Sharon Stone: “Time does not exist”

This article is published in issue 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 26, 2022

I interviewed Sharon Stone at night, in the dark, with a nine-hour time zone, stuck on a sofa with a broken knee, awaiting surgery. I felt very heroic in my suffering, until I read her autobiography, The beauty of living twice, and I realized I was a half saw instead. Sharon Stone had been struck by lightning as a child, nearly decapitated while taming a horse, had dislocated her shoulder, had a tooth devitalized in a trailer without anesthesia, had undergone a full jaw reconstruction, a ruptured ovarian cyst, and in the In 2001, she had had a brain aneurysm so severe that it risked death, and it had deprived her of short-term memory for a long time. She was clearly a superior being. Her radiance, her style and her image had populated a good chunk of my youth. I had grown up with her iconic covers and looks.

I imagined we would immerse ourselves in a glittering world of sex And scandals the nineties. Maybe he would tell me about how the producers of Basic Instinct had they tricked her into taking off her panties – for the legendary leg crossover scene – by telling her that her nakedness wouldn’t show on the screen? Or maybe you would have revealed the identity of the Italian director from whom you had received unsuitable proposals? (When she chilled him by telling him that women now had too much self-love to do certain things, he replied: “The next round I wish you a mother who loves you”). Would we talk about her about her iron will, about her outsized IQ and about when as a child she sensed her destiny as her star? Or about that time, shortly after the release of Basic Instinct, that strangers jumped into her car while she was stopped at a traffic light? Or the other one in which she, chased by fans, she had to hide in the kitchen of a restaurant with her best friend while the cook misled the crowd? I had lost my mind for Casino, whose glittering opulence of the seventies I had adored, the meticulous research work. I fell in love with Ginger who sailed through that betting hall enchanting everyone, wrapped in her 15 kilos of semi-transparent dress in gold and sequins. But she was expecting a surprise for me. Instead of haute couture embroidery and covers by Vogueand perhaps thanks to the nocturnal intimacy in contrast with the light of the Los Angeles desert that filtered through the windows of his house, almost philosophical discourses on the nature of ache and the transformative power of medical surgeryon the Buddhism and on the possibility that the world is saved by those who agree to inhabit a hostile body. She is the first to clearly admit that the old reality is long gone. To try to understand the chaos of the present, she says, it is necessary to throw oneself forward with a goal, without giving in to nostalgia for a past that now seems to be another geological era.

How does a person with his past, and who has touched death several times, to re-emerge from the traumas so bright?
“I have learned that in extreme pain you have to enter it. You can’t resist. There comes a time when it becomes unsustainable, and no medicine can help. The only way is to go through it and try to suspend time. Expand it ».

When I feel pain I’m not dying to dilate time, but I understand what you mean.
“It has always happened to me after surgery, and my relationship with doctors has often been complicated. Pain can be a guide, but first you need to understand how the chakras work, and how to get the energy moving between them. It is a path. Working on breathing is very useful, whether the “discomfort” comes from the body, or from the two together. Even because…”.

…this is usually the case.
“I’ve had pain in my side for over twenty years, and for years the doctors have called me hysterical.”

A doctor told me a short time ago too. It happens to a lot of women I know.
“There is a statistic that women who seek treatment from a male doctor would have a 33% higher chance of dying. With me the doctors always played down, they said that the pain was imaginary. In the nineteenth century, for such things, women were interned. They extracted his teeth as a prevention, because then many ailments stemmed from the teeth. The reasoning was: if in doubt, let’s take them off. Whether it was menstrual or pregnancy problems, the first thing they did to a woman was to pull out all of her teeth. And to men? Of course not!”.

I heard her say that theageism towards more mature women comes from the fact that after forty we become stronger.
“True, but the same happens to men. Which after forty, moreover, mature. They come to understand who they are, and stop struggling like idiots here and there. The difference is that a woman, having reached that point, wants to share her experience with a peer of hers. It’s not that we suddenly feel the need to get together with a 20-year-old to feel strong and in harmony with the universe. It is not like that for men. “