Inside Out(49)

Ashton was great about stuff like that. He left Post-it Notes around the house with messages like “Remember you are magical” or just plain old “I love you,” and they meant so much to me that some of them stayed up for five or six years. It was such a gift to live with someone who so clearly wanted me to feel good, to have fun, to experience pleasure.

He took me to Mexico for a romantic Valentine’s Day trip, complete with a rose petal path leading through the master suite to a candlelit tub. This was our first solo vacation together, and we really went for it. We had couples’ massages, and read together under a canopy on the beach. But most of the time we just lounged naked in bed.

One night, we put some clothes on and went out to dinner. Ashton was enjoying a glass of good red wine when he said, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing—I think it’s all about moderation.”

I wanted to be that girl. The girl who could have a glass of wine at dinner, or do a tequila shot at a party. In my mind, Ashton wanted that, too. So I tried to become that: a fun, normal girl. I didn’t think, This is a kid in his twenties who has no idea what he’s talking about. I didn’t think, I have nearly two decades of sobriety under my belt, and that’s a huge accomplishment. Instead, I cast about for justifications for his argument. Plenty of people party too much in their youth and then develop a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I told myself. I used food as a way to torture myself at one point, and since then I had changed my relationship with eating—but obviously without giving it up altogether. Could I do that with alcohol, too? Back in our room, I took a beer from the minibar.

That first weekend when I opened the door to alcohol again, it was such a novelty to have a buzz. And that’s all it was—I had this under control, I told myself. We left Mexico and flew to Chicago, where Ashton was taping Oprah. I was watching from the greenroom as he gushed about me during the taping—I could see the women in the audience swooning.

We went to Florida next, for a big NASCAR race in Daytona, where Ashton was the honorary starter. There was a hotel room set up for us to use during the race. I slipped back into the room by myself and dipped into the minibar for a beer. No one was monitoring me, of course, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong—you can’t be sober for twenty years and not feel like you’re going to get in trouble if you have a drink. The words AA uses to describe alcoholism are cunning, baffling, and powerful. Can I really get away with this? I thought. If I just drink beer? I drank it all weekend in furtive, deliberate sips.

Our final stop was Miami, where Sean Combs had offered us his house on the Intracoastal Waterway—it was incredibly beautiful, and it was just the two of us. It was there that I noticed my period was late, and I mentioned it to Ashton. “Although we’ve been traveling and sometimes that throws things off . . .” I hedged. There was nobody we could send to the drugstore to get a test, and no way either of us could risk buying one ourselves. But I already knew in my gut. It was a long and exciting twenty-four hours.

I sent Hunter a message, and he had a test waiting for me at the house when we got back to L.A. the next day. When I saw the plus sign come up, I was in shock, then excited, then worried, and then I worked through the whole cycle of emotions all over again. But when I told Ashton, his reaction overrode my mixed emotions: he was thrilled.

Six weeks later, in Parrot Cay, he proposed. He asked me to go down to the beach to watch the sunset, and then he got down on one knee and presented me with a beautiful vintage Cartier ring. I was overwhelmed. I told him I needed to think about it. I didn’t want him to feel he had to marry me just because I was pregnant. But I loved him. And I knew he loved me. And I knew this baby would cement our family, bond us all on the deepest level.

By the end of the night, I’d said yes.

Recently, I happened to see an old clip of myself on an episode of Late Show with David Letterman. It was from 1994, and I was there to promote the movie Disclosure. Letterman said, “You just got a great life! You have a storybook life.” It was soon after Tallulah had been born, and he talked about my beautiful daughters. “And you’re a beautiful woman,” he continued. “You couldn’t be more successful, you’ve got a husband who’s doing okay,” he joked, “and every movie that you’re in turns out to be not only a good movie but very, very successful.” Some of that was, of course, hyperbole—a host flattering his guest to make her feel comfortable and to draw her out for the cameras. But some of it was simply the truth. I did have three great kids. I had a handsome, famous husband who was, indeed, doing okay. Many of my own films had done well at the box office. I was, without question, fortunate beyond measure. But I was still wracked with self-doubt and insecurity. The life around me was remarkable; the messages in my head were still pretty dark. A decade later, when I found myself engaged to my soul mate and expecting his child at forty-two, I felt, for the first time, like the luckiest girl in the world. I was finally at a point where I could take in all this abundance, truly appreciate it, and truly enjoy it.

We started shopping for the nursery. My friend Soleil Moon Frye—whose husband was Ashton’s producing partner at the time—was pregnant, too, and we were excited to be in this together; to have a ready-made circle of new-parent friends.

It was a girl. We named her Chaplin Ray, after a woman I met in Spain, who was my interpreter when I was doing press for G.I. Jane. I loved the name and I loved my newest baby girl.