Ever since her brain exploded, Sharon Stone has
been living in '
IT WOULD BE SO EASY JUST TO jump right into bed with Sharon Stone. She
has asked. Hips cocked saucily, eyes flaming, spiky blond hair looking mighty
fine, she has said, "Oh, let's get in bed! Get in, honey!" And yet,
having known her for less than four hours, you hesitate, not because of morals
— don't be ridiculous — but because of fear for your soul. An exboyfriend once
reportedly called her "the Antichrist," and that kind of comment
makes you think. And so you do think, looking back at those four hours,
pondering what you know about Sharon Stone, what you have heard about Sharon
Stone, and what your next move should be with Sharon Stone,
jumping-into-bedwise.
It's much earlier in the day, a Friday. In her mansion in the
Hollywood Hills, Sharon Stone wakes up at 7:49 A.M., eats breakfast (toast,
fruit and lots of butter, which she shares with her cats), brushes her teeth,
takes a leak, spends some time stretched out on her back on her bathroom floor,
endlessly considers the deep meaning of a very deep poem by Edna St. Vincent
Millay, slips into a pair of hiphugging, belly-showing True Religionbrand jeans
and eventually finds herself at a little French pastry shop down on Robertson,
talking.
She talks a lot and has no shortage of opinions. On George Bush:
"I think he's an idiot." On
But all that happened a decade ago, when she was in her early
thirties. She's forty-six now. She's been through some stuff. She recently
divorced San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein, her husband of five
years, for whom she basically abandoned the movies in 1998 and about whom she
can now say very little ("I have certain inhibitions legally about
that"). She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2001. She used to carry a gun
in her car, for protection; now it's a Louisville Slugger youth bat. She used
to be a notorious speeder, too, but after she and Bronstein adopted a kid,
Roan, now four, she eased up on the gas pedal a lot. She's making movies again
— Catwoman is her latest, in which she plays the villain opposite
"Actually, I don't have any ambition in the film business
anymore," she says over a decaf latte. "I've realized it'd be better
for me to work a whole lot less than I once did, because I'm not a
cookie-cutter thing, and not many people get what I have to give. I wish I'd
understood this earlier. I shouldn't have worked with so many people that I had
to try to explain my vagina and point of view to."
That noted, she leaves the French pastry shop
to do a little shopping. She's changing the feel of her great big living room —
"comfy" will be its new attitude and needs a bunch of new furniture.
She doesn't get too far up Robertson, however, before she spies something lying
on the sidewalk and bends down to pick it up. It's a single earring, gold, with
little red jewels hanging off it.
"Oh, somebody lost her really pretty earring," she says.
A mother and daughter are walking down the street, dressed mainly in
eyepopping boob-revealing attire. Sharon Stone stops them. "I found
somebody's earring," she says.
"What?" the mother says, blinking.
"I found somebody's earring, and I feel bad."
"Well," says the mother, "I don't know what to tell
you."
And then both of them step around Sharon Stone, gingerly, like she's
some kind of loon. Paying no attention, she marches into a nearby store,
explains the situation to a bewildered shopgirl and leaves the thing in her
custody.
"Maybe you'll see the other one on somebody's ear," she says
optimistically, and then goes on her way.
OK, so it does seem that maybe Sharon Stone has mellowed some. Today,
she's saying things like, "Love is everything. Love is it. Love is the
deal, man. It's just it, and when it is, it is." But you never know. She's
an actress, and maybe it's all an act. If so, it's probably not going to be
such a wise idea to hop into bed with her. But it's difficult to say right now.
There's still much to be learned and much to be weighed.
BEFORE "BASIC INSTINCT," SHE LAbored
for ten long years in the world of crappy B-movies, showing up in losers such
as Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. Then came that movie and that movie's
now-infamous interrogation scene, in which she crossed and uncrossed her legs
and revealed in the shadows much more than she'd intended to (in her telling)
or, quite cunningly, exactly what she'd intended to (in everyone else's
telling). In the overheated aftermath, she went right to the top in terms of
salary demands (her upgraded quote: $6 million) and close to the bottom in
terms of movie quality. Both Sliver (1993,with Billy Baldwin) and Intersection
(1994,with Richard Gere) sucked, and The Specialist (1994,with Sylvester
Stallone) wasn't much better, though she did pack a mean, sexy pistol in The
Quick and the Dead (1995), and she did steal thunder even from Robert De Niro
in Casino (1995), for which she won an Oscar nomination.
Along the way, she riddled her personal life with quick, splashy
romances, few of them lasting more than several months at best. In chop-chop
order, she neatly dispensed with Yoakam, Dweezil Zappa, Gary Shandling, actor
Hart Bochner (who later reportedly came out with the "Antichrist"
comment), a few producer types, a few businessmen and assistant directors, and
various others, up to and including half the eligible guys in Hollywood and a
good number of subpar ones as well, if you believed the gossip.
And, according to Sharon Stone herself, it is all gossip, untrue and
unfounded. "What I like to say is, if I had two bucks for everybody who
said they slept with me, I'd be a billionaire," she says, and then goes
on, in her thoughtful, intelligent way, to explain why it was that so many guys
said they had when they hadn't.
"My character in Basic Instinct displayed a sense of sexual
freedom and sexual prowess and sexual danger that maybe no woman ever had
before. Men found her threatening, but they also found her attractive, because
men have a tendency in their own narcissism to be attracted to likeness in
themselves, and that character represented a likeness to male sexuality. So
when they said they'd slept with me, it was them also saying that they'd
conquered a sexual peer. It made them seem more powerful as men. But I would
have to say that the majority of the people who said they slept with me
didn't."
To one contemplating her now, this comes as a big relief, and she
compounds it by also saying that, these days, she's not about sex so much as
about making out and parking.
"I mean, let me ask you this: What's funner than making
out?" she says. "Or, excuse me, is parking so outré? People don't go
parking anymore. What's up with that shit, man?" She says all this using a
droll hippie voice to spike her words with a little irony; even so, it doesn't
seem entirely like a puton. It really does seem that she means what she says.
And to think that Joe Eszterhas, in his recent autobiography Hollywood Animal,
portrays her as little more than a potsmoking home wrecker. What's up with that
shit, man? Could she have changed so much in the past few years?
TO HEAR SHARON STONE HERSELF tell it, she has changed, dramatically,
and not because of her marriage, or her divorce, or her hiatus from Hollywood,
or her child, custody of whom she splits with Bronstein, three weeks on, three
weeks off, this being an off period for her. Instead, the reason revolves
around what happened to her on September 29th, 2001, when an artery in her head
began pumping blood into her brain, causing an explosive headache that
literally knocked her over a couch. It took doctors nearly two weeks to
diagnose the hemorrhage. By that time she was near death and, in fact, had one
of those white-light near-death experiences and came out of it not exactly the
same as she'd been before. Her taste in food had changed — it used to be she
couldn't stand curry; now she loves it. Her famous bad temper
— gone. She'd also lost some of her long-term memory; certain people she
could remember, others she couldn't, and, usually, it was those that she
couldn't remember who would get pissed off about it and say things like,
"I've met you many times, and you don't remember me?" These are
people, she thinks now, that her brain has chosen not to remember, and it's a
good thing.
She thinks she looks different. "Hello! I'm little! And I used to
be a big chick, and it's not as if I don't eat!"
And she certainly is single now and very happy about it, a certain
number of early misgivings notwithstanding. "At first, I thought, 'Oh,
what's it going to be like to be in my forties, have a kid and be single? Will
it be the stinky-foot thing?' Actually, no. I've been
asked out by men twenty-two to thirty-nine, though no one older. The younger
ones, I ask them, What's up with this? You know, I
could be your mom.' And they say, 'But... you're not!' Women my age, we're fun,
we're sexy. And if you're a thirty-five-to forty-year-old, we will take a nap
with you if you nap. We want to have sex and are happy to say, 'I want to have
sex!'"
Has her sexuality changed along with all the other changes?
"Oh, yeah! Ohhhhh. Teahhhh."
For the better?
"Tah! Wahahahaha! Ooofff, yeah. Yeah. Yahoo!" She
pauses for a moment, letting her various high-spirited noises recede, then
starts talking again. "I feel a different kind of alive. I was looking for
something before, but I was looking outside of myself to find it. When I look
back at some of my old relationships, I'm positive my big failure was starting
them up in the first place and becoming partners in pain. Now I feel clearer
about that. If you see somebody that seems like family, gravitate toward that
person. If you see somebody that gives you that whole weird, big-buzzy, trippy,
weirdy thing — run like your hair's on fire! The
tortures of the past, who needs them? You know what?
I'm at the point in life where if you don't want my peaches, don't shake my
tree. I'm into
She laughs a deep, throaty laugh and shakes her head. "When I
think about how I was or what I was before, I have no idea, because everything
for me now is new. When my brain exploded — oh, God, it was the best thing that
ever happened to me. A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing.
I have such a better life now. I remember when I had to refill my mind, I decided to be cautious about what I put in there. I
didn't want to watch the news or read the newspaper. I thought about new ways I
could approach myself, and what I did was, I really found my humanity."
AND YET, OF COURSE, IN TERMS OF hopping into bed with somebody,
humanity newly discovered only goes so far, especially with someone like Sharon
Stone, who has many peccadilloes that also must be taken into consideration. On
the downside, for instance, she has a tendency to call sugar "shug,"
mashed potatoes "mashy potatoes" and breakfast "brecky."
Ugh! Also, she recently woke up with the song "You Don't
Mess Around With Jim," by the late Jim Croce, lodged in her skull —
never a good sign. She uses the words astonishing and amazing far too often for
them to have any real meaning. Plus, for a certain kind of traditional guy, it
might be a problem that she never wears a bra "except for fun" and
that the shirts she sometimes wears allow guys to sometimes get a pretty
complete view of her nipples. She's like this not because she's an insecure
middle-aged woman who needs to continually test out her sexual appeal, and
thank God for that. "It's just that I could care less," she says.
"I'm all for the European sensibility. I mean, you're a guy, and if I can
see your nipples, it's no big deal. Does that mean nipples are not an erogenous
zone on you? Or have you just not had a girlfriend bother to do foreplay in
that direction?"
It's best not to answer those kinds of questions, and instead you
counter with more of your own. Her vices — what might they be?
"None that I don't really find pleasure in, I guess, but they're
mine alone, because if I shared them, then I'm not going to get a big buzz off
them anymore."
A vibrator — has she ever owned one?
"Only as a party favor," she yells, before lapsing into
twenty-three seconds of rolling laughter.
An orgasm — has she ever faked one?
This requires twelve seconds of deep thought. "No," she says
finally, "but I have faked liking presents."
Hobbies — does she have any?
"Well, I love to hit baseballs. I'm up to seventy miles per hour
at the batting cages, and I want to see if I can get to eighty. Also, I'm
golfing like mad these days."
This is, naturally, a disappointing thing to hear — so disappointing
that it might prompt one to come right out and say, with conviction, "If I
was your boyfriend, I'd break up with you over that."
She'd then smile a long time and say, "Bet not," and, in
just the way that she said it, you'd know exactly what she meant and; that she
is probably right. But not for that reason alone. There are, as well, many
other things to recommend her. For instance, now that every girl on earth has
taken to wearing thongs, she has begun doing "the full-underpants thing,
because they're so cute and sort of fresh!" Being a longtime, tireless fund-raiser
for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, she also knows a lot about
condoms and is full of thoughtful advice. "I recommend Avanti, but you
have to find the brand that works for you, whether you need latex or nonlatex,
lubed or nonlubed, ribbed or nonribbed. If you get one that works for you and
your girl, they can actually enhance your sexuality!"
And so there she is, the latest incarnation of Sharon Stone. She's got
her pluses, she's got her minuses, but the question still remains: Knowing what
you now know, are you going to hop into bed with her or not?
SHE DRIVES FROM ROBERTSON TO LA Brea, on her continuous search for
comfy, and then, in a swank establishment called Barclay Butera, she sees a big
comfy bed, and a perverse notion strikes her.
"Oh, let's get in bed," she says to you, who have known her
for less than four hours. She says, "Get in, honey."
Thoughts flicker through your brain, fears and delights, but in the
end, you do what must be done. She slides under the comforter from one side, you slide in from the other. And you lie there, heart
pounding, wondering what to make of all this, while the shopkeepers look at the
two of you and chuckle.
She turns to you and says, smiling, "Oh, my God, this is good!
This is fantastic!" But she's not talking about you, only about the bed.
"It's really quite luxe, the comforter, the sheets, the bedding, the
mattress," she goes on. Then, brightly: "Let's have a little nap. We
might say something in our dreams."
You are disappointed. You are hoping for more, for something more
intimate, something to tell you that you made the right decision when you got
into this bed.
A saleslady appears, reporting back about a table. She says, "The
price is $1,500."
Sharon Stone thinks about this and says, "What kind of wood is it
made of?"
The saleslady frowns. "What kind of wood?"
But the girl in the bed is no longer paying attention to the lady.
She's paying attention to you, gazing in your direction and speaking almost in
a whisper, albeit a stage whisper.
"I didn't mean to use the word wood while we're in here,"
she says. "Don't take it the wrong way."
The saleslady is saying, "What do you think?"
"Good wood," Sharon Stone says, not to her but to you.
"Now,
But she's having none of that. "Hard wood," she says,
snickering. "Haaaaard wood!" And then:
"God, this is good. I want a set in California King, with four king shams
and two bureau shams."
"But they won't be the same at your house because..."
"I know, buttercup. Because you won't be there."
It feels, then, exactly right to have hopped
into bed with Sharon Stone. She has called you "buttercup." What kind
of woman uses the word buttercup? She may have been the Antichrist at one time,
but she's something else again today.
"The way I was before was harder, way tougher," she says a
while later. "I was much more willing to kick somebody's ass. In fact, you
had to restrain me from kicking ass back then. Now it's not my thing. I giggle
much more now. I'm more pink and lacy. You would never have seen me in a pink
top before. I'm much more girly now. It's fun," she says. "It's fun
in a brand-new way."