously difficult for people to believe an older woman and a younger man could actually be happily in love—though nobody blinks an eye when the situation is reversed. (Bruce and his wife, for example, have a twenty-three-year age difference, and nobody’s ever made a peep.) But by the time Ashton and I got married on September 24, 2005, we’d already been through a lot of real challenges as a couple in the two years we had been together. It didn’t feel like we were rushing into anything, quite the contrary. We were celebrating a love that had already survived trial by fire.

I went through herculean efforts to keep our wedding private, with the help of Hunter and Ashton’s dad, Larry. The guest list was small, just our closest friends and family, and most of them thought they were coming over for a housewarming party. The renovations on our Zen tree house had just been completed, and we had the ceremony there, in our living room. It was as intimate and low key as my wedding to Bruce had been big and over the top. Ashton’s father and his mom and stepdad came, along with his twin brother, Michael; his big sister, Tausha; and his niece, Dakota. Bruce was there, with the girls, of course, and, representing my family, George and DeAnna, and Morgan. Lucy Liu arrived after the ceremony was already under way and snuck to her seat with an expression of shock and delight on her face, housewarming gift under one arm.

I wore a beautiful, simple ivory Lanvin gown my friend Alber Elbaz had magically made for me in just a few weeks’ time. Ashton wore white too, for our traditional Kabbalistic ceremony under a chuppah. I walked around Ashton seven times to symbolize the circle of love, and he smashed a glass with his foot—a reminder of the fragility of relationships. Of how easy it can be to break them to pieces.





Chapter 20


We did everything together. We loved playing games, and one of our favorites was Mexican train dominoes—we started doing that two or three nights a week, and we played by the Salma Hayek rules: everyone’s train comes from the same central line of dominoes, and you’re in a cutthroat struggle to block your opponents. Penelope Cruz and her roommate, Daya, introduced us to the game; Heather, Guy, and sometimes Bruce would come, and our friend Eric Buterbaugh, who did the flowers for our wedding. We had a weekly Kabbalah class at our house on Wednesdays; TJ, Ashton’s old roommate, and the rest of their fantasy football league came on Sundays. We had family dinners together every night—Ashton organized his schedule around them. All of the friends coming and going felt like part of our extended family.