NO
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BY
PETER KURTH
The
summer of 1996 will be remembered for two things. It was the summer NASA scientists found life
on Mars and the summer Demi Moore disappeared.
It's my belief that these events are connected, and that a galactic
conspiracy has been revealed.
Consider
the facts. As recently as June, you
couldn't walk through a supermarket or flip on the television without catching sight
of Demi. Her rock-jawed countenance
stared out from a thousand magazine covers.
Her hair shimmered and her breasts spun around in endless trailers for
her last film, Striptease. She
bit her lip and squirted tears on talk shows, delivering sound-bite statements
on everything from marriage and motherhood to interior design and her
dysfunctional childhood, not missing a beat when she got down to "what's
really important" for "a working mom" like herself. And now she's gone -- poof! -- just like that.
Check
it out for yourselves. I spent an hour
at the magazine rack the other day looking for signs of Moorean
life, flipping through People, Cosmo, Vogue and InStyle, scanning the tabloids, perusing Premiere. On a hunch, I tried The New Yorker, since
it was The New Yorker's clever editor, Tina Brown, who gave Demi Moore
her biggest celebrity by slapping her naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity
Fair and helping concoct the legend that Demi is beautiful, talented and
interesting.
But
no: even Tina’s deserted the fold, training her famous nose for trends onto
more important things -- Chechnya, for example, and the inmost thoughts of
Courtney Love. Exhausted, I fell to the
floor, lost in a tide of shiny paper and Calvin Klein advertisements, wondering
how it was possible for a star of Demi's magnitude to
dim so quickly. Had I dreamed the whole
thing? Was there a Demi Moore?
It
wouldn't matter if Demi weren't the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, and if
her "combined films," as the industry says, hadn't grossed a billion
dollars worldwide since 1991. A billion
is a lot of clams, and I find it hard to believe that movie moguls would just happen to axe the career of a goose
who's laid them so many golden eggs. The
fact that Demi’s last three films have all been bombs
is neither here nor there -- if you can sell the Buttafuoccos,
you can sell Demi Moore. Something
larger than a turkey, I think, lies at the back of her disappearance.
It
was Cherie Tartt, Vermont's most glamorous drag
queen, who explained it all for me, as she flipped through the
soldier-of-fortune magazines not far from where I lay, defeated. Miss Tartt brings a
frank and colorful insight to the business of being a woman, and when she says,
"Women don't like Demi Moore," you can believe that she means
it. Gently, she steered my attention to
the "Fall Preview" issue of Us magazine. (As a rule, we don't read Us,
but the popular culture has much to teach, as Miss Tartt
says, and sometimes, darn it, you just need
to know what Jennifer Aniston is thinking!)
And
there it was, buried on page 43 of the current Us, a tiny article that
posed the question, "Is She Box-Office Poison?" and took Miss Tartt's point one step further by reporting -- I suppose
based on some kind of poll -- that women actually hate Demi Moore. They hate her looks, they hate her movies,
they hate her Republican husband, Bruce Willis (whom their own husbands try to
imitate), they hate the fact that Demi has three or four houses and worked-over
boobs and a staff of nannies to look after her kids (whom they also hate, if
only because of their stupid names: Rumer, Scout and
Tallulah Belle).
It
was men who created Demi Moore, I suddenly realized, men who loved her,
men who called her a babe. With a
sinking feeling, not daring to believe what my intelligence told me, I looked
anxiously at Miss Tartt.
"Men
are from Mars," she purred.
"Women are from Venus." And with that, the truth was
revealed. I had found the key to Demi.
Thank
you, Miss Tartt -- now I understand!
Sure,
I still had a way to go to prove my theory that Demi Moore is -- or was -- an
alien, part of a vast Martian plot to eliminate taste, talent, style and
personality from American movies. An
Internet search turned up more than 300,000 "hits" on Demi, and if
that's not fluoride in the water, I don't know what is. My guess is that the Martians are keeping an
eye on their public relations, now that we know they’re here, and that they've
whisked Demi back home to avoid offending a whole half of the human race just
when victory is in their grasp.
Far-fetched?
Maybe. But I offer these facts,
irrefutable and confirmed by Demi Moore’s publicists:
- Demi was born in
Roswell, New Mexico, site of the most famous alien landing in
history.
- Her real name is
"Demetria," and she is not, as you
might expect, Greek. According to
McCall's, she was named "after a beauty product her mother
had seen in a magazine."
That
clinches it, in my opinion. Ask
Tina: Where but in a magazine would
Martians look for a clue to the American brain?
"No
people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform
of dictatorship. He always represents
himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our
dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he
will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil'
to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.'
But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1935