Page 178 - Marie Claire Australia (January 2020)

t was 1977 and 15-year-old
Demi Moore was settling into
her family’s new apartment
in LA when her neighbour,
a young German actress
called Nastassja Kinski,
I asked for her help practising
lines for an audition. Moore obliged
– and it quickly became apparent that
she’d found her calling. “She got so
excited talking about acting that I just
thought, ‘Well, that’s what she was
going to do,’” said Kinski.
Yet even she couldn’t have
predicted what a success her neighbour
would become. By 34, Moore was the
highest-paid actress in the world,
earning more than US $12 million
for one role and starring in a slew of
box-office hits including Ghost, Indecent
Proposal and A Few Good Men.
But behind the scenes there was
tragedy and turmoil, which Moore
recounts in her newly released and
much-anticipated memoir, Inside
Out (HarperCollins). Described as
“wrenchingly honest”, it details her
addictions, divorces, and how she
suffered impostor syndrome at the
height of her career. “No matter
what successes I had, I just never
felt good enough,” she has said.
oore was born
Demetria Gene Guynes
on November 11, 1962,
in Roswell, New Mexico.
MHer father was airman
Charles Harmon, who divorced her
mother, Virginia, after only two
months of marriage, and without
knowing she was pregnant with
Moore. Virginia quickly remarried
newspaper advertising salesman Dan
Guynes, but it wasn’t until Moore was
13 that she discovered he wasn’t her
biological father, something she later
described as a “tremendous betrayal”.
It was a difficult and unsettled
childhood: both parents were
alcoholics and they moved to a new
town every six months. Moore was also
bullied because she had strabismus, a
condition that meant her eyes didn’t
align, and needed two operations to
correct it. Her mum and stepdad
divorced when she was 15.
Around that time, a man in his
40s or 50s started showing up at
Moore’s school. One day she came
home to find him in her family’s
apartment, where, as she wrote in her
memoir, he raped her. “For decades, I
didn’t even think of it as rape,” Moore
recalled. “I thought of it as something
I caused, something I felt obligated to
do because this man expected it from
me – I had let him expect it from me.”
Shortly after the alleged incident,
Moore’s mum Virginia had the man
help them move house. At one point
the man turned to Moore and said,
“How does it feel to be whored by
your mother for $500?”
Asked by Diane Sawyer in a 2019
TV interview if she believes her mother
“sold” her, Moore answered, “I think,
deep in my heart, no. I don’t think it
was a straightforward transaction.
But she still did give him the access.
And put me in harm’s way.”
In 1980, Moore’s stepdad Guynes
committed suicide and her mother’s
drinking worsened to the point where
Moore felt she had no choice but to
leave home. After a glamour modelling
stint and acting in bit parts, she landed
a recurring role in the TV drama
General Hospital in 1982. Two years
later, Moore, then 22, got her big break
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT
Moore in 1985; filming
Ghost with Patrick
Swayze in 1990; Moore’s
naked, pregnant Vanity
Fair cover from August
1991 is still iconic today.
when she was cast as Michael Caine’s
daughter in the rom-com Blame It
on Rio. Although it attracted risible
reviews, Caine was impressed with her.
“She was [a] very skilled actress [and]
I thought she would be a star one day,
and how right I was,” he said.
Yet she almost never made it. By the
time Moore was cast in St. Elmo’s Fire
a year later, she was taking drugs and
drinking heavily. She even turned up
intoxicated for a costume fitting,
forcing director Joel Schumacher
to issue an ultimatum: sober up or
be fired. To everyone’s surprise, Moore
gave up drugs and alcohol on the spot.
St. Elmo’s Fire made household
names out of its young stars, such as
Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Andrew
McCarthy, and they collectively became
known as the “Brat Pack”. There was
much excitement in the press when
it emerged that Moore and Estevez
were dating. It was her second serious
relationship after a failed marriage
to musician Freddy Moore when she
was 17. Estevez proposed and they
set a wedding date for December 6,
1986, but Moore called it off after the
invitations were sent out. “Ending it
was not saying, ‘You’re a real asshole,
that’s why I’m leaving.’ It was,
‘Wow, I really love you so much,
but it’s not right, is it?’” she said.
She wasn’t single for long, though.