March 7, 2023 • 43 mins
No one has ever accused Sharon Stone of having it easy. Sure, the Casino and Basic Instinct actress won fame—not to mention sex symbol status—by playing some of the most memorable femme fatales in recent history. But the same roles also nearly broke her. On this week's episode of Table for Two, Stone reveals Hollywood's darker side to host Bruce Bozzi and explains how she endured everything from getting yelled at on set for not showing enough skin to being told she'd never get nominated for Best Actress. Hear a preview of the episode below, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
We are back at the Sunset Tower Hotel on a glorious, sunny,
yet very cool and crisp day in Los Angeles. We're
about to have lunch with one of the most beautiful
people in Hollywood. And I don't just mean physically, because
she's gorgeous, but also inside. Sharon Stone, Oscar nominated actress,
a Golden Globe winner, the star of Casino, basic instinct.
(00:28):
It's super fun, it's super show. We actually eat, so
I hope you're hungry. I am good. I'm so happy
to see you. Thank you me too. But what I
love about Sharon, what inspires me about Sharon, it's her
commitment to our community, my community, the LGBTQ plus community.
She has been an advocate for raising awareness with HIV AIDS.
(00:48):
She has been the face and the fundraiser for am FAR,
the American Federation for AIDS Research is a big deal,
and she's stood in the fourth of making sure women
and men get paid the same. She's just a rock
star and we're doing We're doing fries, nice and crispy,
(01:13):
leaning in. You're leaning in, So pull up and relax
and grab your rose and get ready. Because she also
is super cool and a fun, outspoken person. High Sharon Stone,
(01:34):
you were here on table for two and we're having
lunch together. This is a dream and have lunch with
you anytime, would you? Yes? Yes, I think we should
just talk. N Why are we not? This is like
the thing with La, like we should just have lunches
and chill out. Yes, you are so much to me,
And I'm gonna tell you a little story. So the
(01:55):
first time I saw you, you don't know, but it
was nineteen ninety two. It was brunch my fame. Who's
on Third? Remember Who's on Third? That restaurant? Joanne? Yep, Yeah,
And you were sitting there with a bunch of guys
and I remember looking at you and being like, she's
(02:17):
so beautiful, she's amazing, and what you did. So I'd
like to sort of begin our conversation today because this
is all about just a connection. And what I believe
is the beauty of a meal is the romance of
the meal. You know, I was young. People forget that.
They forget that, they forget that. It's like people don't
(02:40):
ask each other for dates anymore, and they want to
text and hook up. Yeah, it's like they don't romance.
They don't seduce. They don't. It's not interesting. Frankly, it isn't.
It's everything we had growing up. Yeah, it was so.
It was titillating. It was like you didn't know there
(03:00):
was poetry. It was poetry, right, A beautiful word to you. Yes,
I mean at that time you were hitting, you were becoming,
which we'll talk about who ran off with my name
and identity, But what you were also doing, which led
to was you are a truth teller. I am so.
(03:23):
I am not out here looking to get people, as
I'm a very big Sheryl Lead Ralph fan. Like I've
known Cheryl Sheryl. I've known Chryl since we were kids
in waiting rooms trying out for the same jobs in Manhattan.
And she's the most warm, loving, generous kind. You know.
(03:46):
The first time I met her, she had a bag
of liquorice wheels and I was sitting next to her
right sharing her liquorice wheels. And let's order some lunch.
You have to eat, you boy, you have a face
to paint. To look at that face and stuff. No,
(04:09):
you have no face to paint. Um, bam, bam, you
know anything. This is lunch, babe. Well, I'm going to
have the Tower Burger because it's so anza. Yeah, And
do you have any gluten free thing you can stick
it on like a breath, let us wrap. I'll do
(04:34):
the gluten free bread toasted, well toasted. I like the
burgger medium. I like those onions you saute them, right,
I like that? And do you want cheddar or cheese
greer we're doing We're doing fries nice and nice and crispy.
(04:57):
Leaning in, you're leaning in and you know I do
my my classic, my chop salad with chicken. Yeah, I'm
digging it, Okay. I like I'll have sparkling sparkling water
and maybe I'll have an iced coffee. You're going on
right now? Say again, just just I'll have milk on
(05:20):
the sign. I know, I am. I've had two already.
Like I'm like Jack Jo, I'm sitting here with so well.
I was really leaning into your sort of amazing commitment
to am far into raising the awareness, to the amount
of money and to your commitment to HIV AIDS and
(05:40):
what you've done as a human. It's breast cancer home
listeners like always, I mean, it was that always a
part of it was a part of my upbringing. Right, Yeah,
it was a big part of my upbringing. You know,
it's not like I came from wealth, Nope, but I
(06:02):
in my universe, we weren't poor. It's hard to explain
that when you'd say, like my dad made fourteen grand
a year, but we weren't poor. So I grew up
in a very small rural community where, like, you know,
we were like ninety people my school. Right, kids drove
(06:24):
their tractors to school in the morning after they finished
their farm tours. Right. So we had two acres, which
is two two and a half acres, which is a
big parcel of land when it has next to it
a ravine with its own stream, where we would walk
(06:46):
down the edge of the ravine and you know, get
the ice in the winter and put it in a
bucket and have fun making ice cream in the basement
with that with the crank thing. And my dad built
a treehouse on the side of the ravine with a
back door that had a rope with knots and we
could jump out and swing across the ravine. And he
put bunk beds in the treehouse. And you know, when
(07:08):
lightning stuck struck that tree, he brought it down with
a pulley and made it into a playhouse. From my
sister and Marianne, you know what I mean, very idyllic
kind of childhood. But we had neighbors, you know, and
neighbored by neighbors, I mean like a mile away who
(07:30):
had eight kids and were much poorer than we were.
So we provided their Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and it
was like a secret like that, we drove with the
lights out in the car and put it on their
doorstep and put their presence and that kind of stuff,
and it was really great. And when my parents went
(07:53):
to somebody's house for dinner, they left early, and of
course my mother per usual, had a wet wash cloth
up in a plastic bag in her bag, and they
would stop in a field and my dad would walk
out into the field with a big newspapers and he
would cut a gigantic bundle of wild flowers and bundle
(08:16):
them with binders twine and put them in the back
of the car, and then my mom would wash his
hands into with the washcloth in her thing and they
would wrap it with you know. That's what they would
take for dinner, was this gigantic bundle of wild flowers.
That was a romance of My parents were wildly in
love with each other's beautiful I mean, they fell in love.
(08:37):
She got pregnant at sixteen, he was seventeen. They both
had no parents. You know, my dad came from an
extremely wealthy oil family, and the oil well blew when
he was little, when he was four and killed everybody.
And then they were suddenly went from great wealth to destitution,
(08:59):
right you said, or his nephew or somebody took over
the business. And his nephew, who was eighteen, Yeah, because women,
even though my grandmother's money was in this, women didn't
get the money. And this is why my dad became
such a diehard feminist, because the eighteen year old nephew
got all the money, and of course blew it at
(09:20):
the track sous so a couple of years and everybody
was completely broke. And you know, my dad just could
not fathom that his mother, who was my Grandmaalela, who
was tough as nails. I mean, this is a woman
who walked her property in a Chapparelli suit with her
(09:43):
German shepherd Rex in his studded collar, in her black
jack and her other hand. You know, but she wasn't
getting her due because she was certainly capable and tough
enough to handle it. Yeah, reading about your childhood was
absolutely amazing because I to lose everything, right, Yeah, you know,
you'll lose everything, and you what you have to constantly
(10:04):
remember is you don't lose everything, right. You'll lose stuff, right, stuff, Yeah, yeah,
and the crocodiles will give it to you, and the
crocodiles will take it away. And the great thing is,
as long as the crocodiles don't get you, you're You're
a guy. So now you're like this movie star. And
(10:29):
now you're also because it's in your DNA, you're leaning in,
you're giving back, You're you're separating, You're not so because
at that time, Oh, that's the point of fame, I think, yeah, right,
is it's you've got this big purple dinosaur hanging onto
you everywhere you go. If that dinosaur isn't working for
(10:50):
you and for the people, yeah, it's gonna eat you.
What was you're leaning into? Hiv aids? Well, I was
in can and I got asked to fill in for
a night for Elizabeth Taylor, and it was an incredibly
moving experience. I mean, mind blowing because while I had
(11:14):
been in the modeling industry, which has been very good
to me, very good to me when I was nineteen
in New York, and which I can say is the
business where I have really learned the most. I have
learned more about myself and others in that business than
(11:34):
anywhere in the world. It's taken me around the world,
It's introduced me to more people, and there's more loyalty
and family and we have to get down to work
in that business than in any other business I've ever
worked in. But not all of these businesses are kind back.
(11:58):
But in my business when the modeling business, we look
out for each other and we don't want the business
to just go by the wayside, and we want to
look out for each other. At least I do, and
I can say I have tremendous respect for people like
Anna Wintour and these photographers that have carried endless pounds
(12:22):
of cameras on their backs for their whole lives. And
like I do in the movie business, when I see
people dragging cable and the rain is coming down and
then I'm not on set, I would be inclined to
drag some cable. Anna sat with me at lunch. And
she's an incredible woman. She has your passion and your
(12:43):
romance for her work, and so generous, yeah, and so elegant.
And believe me, I didn't understand her when I was
a young person. She's a very shy, ye shy woman. Yes, okay,
So you're the modeling and leaning into the HIV aids. Well,
when they asked me to come back, they after I
(13:06):
did the first one, and they said would I do
three more years? And because I recognized that Elizabeth was
winding down and her ability to continue to do it,
and so I said sure, I would do three more years.
And I said, um, gorgeous, thank you. That's the way
(13:30):
that you enjoy Thank you so much. Well, of course
I said sure, most for ours, right Okay, So I
said sure I would do three more years. And you know,
I'm a problem solver. You are you are a problem
(13:56):
I'm a person that gets that stuff off my desk.
I'm a person and that you know, if something needs
to get done, I do it today. I'm a person that, like,
if there's an issue, I'm not the person that like
likes to talk around it. If someone's doing something that's
just bullshit. I'm like the person that calls bullshit. I'm
(14:18):
you are a truth teller. I really am. And I
know it concerns people. Yeah, of course it really concerned that. No,
they don't. And frankly, I don't always like it. I
don't like that I'm not, you know more suave people
are lauded for diplomacy, but I think there's a lot
(14:39):
of time wasted with people not talking about what's really
actually going on. You know. My dad always used to say,
you know, I like give it to me with the
bark on right, and people think that it's cruel a
lot when you just say it the way that it is.
(14:59):
I I feel like, if I really respect you, I'm
gonna tell it like it is. Yeah, And if I
don't respect you, I don't really care what you think
or what you if you want to know or anything,
because it's not worth my time to get into it
with you because you're not going to get it. And
(15:20):
why bother. I mean, it's digging because we're gonna and
that's not it, you know. And I think that one
of the things that's consistent with what you can see
with your life and your career is your ability to
tell the truth and say this is no, no, no no,
(15:41):
this is not the way this is going to go down.
Like right, I see it as it is, and I
think that that is so refreshing you like that. I mean, come, um,
which I love I love about I really admire that, Sharon,
about you. And I've seen it from the distance that
(16:03):
you know, I find it so interesting how like it.
I see that it's gotten you in trouble like of course,
because people don't want because they want people to fit
in their their zones, you know, like their their buckets.
And then all of a sudden you have you. But
have you come with all the smarts, his brain, his body,
(16:24):
this beauty that's threatening? I think, well truth right, no, right,
(16:50):
Welcome back to my lunch with Sharon Stone on table
for two with burger in hand and some crispy fries.
Sharon told me about a wardrobe emergency that took place
right before a pretty major award show. I mean, you
tell a story which I thought was interesting. You get
to can your bag is lost. No one, all these
(17:13):
actresses are around with, you know, clothes on racks, and
no one wants to give you shit because you're a threat.
You know what I mean, like, can you tell me
about that. I'm so interesting because I think that's that's
a thing that you've been able to sort of beautifully
(17:33):
navigate in your life. When I went to can the
first time and yeah, bags didn't come. Yeah, but you
also know, navigating people who want to push backron you
and I didn't. And I didn't have any money, and
I couldn't buy new clothes, so I had to keep
figuring out how to make what I had on in
(17:53):
just sixteen different outfits. You. But it's like when I
first got invited to the Oscars, right before Basic Instinct
had come out. Movie hadn't come out, so no one
would lend me a dress. And then it came out
like a few days right before the Oscars or something,
(18:15):
and I was going to present, but no one would
give me a dress. It was unbelievable because I didn't
have any money to buy anything. And I was like,
oh my god, all these people in their forty thousand
and fifty thousand dollars dresses. And I went and bought
it Betsy Johnson jumpsuit because that was it, a polyester jumpsuit.
(18:38):
That was the best I could do. And I'm doing
my own hair and makeup right, And I was just
like wow, like this is awful, Like how am I
going to do this? Right? But then I got there
and I was like in the fourth or fifth row back,
which was really good. Yeah, And I was on the
aisle and I was seated right behind Anthony Hopkin, and
(19:00):
when I walked by, he put his hands together and
put them over his head like champion and held them
up to me when I passed him, and I was like,
oh my god, right, he saw my movie, right, and
he's giving me that right thing, the champion, Like yes, right.
(19:21):
And I told my dad and my dad was like, kid,
you could look good in the burlaps, that's right at
the end of the day. And I was like, oh right.
And so after that, I thought, you know, it doesn't matter.
I could wear a T shirt to the Oscars and
so I did. Right. Well, I mean two things. One
(19:41):
is yeah, that's you know, your strength, your power of
mind and beauty and you and you so you're like, okay,
you did not go, you went. You threw it on.
Hopkins is saying, yes, the world's about to see you
in a major way. What did it feel like and
how did that journey, the lack of effing generosity of
(20:05):
people when you're sitting in a room you got, you
got yourself in that room, and now you have the
lack of generosity, Like, but you didn't use Joe's not
to leave the room. You're like, I'm here, and that's
what to me is Well, it was hard because when
I got I got nominated for a Golden Globe for
that part. And when I went to the Golden Globes
(20:26):
and they called my name, a bunch of people in
the room laughed. It was horrible. It was horrible. It
was horrible. Oh my god, it was horrible. I was
so humiliated. I was so humiliated. And I was like,
does anybody have any idea how hard it was to
(20:48):
play that part? How gut wrenching and it's frightening, and
how much work it was to play this part and
kind of try to carry this complaint ex movie that
was really breaking all boundaries and everybody was protesting against
and the pressure and I auditioned for it for nine months,
(21:13):
which I can't go over. They offered it to thirteen
other people and now you're laughing at me. I was
just like, oh my god, I just wanted to crawl
into a hole, you know, yeah, no, of course you did.
And then you know, I lost custody of my child
when the judge asked my child, my tiny, little tiny boy,
(21:33):
do you know your mother makes sex movies? Like this
kind of abuse by this system, this kind of abuse
that I was considered what kind of parent I was?
Because I made that movie. People are walking around with
no clothes on at all on regular TV now and
(21:55):
you saw maybe like maybe like sixteenth of a second
of possible nudity of me right right, right and now.
And I was custody. I was custody of my child.
How did you survive that? Are you kidding? I ended
up in the Mayo clinic with extra heartbeats in my
(22:18):
upper and lower chamber of my heart. I did not
know that when you say break your heart, yea, it
broke my heart. It broke your heart. Literally, that broke
right the whole thing. Yes, upper and lower chambers, it
broke my heart. I went in to get a mammogram
and they're like, something's wrong. We need you to do
(22:39):
a treadmill test. And I'm like what. All the doctors
came running in, They're like, whoa that's crazy, Sharon. And
if you look, if you look at that moment, would
that happened today? We have a whole different right now
we're put through the Ringer'd be illegal. You were playing
a part like what you said was when an audience
comes to see a movie versus like one critic comments
(23:01):
to see a movie like you know, we come. I mean,
you know the guy that played Jeffrey Dalmer. No one
thinks that he's a people who eats people? Right? Do
you know what I mean? As he said, you know,
this is a very hard part to play. It was
very hard to watch. I hope we got something from it, right,
Its eaters exactly. It doesn't turn him into a serial
(23:22):
killer who eats people or make him an antisocial person.
It makes a very complex person who took an incredibly
difficult part which probably made him ill to play. Sure,
it is brutal to play these characters. Oh yeah, And
this is why I don't play them anymore. I don't
(23:42):
want to. And it's one thing for the audience not
to understand that piece. If you're an actor, what you
have to go through. But it's a whole another story
when you're your peers and you're the people in the
business are not understanding that, and like you're losing custody
and you have the legal system. I mean you're like,
wait a minute, I mean you know this is my job,
(24:02):
Like this is oh I hate to do and none
of you know. The fact that you went through it
is absolutely and literally it sort of ended my dating
world because men were afraid of you. And I also
think that men didn't want to data woman that other
men thought of like that right, and that's also a
(24:23):
failure of the male. Yeah reality, sure, that's your own shit.
Yeah really, yeah, I can't wade through that situation. Then
you go on and you go on to what is
(24:44):
like one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen,
which is of course in Casino, and here you are.
Now I was so blessed. Come on, you're working like
you're working with de Niro, You're working with Frans actorking
with Peshi in the business, the greatest director of all times. Yes,
and there you are, that beautiful face, that incredible performance,
(25:09):
that whole thing, that whole transformation from like when you
exerts the drugs and it goes dark and everything. First
of all, I love that movie. I love that movie.
I mean, and I love those guys. I love that
Nick Poleggi script. Yeah, Nick Poggi, he's amazing. So tell
me about that tray. So you go from ninety two
(25:29):
to ninety five and then you end up back in
the room where they laughed at you. You win a glow,
You're nominated for an Oscar. How does that feel? It
was super surprised. I mean, they told me we can
run you for supporting actress, you'll win the Oscar. You
can't win for a leading lady. That they're never gonna
let you get a leading lady Oscar. They're never gonna
(25:53):
let you get because of the size of the part,
because it was you, because it was me and I.
But I am the leading lady in the film, right,
So I want to run for leading Lady. And they said,
but you won't win, and I said, I don't care.
I'm not in it to win it. That's not the
(26:13):
point here. The point is the actual work that I
did right. And I did the work. You did the
leading lady work for five months with Robert de Niro
and Joe Pesci and James Woods. Right, I did the
work right. So I'm going to be in the category
for the work that I did, right, I'm not in
(26:35):
it so that you'll say, oh, okay, right, okay, Sar,
if you could have it, you can have the statue.
Right now, I'm in the lane that I drove in
perfectly and thanks. So I didn't expect to get the
(26:56):
oscar because people don't think of me as an actress,
you know. They don't think of me as a person
who loves her craft, you know what I mean. Because
I don't walk around saying that. I don't walk around
saying like I'm a dramatic actress. I don't walk around
(27:18):
having discussions on TV about my dramatic acting. Right. I
don't talk about my art for right, because I don't
think of it like that at all. To me. I know, Greta,
(27:40):
Greta Garbo is looking at me like a literally, which
is more. I used to have dinner with her and
not with her. This is so wonderful. She lived like
three blocks from me in New York when I was
a young girl. She used to walk around New York
her big hat and her big coat and her goloshes
(28:03):
and me too, and we would go to this restaurant
that was between our houses and sit alone at tables,
facing each other, really, and we had dinner in this
same restaurant, facing each other dozens of times. You're blowing
me away. And I never spoke to her, and she
(28:24):
never spoke to me. But alone in this restaurant, I
sat with Greta Garbo. Wow, and that's the universe again, right,
And she's looking at me like you're trying to explain this.
I know, Greta Garbo. I feel like Grega Garbo right now.
It's like trying to explain how the wind meets the trees.
(28:44):
You're like, what I do. And this is why I
love playing people that already lived, because I feel like
I opened my soul and let them talk through me.
And so I'm not a dramatic actress. I am a
spiritual conduit. And when I have the extraordinary pleasure and
(29:10):
honor of receiving a script that is actually intended for me,
I know it when I get it, and I feel
like I knew it when I got the Casino script.
They didn't know it when I got the Casino script,
and they were seeing so many other people really, and
I was just like, I'm going to wait till they're
(29:31):
done with that. Yeah, I love that. I love your
ability to take a step back because I also feel
like one of the big things in life is timing
when you were seeing and to say, like, I'm supposed
to play Phillis Stiller, and I know that, like I'm
sitting here with you, right, I just know it. That's fantastic.
Like there are people I'm supposed to play. It's going
(29:53):
to happen or they're going to miss it. Right. I
was great friends with Phillis. I went to her house,
I had dinner with her multitudes of time. She taught
me her laugh. You know, I know I was supposed
to play her. She didn't even get famous at all
until she was in her forties. I'm supposed to play Phyllis.
I love, Like, like literature, I'm going to take a
(30:16):
picture of it, like so I could post it and
show people like you're trying to explain, yes, she really is,
and that you have all those moments. It was just
so wonderful. I would sit in this table that was
to the like the left front, and she would sit
on the back right looking forward, and I would sit
(30:37):
in the left front looking back, and I used to
just think This is so great My Dinners with Garbo.
(31:05):
Welcome back to Table for two. As I mentioned at
the beginning of the show, one of the amazing and
endearing things about Sharon Stone is that she is so outspoken.
Sharon talks very candidly about the harring events at the
heart of her book, The Beauty of Living Twice. So
in your memoir, you know, you're very honest about when
(31:27):
you were in your early forties and you had the
brain emerge and like that whole experience. It's so rivening.
I'm telling you read this book and one of The
Beauty of Living Twice available on amazone in any Star
exactly good fun. The fact that you share that you
crossed over and you saw people you love made me
(31:49):
feel so at peace. Oh you should feel at peace
and even though you got the kick in the chest
to come back. Yeah, so I'd like to know about
that and your grandmother coming saying don't move your yeah,
this is These are like things because you and then
your strength to say what are you doing here as
you're being wheeled in, don't do that? This is I
(32:11):
need to know more about this operation before you do it, Like,
tell me about those things. That. So, first of all,
when this happened to me, I felt very disenfranchised. I
was not getting the help that I needed. So I
didn't get to the hospital for three days of this
brain blead home. I was home, Yeah, and I was
(32:34):
calling and trying and asking and begging and bleeding and
wanting to get to the hospital, but couldn't get there. Eventually,
when I got to the hospital and I had the
first MRI and they discovered the brain blead and they
realized how long it had been going on, I was
in really bad shape. Yeah, that's where I had the
(32:55):
initial what I call like the white out, you know,
where I was dying and coming back. They then immediately
transferred me to a hospital that had a neurological I
see you, and a neurological I see you is just
a wheel, a circle around a nurse's station. It's not
(33:18):
they're not rooms, and there's just ae drape separating each person.
And it's an incredibly traumatic environment for many reasons, one
of which is the neurological pain is unbelievably painful. First
of all, you don't even know where it is because
it's all over the place, and it's inside and outside
(33:40):
of your body. So when it was happening, I was
actually holding outside my head. I was holding above my
head like I was holding yes in the crown chakra
above my head. I was holding this space outside my
head and holding onto it like it was sitting on
top of my head screaming. I think I was holding
(34:02):
my beingness, which was literally outside my body. And so
after a few days of this screaming because they had
missed it when they went in, well, they went in
it through my phemeral artery and scanned and missed my
why this was happening to me. So I'd been laying
(34:22):
on one side, which was less painful, so the blood
had pulled on the opposite side of my head, so
they didn't know what was going on. And that's really
heavy when everybody screaming and you're all fighting for your
life or all of our beds are on scales and
it's your body mass that they're measuring, right, So I
(34:43):
lost eighteen percent of my body mass in the nine
days I was in there. And you can only have
like a guest at a time, and so my friends,
my family are there. I had like my really my
ride or die, best friend Donna Shavo. She slept in
an alcove of a window in the hospital the entire week.
(35:06):
You know, my mother sat outside the room. It was unreal,
and I didn't meet and I didn't know what to do,
and for some reason, they weren't putting me on nutrition. Yeah.
I'm like about to ask you you're not you don't
have an IVY with I'm satly yeah right, but like,
I don't know what's going on. And my dad became
so desperate and so he really, my dad, God rest,
(35:31):
it is amazing. So he said, would you have a milkshake, honey?
And I'm like, okay, Dad. He went to the store,
he bought the milkshake, the ice cream, he bought ice,
he bought milk. He went home, he made me a milkshake.
He put it in a mason jar, packed it in ice,
(35:53):
brought it to the hospital and fed it to me. Wow, okay, yeah,
says everything right, Yeah right, I think because you know,
my dad got a stop at Joe Cancer after that. Yeah.
And I always said, you know that my dad, I know,
(36:14):
said the prayer that I say for my children, which
is give it to me. Yeah, give it to me.
But any parent wants of course you say give it
to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that my dad
got sick because he said, give it to me, let
her live, give it to me. Yeah. Wow. Sure. And
(36:35):
I just think that that's what we do as barons.
We say, give me the drama, give me what it is,
let me garriott, let me help them, yeah, take me,
take me. Yeah. But you were able to, I mean,
between the stories of your mom and your dad and
your dad doing that the strength the survivor, and you
to be also to have the voice, because so many
(36:58):
of us don't have the voice, the courage to say no,
I don't want to do this. I don't understand this.
This is power. You've been surrounded by so much power
in your life. You emanate that so profoundly. I feel
it's a hell of a survival story. It really it
wasn't you know. It wasn't like a snappy comeback. No.
(37:20):
You know. I had to learn to walk. Yeah, I
had to learn to talk because I came out of
it with a really bad stutter. I lost my depth
perception right well, everything hearing blew out in my right ear.
I mean I was walking on the tops of my
feet when I left that husband. Yeah, it's amazing, you know,
the narrative of your life that takes you from Pennsylvania
(37:43):
and like you said, a poor but not a poor
family because of everybody else, and then where you land
because Middle America, my friend is poor. Yes, it's poor. Yeah,
so's the painting that you're doing now? Is that an express? Like?
How did that? Because you didn't go to university that
(38:03):
you could have gone. I didn't go to university. Was
university and I finished and got my bachelor's degree because
I was out here and Hillary Clinton came to talk
to a bunch of us and she was like, you know,
you guys have so much power that you don't even realize.
You can do anything you want to do. You're an artist,
(38:25):
but you can go outside your art form. You can
write a song, you can do this, you can do that.
Because you have more power than you're using. You can
do whatever you want. And I started. Really, I was
sitting on the floor because so many of us came,
there weren't places to sit. So I was sitting very
near her, and I was thinking about what she was saying,
and I thought, you know what, And so I wrote
(38:48):
a song for Katrina and I wrote the title track
song for Come Together Now to Come Together Now Katrina album.
I wrote the lyrics WHOA, and I started getting people together.
I'm like, we're going to write an album for katrain them,
and everybody's like, you can't do that, and you can't
get the artists and these artists are all under contract
(39:11):
and blah blah blah, and you can't do it. And man,
let me tell you the resistance I got. And I
never really got the credit for writing the lyrics because
you have to really give up everything in order to
get anything done. But I didn't do it to get credit.
I did it to get it done right right. And
then Planet Hope, my sister Kelly and I's organization, we
(39:32):
went down there and we got those soldiers who were
holding all the supplies in the trucks because they took
the trucks down there, but then they didn't give the
stuff to the people. Okay, so the whole bullshit of
we're taking all these trucks down here, yeah, they did,
but they didn't open the trucks, so it was like
getting them to open the trucks. We also planned to
(39:52):
Hope went down there and we bought kegs of beer
right for the soldiers because guess what, that's how you
get the trucks open right, right. And then we bought
things for people that like the little things, eye class prescriptions,
how you get your diabetes, your insulin filled, how you
(40:13):
get your dentures, all the things that like the little
things that people couldn't get back right, And we did
on the ground stuff. But you know, we had a
lot of girls from New Orleans and Louisiana and we
call them are steel Magnolias. Yeah, and those girls, those
girls can get stuff done right. So we get stuff
(40:33):
done on the ground. We worked with Burlington Coat Factory.
We get coats for kids to go to school. We
work with you people to donate their seconds so we
can get shoes for these migrant workers kids. You got
to get on the ground and get in there. So
that's when I started being a lyricist because I was like,
oh wait a second, I can write songs about things
(40:55):
that matter, you know, like this Nobel Peace Prize winner
was machine gun to death in his car going to
the airport in South America because he was in a
car convoy and it was supposed to be like a
cartel guy that was was going to be hit and
they hit the wrong person. So I wrote a song
(41:15):
about that guy. What's it like to know that as
these killers are coming towards your car that that's it.
It's the end of your life. And you spent your
life about peace. You're such an artist, right, I mean,
you're such a prolific artist to owe you to thank you,
to express yourself. And so I thought, you know what,
I can do these things. So I went back to
(41:36):
college and got mine my bachelor's degree exactly because it's like, yes,
I can do this. I can do this, and I'm
going to go get my bachelor's degree. And when it
came in the mail, I was so proud, Sharon, as
we said of wrap a lunch because I can literally
(41:56):
sit with you. We're going to have many lunches together
our home and not always I obtes I have questions
for you. You do yes? Oh my god, I want
to say, who interviews you? I'm gonna come and interview
you for your interviews? Would you do that? Yes? Yes,
Bruce Bozzy Sharon Stone, Yeah, okay, you heard that. We're
gonna do that. Be an honor. Um. I've described you
(42:19):
as a champion, as a survivor, as a truth teller,
as easy on the eyes. But I'm also going to
say you're pretty chick and you have to read the
beauty to understand what that means. So pick that out.
I am and you you are very absolutely Adore you, Sharon,
(42:40):
Thank you for Thank You. Table foot You with Bruce
Bozzi is produced by iHeart Radio seven three seven Park
and Airmail. Our executive producers are Bruce Bozzi, Jonathan Hoss
Dresser and Nathan King. Table for two is edited and
(43:02):
written by Tina Mullen and researched and written by Bridget
arsenalt Our sound engineers are Emil B. Klein, Paul Bowman
and Alyssa Midcaff. Table for two's la production team is
Danielle Romo and Lorraine Viz. Our music supervisor is Randall Poster.
Our talent booking is by Jane Sarkin. Special thanks to
Amy Sugarman, Uni Cher, Kevin Yuvane, Bobby Bauer, Alison Kantor
(43:27):
Graber and Barbourne, Jen and Jeff Klein, and the staff
at the Tower Bar in the world famous Sunset Tower Hotel.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We are back at the Sunset Tower Hotel on a glorious, sunny,
yet very cool and crisp day in Los Angeles. We're
about to have lunch with one of the most beautiful
people in Hollywood. And I don't just mean physically, because
she's gorgeous, but also inside. Sharon Stone, Oscar nominated actress,
a Golden Globe winner, the star of Casino, basic instinct.
(00:28):
It's super fun, it's super show. We actually eat, so
I hope you're hungry. I am good. I'm so happy
to see you. Thank you me too. But what I
love about Sharon, what inspires me about Sharon, it's her
commitment to our community, my community, the LGBTQ plus community.
She has been an advocate for raising awareness with HIV AIDS.
(00:48):
She has been the face and the fundraiser for am FAR,
the American Federation for AIDS Research is a big deal,
and she's stood in the fourth of making sure women
and men get paid the same. She's just a rock
star and we're doing We're doing fries, nice and crispy,
(01:13):
leaning in. You're leaning in, So pull up and relax
and grab your rose and get ready. Because she also
is super cool and a fun, outspoken person. High Sharon Stone,
(01:34):
you were here on table for two and we're having
lunch together. This is a dream and have lunch with
you anytime, would you? Yes? Yes, I think we should
just talk. N Why are we not? This is like
the thing with La, like we should just have lunches
and chill out. Yes, you are so much to me,
And I'm gonna tell you a little story. So the
(01:55):
first time I saw you, you don't know, but it
was nineteen ninety two. It was brunch my fame. Who's
on Third? Remember Who's on Third? That restaurant? Joanne? Yep, Yeah,
And you were sitting there with a bunch of guys
and I remember looking at you and being like, she's
(02:17):
so beautiful, she's amazing, and what you did. So I'd
like to sort of begin our conversation today because this
is all about just a connection. And what I believe
is the beauty of a meal is the romance of
the meal. You know, I was young. People forget that.
They forget that, they forget that. It's like people don't
(02:40):
ask each other for dates anymore, and they want to
text and hook up. Yeah, it's like they don't romance.
They don't seduce. They don't. It's not interesting. Frankly, it isn't.
It's everything we had growing up. Yeah, it was so.
It was titillating. It was like you didn't know there
(03:00):
was poetry. It was poetry, right, A beautiful word to you. Yes,
I mean at that time you were hitting, you were becoming,
which we'll talk about who ran off with my name
and identity, But what you were also doing, which led
to was you are a truth teller. I am so.
(03:23):
I am not out here looking to get people, as
I'm a very big Sheryl Lead Ralph fan. Like I've
known Cheryl Sheryl. I've known Chryl since we were kids
in waiting rooms trying out for the same jobs in Manhattan.
And she's the most warm, loving, generous kind. You know.
(03:46):
The first time I met her, she had a bag
of liquorice wheels and I was sitting next to her
right sharing her liquorice wheels. And let's order some lunch.
You have to eat, you boy, you have a face
to paint. To look at that face and stuff. No,
(04:09):
you have no face to paint. Um, bam, bam, you
know anything. This is lunch, babe. Well, I'm going to
have the Tower Burger because it's so anza. Yeah, And
do you have any gluten free thing you can stick
it on like a breath, let us wrap. I'll do
(04:34):
the gluten free bread toasted, well toasted. I like the
burgger medium. I like those onions you saute them, right,
I like that? And do you want cheddar or cheese
greer we're doing We're doing fries nice and nice and crispy.
(04:57):
Leaning in, you're leaning in and you know I do
my my classic, my chop salad with chicken. Yeah, I'm
digging it, Okay. I like I'll have sparkling sparkling water
and maybe I'll have an iced coffee. You're going on
right now? Say again, just just I'll have milk on
(05:20):
the sign. I know, I am. I've had two already.
Like I'm like Jack Jo, I'm sitting here with so well.
I was really leaning into your sort of amazing commitment
to am far into raising the awareness, to the amount
of money and to your commitment to HIV AIDS and
(05:40):
what you've done as a human. It's breast cancer home
listeners like always, I mean, it was that always a
part of it was a part of my upbringing. Right, Yeah,
it was a big part of my upbringing. You know,
it's not like I came from wealth, Nope, but I
(06:02):
in my universe, we weren't poor. It's hard to explain
that when you'd say, like my dad made fourteen grand
a year, but we weren't poor. So I grew up
in a very small rural community where, like, you know,
we were like ninety people my school. Right, kids drove
(06:24):
their tractors to school in the morning after they finished
their farm tours. Right. So we had two acres, which
is two two and a half acres, which is a
big parcel of land when it has next to it
a ravine with its own stream, where we would walk
(06:46):
down the edge of the ravine and you know, get
the ice in the winter and put it in a
bucket and have fun making ice cream in the basement
with that with the crank thing. And my dad built
a treehouse on the side of the ravine with a
back door that had a rope with knots and we
could jump out and swing across the ravine. And he
put bunk beds in the treehouse. And you know, when
(07:08):
lightning stuck struck that tree, he brought it down with
a pulley and made it into a playhouse. From my
sister and Marianne, you know what I mean, very idyllic
kind of childhood. But we had neighbors, you know, and
neighbored by neighbors, I mean like a mile away who
(07:30):
had eight kids and were much poorer than we were.
So we provided their Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and it
was like a secret like that, we drove with the
lights out in the car and put it on their
doorstep and put their presence and that kind of stuff,
and it was really great. And when my parents went
(07:53):
to somebody's house for dinner, they left early, and of
course my mother per usual, had a wet wash cloth
up in a plastic bag in her bag, and they
would stop in a field and my dad would walk
out into the field with a big newspapers and he
would cut a gigantic bundle of wild flowers and bundle
(08:16):
them with binders twine and put them in the back
of the car, and then my mom would wash his
hands into with the washcloth in her thing and they
would wrap it with you know. That's what they would
take for dinner, was this gigantic bundle of wild flowers.
That was a romance of My parents were wildly in
love with each other's beautiful I mean, they fell in love.
(08:37):
She got pregnant at sixteen, he was seventeen. They both
had no parents. You know, my dad came from an
extremely wealthy oil family, and the oil well blew when
he was little, when he was four and killed everybody.
And then they were suddenly went from great wealth to destitution,
(08:59):
right you said, or his nephew or somebody took over
the business. And his nephew, who was eighteen, Yeah, because women,
even though my grandmother's money was in this, women didn't
get the money. And this is why my dad became
such a diehard feminist, because the eighteen year old nephew
got all the money, and of course blew it at
(09:20):
the track sous so a couple of years and everybody
was completely broke. And you know, my dad just could
not fathom that his mother, who was my Grandmaalela, who
was tough as nails. I mean, this is a woman
who walked her property in a Chapparelli suit with her
(09:43):
German shepherd Rex in his studded collar, in her black
jack and her other hand. You know, but she wasn't
getting her due because she was certainly capable and tough
enough to handle it. Yeah, reading about your childhood was
absolutely amazing because I to lose everything, right, Yeah, you know,
you'll lose everything, and you what you have to constantly
(10:04):
remember is you don't lose everything, right. You'll lose stuff, right, stuff, Yeah, yeah,
and the crocodiles will give it to you, and the
crocodiles will take it away. And the great thing is,
as long as the crocodiles don't get you, you're You're
a guy. So now you're like this movie star. And
(10:29):
now you're also because it's in your DNA, you're leaning in,
you're giving back, You're you're separating, You're not so because
at that time, Oh, that's the point of fame, I think, yeah, right,
is it's you've got this big purple dinosaur hanging onto
you everywhere you go. If that dinosaur isn't working for
(10:50):
you and for the people, yeah, it's gonna eat you.
What was you're leaning into? Hiv aids? Well, I was
in can and I got asked to fill in for
a night for Elizabeth Taylor, and it was an incredibly
moving experience. I mean, mind blowing because while I had
(11:14):
been in the modeling industry, which has been very good
to me, very good to me when I was nineteen
in New York, and which I can say is the
business where I have really learned the most. I have
learned more about myself and others in that business than
(11:34):
anywhere in the world. It's taken me around the world,
It's introduced me to more people, and there's more loyalty
and family and we have to get down to work
in that business than in any other business I've ever
worked in. But not all of these businesses are kind back.
(11:58):
But in my business when the modeling business, we look
out for each other and we don't want the business
to just go by the wayside, and we want to
look out for each other. At least I do, and
I can say I have tremendous respect for people like
Anna Wintour and these photographers that have carried endless pounds
(12:22):
of cameras on their backs for their whole lives. And
like I do in the movie business, when I see
people dragging cable and the rain is coming down and
then I'm not on set, I would be inclined to
drag some cable. Anna sat with me at lunch. And
she's an incredible woman. She has your passion and your
(12:43):
romance for her work, and so generous, yeah, and so elegant.
And believe me, I didn't understand her when I was
a young person. She's a very shy, ye shy woman. Yes, okay,
So you're the modeling and leaning into the HIV aids. Well,
when they asked me to come back, they after I
(13:06):
did the first one, and they said would I do
three more years? And because I recognized that Elizabeth was
winding down and her ability to continue to do it,
and so I said sure, I would do three more years.
And I said, um, gorgeous, thank you. That's the way
(13:30):
that you enjoy Thank you so much. Well, of course
I said sure, most for ours, right Okay, So I
said sure I would do three more years. And you know,
I'm a problem solver. You are you are a problem
(13:56):
I'm a person that gets that stuff off my desk.
I'm a person and that you know, if something needs
to get done, I do it today. I'm a person that, like,
if there's an issue, I'm not the person that like
likes to talk around it. If someone's doing something that's
just bullshit. I'm like the person that calls bullshit. I'm
(14:18):
you are a truth teller. I really am. And I
know it concerns people. Yeah, of course it really concerned that. No,
they don't. And frankly, I don't always like it. I
don't like that I'm not, you know more suave people
are lauded for diplomacy, but I think there's a lot
(14:39):
of time wasted with people not talking about what's really
actually going on. You know. My dad always used to say,
you know, I like give it to me with the
bark on right, and people think that it's cruel a
lot when you just say it the way that it is.
(14:59):
I I feel like, if I really respect you, I'm
gonna tell it like it is. Yeah, And if I
don't respect you, I don't really care what you think
or what you if you want to know or anything,
because it's not worth my time to get into it
with you because you're not going to get it. And
(15:20):
why bother. I mean, it's digging because we're gonna and
that's not it, you know. And I think that one
of the things that's consistent with what you can see
with your life and your career is your ability to
tell the truth and say this is no, no, no no,
(15:41):
this is not the way this is going to go down.
Like right, I see it as it is, and I
think that that is so refreshing you like that. I mean, come, um,
which I love I love about I really admire that, Sharon,
about you. And I've seen it from the distance that
(16:03):
you know, I find it so interesting how like it.
I see that it's gotten you in trouble like of course,
because people don't want because they want people to fit
in their their zones, you know, like their their buckets.
And then all of a sudden you have you. But
have you come with all the smarts, his brain, his body,
(16:24):
this beauty that's threatening? I think, well truth right, no, right,
(16:50):
Welcome back to my lunch with Sharon Stone on table
for two with burger in hand and some crispy fries.
Sharon told me about a wardrobe emergency that took place
right before a pretty major award show. I mean, you
tell a story which I thought was interesting. You get
to can your bag is lost. No one, all these
(17:13):
actresses are around with, you know, clothes on racks, and
no one wants to give you shit because you're a threat.
You know what I mean, like, can you tell me
about that. I'm so interesting because I think that's that's
a thing that you've been able to sort of beautifully
(17:33):
navigate in your life. When I went to can the
first time and yeah, bags didn't come. Yeah, but you
also know, navigating people who want to push backron you
and I didn't. And I didn't have any money, and
I couldn't buy new clothes, so I had to keep
figuring out how to make what I had on in
(17:53):
just sixteen different outfits. You. But it's like when I
first got invited to the Oscars, right before Basic Instinct
had come out. Movie hadn't come out, so no one
would lend me a dress. And then it came out
like a few days right before the Oscars or something,
(18:15):
and I was going to present, but no one would
give me a dress. It was unbelievable because I didn't
have any money to buy anything. And I was like,
oh my god, all these people in their forty thousand
and fifty thousand dollars dresses. And I went and bought
it Betsy Johnson jumpsuit because that was it, a polyester jumpsuit.
(18:38):
That was the best I could do. And I'm doing
my own hair and makeup right, And I was just
like wow, like this is awful, Like how am I
going to do this? Right? But then I got there
and I was like in the fourth or fifth row back,
which was really good. Yeah, And I was on the
aisle and I was seated right behind Anthony Hopkin, and
(19:00):
when I walked by, he put his hands together and
put them over his head like champion and held them
up to me when I passed him, and I was like,
oh my god, right, he saw my movie, right, and
he's giving me that right thing, the champion, Like yes, right.
(19:21):
And I told my dad and my dad was like, kid,
you could look good in the burlaps, that's right at
the end of the day. And I was like, oh right.
And so after that, I thought, you know, it doesn't matter.
I could wear a T shirt to the Oscars and
so I did. Right. Well, I mean two things. One
(19:41):
is yeah, that's you know, your strength, your power of
mind and beauty and you and you so you're like, okay,
you did not go, you went. You threw it on.
Hopkins is saying, yes, the world's about to see you
in a major way. What did it feel like and
how did that journey, the lack of effing generosity of
(20:05):
people when you're sitting in a room you got, you
got yourself in that room, and now you have the
lack of generosity, Like, but you didn't use Joe's not
to leave the room. You're like, I'm here, and that's
what to me is Well, it was hard because when
I got I got nominated for a Golden Globe for
that part. And when I went to the Golden Globes
(20:26):
and they called my name, a bunch of people in
the room laughed. It was horrible. It was horrible. It
was horrible. Oh my god, it was horrible. I was
so humiliated. I was so humiliated. And I was like,
does anybody have any idea how hard it was to
(20:48):
play that part? How gut wrenching and it's frightening, and
how much work it was to play this part and
kind of try to carry this complaint ex movie that
was really breaking all boundaries and everybody was protesting against
and the pressure and I auditioned for it for nine months,
(21:13):
which I can't go over. They offered it to thirteen
other people and now you're laughing at me. I was
just like, oh my god, I just wanted to crawl
into a hole, you know, yeah, no, of course you did.
And then you know, I lost custody of my child
when the judge asked my child, my tiny, little tiny boy,
(21:33):
do you know your mother makes sex movies? Like this
kind of abuse by this system, this kind of abuse
that I was considered what kind of parent I was?
Because I made that movie. People are walking around with
no clothes on at all on regular TV now and
(21:55):
you saw maybe like maybe like sixteenth of a second
of possible nudity of me right right, right and now.
And I was custody. I was custody of my child.
How did you survive that? Are you kidding? I ended
up in the Mayo clinic with extra heartbeats in my
(22:18):
upper and lower chamber of my heart. I did not
know that when you say break your heart, yea, it
broke my heart. It broke your heart. Literally, that broke
right the whole thing. Yes, upper and lower chambers, it
broke my heart. I went in to get a mammogram
and they're like, something's wrong. We need you to do
(22:39):
a treadmill test. And I'm like what. All the doctors
came running in, They're like, whoa that's crazy, Sharon. And
if you look, if you look at that moment, would
that happened today? We have a whole different right now
we're put through the Ringer'd be illegal. You were playing
a part like what you said was when an audience
comes to see a movie versus like one critic comments
(23:01):
to see a movie like you know, we come. I mean,
you know the guy that played Jeffrey Dalmer. No one
thinks that he's a people who eats people? Right? Do
you know what I mean? As he said, you know,
this is a very hard part to play. It was
very hard to watch. I hope we got something from it, right,
Its eaters exactly. It doesn't turn him into a serial
(23:22):
killer who eats people or make him an antisocial person.
It makes a very complex person who took an incredibly
difficult part which probably made him ill to play. Sure,
it is brutal to play these characters. Oh yeah, And
this is why I don't play them anymore. I don't
(23:42):
want to. And it's one thing for the audience not
to understand that piece. If you're an actor, what you
have to go through. But it's a whole another story
when you're your peers and you're the people in the
business are not understanding that, and like you're losing custody
and you have the legal system. I mean you're like,
wait a minute, I mean you know this is my job,
(24:02):
Like this is oh I hate to do and none
of you know. The fact that you went through it
is absolutely and literally it sort of ended my dating
world because men were afraid of you. And I also
think that men didn't want to data woman that other
men thought of like that right, and that's also a
(24:23):
failure of the male. Yeah reality, sure, that's your own shit.
Yeah really, yeah, I can't wade through that situation. Then
you go on and you go on to what is
(24:44):
like one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen,
which is of course in Casino, and here you are.
Now I was so blessed. Come on, you're working like
you're working with de Niro, You're working with Frans actorking
with Peshi in the business, the greatest director of all times. Yes,
and there you are, that beautiful face, that incredible performance,
(25:09):
that whole thing, that whole transformation from like when you
exerts the drugs and it goes dark and everything. First
of all, I love that movie. I love that movie.
I mean, and I love those guys. I love that
Nick Poleggi script. Yeah, Nick Poggi, he's amazing. So tell
me about that tray. So you go from ninety two
(25:29):
to ninety five and then you end up back in
the room where they laughed at you. You win a glow,
You're nominated for an Oscar. How does that feel? It
was super surprised. I mean, they told me we can
run you for supporting actress, you'll win the Oscar. You
can't win for a leading lady. That they're never gonna
let you get a leading lady Oscar. They're never gonna
(25:53):
let you get because of the size of the part,
because it was you, because it was me and I.
But I am the leading lady in the film, right,
So I want to run for leading Lady. And they said,
but you won't win, and I said, I don't care.
I'm not in it to win it. That's not the
(26:13):
point here. The point is the actual work that I
did right. And I did the work. You did the
leading lady work for five months with Robert de Niro
and Joe Pesci and James Woods. Right, I did the
work right. So I'm going to be in the category
for the work that I did, right, I'm not in
(26:35):
it so that you'll say, oh, okay, right, okay, Sar,
if you could have it, you can have the statue.
Right now, I'm in the lane that I drove in
perfectly and thanks. So I didn't expect to get the
(26:56):
oscar because people don't think of me as an actress,
you know. They don't think of me as a person
who loves her craft, you know what I mean. Because
I don't walk around saying that. I don't walk around
saying like I'm a dramatic actress. I don't walk around
(27:18):
having discussions on TV about my dramatic acting. Right. I
don't talk about my art for right, because I don't
think of it like that at all. To me. I know, Greta,
(27:40):
Greta Garbo is looking at me like a literally, which
is more. I used to have dinner with her and
not with her. This is so wonderful. She lived like
three blocks from me in New York when I was
a young girl. She used to walk around New York
her big hat and her big coat and her goloshes
(28:03):
and me too, and we would go to this restaurant
that was between our houses and sit alone at tables,
facing each other, really, and we had dinner in this
same restaurant, facing each other dozens of times. You're blowing
me away. And I never spoke to her, and she
(28:24):
never spoke to me. But alone in this restaurant, I
sat with Greta Garbo. Wow, and that's the universe again, right,
And she's looking at me like you're trying to explain this.
I know, Greta Garbo. I feel like Grega Garbo right now.
It's like trying to explain how the wind meets the trees.
(28:44):
You're like, what I do. And this is why I
love playing people that already lived, because I feel like
I opened my soul and let them talk through me.
And so I'm not a dramatic actress. I am a
spiritual conduit. And when I have the extraordinary pleasure and
(29:10):
honor of receiving a script that is actually intended for me,
I know it when I get it, and I feel
like I knew it when I got the Casino script.
They didn't know it when I got the Casino script,
and they were seeing so many other people really, and
I was just like, I'm going to wait till they're
(29:31):
done with that. Yeah, I love that. I love your
ability to take a step back because I also feel
like one of the big things in life is timing
when you were seeing and to say, like, I'm supposed
to play Phillis Stiller, and I know that, like I'm
sitting here with you, right, I just know it. That's fantastic.
Like there are people I'm supposed to play. It's going
(29:53):
to happen or they're going to miss it. Right. I
was great friends with Phillis. I went to her house,
I had dinner with her multitudes of time. She taught
me her laugh. You know, I know I was supposed
to play her. She didn't even get famous at all
until she was in her forties. I'm supposed to play Phyllis.
I love, Like, like literature, I'm going to take a
(30:16):
picture of it, like so I could post it and
show people like you're trying to explain, yes, she really is,
and that you have all those moments. It was just
so wonderful. I would sit in this table that was
to the like the left front, and she would sit
on the back right looking forward, and I would sit
(30:37):
in the left front looking back, and I used to
just think This is so great My Dinners with Garbo.
(31:05):
Welcome back to Table for two. As I mentioned at
the beginning of the show, one of the amazing and
endearing things about Sharon Stone is that she is so outspoken.
Sharon talks very candidly about the harring events at the
heart of her book, The Beauty of Living Twice. So
in your memoir, you know, you're very honest about when
(31:27):
you were in your early forties and you had the
brain emerge and like that whole experience. It's so rivening.
I'm telling you read this book and one of The
Beauty of Living Twice available on amazone in any Star
exactly good fun. The fact that you share that you
crossed over and you saw people you love made me
(31:49):
feel so at peace. Oh you should feel at peace
and even though you got the kick in the chest
to come back. Yeah, so I'd like to know about
that and your grandmother coming saying don't move your yeah,
this is These are like things because you and then
your strength to say what are you doing here as
you're being wheeled in, don't do that? This is I
(32:11):
need to know more about this operation before you do it, Like,
tell me about those things. That. So, first of all,
when this happened to me, I felt very disenfranchised. I
was not getting the help that I needed. So I
didn't get to the hospital for three days of this
brain blead home. I was home, Yeah, and I was
(32:34):
calling and trying and asking and begging and bleeding and
wanting to get to the hospital, but couldn't get there. Eventually,
when I got to the hospital and I had the
first MRI and they discovered the brain blead and they
realized how long it had been going on, I was
in really bad shape. Yeah, that's where I had the
(32:55):
initial what I call like the white out, you know,
where I was dying and coming back. They then immediately
transferred me to a hospital that had a neurological I
see you, and a neurological I see you is just
a wheel, a circle around a nurse's station. It's not
(33:18):
they're not rooms, and there's just ae drape separating each person.
And it's an incredibly traumatic environment for many reasons, one
of which is the neurological pain is unbelievably painful. First
of all, you don't even know where it is because
it's all over the place, and it's inside and outside
(33:40):
of your body. So when it was happening, I was
actually holding outside my head. I was holding above my
head like I was holding yes in the crown chakra
above my head. I was holding this space outside my
head and holding onto it like it was sitting on
top of my head screaming. I think I was holding
(34:02):
my beingness, which was literally outside my body. And so
after a few days of this screaming because they had
missed it when they went in, well, they went in
it through my phemeral artery and scanned and missed my
why this was happening to me. So I'd been laying
(34:22):
on one side, which was less painful, so the blood
had pulled on the opposite side of my head, so
they didn't know what was going on. And that's really
heavy when everybody screaming and you're all fighting for your
life or all of our beds are on scales and
it's your body mass that they're measuring, right, So I
(34:43):
lost eighteen percent of my body mass in the nine
days I was in there. And you can only have
like a guest at a time, and so my friends,
my family are there. I had like my really my
ride or die, best friend Donna Shavo. She slept in
an alcove of a window in the hospital the entire week.
(35:06):
You know, my mother sat outside the room. It was unreal,
and I didn't meet and I didn't know what to do,
and for some reason, they weren't putting me on nutrition. Yeah.
I'm like about to ask you you're not you don't
have an IVY with I'm satly yeah right, but like,
I don't know what's going on. And my dad became
so desperate and so he really, my dad, God rest,
(35:31):
it is amazing. So he said, would you have a milkshake, honey?
And I'm like, okay, Dad. He went to the store,
he bought the milkshake, the ice cream, he bought ice,
he bought milk. He went home, he made me a milkshake.
He put it in a mason jar, packed it in ice,
(35:53):
brought it to the hospital and fed it to me. Wow, okay, yeah,
says everything right, Yeah right, I think because you know,
my dad got a stop at Joe Cancer after that. Yeah.
And I always said, you know that my dad, I know,
(36:14):
said the prayer that I say for my children, which
is give it to me. Yeah, give it to me.
But any parent wants of course you say give it
to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that my dad
got sick because he said, give it to me, let
her live, give it to me. Yeah. Wow. Sure. And
(36:35):
I just think that that's what we do as barons.
We say, give me the drama, give me what it is,
let me garriott, let me help them, yeah, take me,
take me. Yeah. But you were able to, I mean,
between the stories of your mom and your dad and
your dad doing that the strength the survivor, and you
to be also to have the voice, because so many
(36:58):
of us don't have the voice, the courage to say no,
I don't want to do this. I don't understand this.
This is power. You've been surrounded by so much power
in your life. You emanate that so profoundly. I feel
it's a hell of a survival story. It really it
wasn't you know. It wasn't like a snappy comeback. No.
(37:20):
You know. I had to learn to walk. Yeah, I
had to learn to talk because I came out of
it with a really bad stutter. I lost my depth
perception right well, everything hearing blew out in my right ear.
I mean I was walking on the tops of my
feet when I left that husband. Yeah, it's amazing, you know,
the narrative of your life that takes you from Pennsylvania
(37:43):
and like you said, a poor but not a poor
family because of everybody else, and then where you land
because Middle America, my friend is poor. Yes, it's poor. Yeah,
so's the painting that you're doing now? Is that an express? Like?
How did that? Because you didn't go to university that
(38:03):
you could have gone. I didn't go to university. Was
university and I finished and got my bachelor's degree because
I was out here and Hillary Clinton came to talk
to a bunch of us and she was like, you know,
you guys have so much power that you don't even realize.
You can do anything you want to do. You're an artist,
(38:25):
but you can go outside your art form. You can
write a song, you can do this, you can do that.
Because you have more power than you're using. You can
do whatever you want. And I started. Really, I was
sitting on the floor because so many of us came,
there weren't places to sit. So I was sitting very
near her, and I was thinking about what she was saying,
and I thought, you know what, And so I wrote
(38:48):
a song for Katrina and I wrote the title track
song for Come Together Now to Come Together Now Katrina album.
I wrote the lyrics WHOA, and I started getting people together.
I'm like, we're going to write an album for katrain them,
and everybody's like, you can't do that, and you can't
get the artists and these artists are all under contract
(39:11):
and blah blah blah, and you can't do it. And man,
let me tell you the resistance I got. And I
never really got the credit for writing the lyrics because
you have to really give up everything in order to
get anything done. But I didn't do it to get credit.
I did it to get it done right right. And
then Planet Hope, my sister Kelly and I's organization, we
(39:32):
went down there and we got those soldiers who were
holding all the supplies in the trucks because they took
the trucks down there, but then they didn't give the
stuff to the people. Okay, so the whole bullshit of
we're taking all these trucks down here, yeah, they did,
but they didn't open the trucks, so it was like
getting them to open the trucks. We also planned to
(39:52):
Hope went down there and we bought kegs of beer
right for the soldiers because guess what, that's how you
get the trucks open right, right. And then we bought
things for people that like the little things, eye class prescriptions,
how you get your diabetes, your insulin filled, how you
(40:13):
get your dentures, all the things that like the little
things that people couldn't get back right, And we did
on the ground stuff. But you know, we had a
lot of girls from New Orleans and Louisiana and we
call them are steel Magnolias. Yeah, and those girls, those
girls can get stuff done right. So we get stuff
(40:33):
done on the ground. We worked with Burlington Coat Factory.
We get coats for kids to go to school. We
work with you people to donate their seconds so we
can get shoes for these migrant workers kids. You got
to get on the ground and get in there. So
that's when I started being a lyricist because I was like,
oh wait a second, I can write songs about things
(40:55):
that matter, you know, like this Nobel Peace Prize winner
was machine gun to death in his car going to
the airport in South America because he was in a
car convoy and it was supposed to be like a
cartel guy that was was going to be hit and
they hit the wrong person. So I wrote a song
(41:15):
about that guy. What's it like to know that as
these killers are coming towards your car that that's it.
It's the end of your life. And you spent your
life about peace. You're such an artist, right, I mean,
you're such a prolific artist to owe you to thank you,
to express yourself. And so I thought, you know what,
I can do these things. So I went back to
(41:36):
college and got mine my bachelor's degree exactly because it's like, yes,
I can do this. I can do this, and I'm
going to go get my bachelor's degree. And when it
came in the mail, I was so proud, Sharon, as
we said of wrap a lunch because I can literally
(41:56):
sit with you. We're going to have many lunches together
our home and not always I obtes I have questions
for you. You do yes? Oh my god, I want
to say, who interviews you? I'm gonna come and interview
you for your interviews? Would you do that? Yes? Yes,
Bruce Bozzy Sharon Stone, Yeah, okay, you heard that. We're
gonna do that. Be an honor. Um. I've described you
(42:19):
as a champion, as a survivor, as a truth teller,
as easy on the eyes. But I'm also going to
say you're pretty chick and you have to read the
beauty to understand what that means. So pick that out.
I am and you you are very absolutely Adore you, Sharon,
(42:40):
Thank you for Thank You. Table foot You with Bruce
Bozzi is produced by iHeart Radio seven three seven Park
and Airmail. Our executive producers are Bruce Bozzi, Jonathan Hoss
Dresser and Nathan King. Table for two is edited and
(43:02):
written by Tina Mullen and researched and written by Bridget
arsenalt Our sound engineers are Emil B. Klein, Paul Bowman
and Alyssa Midcaff. Table for two's la production team is
Danielle Romo and Lorraine Viz. Our music supervisor is Randall Poster.
Our talent booking is by Jane Sarkin. Special thanks to
Amy Sugarman, Uni Cher, Kevin Yuvane, Bobby Bauer, Alison Kantor
(43:27):
Graber and Barbourne, Jen and Jeff Klein, and the staff
at the Tower Bar in the world famous Sunset Tower Hotel.
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