Inside Out(47)
When the girls got off the bus and saw us, they all started whispering, “Is that ASHTON KUTCHER?!?”
He clicked with Scout and Tallulah right away. Ashton had a wonderful stepfather who meant a lot to him, so I think he innately understood the impact that men could have on the lives of children who weren’t biologically theirs. And he liked that I was a mom: I think the possibility of being someone important to my kids was a part of the relationship that appealed to him. That might sound like an odd thing for a twenty-five-year-old, but again, he wasn’t your average young guy. On the one hand, he was naughty and scampish, but on the other, there was a responsible, sincere, and centered quality to him. He had a very strong sense of the role that a good man should play in the life of a family. And he wanted to be part of our gang.
The next day, our plane had to return to L.A. to get Bruce, and Ashton went with it to get back to his job. I wanted Bruce to know in case they crossed paths—I told him, “I have a friend who’ll be getting off the plane, Ashton Kutcher.” Bruce’s reaction was: “You are such a good mom.” He assumed I’d brought Ashton as a special treat for the girls, the way we’d once arranged for Aaron Carter to come to Disney World for Scout’s birthday.
AS IT TURNED out, Ashton and Bruce got along really well. We hung out regularly, playing cards, having dinner, just chilling out. It was lovely. (A funny aside: Ashton first moved to L.A. with January Jones, the actress who played Betty Draper on Mad Men. They were engaged, and they were both just starting out at the time—modeling, taking small parts. As a twenty-three-year-old, January had a tiny role in the movie Bandits, which Bruce starred in when he was forty-six. Ashton was convinced they’d had a fling on set. Years later, I happened to sit next to January at an event, and I mentioned this. “Are you serious?” she said, laughing. “I told him a hundred times, I didn’t want to fuck that old man!”)
Ashton and I kept our relationship quiet for a little while, but then it just got silly: we were in love, and we wanted to be in each other’s lives for everything, big and small. In June 2003, we made our first public appearance together, at the premiere of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. In a fantastic Missoni minidress, I took on the red carpet, with Ashton on one arm and Bruce on the other, and all three kids front and center. I was saying, You can be a family after divorce, just in a new form. And I was preemptively neutralizing any narrative of conflict between Bruce and Ashton the press might try to drum up. It worked. It was a damn good night.
But the response to our relationship was every bit as frenzied as I’d anticipated, maybe even more so. We were in the tabloids constantly; we couldn’t leave the house without being photographed. My agents said that my relationship was hurting me: all the focus on me being with a younger man meant that people weren’t taking me seriously. I didn’t care. I’d never been so happy in my life.
I bought a beautiful house, not far from that piece of land where he wanted to build his dream house, up in the mountains above Beverly Hills. It was like a peaceful Zen tree house, high above the noise and traffic of the city. You could watch the sun set pink over the mountains when you sat out back by the pool, and you could see the trees everywhere you looked through the glass walls. It was going to be our oasis.
Ashton and I didn’t want to be apart for a minute. When my house was being renovated, he invited my girls and me to stay with him. It just seemed foolish to go rent something separate when we wanted to be together all the time, and the girls loved Ashton. Rumer wanted to come back to L.A.: she missed her family, and boarding school hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be.
Ashton’s house was one of his first big purchases, high above Beverly Hills, complete with tennis courts and a pool—it was a pretty remarkable place for a twenty-five-year-old to have earned. Ashton had a very different relationship with success than Bruce had. He didn’t spend wildly. He was careful and methodical, and his investments always reflected that, including his first home. Though prior to our arrival, it had been a straight-up L.A. party house—you can read about it in Rolling Stone. (George Bush was president at the time, and somehow his twin daughters ended up doing bong hits at that house at one of Ashton’s parties. He was sure the Secret Service was listening in on his calls from then on.) There were definitely some late-night doorbell rings before word got out about Ashton’s new roommates.
About a year and a half into our relationship, Ashton hosted SNL for a second time, and we decided to address all the chatter about our age difference head-on, and in the funniest way possible. Unlike the time I’d hosted alone, this time I enjoyed every minute. During his opening monologue, Ashton said, “Magazines focus on our age difference, and all that I focus on is she is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and she’s here tonight. Demi, I love you, baby.” The camera panned to me in the audience—in makeup that made me look about ninety, with a white wig and eyebrows, wearing a frowsy purple dress and holding a pocketbook in my lap like the Queen of England. “You’re doin’ great, baby,” I croaked in my best old-lady voice. “You’re lookin’ hot!”
Then Ashton called me up to the stage “so we can just enjoy this moment together,” and I shuffled out of my seat and leaned over onto the walker that was waiting for me in the aisle. “She is still the hottest woman in Hollywood,” he announced once I was up onstage, which got a huge laugh because I looked like I had just hobbled out of a nursing home, and I had these massive, hanging boobs the SNL people had made for me. “I wear this medallion as a symbol of our love,” Ashton said, gesturing to his necklace. I followed that up with, “And I’ve got this identification bracelet; it lets the medical technicians know I’ve got the diabetes!” Ashton nodded and said, “She’s got ’em bad.” Then we made out a little and my false teeth came out in his mouth.