Inside Out(48)
The whole thing was hilarious. I loved that I was at a point in my life where I didn’t care what the tabloids said; I didn’t care what people thought of my choices. I was living the way I wanted to live. And there was no reason to be sensitive about my age: I had just turned forty-two. And I was pregnant.
Chapter 19
Ashton and I knew right away that we wanted to have a baby together, it was always just a question of when. I had leapt into having a family with Bruce, and this time, I wanted to build a foundation in the relationship first. I wanted time for us to enjoy each other. But I was also in my forties. To remove the time pressure, less than a year into our relationship, we decided to freeze embryos.
I was offered a movie called Half Light, which was supposed to be the big follow-up my team had gotten for me on the heels of Charlie’s Angels. I’m sure most of you have never even heard of it, which tells you something. It was an interesting script—a thriller/ghost story about a bestselling crime novelist who is haunted by guilt over the accidental death of her son—but there were issues with money, the director was unknown, and shooting it would mean being away from my girls for a month before they could come see me—longer than we’d ever been apart.
Ashton told me to do it. “The girls will stay here, and I’ll come home for dinner every night,” he said. “I will hold down family life, as if you’d never left.”
We filmed in Wales and Cornwall. Before I left L.A., I had given in and bought all three girls devices, so they could reach me anytime they wanted. Technology had just gotten to the point where everyone was texting photos back and forth, and I missed my girls and Ashton terribly, though they seemed happy in the flow of pictures we exchanged. I was elated when he brought them to see me. We stayed in an amazing house in London, near Mayfair, that had once been a nunnery. There was a pool in the basement—it was like going swimming in an underground cave. It was such an adventure exploring all the back staircases with the girls and figuring out what went where in that crazy house.
One night, after they’d gone to bed, Ashton and I sat in the great room, cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, and had our first conversation about getting married. We were so comfortable, sitting in that gorgeous firelight, and it was a really mellow, easy conversation about whether we ought to consider it for my girls. Was it something that might be helpful for them, we wondered, as they tried to make sense of this new family, our new household? There was so much press about our relationship not being serious, when, in fact, he had just come from holding down the fort for a month; the girls had started calling him MOD, short for “my other dad.”
Ashton and I went to a Shabbat service at the Kabbalah Centre in Marylebone. I had begun studying Kabbalah soon after I moved back from Idaho. When I’d first arrived back in L.A., I felt like I didn’t know anyone anymore. But my friend Guy Oseary, who I’ve been close with since the nineties, was there, and he got me back into the social swing of things: he took me to dinner parties; took me to clubs (I didn’t drink, but I loved to dance); reconnected me to Madonna—her husband at the time, Guy Ritchie, gave me a copy of The Power of Kabbalah. Guy Oseary then invited me to come and meet their teacher, Eitan, at the Beverly Hills offices of Maverick, the record label he’d started with Madonna, and it was a deeply calm and insightful hour, hearing Eitan speak about the tenets of Kabbalah and the spiritual side of Judaism. I was curious to know more, so I went home and jumped into reading the book. Madonna was doing a weekly class at her house, and I started to go regularly.
When Ashton and I got together, he became interested in Kabbalah, too. We shared a yearning for a spiritual life. He was raised Catholic; I was baptized Catholic but raised not much of anything. But we were both really questioning what we were meant to be and do, how we fit into the grand plan. We were convinced that, however that was, our union was a step on the right path.
The girls were seventeen, fourteen, and eleven at the time, and, as I’ve said, he really wanted to be the world’s greatest stepdad. He was also a vibrant guy in his twenties who wanted to go out and have fun, and we did a lot of that, too. We went to Lakers games; we hung out with his friends from That ’70s Show; I introduced him to everyone I knew in L.A., which by then was a pretty wide swath of the entertainment industry.
Ashton was very good at connecting with people—networking, to use an old-fashioned word for it. He was good at it in person, and he was good at it online. He was one of the first people to have more than a million Twitter followers; he understood the power of social media way before most people, and he got me into it for a while, too. Originally, Ashton and I were just playing, seeing what it did and what it meant. But then I realized that Twitter was a way for me to interact directly with people without the media middlemen. I think people had seen a disproportionate number of pictures of me in the tabloids frowning or looking angry as I tried to ward off the omnipresent circling photographers; I saw Twitter as an opportunity to show people a side of myself that is much lighter and warmer. And all of a sudden people were getting to know me, not a tabloid image of “Gimme Moore” or whoever the press had decided I was that week. I was connecting with them, sharing something real. And it was a two-way street. Once, when Ashton was out of the country, and he knew I was asleep, he sent out a message to all his followers to start a “love tsunami” by flooding my Twitter feed with messages of love all at the same time. I was still in my pajamas when I noticed my Sidekick—the device of the moment—was blowing up with thousands of love tweets.