ON SECOND THOUGHT
“Ghost Got Horrible Reviews”: Demi Moore Remembers the ’90s
In 1996, Demi Moore made headlines when she became the highest-paid actress in history, for Striptease. Around that time, she appeared on the cover of this magazine, where the A-lister was met with a proper grilling from Hal Rubenstein, who challenged her on public perceptions, personal insecurities, and those two iconic Vanity Fair covers. Here, she revisits that conversation with the same courage of her convictions as she did back then.
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DEMI MOORE: I think I answered that really well. That still holds for me. What I was really saying is that it just so happened to be me, but the more important point is that it happened. It was a game changer for women to basically be paid on par, but it was reduced to the idea that because I was playing a stripper, it had less value.
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MOORE: When Vanity Fair wanted to do the cover with me, I was already seven-and-a-half months pregnant. Obviously, we did some images clothed, but at the end of the shoot, we did other ones of me nude. I remember saying to Annie [Leibovitz], “Wouldn’t it be amazing if they used this for the cover?” Then two weeks later, Annie calls me to say, “Hey, I’m sending you the image. How would you feel about letting them use this for the cover? Or we could do the one of your hand covering your breast.” It’s not that I was entirely naive, but I never imagined it would have the impact that it did, because I was just reflecting how I felt—that women had not had an opportunity to express themselves while pregnant.
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MOORE: I’m my own worst critic. I’m harder on myself than I would ever be on anyone else and definitely still have moments of not feeling good enough, but I remember somebody saying to me, “You will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you put down the measuring stick.”
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MOORE: I’m not automatically thought of as a comedic actress, but I feel like I’ve had more of a taste since then. But I think, because I’m much more eccentric and goofy and nerdy than what people might imagine, that there are some places to go that would still be really fun.
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MOORE: What I can look at in hindsight is how I felt about myself, that I was not just small in stature, but in my own drive or my own feelings of not being enough. Energetically, I came out of a situation in my early years where I looked at everything as life or death. That had an intensity that was my driving force, and it wasn’t so much about trying to dominate anybody else. It was just about trying not to have my whole life fall apart, because my whole life as a kid always felt like it was falling apart.
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MOORE: For me, the movie was about a mother trying to survive and take care of her child, and it just so happened that stripping was a means to an end. Because I did two films back-to-back, Striptease and then G.I. Jane, and at the same time, there was all of this press about me becoming the highest-paid actress. I think that one film, in a sense, was seen as betraying women, and one was seen as betraying men. At that point, they just weren’t ready to let that win. I just happened to be the symbol holding it at the moment.
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MOORE: Wow, that was very well stated from my perspective. Unless it’s something that you want to be out in the world with, it really isn’t anybody’s business, but I do think in our current time that if we have a strong belief, then we can’t be on the sidelines. We’ve got a lot at stake for some of those things I pointed out, like women’s reproductive rights. And our current times make those times seem like kindergarten.
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MOORE: Let me clarify. Everything in life is neutral. It only holds value by what we as individuals choose to give to it. But I want to say one thing: Ghost got horrible reviews. I remember seeing the movie and thinking it was great, and then the first reviews were awful. I was so out of my body, because all of a sudden, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can trust myself because I thought it was good? At that moment, I decided to not read reviews, because you have to give equal value to the good and the bad.
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MOORE: I mean, I think that I found greater acceptance of myself, but I literally still feel exactly the same.
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MOORE: That is still true today. It was terrifying for me to do that role, to have to be on a stage, to be portraying someone who was a stripper and removing my clothes. It empowered me in a way that was less about those I was dancing for, and more about how I experienced myself.
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MOORE: And isn’t that the truth?