Hot Cover: Sharon Stone
Why can’t we fly to Vegas for this?” she asks. That is her request. Because you are dealing with a Sex Babe who could possibly be the Devil, it would be wise to begin where it is safe. It would be wise to begin where she cannot distract you and weaken your judgment. Because she will try. “Maybe if we just go to Vegas …,” she says. And you see her point, of course. You see her point always. She always has a point, in addition to much else. As she has said, “If you have a vagina and a point of view, that’s a deadly combination.” This is how she talks, by the way. But then, she is famous for her lack of inhibition. Shame wastes her time, which nothing ever should. “If there’s anything I have particularly in common with the character I play in Basic Instinct, it’s that I don’t have a lot of guilt,” she says. “I think I oughta do what I wanna do.” For instance, she once went to Vegas and met a man whom she agreed to marry ten days later, because it was what she wanted to do. Vegas has this sort of effect on her, which is important to understand if you are going to end up in Vegas with her. “Maybe we should just go to Vegas and gamble and talk while we’re playing blackjack,” she says. “Let’s do that.”
You do gamble, but not in Vegas; not because it is unsafe there, but because she never mentions it again. She drops the idea of Vegas as if it were an unworthy suitor. Like that. As with most Sex Babes, she is mercurial this way. She is like a dice roll, with better and more dangerous possibilities. Thus, whenever you are with her, you are gambling a little. “Pick one,” she says, as if to demonstrate, cupping her hands over a pastel pile of candy Tiny Conversation Hearts. You have given her your Hearts, and now she is playing with them, on the table of a swell Los Angeles restaurant where Steve Martin is having lunch right over there. She hides the Hearts from view, and you take turns blindly plucking them out and brandishing their tarty epigrams. (She is the kind of woman who turns candy into a roulette game.) Her first Heart says, COAX ME, and she thrusts it in your face, smiling coyly. (Pitifully, you parry with NICE GIRL.) Before long she issues forth with DIG ME, BE GOOD, BE MINE, SAY YES, SMILE, WILD (“That’s mine for sure!”), HOT MAMA and KISS ME. She extends her hand. “Now, this time you have to pick what you wish for,” she says at last, and so she picks LUV YA. “Luv ya,” she sings sweetly, pushing all of the Hearts away, without having eaten a single one.
Actresses are given to confounding men’s hearts. Men who know actresses know this to be true. They tell other men, and eventually most men know that actresses are given to confounding men’s hearts. (Of course, this does not stop men from falling prey.) Actresses – especially those of the Sex Babe variety – are born with wiles that are always at work, beguiling and bedeviling. It is a natural phenomenon, probably rooted deep in the psyche, over which the actress has little control. Nevertheless, such women are not unaware of their impact. They watch themselves being watched by others; they watch themselves drive men to despair. They see everything they do, often without feeling a part of it. “Sometimes it’s like watching your life at a drive-in movie,” she says.
I have watched Sharon Stone, America’s Premier Sex Babe, watch herself being watched onscreen. In Basic Instinct – itself the very reason why Sharon Stone has come to our attention – the world was permitted to look up her dress. (The vista, which stares out between her shifting thighs during a police interrogation, quietly upstaged all other erotic histrionics in the movie.) “You can see right through to Nebraaaaaaaska!” she says, a bit unhappily, as though duped by her director. “Fuck! I wanna have the indication of that, but I don’t wanna see that!” But that is exactly what the world saw, and as a result, she now owns the world. “That was Malcolm X’s Theory of Pussy Power, wasn’t it?” she says, seizing all the power anyway, because it is what she wants to do.
If she is the Devil, Hell has improved. Without question, she possesses many of the requisite qualities. “I’m a great deal maker,” she says, citing just one, to be helpful. “I think I’d be a great agent.” For certain, she has at least played the Devil, if we are to believe the one who wrote Basic Instinct. In a deal Mephistopheles would have envied, Joe Eszterhas was paid $3 million for his improbable screenplay about a blond, frequently nude, bisexual ice-pick enthusiast and the detective who loves her. “Eszterhas’s original concept was that she is the Devil,” says the film’s Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, adding that the script initially called for “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones to play over the final scene. “If the Devil looks this good,” he says, “that’s why you have the sympathy, right?” (To becalm the angry homosexuals who have taken his film’s dark vision personally, the director says: “The Devil, like God, is probably bisexual, or should be, if he wants to love everybody. I see Satan in the same position as God.”)
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