Inside Out(43)

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it happened. We got a call from our lawyer within days of our decision, saying he’d learned that the tabloids had—somehow—been tipped off, and they would be running a story about our breakup the very next day. It felt awful, as it always does when you learn that someone you trust (Because who else would know? We had hardly told a soul!) is quite literally selling you out. Usually, whatever the story is that the tabloids have gotten ahold of is a little bit right and a lot wrong, but that little bit that’s true is just enough to make you feel totally exposed, especially when they claim that their source is “someone close to you.” That “someone” could be as removed as a guy who overheard someone you know talking at a restaurant, or it could be a person you think is a dear friend who is getting paid to reveal your secrets. It makes you question the loyalty of everyone around you and leaves you with a terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach. Anyway, I had a pit in my stomach, a dying mom, and a marriage that was ending when we got that call from our lawyer. We didn’t want to give the tabloids the satisfaction of breaking the story, so we announced our split that day ourselves. (Gratifyingly, our preemptive strike did achieve the desired effect. “The couple confirmed the breakup late Wednesday in a brief press release that was disappointingly [for Enquiring minds] bereft of details,” a journalist wrote at the time on E! News. “The hand-out said Bruce and Demi were ‘ending’ their union. And that was about it.”)

We would have preferred to have had more time to deal with our own feelings and to sit down with our children to tell them in the most loving, supportive way possible what was going to happen. Instead, we were rushed and upset. You want to be able to work through a situation like this (or, really, any situation) from the inside out, not the outside in, but we didn’t get that chance. We made what we thought was the best decision for all of us, and luckily the children were so young when we told them about our separation that they couldn’t really comprehend what it meant. It was hardest for Rumer, of course, who was ten and had the clearest sense of what was about to change—of what we were all losing.





Chapter 17


Recently, I did an on-camera interview with a young man who was a total film buff, and he told me how much he loved G.I. Jane, how he’d watched it recently and felt it really held up. Then he said, “They were so rough on you in the press back then—and it was a great film! What was that about?” I told him, “You have no idea how nice it is to hear that you could see that was going on.” G.I. Jane never got its due, in my opinion—quite the contrary. Between its savage reception, and Bruce and me splitting up, and my mom dying, I was totally wrung out by the end of 1998.

Unfortunately, I had already contracted to do a movie in France called Passion of Mind well before Bruce and I made our announcement, and before I knew my mother was dying. I was miserable in Paris. I’d taken the girls along and put them in school there for the four months we needed to be in France, but to get to the movie location on time, I had to leave our rented house at five thirty a.m., before they were awake. By the time I returned, they’d always gone to bed. There was almost no point in their being with me. This was no way for us to live at a moment when there was this huge change taking place in our family, the biggest upheaval so far in my children’s lives. They needed more of me than this, and, frankly, I needed more of them. I made a decision: no more movies; no more running around. I wanted to be at home in Hailey with my girls. If I couldn’t give them a mother and father who were married, I wanted them at least to have a stable home and a consistent routine. For the next five years, I became something I’d never been before: a full-time mom.

Bruce and I did everything we could think of to make the split as easy as possible for our children, but of course there were challenges. Scout, who had always been the most independent and outgoing of the girls, the epitome of confidence, was suddenly terrified to spend a night away from home. It was like she was afraid that if she left the house something else would change while she was away.

Meanwhile, five-year-old Tallulah would eat only white food. We tried to steer her toward a better diet by taking away bagels and cream cheese, and she responded by not eating anything . . . for days. It was her reaction to things feeling out of control. This was the way a kindergartner was able to find some power, and she was remarkably stubborn. (I finally gave in and let her have the bagels. It may not have been the ideal choice, but I also couldn’t let her starve.) I was concerned about her using food as a source of control and where that could lead; I recognized all too well the possibility that this could turn into something bigger. These issues weren’t necessarily out of the norm, but if I hadn’t been there to address them, they could easily have escalated.

The move to Idaho was best for my girls, but it wasn’t easy transitioning to being on my own without the distraction of work. I fought feeling sorry for myself and using the wrong things to push away that feeling. From the beginning, I made a pledge: I would not use alcohol or drugs to get through my divorce, and the same went for food. I remembered what I had put myself through before trying to control my body and my emotions, and if I gave in to that again, I knew it would destroy me.

Bruce stayed in the guest house in Hailey for a while after we decided to separate. Eventually, he moved into his own house, about ten miles away on the road to Ketchum. When the house and property across the street from us became available, Bruce bought it. We then had a true family compound where the children could easily go back and forth between their parents, and enjoy the luxury of Bruce’s heated swimming pool, even in the dead of winter. It was ideal.