I remember seeing a clip of Demi Moore on General Hospital and she already had X factor - the beauty of course, with that long flowing hair and deep dark eyes, and the acting but most of all the husky voice. That was her secret weapon. That's why when she was coming through she always seemed as though she was going to Make It- she seemed like a star. It didn't hurt she had a high profile love life (Emilio Estevez, Bruce Willis) but she had genuine charisma - more so than say Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy - and after being "promising" for most of the 80s she became a genuine box office draw in the early 90s.
Her decline as a star was surprisingly quick - she had two big noisy vehicles that underperformed, Striptease and GI Jane... both unfairly, I feel. She makes it sound like she basically decided not to act for a bit which is kind of true but not til after she'd made The Juror and The Scarlet Letter.
There is plenty here about Moore's family life which is fascinating. She was a character out of a soap opera - both parents charming rogues, her father was fond of getting in fights and charming and turned out to be not her biological father and killed himself, her mother was a charismatic beauty hopeless with men and money who constantly let down her daughter. Moore lost her virginity early, was raped as a teenager, very sexually precocious - she lived with a guy in his late twenties when she was sixteen, left him for his friend who she then married, slept with a different guy the night before her wedding. She was a California girl of the seventies I guess.
The book has lots of juicy stuff like
* doing heaps of coke making Blame It on Rio
* she got into acting because she became fascinated by her 70s neighbour Natassa Kinski (and dined with Roman Polanski who didn't try anything)
* she took Jon Cryer's virginity making No Small Affair
* only remembers a one night stand with Rob Lowe making St Elmo's Fire
* was forced to go to rehab before St Elmo's Fire
* got constantly criticised for her body by Adrian Lyne but doesn't hold it against him because him yelling out during the sex scenes was so comic and she turned out looking so good at the end
* she had to audition for most of her roles
* had threesomes with Ashton Kutcher.
Kutcher and Bruce Willis actually come out of the book very well - hard working, caring, dilligent, good father figures. Kutcher is a cheater who gets cold at the end but he's no monster and she says lots of nice things about him.
The one area of this I thought was skimpy on was making of various movies. The big ones are there like Ghost and Indecent Proposal and Charlie's Angels but nothing on The Scarlet Letter and The Juror and odd films like Mortal Thoughts, Now and Then, Wisdom, Nothing But Trouble, Deconstructing Harry. There's not even that much on Disclosure.
Still she's a fascinating character and it's extremely well written. I read this in one session.
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