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December 2006

 

“Big Momma”

By Claire Hoffman

 
Her arrival is heralded by whispers of “She’s here, she’s here — Big Momma’s here.” Sharon Stone enters in a whirlwind of still-damp blond hair and long tan legs, wearing seersucker shorts, copper sandals, and a white tank top. She walks quickly, her body tilting from the weight of the baby carrier she’s lugging toward the squad of waiting stylists and assistants, all of whom refer to her by a code name, Big Momma.

It’s a blazing hot day in the San Fernando Valley, where Stone’s sister (and preferred stylist) Kelly Stone lives in a sprawling ranch house, and where Stone is being photographed today.

“This looks like a safe spot,” she says to Quinn, her 3-month-old son — her third (and third adopted) child. She sets him down gently in the corner of the makeshift dressing room. Coos and oohs close around the baby as he looks up at the gathering of pretty women. His beaming mother turns away to talk excitedly with Kelly, who collapses cross-legged on the brown carpet.

“I swear to God you have 200 bags, wait till you see,” Stone says, referring to the trash bags outside in her car. She has filled them with donated purses, clutches, and totes, all to be auctioned off at the Hollywood Bag Ladies Lupus Luncheon. Kelly was recently diagnosed with the disease.

Mom First… Actress Third

“The for-profit work I do is almost the secondary thing now,” Stone tells me later. “Actually, my work as an actress is tertiary, because my work as a mother is first and my philanthropic work is second. So my work as an actress is third — at best. You know, those first two are what’s going to leave a mark when we’re not here.”

Her focus on humanitarian efforts might seem out of sync with her image as a world-famous sexpot, but Stone has never followed any predictable Hollywood path. After two decades in the movie business, two divorces, the kids (in addition to Quinn, there are Laird, 18 months, and Roan, 6 years), and a near-fatal hemorrhage five years ago, the turns of fate have made her strong. She’s a woman who persistently does what she wants, how she wants.

Recently that has meant taking on more complicated roles in more artistically daring films. In 2005 she drew excellent reviews for her portrayal of the wanton mother of an equally loose teenage daughter, opposite Bill Murray as her ex-boyfriend, in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers . In January, you can see her as the stepmother of a young drug addict in Nick Cassavetes’s not-for-the-fainthearted suburban drama Alpha Dog , with Justin Timberlake.

And audiences are now being captivated by her performance as Miriam, a hairdresser whose husband is sleeping with a younger woman, in Bobby , Emilio Estevez’s homage to Robert F. Kennedy. The movie (which also features Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins, and Helen Hunt) is an Altman-esque imagining of the lives of the people in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the hours before Kennedy’s assassination there. It captures a moment in American life when idealism and optimism were crushed.

Estevez says Stone agreed to go out on a limb in this role. “I had to ask, ‘Are you willing to show your warts?’ ” he says. “And she said, ‘I don’t care if I’m thin or fat, I don’t care how I look. I love the script. I love the message.”

That willingness, Estevez says, allowed her to craft her role without any of the steeliness that became her signature after Basic Instinct made her a global sensation. “It’s a testament to her that she continues to reinvent herself,” Estevez says, “and she did that in this movie. She’s so vulnerable in the film. She’s like a broken-winged bird.”

Stone’s Survival Instinct

It’s been 14 years since Stone gave her erotically charged performance as the psychopathic novelist Catherine Trammel in Basic Instinct . Years, too, since she famously quipped, “You can only sleep your way to the middle; you have to claw your way to the top.”

Her infamous claws have retracted a bit; those around her say that she has mellowed, become more patient. She says that being a huge movie star for more than a decade has been an incredible ride. “We had fun. We stayed at the best hotels. Ate at the best restaurants. We had the ass-kissing du jour. I frankly — I have no regrets,” she says, laughing off the idea that she’s happier now than she was 10 years ago.

Time has transformed her, though. She says she’s become thinner in recent years, losing her round bottom and some softness in her face. But she’s all for change, matching her body’s evolution to her longtime interest in fashion.

“You grow. You don’t want to stay the same,” she says. “The thing that was great for you before isn’t going to be great for you now. A woman should have many faces through her life not just one face, not just one hairdo, not just one way. You want to keep rediscovering what’s fun for you.”

For Stone, this year discovering what’s fun has meant, among other things, wearing purple and blue toenail polish. That would have horrified her back when she was trying to emulate the old-movie star glamour of Hitchcock blondes such as Grace Kelly.

“That’s not what is good for me now,” she explains. “I don’t look like that anymore. My body chemistry has changed, and how I feel comfortable has changed.”

I interject that her face is looking pretty good — and I am certainly not alone in this appraisal: Last spring, she became the new face of Dior, promoting its Capture Totale antiaging skincare line. But Stone shrugs off my compliment, insisting that she sees a difference each morning.

“My face has changed radically,” she says. “And that’s okay. I think you have to understand how you look now and not try to be the same as you looked 10 years ago. And how you look and how you age are different for everyone. Magazines that say “You wear this in your twenties” and “You wear this in your thirties” and “You wear this in your forties” are asinine. Because, does every 40-year-old look good in a bob? Should every 40-year-old wear the tasteful lady suit?”

But if not the lady suit, then what? Apparently, that’s a complicated question. After arriving for the photo shoot, Stone spends a few hours with her sister and several assistants intently examining each item as Kelly presents it to her. The rooms and hallways are crammed with racks of gowns, bustiers and cardigans, and the floor is littered with stilettos and ankle boots in every color of the rainbow.

“Oh my god, where did that come from?” Stone murmurs as she picks up a kimono-like jacket and slips it on over her shoulders. “That’s fabulous,” she says, pointing to the next thing down the rack. “This is gorge,” she says of another.

Kelly teases her sister, telling her not to do her job, though Stone has a capable quality that makes you think she might be better than you at everything. Kelly praises her older sister’s fashion sense, something she admired when she was in high school and Stone would return home from modeling in New York City, full of style advice — and once with 17 boxes of clothing for Kelly. “She threw them on the bed, and she had had every gift wrapped,” Kelly remembers, adding, “I am proud of her fashion eye, but that’s the least of what she has to offer.”

Highs and Lows

Once the sisters have selected the clothing for the shoot, Stone settles into a small bedroom with her hairstylist, makeup artist, and publicist. These women have been working with her for years, and her attitude with them is less movie star and more executive, confidently doling out ideas and instructions. She plops in a chair in front of a mirror, taking Quinn from his nanny and feeding him his bottle as she talks about her emotional connection to Bobby , which led her to take the role of Miriam long before the large constellation of other stars signed on.

As her hairstylist weaves in extensions and she rocks Quinn, Stone recalls the day in 1963 when the announcement came over the school speaker in her hometown of Meadville, Pennsylvania, that John F. Kennedy had been killed. Her teacher crumpled over her desk and began to sob. Stone, who was only 5 at the time, gasps a little, her voice breaking. She and her classmates were ushered to buses waiting outside the school. At home, she found her mother, a housewife, and her father, a factory worker, waiting with a fire burning in the fireplace. The tight-knit family — her parents have been together since they were teenagers — sat down on the floor and cried together.

Stone is the second of four children, and she excelled in school, graduating from high school early, alongside her mother, who had worked nights to earn the diploma she had never gotten as a young parent. Stone won a scholarship to Edinboro State University, in Pennsylvania, where she planned to major in creative writing.

But when a local beauty contest judge suggested that she start modeling, she dropped out of college, moved in with an aunt in New Jersey, and went to work as a Ford model in New York City. Soon she got the acting bug, and in 1980, she floated through Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories briefly but so impressively that other roles followed. Her breakthrough part came a whole decade later, in 1990, playing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife in Total Recall , directed by Paul Verhoeven. Known for his high-gloss, high-relief dramas, the Dutch director then cast Stone in his next film, Basic Instinct .

In 1998, the year she turned 40, an era of peace and domesticity seemed to begin for Stone. She married Philip Bronstein, then editor of the San Francisco Examiner , and in 2000 she and Bronstein adopted her son Roan. But something else happened in 1998: Stone’s career was sidelined. She believes this was at least partly because she breezily admitted her age. “I thought it was great and European, how women are so sexy when they’re 40,” she says. But she sees now that she misread Hollywood.

“I thought I should play parts of a 40-year-old, not parts of a wannabe 35-year-old. But people just went, ‘Oh, she has leprosy.’ I didn’t know 40 meant leprosy,” she says, laughing at the notion. “But nobody wanted to give me a job. It was an intense time.”

In 2001, Stone experienced near-fatal bleeding near her brain. Three years later, she and Bronstein, citing irreconcilable differences and agreeing not to file for spousal support, divorced. So it was after her recovery from the hemorrhage, and after she had settled into the life of a single mother, and after the anti-40 tide had turned in Hollywood (helped along by Desperate Housewives and HBO ) that Stone started back to work with a strategy of taking small roles — with the exception of this year’s much anticipated Basic Instinct 2 . That sequel, which starts with her character masturbating while driving a sports car and ends with her driving a man mad, failed both at the American box office and with critics, but the big marketing campaign for it reminded the world of Stone’s glamour.

Stone as Philanthropist

In recent years, Stone has emerged as an important philanthropist (winner of the Harvard Foundation’s Humanitarian Award, among other honors). Between film projects and parenting, she has spent much of her time raising money for Kelly’s and her charity for needy children, Planet Hope, as well as serving as chairman of amfAR’s Campaign for AIDS Research.

In 2005, at the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Stone made headlines by raising more than a million dollars in 30 minutes to buy antimosquito bed nets to fight malaria. She hadn’t planned the show-stopping activism, but she says she just couldn’t help it when Benjamin Mkapa, then president of Tanzania, pleaded with the highbrow audience to help children who were dying because of the lack of nets. Stone stood up in the audience, offered President Mkapa $11,000 and then remained standing while urging people around her to also help.

“Wouldn’t you want to give that man all the money in your purse?” Stone asks me. “Those guys paid $35,000 to go to Switzerland for four days. Someone had to stand up and say, ‘Just give up what you spend on a fucking golf game. And, you know, your wife doesn’t need the pin at Christmas. I promise you she’ll live without it.’ I have a very luxurious life too. But you know what? Let’s not leave children dying — you can have my new car.”

Stone has been creative about raising money for AIDS research through amfAR. She designed a Louis Vuitton travel case one year and Fendi luggage in another, and she coauthored Something to Hold , an art book about guardian angels, with her photographer friend Mimi Craven — all sales go to benefit amfAR. And at this past May’s amfAR benefit auction in Cannes, she raised more than $4 million in short order as the auctioneer. She’ll exploit the desire she still elicits, if she has to: She has been known to fasten jewelry to her decolletage in order to up the bidding. To Stone, problems that bedevil others seem simple and their solutions obvious — as long as people get moving and do something.

She moves conversationally from sick Tanzanian children to the world’s shrinking fuel supply to global warming to the war in the Middle East. Even as she hops up from her chair, her face transformed from radiant mother to glittering star, she continues to think aloud about world problems and their root causes.

“Can’t people show up for one another?” she says, as she hands Quinn off to his nanny and examines herself in the mirror — her hair thick and tousled, her face picture perfect. Just a few weeks after our interview, she will become the spokesmodel for American design duo Badgley Mischka because, they say, their “collection represents Hollywood glamour with a modern twist, and Sharon epitomizes that.”

And as she heads down the hallway to her photo shoot, talking heatedly about world problems and human kindness, she exhibits just that: glamour and its modern, compassionate twist.

“Showing up for one another is a big thing in life, much bigger than being fancy,” she says. “I don’t care how fancy that person looks or how nice their home is, they still need milk and bagels every three days. And if you say to your fancy neighbor, “‘I’m going out for milk. Do you need some?’ believe me, that person’s going to feel cared for. In a whole new way.”