Lightning has a way of finding Sharon Stone. As a teenager in rural Pennsylvania she was ironing her waitressing uniform, one hand on the outdoor tap, when a bolt hit her family’s well and she was thrown to the ground. Fame arrived in another flash, pitching the small-town beauty queen, jobbing model and Hollywood straggler — she feared she was “ageing out” of the business at 32 — into superstardom when she played Catherine Tramell, the leg-crossing, underwear-shunning serial killer in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 film Basic Instinct. In 2001 came the unluckiest strike of all, “as if Zeus himself had hurled a bolt of lightning directly under the back right-hand side of my head”: a massive bleed into her brain and spine that came with a 1 per cent chance of survival and left her with 23 platinum coils replacing her vertebral artery.
Stone’s memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, zigs and zags with a similar unpredictable energy. Her writing can be electrifying, especially when she’s describing her early life or her illness; at other times, a drizzle of Hollywood spirituality and cosmic learning dims the brightness. There are deviations from the standard film-star biography: her romantic life, for example, is only patchily covered, while she alludes to a confidentiality agreement that means she cannot talk much about her custody battle over her son Roan, the eldest of the three boys she adopted.
Instead, as the title suggests, The Beauty of Living Twice is about survival, about the nerve-holding clarity that comes with age and after a terrifying near-death experience. She cheerfully admits she could be seen as a “quirky broad”, an endearing impression strengthened by her more robust writing, the brisk, gum-popping aphorisms issued as if she’s sparring with Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant: “Style is what you do with what’s wrong with you,” she writes. “Grow up with nuts, be a nut.”
Born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1958, Stone came from a turbulent Irish-American family. Her father’s family were wildcat oil drillers who had lost a fortune. Her grandmother, still dressed in Schiaparelli, taught her to pickpocket: “We were women who might well have to learn to take care of ourselves.” Her mother came from horrific childhood abuse: before she was fostered by a dentist, she was beaten with thorns and was “the type of thin only rickets and scurvy can create”.
Stone’s upbringing involved beatings too, but she was a clever oddball who took a live bat into school show-and-tell and bears a scar from where she nearly decapitated herself on a washing line while breaking a horse. Yet her early life was marked most deeply by the sexual abuse she and her younger sister experienced at the hands of her grandfather Clarence. She writes with woozy, bilious detail about the room they were locked in, recalling the dust in the air, the loops of green fabric on a chair, her grandmother’s apron as she blocked the doorway. She knows how to focus, understands how to frame a terrible scene.
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Elsewhere she displays a harder, tougher edge. In 2018 Stone made news when she laughed at an interviewer who asked if she’d had a #MeToo experience. She was a teenager when she left for New York to model, she said. Nobody was looking after her. Here, agency boss Eileen Ford tells her she’d like to “throw me down the flight of stairs I’d just come up and bounce the fat off of my ass”. She mentions the times it was suggested she sleep with her co-stars for “chemistry” and the unnamed director who refused to keep shooting because she wouldn’t sit on his lap. The most famous scene of her career — flashing the police interrogators in Basic Instinct — happened without her full consent: she was told to remove her underwear as it was “reflecting the light”. When she saw the finished scene in a room full of male agents and lawyers, she got up and slapped Verhoeven across the face. “There have been many points of view on this topic,” she writes, “but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: the other points of view are bullshit.”
Shortly before her stroke, she had an operation to remove tumours in her breasts. When she came round from the anaesthetic, the surgeon had, without her knowledge, reconstructed her breasts a size larger: “I’m certain you look better now,” he told her. Early in the book, writing about her illness, she suggests hospital staff thought she was a silly actor faking her symptoms: it initially seems like odd paranoia but, as she reveals more, it’s clear how she’s always had to fight for control, for credibility, to be believed. It’s why, perhaps, she is so attuned to the indignities of illness and recuperation, her body feeling like “ragged pieces of dirty Kleenex”. For two years, she could not read. When her vision returned, middle age had pushed her into reading glasses: “I am a punch line. Or a punched line.”
The Beauty of Living Twice is all over the place — a passage about spending 1984 in Zimbabwe shooting King Solomon’s Mines, all Congolese black hash and terrifying hospitals, demands another book, while her description about her “life of service” is a textbook illustration of the queasy interplay between charity and celebrity, and what happens when Madonna is late for a fundraising gala. Yet it leaves the righteous impression of somebody who knows her own value, who understands Basic Instinct is “about more than just a peek up my skirt, people” and who knows the power of women getting mad and getting even. “No, I didn’t get the fairy tale,” she writes. “I got real life.” Even through the Hollywood filters, it’s there on every page.
The Beauty of Living Twice by Sharon Stone
Allen & Unwin £18.99 pp244
