In an exclusive excerpt from her memoir, Stone writes about predatory directors, being a “difficult” woman in Hollywood, and her most iconic role: “It’s about more than just a peek up my skirt, people.”
When I first came to Hollywood, I was still striking out a lot. Almost getting cast and then not. I knew this fellow who we all thought was a funny guy, a smart guy—interesting but really, really cheap. We used to tease him about how cheap he was. One day he said to me, “Sharon, you get so close on every project you go up on, but you always come in second. You really need a great acting teacher. I know this man who is so amazing that if he doesn’t completely change your life, not just your acting, your life, I will pay for all of your lessons.”
Well, we all thought this was hilarious, this friend being so cheap, of course. So I said I would go to his guy.
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And that guy changed my life.
That guy, Roy London, ended up teaching a lot of us. Not just me: Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr. and Forest Whitaker and Geena Davis and Garry Shandling, and oh, the list goes on. That amazing, lovely man was such a special, dear teacher in the truest sense of the word. He passed away way more than 25 years ago now, and it amazes me still how I continue to learn from him. I can be standing in a driveway waiting for someone and suddenly be struck with a deeper understanding of something from a class years ago. Good teachers are like that. They are few and far between. I am and will be eternally grateful that Roy was in my life.
Stone poses for a portrait in Los Angeles in 1988, just a few years before her break out role as Catherine Tramell.By Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images.
The lesson that sticks with me the most was from the last class I took.
Roy had called me up and said, “You have graduated—you don’t have to come back.”
I panicked. “But I’m not done—I haven’t gotten it.”
He said, “You have played every woman’s part. There is nothing left to do.”
So I said, “Then I need to come back and play the men’s parts.”
He reluctantly agreed.
I came back and we started. Actually, he first had me do an Oscar Wilde piece for two women; he was still unsure that I hadn’t simply lost my mind and that I might not with some convincing go away. When it was clear I was there to stay, he assigned me David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. I came back with a ferocious determination. His notes to me after the first performance were to go home and not work on it for a week. For me, a near impossibility.
I did as I was told. Although I cried a lot that week.
I came back and, with great insouciance, did the scene. I ripped it up. The class stood still. I had found my place. Roy was simply stunned. I will never forget the look on his face as he slowly turned to the class, and then to me, and said, “Well, what have we learned?”
And I said, “That I am enough.”
He said, “You have graduated, class dismissed.”
Sometimes it is the part of us that is not like others that makes us special, that is our talent. I would go so far as to say that sometimes it is the antisocial piece, the part that makes it hard to be the hit of the party, that makes us wonderful. It was very hard for me to get to that part and make it my own.
Chuck, my manager at the time, had told me that no one would hire me because everyone said I wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t, as they liked to say in Hollywood at the time, “fuckable.”
I was still so shy and introverted. But Roy kept badgering me. Roy would ask me, “If you keep leaving your sexuality at the door, how do you expect to play anyone at all?”
Six weeks later I was cast in Basic Instinct.
That makes it sound easier than it was. It was not easy. Chuck had to break into the casting director’s office with his credit card and steal the script so we could read it, as no one would give it to us. I knew right away that I wanted to play that part. Chuck then called the director, Paul Verhoeven, every day for seven or eight months to get me a screen test. I had already done Total Recall with Paul, but Michael Douglas didn’t want to test with me. Hey, I was a nobody compared to him, and this was such a risky movie. So Paul tested with me, and kept playing my test after those of everyone else who had tested.
Eventually, after they had offered the part to 12 other actresses who had turned it down, Michael agreed to test with me.
The test is online. You can watch it if you want.
Michael and I are friends now. He taught me so much. He has been such a profoundly important human rights activist, and I admire him so much. He isn’t afraid to play the villain; he’ll say, “It’s the best part—you can do whatever you want,” and then he laughs that fabulous laugh, which tells you that he knows exactly where the line is.
I did a movie in Italy a while ago. The director told me to do something, and I said, “Women don’t act like this anymore.”
He said, “Why?” and I said, “We respect ourselves.”
His only response was, “Next time get a mother who loves you.”
I wasn’t shocked. At the time, I was convinced that my mother didn’t love me. How could she? Who in God’s name had taken care of her? Who had taught her how a parent should love? However, I was a woman, a grown woman. A woman who, through arduous undertakings, had learned what life had done to my mother. And he? He was a man from the generation that had done it. Like Michael, I knew where the line was, and he was over it.
I stopped working for him that day. Oh, I stayed, I finished the picture. But I made sure I gave every thought to its complete disaster. Why? You can’t shame me. And you will not, should not, even consider shaming my mother.
Oh, not that the universe hasn’t given pause to this concept. I mean, girl. After we shot Basic Instinct, I got called in to see it. Not on my own with the director, as one would anticipate, given the situation that has given us all pause, so to speak, but with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project. That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told, “We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on.” Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullshit.
Now, here is the issue. It didn’t matter anymore. It was me and my parts up there. I had decisions to make. I went to the projection booth, slapped Paul across the face, left, went to my car, and called my lawyer, Marty Singer. Marty told me that they could not release this film as it was. That I could get an injunction. First, at that time, this would give the film an X rating. Remember, this was 1992, not now, when we see erect penises on Netflix. And, Marty said, per the Screen Actors Guild, my union, it wasn’t legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion. Whew, I thought.
Well, that was my first thought. Then I thought some more. What if I were the director? What if I had gotten that shot? What if I had gotten it on purpose? Or by accident? What if it just existed? That was a lot to think about. I knew what film I was doing. For heaven’s sake, I fought for that part, and all that time, only this director had stood up for me. I had to find some way to become objective.
Chuck had to break into the casting director’s office with his credit card and steal the script so we could read it, as no one would give it to us.
I had spent so long coming to the project that I had fully examined the character and the dangerousness of the part. I came to work ready to play Catherine Tramell. Now I was being challenged again.
I can say that the role was by far the most stretching that I had ever done in terms of considering the dark side of myself.
It was terrifying. I had walked in my sleep three times during production, twice waking fully dressed in my car in my garage. I had hideous nightmares.
During the shooting of the opening stabbing sequence of the film, at one point we cut and the actor did not respond. He just lay there, unconscious. I began to panic; I thought that the retractable fake ice pick had failed to retract and that I had in fact killed him. The fury of the sequence coupled with the director screaming, “Hit him, harder, harder!” and, “More blood, more blood!” as the guy under the bed pumped more fake blood through the prosthetic chest, had already made me weak. I got up, woozy, sure I would pass out.
It seemed I had hit the actor so many times in the chest that he had passed out. I was horrified, naked, and stained with fake blood. And now this. It seemed like there was no line I wouldn’t be asked to skate up to the very edge of to make this film.
After the screening, I let Paul know of the options Marty had laid out for me. Of course, he vehemently denied that I had any choices at all. I was just an actress, just a woman; what choices could I have?
Because my family was dealing with Uncle Beaner’s death and couldn’t come to the premiere, Faye Dunaway took me. She knew just what to do. The film had so much crazy hype that the premiere was on the lot, not at a big theater: They just could not control the crowds. We were in a big screening room; when the film ended, there was absolute silence. Faye grabbed my arm and whispered, “Don’t move,” and I didn’t. Neither did Michael, in the seat in front of me. He looked left and right, at the producers and at Paul. Finally, after what seemed like forever, the crowd began to scream and cheer. “What now?” I said to Faye, to which she replied, “Now you are a big star and they can all kiss your ass.”
Basic Instinct was my 18th movie. For years, I had been getting pummeled doing a bunch of crap movies and so-so television, back in the day when TV wasn’t king. I was 32 years old when I got that job. I told my agent that if they got me in that door, I would get the job. I knew this was the last chance—I was aging out of the business I hadn’t really gotten into yet. I needed a break.
It wasn’t until we took the movie to Cannes that Michael found out I had already done all those other shit movies. He stood up and made a beautiful toast to me. That moment was so amazing; I was wearing my beach cover-up as an evening gown; people had broken into my room to steal Sharon Stone’s belongings. I was a star and one with no money to buy new clothes. Welcome to Hollywood, honey bun. I went upstairs at this hotel/restaurant and had the dry heaves in the toilet. My friend Shep put my feet in a bathtub of cold water and told me the new rules of what it meant to be famous and gave me a Valium.
After I was told that I got the part for Basic Instinct, I was asked to come in to meet with Paul Verhoeven, as well as some other people from the production company. I was so nervous and excited I could hardly hear.
I met with Paul in the company’s offices in Hollywood, then said hello to a few other people on the way down to fill out some paperwork and meet the line producer, an older, kind of dodgy man, in his messy office. He closed the door and sat down and said, “You were not our first choice, Karen. No, you were not even the second or the third. You were the thirteenth choice for this film.”
He continued to call me Karen all through the making and postproduction of the movie.
I left that meeting so messed up that I got into my car in the parking lot, put on my rap music super loud, and backed into a semi three feet behind me.
When I went to the Oscars for the very first time after making that film, I sat next to this same line producer at the Governors Ball dinner, which happens right after the ceremony. He did not call me Karen.
I had to find a certain coping mechanism to play that part, with all kinds of resistance around myself and around the film happening simultaneously. The ways that I had learned to disappear inside myself made it possible to disappear inside this character, who was as tough and smooth as the white silk scarf she wore.
When I saw the film, I not only saw that I could make myself beautiful in this way—with the top talents in Hollywood highlighting all of my best parts and hiding my flaws—I could quite convincingly cover my vulnerabilities by removing the tender, fragile self at my exterior.
It wasn’t that I vowed to be this character from now on, but I would be less weak on the outside, less available to be eaten alive. You see, I was still making decisions based on the experiences and scars of an eight-year-old, and those deep cuts and broken bonds of security that I had not yet actively learned to replace. I was still faking it till I made it. I was sort of good at it. But for the first time, I was asking to learn how to know something new. I was asking for the world to change. I was asking for permission to say why.
I was asking to be seen, and respected. I was asking to be known.
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When I played a serial killer in Basic Instinct I tapped into that rage. It was terrifying to look into the shadow self and to release it onto film for the world to see. To allow people to believe that I was “like that.” Even more, to let myself know that I have or had darkness within. I can say that it was and is the most freeing thing I have ever done.
Ultimately, it also let me know that I wasn’t really the stabbing type. Letting myself process that rage was magnificent, and I think letting others feel that release was a bit therapeutic for the audience. I know it’s not just me.
The day Basic Instinct came out in theaters I hired a limo. Mimi and I started in Harlem and went to movie theaters all over NYC, from one side of town to the other, into the wee hours of the morning. We had bought two bowler derbies and wore our hair up inside, and both of us wore our glasses. We watched about 20 minutes at each theater.
Harlem was my favorite. People were yelling and screaming at the screen. Cheering my character on. We were having a ball, seeing the reactions all over town. We stopped in the Upper East and West sides, Hell’s Kitchen, all the way into the Bowery. We were running in and out of theaters at various points during the film and fleeing like thieves into the day and night. And the audiences went wild, they loved this movie! It was one of the best times.
The next morning while we had a glorious, celebratory breakfast, the horrible reviews came out.
What is a critic? Someone who sees movies for free and then tells you what they think.
What is an audience? Someone who tells you how a movie makes them feel.
Do you have any idea how many people have watched Basic Instinct in the last 20-something years? Think about it. It’s about more than just a peek up my skirt, people. Wake up. Women championed that movie; men were obsessed with a woman who could make it stop. She was their favorite. But now, only now, do I go to events and there is a certain respect about that film. Oh, that film is coooooool. But when I went to the Golden Globes as a nominee in 1993 and they called my name as a glamorous finalist, everyone laughed. Well, not everyone, but enough of the room so that I was told where I sat.
Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullshit.
I think that I am not alone in processing some pent-up female rage. It’s unnerving to know that for me, this rage was so controlled, I think because I was forced to control it for so long, to keep it hidden as though it were my shame. This was the nature of abuse in my era. Everything carried the heavy weight of threat. Not only to me but to those I loved or was supposed to love or whateverthefuck was going on there.
As we are learning, abuse comes in all kinds of ways and our reactions come in all ways. Generation after generation we will still be learning just how to talk about and deal with abuse without being abusive in our very discussions, sensationalistic in our interest, cruel with our concern.
I recently had a talk with my European bodyguard, Bruno. We have traveled the globe together for more than 30 years. He was laughing, saying that when we started, his job was much more difficult since I was much more difficult. Of course, it was also at the height of my fame, which was a scene. But he said that the change in me from my Buddhist practices was so big that I had become, in his words, “so beautiful on the inside” and “so easy to be with,” and so his job was easy now. I must have been a hellion. In fact, I am sure of it. I used to love to mix it up.
Peace of mind is a rush, though, I must say. Bigger than the other thing—and a lot less trouble. Though I can look back and laugh. Oh, I used to cause some trouble. I used to love to piss people off. Just to watch. It was so easy to wind people up. I think that I liked to have control of people’s minds and it was so easy to get them off their rockers. I wasn’t the person who was at home later, thinking, Gee, I wish I’d said that, I was the person who went home thinking, Gee, I wonder if I really should have left them in pieces on the floor.
It is okay to change.
So, the acting thing: I do still like it. Actually, I like it more than before. I feel much more comfortable in it, and it’s a whole lot easier to do. I feel less pressure when I do it now, as it is not my entire world. I have also had more profound life experiences to bring to it. When the workday is over, good or bad—and it’s mostly always good—I go home to a house full of love, so no big deal.
I am proud of my success in my work. It belongs to me, I earned it. I kept getting up to bat, just like my dad said. Not every movie or TV job I’ve done has been a winner. Some of them seem like I’m a pie girl again: just shoveling the crap out of the can into the premade crust. However, work is work. I go into each project wanting to do my best, be my best, hoping for the best outcome. Hoping to be promoted. I get myself a little gift each time. A sweater for this job, a new kitchen for that job, the kids’ tuition for this one, in rougher times. Each one is sweet, even if it didn’t work out as a box-office hit or even if the thing as a whole failed.
Even with the worst directors, like the one who wouldn’t direct me because I refused to sit in his lap to take direction. This #MeToo candidate called me in to work every day for weeks, when Laird was a brand-new baby, and had me go through the works—hair, makeup, and wardrobe—and then wouldn’t shoot with me because I refused to sit in his lap and take direction. Yes, this was a multimillion-dollar studio film, of which I was the star, and the studio didn’t say or do anything. I just kept coming to work and spending the day constantly getting retouched in my trailer and being with my baby.
Of course the film was a bomb. The level of insecurity and unprofessionalism, and I would guess drug abuse, required to make those kinds of choices never leads to good work. But as a superstar, which at that point I was, and a woman, I had no say. That was how it was in my day. Even a high, abusive director had more power than I did.
Thank God it is not that way now. The whole system is changing. The financial burden is real, and the old boys’ club isn’t covering for this anymore. There are more women at the helm, and they aren’t in the pocket of the men, forced to play along or be canned.
Not to say there weren’t great men in my day too. Men who would come in and shut the show down when things were going wrong, men who would talk to me. Those men helped us make great pictures. Those men helped us make great pictures like Casino. Those men shut down a show I was on when the director was so high on cocaine he was spinning. Now that same director has sobered up and gone on to do fabulous and important work. Not with me, of course, as I aided in the shutdown.
I don’t regret my choices. Being an actress used to be everything to me. Really, just everything. I used to eat, sleep, breathe, run, play, and work at nothing but acting. I loved everything about it. The pages of words, the look in the other actors’ eyes, the lost places in the scenes, the scents of the soundstages and locations. The feeling of pulling up to a new location, like running away with the circus. I was putty in the hands of a great director, thrilling to his every thought, and angry to be held hostage by the mediocre ones.
“What now?” I said to Faye Dunaway, to which she replied, “Now you are a big star and they can all kiss your ass.”
I loved working for the studios, feeling the tradition of the ones who went before me: Bogie and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. I wanted to be great like they were. I wanted to be a superpro. I wanted every movie to be a hit; I worked my ass off to sell my movies all over the world to make sure they were. I was proud to do it, happy to be a studio girl.
I stood up for gay actors and actresses. I told the studio when their people were not available to work because they were too high to talk or too drunk to drive. I was on the side of the studio, and I loved my job. That didn’t work out great for me either. It’s not a popular position to be in: certainly not then, certainly not as a woman. It would be fair to say I fucked myself.
Now, I suppose in retrospect, I might seem dependable. I was the one who always sold my films, good or not so good. Showed up to work on time, did my job. But then, in the good ol’ days, with the good ol’ no-rules, women as superstars were not a darling of the system. They preferred us to be ornaments. I was supposed to do what I was told.
I had actor approval in my contract. No one cared. They cast who they wanted. To my dismay, sometimes. To the detriment of the picture, sometimes. I had a producer bring me to his office, where he had malted milk balls in a little milk-carton-type container under his arm with the spout open. He walked back and forth in his office with the balls falling out of the spout and rolling all over the wood floor as he explained to me why I should fuck my costar so that we could have onscreen chemistry. Why, in his day, he made love to Ava Gardner onscreen and it was so sensational! Now just the creepy thought of him in the same room with Ava Gardner gave me pause. Then I realized that she also had to put up with him and pretend that he was in any way interesting.
I watched the chocolate balls rolling around, thinking, You guys insisted on this actor when he couldn’t get one whole scene out in the test.… Now you think if I fuck him, he will become a fine actor? Nobody’s that good in bed. I felt they could have just hired a costar with talent, someone who could deliver a scene and remember his lines. I also felt they could fuck him themselves and leave me out of it. It was my job to act and I said so.
This was not a popular response. I was considered difficult.
Naturally I didn’t you-know-what my costar; he was baffled enough without me confusing him some more. But he did make a few haphazard passes at me in the upcoming weeks, I’m sure spurred on by this genius.
I’ve had other producers on other films just come to my trailer and ask, “So, are you going to fuck him, or aren’t you? … You know it would go better if you did.” I take my time and explain that I am like the nice girl they grew up with, and get them to recall that girl’s name. This leaves us all with a little bit of our dignity.
Sex, not just sexuality onscreen, has long been expected in my business. I do not in any way think that this is about my business, particularly. I have seen my mother in a rage because some man pushed her up against the filing cabinets at my dad’s factory. I have heard her in the kitchen, saying, “I told that bastard to back the fuck up before I stick him in the neck.” Then we all laugh at her and with her. But I know how scared she felt.
My father used to call me back from playtime in our giant yard, take me aside, and, putting his hand on my shoulder, say, “You are letting those boys beat you so that they will like you. Now, go out there and win, and they will respect you.”
For my generation of women, this could be seen as good-naturedly spilling the milk shake I was serving onto the lap of the asshole who put his hand up my skirt as I worked my way through college in blue-collar Pennsylvania.
Roy London suggested I approach my male bosses with my “feelings,” so as not to be threatening. He said they would be less threatened if I had “feelings” instead of opinions. I tried that. Tried so long to keep working without compromising myself.
People used to say, “Sharon Stone has the biggest balls in Hollywood.” It’s not a coincidence that I was the first woman to get paid something considered respectable—still a whole lot less than men, but more than women had been paid in the past.
People criticize me and say that men are intimidated by me. That just makes me want to cry.
I was often alone on a set with hundreds of men. Hundreds of men and me. Often not even the caterer employed women when I was first working. My makeup and hair were men. Can you imagine what it was like to be the only woman on a set—to be the only naked woman, with maybe one or two other women standing near? The costumer and the script gal? And now I am the intimidating one.
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This new press circus, with the humble letting go of the accused with a tidy yet massive settlement, is not due process for what are in fact crimes, crimes for which we have not discovered practical jurisprudence. Why must we “stand together and stay strong”? Where is the law? Did we let our pussy-grabbing president take that with him too? I personally do not believe that we did. I believe that there is a great and good court of law for this that must be revised, reviewed, revamped, reclaimed, and reconsidered to respect the sexuality of the public as a whole.