Sharon Stone Covers INSTYLE’s ‘Confidence’ Issue

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Sharon Stone has finally grasped what had been eluding her for so long: boundaries, peace, and control. For the cover of InStyle’s Confidence Issue, the Hollywood icon poses in front of her very own artwork and opens up about being ill-prepared for instant stardom and the business of being famous. Reflecting on her legendary career, she shares an unfiltered inside look at a variety of wild moments, including the time when the police showed up at her doorstep while O.J. Simpson was taking part in the best-known car chase in American history, pitching her own version of the Barbie movie decades ago, and helping to start the Homeless Not Toothless charity organization that’s been made famous on Bravo’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

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On the warped expectations of fame that people had for her years ago:

“It’s very expensive to be famous,” Stone tells me now. The house she closed on from the nondescript hotel, the staff she hired to keep her safe, the publicists, the makeup artists, the managers—it added up. “You go out to dinner, and there’s 15 people at the table, and who gets the check? You get the $3,000 dinner check every single time.”

“At least now [people] understand that Jennifer Lawrence can’t just skip onto an airplane,” she says, pushing her black frame glasses up over a mop of still-platinum hair. “Nicole Kidman can’t jump onto Delta. Sharon Stone can’t do it either, whether or not she’s doing a lot of movies. [People] think, ‘What have you been in?’ And it’s like, Dude, they know me in the Amazon rainforest. It’s tampons, Q-tips, and Sharon Stone.”

On trying to get her own version of Barbie made decades ago: The pitch did not go over well. This was “back in the white hot days, back when Jesus lived,” she says, grinning. “They took us out of the studio like we were on fire.” She was thrilled to see Gerwig and Robbie—whom she lovingly calls her “movie daughter”—triumph where she had been thwarted. “It makes me want to cry, actually,” Stone says, “because I think of all the times I sat at my kitchen table, thinking, This is f—ing torture. I was banging my head against this supposedly glass ceiling, but it felt like it was made of f—ing concrete.”
On waking up from plastic surgery to an unexpected result: 
Not long before the stroke, Stone had reconstructive surgery. Doctors had found benign, but large tumors in both breasts and removed them. When she was reasonably healed, she went to see a plastics guru. She woke up from the surgery to find entirely unfamiliar boobs attached to her chest. Her doctor had wanted to make her more proportional—bigger breasts to match her hips. “We decided that it would fit better,” he told her.

“I was standing there deciding if my fist would look good in his teeth,” Stone remembers. “I had rage for him.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

On moving on after her divorce, which she describes as torture: “I made an altar, and I sat at that altar, and I worked with many people to teach me forgiveness,” she says. “You can’t bite into the seed of bitterness. Once you bite it, you can’t spit it out anymore.”

On setting boundaries: “I found limits,” she says. “There’s a limit to me. For so long, everybody wanted me to be all things to all people because I was the limitless Sharon Stone. F— that bullshit.”

On helping to start the Homeless Not Toothless charity organization: “I wanted to call it something else,” she says, with a sigh, “but Jay [Dr. Jay Grossman] insisted that it be called Homeless Not Toothless.”

On why Casino was such a hit: “You wanna know why?” Stone asks, devilishly. “Marty Scorsese is a f—ing genius. Robert De Niro is one of the greatest actors who has ever lived. And guess who is a really good actress?”

On covering Leonardo DiCaprio’s fee for The Quick and the Dead: “I wanted to be in a great movie, not a stupid movie,” she says, “so I got the best people to surround me that I possibly could.” Later, she defended her decision to a bewildered producer. “I get this isn’t man-think,” she told him, “but concentric thinking is how women think.” She paid DiCaprio $1 million—a full third of her own check. Before she made that fact public in her book, she suspects he had no idea. “Leo was a kid,” Stone says. He would sit in her trailer and do impersonations of her. Her sister was with her on set in Arizona when DiCaprio turned 18. “We took him go-karting [to celebrate].”

[Photo Credit: Eric Michael Roy/InStyle]

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