On Abuse, Death, and Who Believed in Her | Sharon Stone

 I'm not a quitter. I'm just not a quitter.
 Prior to that movie, I would never get the part.
 Won't you the 13th choice?
 Yeah, and I would ask my manager, why did I not get it?
 They don't think you're sexy, and I won it.
 I think we've got a great show tonight.
 I had a nine-day brain hemorrhage and a 1% chance of survival.
 And I was like, those are my odds.
 World-renowned actress, sex symbol.
 Oscar nominated Emmy and Golden Globe winning after...
 comparable Sharon Stone.
 He was very tough with me.
 If I tried to be less than my best to fit in, I was reprimanded.
 You'd been taken for teaching your last mate's cursive and multiplication.
 Sharon, is this true?
 Yes, sir it is.
 Here's what's gonna happen.
 It's not going to stop.
 I deal with people who are such bullies who don't even want to talk to women.
 Still today you do.
 I don't think you know who you're dealing with.
 They're not fulfilling themselves if they're trying to run your show.
 I work my own door.
 Sharon Stone has been in some of the biggest movies of all time.
 Basic instinct, casino, total recall.
 But growing up working class in Pennsylvania,
 where she would get sent to the principal's office for teaching the other kids.
 Becoming a movie star wasn't really on the radar.
 Her life has not been easy.
 She's been misunderstood, typecast, and after a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed her,
 had to relearn how to live in her own body again.
 But through every chapter of it, there was one man, a constant,
 with a hand in every major decision Sharon says she ever made.
 She is a golden globe and any winner, an Oscar nominee,
 and a star of Euphoria, now streaming on HBO,
 and laughing as I introduce her.
 Please welcome to the show Sharon Stone.
 Thank you.
 It's a pleasure.
 It's such a touching introduction.
 Even a good call.
 You had me in tears before you even said hi.
 What brings the emotions with simple introduction?
 Because it's true.
 I'm Sharon Stone and the person who believed in me was my dad.
 Joseph William Stone III.
 Oh my God.
 Well, hold on.
 Look at him.
 That's such a character picture.
 You always had a hat, that man.
 Look at him.
 My dad was quite fantastic.
 Guy, super empathetic.
 Really.
 He was so sophisticated and tough and smart and cool.
 Yet tender and vulnerable.
 Yes.
 Well, if you really think about his personality, he really was.
 He had that touch of kings.
 He was so such a gentleman.
 He would never let someone be bullied.
 He would never let someone be racially profiled or profiled
 by their gender or their gender choices or nothing.
 He would never let a woman be sworn in front of or, you know,
 he was the guy who stood up when a woman entered the room.
 He pulled my mother's chair out for dinner every night.
 I mean, he was so chivalrous and yet so tough for a guy
 who was a laborer in a machine shop.
 And yet he was incredibly handsome and incredibly mannered.
 And when I see now like his, you know, confirmation photo
 in the silk suit with the silk hose to the knee and the Bible
 with the gold crucifix on it in the oval, gilded frame.
 And I piece together things about his life.
 And then I did the finding erutes and found out all the things
 about him and our lives and me and my family history
 and that his greatest grandparents were the actual king
 and queen of France.
 And oh, my God, that he never even knew about himself, right?
 And yet he was still that kind of man that defended everybody's
 honor and did all of the things that one would do who was that man.
 So then I want to take you to that end to one of my favorite stories
 which comes from the principal's office.
 So set the stage for me.
 You're about how old?
 Oh, I was so little.
 I must have put that point in six or seven tops.
 You'd been taken for teaching your classmates cursive writing
 and multiplication.
 And multiplication.
 And while the rest of the class was still in addition,
 Sharon's causing trouble trying to help them learn more faster.
 I was bored.
 Yes.
 Right.
 So the school.
 I had opinions.
 I had thoughts.
 And the school thought you were a behavioral problem.
 And so they...
 Similar to today.
 So they call you to the principal's office and they also call your dad Joe
 from his job, which was an hour away.
 And he was working swing shift.
 Right.
 Which is first shift, then second shift, then third shift, week after week.
 Which is just beats the hell out of a person.
 Right.
 So my dad was not charmed by this.
 Right.
 So he takes the day off.
 Takes the day off.
 To go to this meeting.
 To go to elementary school.
 Yep.
 I'm called in.
 I'm sitting in the back of the office.
 He's up by the principal's desk.
 Okay.
 And the principal starts up.
 Sharon will not stay with the rest of the class.
 My dad, please explain.
 She is writing cursive when we're printing.
 She's doing multiplication when we're adding them subtracting.
 And what's worse, she's teaching two other girls to do the same.
 This is incredibly disruptive, and it needs to stop.
 To which Mr. Joe somewhat quickly, immediately or after a long pause says what?
 He thinks about it for a minute, and he turns around and says, Sharon, is this true?
 I say, yes, sir.
 Yes, sir, it is.
 He says to me, come here.
 I say, what?
 I don't want to come here.
 He says, come here.
 I say, yes, sir.
 I walk up to him.
 He picks me up and puts me on his lap.
 I think, okay.
 And he says to me, this is true.
 You have done all these things that Mr. whatever that was name was said.
 Yes, sir, I did.
 Alrighty.
 He turns to him whatever his name was.
 He says, here's what's going to happen.
 It's not going to stop.
 She's going to keep right on doing it.
 Are we all clear?
 Are we clear?
 You're not going to stop.
 We're going for ice cream.
 Do not call me away from my job again for this kind of shenanigans.
 I mean, like he was just like, I'd had it.
 You know what I mean?
 He was like, this he thought was like just absurd.
 He picked me up, took me out for ice cream, and that was it.
 There wasn't even a further discussion at ice cream or at home.
 Does the memory sit in your mind as a hallmark example of when you first started to see him believe in you in a way?
 Well, he was very tough with me.
 You know, he wouldn't allow me to be less than my best.
 If I tried to be less than my best to fit in, I was reprimanded.
 He really would explain to me that this way that I would sometimes fold myself in to get boys to like me or to try to be included.
 He would be like, you're just trying to get them to like you knock it off.
 And he would like really be tough.
 And it's not a popularity contest.
 In many ways, he was a girl dad before we had a phrase for it.
 Yeah, and he was very much like he would yell at me when I was playing and have me come in.
 You're letting those boys win because you want them to like you.
 Knock it off.
 I'm like, Dad.
 What?
 Dad.
 What?
 You have two brothers. Was he as hard on you as he was on your brothers?
 He was harder on me than he was my younger brother because I made him knock it off finally.
 I really finally confronted him when I was 14.
 About?
 Because he was a hitter.
 Oh.
 You know, if you didn't do it, it was like the great Santini.
 I mean, he would hit you too.
 Yeah, he would throw me down a flight of stairs and then the belt would come off.
 And then I would get, well, real whipping, you know, and finally at 14, I told him off.
 I really told him off.
 I remember specifically that he was yelling at me to calm down those stairs.
 Right, goddamn now.
 And I came down the stairs like the Queen of France.
 Like one step at a time and then walked up to his face and said, why do you need to hit me some more to feel like a man?
 Is that what's going on here?
 Because if you do, let's get with it.
 But I will never love you again.
 I'm done.
 Holy shit.
 And I'm not going to cry.
 So if that's what we're looking for, don't be, don't be expecting it.
 And what did he say?
 He cried.
 He cried.
 He cried.
 He cried.
 And he went, go to your room.
 Interesting.
 And he never hit anybody again.
 Really?
 It was over.
 And then we started talking.
 He would talk to me.
 He stopped hitting.
 He never hit anyone ever again.
 Wow.
 And we became very close.
 Very, very close.
 And about a year later, I became a Buddhist.
 Why?
 I...
 15 years old, you become a Buddhist.
 Well, I hadn't planned on it.
 But I had tried.
 I started at 10.
 I went to him and said, I wanted to go to church with someone else.
 Well, he didn't like our church.
 That it didn't make sense to me.
 And I wasn't feeling it.
 And I wanted to try something else.
 And he said, well, we need to talk about this.
 Like, what do you think you would do?
 And I said, maybe go to...
 With some other kids from school.
 Try out where they're going.
 Like, none of this.
 And just not feeling this.
 Okay.
 Well, who could you go to church with?
 And explain this to me.
 And I went to a few other of the different.
 There wasn't a lot of opportunity.
 Not things were.
 I mean, there was Protestant.
 There was Catholic.
 There was Baptist.
 There wasn't many...
 Amish.
 Lots of Amish people.
 And Buggies.
 My dad, best friend, was a guy who married an Amish girl.
 And they had eight kids.
 And they came in their buggy to our house.
 And it was great.
 It was adorable.
 So, I liked Baptist the best for a while until the baptism.
 And they wanted to push my head in the water.
 And I was like, I don't want someone holding my head underwater.
 I don't like that.
 I don't want to do that.
 I think that's weird.
 I was just trying to find something.
 And then this woman bought the property across this dirt road.
 We had this big two-acre property that the back of it ended at a dirt road.
 And across the dirt road, there was a piece of land and this woman bought it.
 And she put a motor home on it.
 So, she moved in, single with her son.
 And that's where the bus dropped me off and picked me up.
 So, I had to wait and snow to my ways, whatever it was.
 I had to wait over there to get the bus.
 And I got off the bus one day and she was outside.
 And she said, my son had an accident and he's in a cast.
 And I have to go to work and I need you to look after him.
 And I've already talked to your mother.
 And I said, okay, when?
 And she said, now I'm leaving and got in her car.
 And I didn't even know what to do.
 I didn't know even like, what are you, how do you go into a motor home?
 What do you ring the bell?
 What do you do?
 Right?
 And I went in and he had been in an accident.
 I broke in his back and was in a body cast in a hospital bed
 in what was the living room area of the motor home.
 And which was also shocking because I'd never been inside a motor home
 where it's like living room kitchen, the whole thing, right?
 And he had the bottle on the side of the bed that he had to pee in.
 And he was like 17.
 And I was like 15.
 And I sat a chair next to him.
 And I was like, I have books in my bag.
 I can read to you because I was always the girl with 700 books.
 And I had taken Sid Arthur and the prophet out of the library.
 And so I started reading these books to him,
 which became particularly significant because he was immobilized in a body cast.
 And so I was reading these and we were really discussing them
 because it became so profound to both of us
 because we were in this weird position.
 And it became super meaningful to us.
 And I think that was really the beginning of the Buddhism for me
 because I had to learn to sit quietly and be thoughtful and compassionate.
 Before we move back to your dad, I want to ask you,
 if I would have met you as a 14-year-old girl living in that town,
 describe the town for me.
 Well, first of all, there's no town.
 And we lived on the line between the two towns.
 So our house, we went to Segerton High School
 and the neighbors that lived on the other side of the creek,
 they went to Medville, which was the bigger town,
 the town that had a town, not much of a town, but a town.
 And it had a college that was kind of an important college called Allegating College.
 Segerton had a roundabout and a dairy queen.
 And that's where I went to school with 85 other kids.
 And at my school, people drove their tractors to school after they finished their chores.
 I have a photo.
 That's Linda Whistler, my best friend in school.
 When you look at that picture of you, what comes to mind?
 Well, that I dyed my hair constantly.
 I think it was red in that picture.
 So you in high school describe this girl to me.
 People called me Sherry.
 I was often wearing my dead aunts very smelly clothes to school,
 because she was a chain smoker.
 As people do?
 Well, because those were all the clothes I had.
 Oh, wow.
 And so when she died, I got her clothes.
 Wow.
 I was in high school and college at the same time.
 Oh, yeah, you were super smart.
 As was Linda, we were the brain, brain, and wave of our class.
 There were three of us.
 Linda and me and a girl named Sharon Steele.
 But what were your dreams then to do what?
 Be who?
 Get the hell out of there, probably, mostly.
 That's fair. That's fair.
 I mean, I mean, cute as a little button.
 You know what's so funny is that someone gave me a parasol like that.
 And I have it hanging on my mirror even now.
 I'm sitting on the coffee table in our living room.
 What a fragile little thing.
 My mom didn't really want kids.
 She was an unhappy mom.
 I wanted her to like me.
 I think she took the picture.
 I think I was trying to get her like me.
 To be a good kid.
 To be likeable.
 I know she died in 2025.
 Did she eventually get to a point where you felt like she liked you?
 No.
 And I wanted it.
 I really wanted it.
 I mean, I was taking care of her in her final days in my house.
 I wanted those things.
 I wanted the I love you.
 I'm proud of you.
 I'm sorry.
 I'm sorry too.
 I hope you're good.
 You know, but she was so troubled.
 My mom.
 And suffering emotionally and mentally.
 And I was a little quite still a bit like that.
 You still are.
 How so?
 I was at her bedside.
 Oh, yeah.
 So a little bit like that.
 That kind of like.
 I want you to like me.
 I want you to love me.
 So you never heard your mother say I love you?
 I don't know if she said it out loud to me ever.
 You know, I was once told and you'll probably identify with this.
 No matter how old we get, we always look at our parents through the lens of a child.
 Yes.
 No matter how old we get.
 Of course.
 I don't think that I understood that until she loved herself wholly, she couldn't love me.
 Because I reminded her so much of herself.
 I had her body shape.
 I had many of her characteristics.
 And my dad, when he didn't feel the stability from her, he would come to me for help.
 Can you do this?
 Can you do that?
 Can you be this?
 Can you be that?
 When I'm going to die, I'll come to you when I'm four months out.
 Not you'll come to us.
 But they moved to my house when he was dying.
 They moved to my house when he was sick.
 And I'm sure in some way she had to feel internally incompetent.
 And that must have made her rage and feel upset or less than in some way.
 Did you ever tell her that?
 Because that can be very threatening to someone.
 No.
 Yeah.
 What I did was try to offer her everything I could to make her feel strong or powerful
 or give her anything she might need, which is not always the right answer.
 Because when you're too helpful, the teeter-totter of life is too way down.
 And the person never gets to come down and bring you up.
 Hey, that's good.
 And you're always leaving them up in the sky with no ability to what can they do for you
 so you get to take the ride.
 You feel like you overdid and overgave?
 Many times in my life with many members of my family, I over-helped,
 leaving them to remain incompetent or dependent.
 And I left people in rage when you would stop giving.
 So they could demand to take out of rage or upset or unhappiness or just blindness.
 But in many ways it was my own fault.
 It was my own fault because when the good thing happens to you
 and the great things happen to you, and as we know many not great things have happened to me also.
 But I had the great force of my father.
 And I inherited.
 I have in me.
 I have the blood that he had.
 I had got it.
 I got the thing.
 How does it show up in you?
 I'm not a quitter.
 I'm just not a quitter.
 You know, I had a nine-day brain hemorrhage and a vertebral artery rupture
 and a 1% chance of survival.
 And I was like, those are my odds.
 My dad got a suffigial cancer and had a 3% chance of survival and had an inoperable tumor and beat it.
 You know, and thought my Buddhism was absurd and was mad at me and we weren't talking.
 And my mom called and said, they think he has a suffigial cancer.
 I don't know what to do.
 And I said, I'm buying you a plane ticket. Get on the plane this afternoon.
 And she said, there's no more planes. I said, you're getting on in the morning.
 There's no, I think he has a suffigial cancer. He's coming to UCLA right now.
 Right now. I will make the appointment. You'll be in tomorrow.
 You're going to get on the first plane. That's it. You're coming now.
 We're not thinking, we're not waiting for a small hospital in Pennsylvania to just figure it out.
 You're coming now.
 And he came and we were mad at each other.
 And he had made a lot of fun of my Buddhism and my attitudes and my hands on healing and all my stuff.
 And they flew out and he was pacing.
 And he said, well, what about all this stuff that you do?
 Is there something I should do? I mean, what do I do?
 And is there someone that I should talk to?
 And I said, well, of course there is dad.
 And he said, well, maybe it should be you.
 And I said, well, dad, given our state of relationship, I don't know if it can be me.
 I don't know that you'll do what I tell you to do.
 And he said, Jesus Christ, I'll drink monkey piss if that's what I have to do.
 And I restart laughing and I said, well, maybe you will because I was so mad at him.
 And he said, well, maybe I will.
 And I said, okay, then, then I will help you.
 And he said, fine.
 And I said, okay, then we're going to take you to get the test.
 And I will help you.
 But the relationship between the two of you sounds to me to have come easy.
 No, we worked for it.
 And so he said, okay, and he went to the hospital and they diagnosed him.
 And they said you have a three percent chance of living three months.
 The tumors through the wall of your esophagus, it's inoperable.
 And he came home and he said, what do I do?
 The way you have to pull the tumor inside your esophagus.
 And he said, well, how the fuck?
 And he never swore, am I going to do that?
 I said, well, you're going to have to learn to meditate.
 And we don't have time for a big discussion about all that.
 So I'm going to do it like you're a kid and you're going to just have to go with it.
 And I'm going to make up a program and you just have to say yes.
 And he goes, yes.
 And he said, okay.
 So I've made up this thing where he had to find the tumor, make it a color, find his esophagus,
 make it a shape and a size and a color.
 And every time he thought, I have cancer.
 No matter, I made it really specific.
 I don't care if you're taking a piss.
 I don't care if you're in the middle of a conversation.
 I don't care what you're doing.
 You stop and you do the meditation and you pull it inside.
 I don't care if it's a thousand times a day.
 Every time it process your consciousness, you have to do it.
 Fine.
 He did it.
 Ten days later, he went back to the hospital and the tumor was inside the esophagus.
 And they were like, we don't understand what happened, but you can have the surgery.
 We will give you the surgery.
 And then they called me and they said, we're very concerned about giving him the surgery.
 I think it was 72.
 And they said, it's a very dangerous surgery.
 And in these surgeries, we often have heart problems if the person is in their 70s.
 And he can have a heart attack on the table and die.
 I said, don't worry about that.
 I'll deal with that.
 He'll be fine.
 They're like, okay.
 We've never seen the tumor thing, so okay.
 And so I said to him, I want you to do.
 We're going to start a new meditation where you listen to the sound of your heartbeat.
 And you lay and you meditate and you hear your heartbeat.
 And you know when your nervous is scared how you hear your heartbeat in your ears and your temple,
 I want you to get where you can just hear it by laying down.
 And I want you to start amplifying that in your consciousness so it sounds like a drum.
 So it's so loud you can't escape it.
 Like you think of yourself like an American Indian and you hear
 and it's so loud that it's making you nuts.
 And then when they take you into surgery, I want you to tell them,
 don't play any music during this operation and don't speak.
 No chit chat among the doctors.
 I want you to tell them that you've practiced a meditation to your heartbeat
 and that they will disrupt you if they play music or chit chat.
 And then as they're about to put you out when they tell you to count backwards,
 tell them, I'm going to be doing my heartbeat.
 There'll be no counting.
 I'll be counting my own heartbeat.
 Thank you.
 And they said that they have never had a patient where the heartbeat was so strong
 they could hear it themselves.
 So they didn't have the machine they needed to perform this surgery.
 They had to borrow it from another hospital.
 It was a very pricey machine.
 And when he survived the surgery, I bought the hospital the machine.
 And they called my dad the bull at the hospital.
 They said we've never had anything like this happen.
 He was like a goddamn bull in that operating room.
 And when I sent them the machine, they wrote the bull on the front of the machine.
 Are you kind of psychic?
 I'm very psychic.
 I mean, I ask because I heard when you got here, my booker is pregnant.
 And you were like, hey, can I offer some words?
 She was like touched by what you said.
 But you mentioned something about like somebody named Emma will be your pregnancy partner.
 Yeah.
 And she was like, no, Emma came to mind.
 And she was like, oh, there is like an Emma in my life that is all, you know.
 So like it's also pregnant and pregnant to do it the same time.
 So you think you are, you think you are psychic.
 You will probably get calls from women.
 I see women who are pregnant.
 And I ask them, do you want me to talk to you about your pregnancy?
 Is it just pregnant women or people in general?
 It's a lot with pregnancy.
 I can usually tell you, if you're having a boy or a girl, what they look like,
 sometimes what they want to be named or names of people that their ancestors are,
 I can usually tell you what they look like, what their hair color is.
 I can often tell you things about their personality.
 I can sometimes tell them if they're going to have a late or early delivery.
 I don't know why.
 But part of it I think is because my dad was like Mr. Field and Stream.
 I mean, he hunted for almost everything that we ate.
 They hunted and fish to eat my brothers and my dad.
 I got come home and they would be like a turkey stretched out on the clothesline
 or a deer hanging from a tree or buckets of fish on the doorstep
 or my mother planted a garden and canned.
 That's really what we ate growing up.
 And the milk came from the dairy and a gigantic can, you know,
 that was like as tall as this table.
 I mean, it was really truly, I think, part of my helpful survival
 was because I ate and I think so organically.
 How do the animals trace back to that?
 Well, because my, you know, my brothers wanted to hunt and fish,
 but I was always...
 Because as my ex-husband used to call me,
 mis-peace and f**k and quiet.
 I've never business you off.
 I just couldn't cope with the killing.
 I was very like didn't like the hunting and the killing.
 But my dad loved the woods and so I would go with him if he wouldn't kill anything.
 So he would take me in the woods and teach me to find deer in their sleeping beds
 and walk up to animals and...
 But because he was so good at it and because I was mis-peace and f**king quiet,
 I could go pet the deer.
 And the deer started to come to me.
 I was like this nature girl in the woods where I would go pet animals
 and I knew how to spot animals because he was, of course, the best spotter.
 And so I just have this thing and like babies will crawl out of people's laps
 and crawl in like at public events and crawl over into my lap.
 And I just have a way with animals and babies and...
 When you share some of these stories, do some people think you're a little crazy?
 Well, I have to say they call me back and say, oh my God.
 Thank God you told me that because I got my hair nails done and my baby was two weeks early.
 And you know what? They look exactly like you said and oh my God.
 And they do have flaming red hair or they are like this or it is like that.
 Or I would be like, oh my God, you probably don't remember me.
 I met you at Barney's and you told me about my kid and oh it was like, you know.
 Yeah, I have a quite a bit of that and it's really funny.
 But do other people think you're crazy when you tell stories like that?
 Let me just say only men.
 Ah!
 And why do you think that is?
 Because I think that it's not uncommon for women who are in touch with their intuition
 to be in this way.
 What's uncommon is that for people to be overt with it.
 And I was never made self-conscious about it as a kid.
 In fact, I was encouraged to be this way.
 Well, didn't your dad think that you were going to be like some kind of American Pharaoh or something?
 He thought I was a reincarnation of a Pharaoh which he never told my family or anybody else.
 He didn't, you know, he didn't talk to the rest of the family the way he talked to me.
 I think he knew that they would think that we were both crazy.
 Okay.
 But he thought I had a special purpose.
 And he gave me things, books and things that people from where we were from would have thought.
 Like, no.
 Like, he gave me the book, the woman who run with the wolves.
 Like, that's not a book that dads from Pennsylvania give their daughters.
 In my research and reading about Joe, he was a man who worked with his hands grew up blue collar in rural Pennsylvania.
 Loved Hillary Clinton.
 Oh, by the way, you came from Michelle Obama's podcast before you came here.
 Yes.
 Joe think if he had lived to see Michelle Obama that his daughter was on Michelle Obama's podcast.
 He would have cried.
 Nothing.
 I am crying for him.
 That they were the president of First Lady was my dad's dream.
 That would have been a, that was such a dream.
 Oh, and he didn't live to see it, right?
 He lived to see Barack Obama become president.
 He did.
 Okay.
 Okay.
 But he was disappointed.
 And he was disappointed that I voted for Barack Obama because he wanted Hillary because he wanted Hillary to be president.
 Because he and my mother were both profoundly hurt because women were treated so badly.
 And they both were, my dad was a super feminist.
 And my dad just really didn't think that women got a fair shake.
 And a die hard Democrat.
 Die hard.
 To the extent that you talked about him being such a force and would get in somebody's face if he saw it in justice.
 There's a story about you, you were in California, you're in your 20s.
 And you've got a boyfriend that is physically threatening you.
 So you pick up the phone and you dial rural Pennsylvania.
 And he's, you know, 3000 miles away.
 And he tells you to put the phone on speaker.
 Describe what he says next.
 This guy was threatening me.
 He said he was going to beat me up.
 And I call my dad.
 And I'm like, he won't leave.
 And he's threatening me.
 And I don't know what to do.
 And I can't get out.
 And I was in, I went in the bathroom and I locked the door and I called my dad.
 And I don't know what to do.
 And my dad says, put the phone on speaker where he can hear me and open the goddamn door.
 I'm like, really?
 He's like, open the goddamn door right now.
 Yes, sir, open the door.
 My dad says is the guy's name.
 The guy is like, who's on the phone?
 I said, my dad.
 He goes, oh, so you call your dad?
 I said, yes, I did.
 My dad says, you know what that sound is?
 The guy says, no, he says, I'm unlocking the gun cabinet.
 You know what this sound is?
 It's two shells going in the shotgun.
 You know what the next sounds you're going to hear is me walking out the goddamn door to the airport.
 I'm going to come out there.
 I'm going to blow your ass all over the goddamn living room.
 If I don't hear the door shutting behind you right now.
 The guy's like, what are you doing?
 What are you doing to me?
 I'm like, I'm not doing anything.
 My dad says something to him like, if I were you, I'd stop the talking and get to moving.
 I don't hear that door.
 Did the guy leave?
 Click.
 Gone.
 Gone.
 My dad's like, now take a chair, put it under the door.
 I mean, it was like, and I tell you, my dad would have gotten on the plane with his gun,
 but shells at the store walked over.
 All right, another great story about your dad.
 The vanilla milkshake in the ICU.
 I was really in bad shape.
 I was in ICU.
 You had a nine-day misdiagnosed hemorrhage.
 Yeah, I was already in the first hospital.
 I hadn't gotten to the hospital for three days already.
 I've been bleeding on the floor.
 I finally, my gynecologist, thank God, posed threats that got me to the hospital.
 I get to the hospital.
 By the way, it's right after September 11th.
 Yes.
 So you're in the ICU and there's wall to wall coverage of the attack.
 It was a nightmare.
 I'm in there.
 They do the initial thing.
 I die on the table.
 They defibrillate me.
 They call it secondary ambulance.
 They say they're going to take me to a neurological hospital that has a special ICU.
 I'm on a scale.
 And they're weighing the loss of my body mass because you're not losing weight.
 You're losing mass.
 And I couldn't eat, obviously.
 I couldn't think.
 I couldn't see.
 I'm in and out of a coma.
 They had put me on IV delotted, which is synthetic heroin, for the extreme pain.
 I'm hallucinating.
 I'm going in and out of this weird coma where I think I'm falling through stacks of colored fabric.
 And I'm feeling this hitting, like I'm hitting and falling, hitting these piles of fabric and falling.
 And I just see these colors and this fabric going, phew.
 And then I keep going in and out of these scenes from Cinema Paradiso, which was so beautiful, which I love this film.
 And I just keep seeing it and seeing it.
 And I keep seeing this actor who was the ship captain in Titanic.
 And he keeps coming in and out of this dream.
 And I keep hearing Simon and Garfunkel singing bridge over troubled water over and over again.
 And this is my coma that goes on and on in and out for nine days.
 This falling, this actor, Cinema Paradiso, this song, and then I'm awake.
 And then I'm back in this weird coma of the strange falling dream, right, in these colors and this fabric.
 And then I'm awake.
 And I've at certain point I've lost 18% of my body mass, right, which is a lot, right.
 And my dad, my mom, doesn't really come in the room.
 She sits like a century outside the door.
 She's like, no one else is going to mess with her.
 And she is in her filthy gardening shorts that she had on when they called her and she's never washed.
 She's sitting there, dirt on her hands, her feet, dirt on her legs, and she's still sitting there in that.
 Like, no one else is going to hurt her, right.
 She's like a wild animal.
 And my dad is the one who's coming in and going and trying to figure out what to do, right.
 And my dad finally says to me, you have to eat something.
 We're losing you. You're disintegrating.
 Think of anything at all that you could possibly eat and I'll go get it.
 Vanilla milkshake.
 And I say, okay, maybe a vanilla milkshake. I think I could have that.
 Because that's like my favorite thing, right.
 Because he thinks he will make me the best.
 Because a store bought vanilla milkshake or a milkshake from a store is not the best one.
 So he's like, he's going to get the best ice cream so he goes and he gets...
 I don't remember where it was.
 Baskin Robbins.
 Baskin Robbins.
 Because to Baskin Robbins, he gets the French vanilla which I loved.
 He goes and he gets a mason jar which I don't know where he got it.
 Because that's what we drank out of when I was a kid.
 We drank out of mason jars.
 He gets ice.
 He goes home.
 He makes the vanilla milkshake.
 Which to this day kills me.
 Packs it in a cooler of ice, goes and buys straws, and brings me a vanilla milkshake
 in a mason jar to the hospital.
 And it was so the best vanilla milkshake of my life.
 And he's feeding me this vanilla milkshake through the side of the bed.
 Because I can't move.
 And he got me to eat.
 And they had given me a...
 Like, it's angiogram.
 Because they didn't know what to do.
 And they missed it because right prior to this happening, I had had breast tumors.
 And one of them was bigger than the size of my entire lift press.
 It was all the way up into here.
 And the doctor had come out to my house and said, look.
 We think you should have a bilateral mastectomy.
 This is really bad.
 And we usually, when they're all the way up into here, we know before we go in that their cancer.
 And I said, I don't have cancer.
 And he said, you don't get to decide that.
 And I said, I do get to decide that.
 I'm deciding.
 But I am deciding that I will have a bilateral because I'm not fucking around.
 And my husband said, this is ridiculous.
 And got up and left the room.
 Which part was ridiculous?
 That I would have a bilateral.
 Oh.
 And the doctor said...
 Not that the cancer, if it was true, might kill you.
 No.
 He was mad about the breast being removed.
 Okay.
 And so the doctor said to him, if I had more patients like her, we'd have more women alive today.
 You need to sit down.
 And I said, I make the decisions.
 Not you.
 That was the end of the marriage.
 Got you.
 That was it.
 He was done with me then.
 It was over.
 Oh, it ended because he ended it, not you.
 It was just over in the room.
 It was just over.
 It was just over.
 He thought I was ridiculous.
 He thought I was foolish.
 He thought I was making too many decisions myself.
 Have you found a male partner who loves you just the way you are?
 So I guess the answer is not yet.
 Well, I've had work to do.
 I understand.
 I had a lot of work.
 It was my fault.
 I was still marrying my mom.
 But you were still marrying your mom.
 Yes.
 Most women would say I was marrying my dad, but you said my mom.
 I married my mom.
 So I went to the hospital.
 And I told them.
 We need to work this out.
 So I come in at night because obviously the fame was too big of a deal.
 They brought me in at night.
 They closed everybody's rooms.
 They brought me in.
 And I'm like, you need to biopsy me while I'm on the table.
 So we know how much to take.
 Let's do this thoughtfully.
 Let's open me up and biopsy what you're taking while I'm open.
 Because I don't want to mess here.
 I don't want to I want us to know what's going on.
 They brought me in.
 They opened me up.
 They took all of everything here.
 And they ended up taking half of the right side.
 And by the time I came too,
 there was 10, 12 people around my bed.
 And I opened my eyes and looked up and said, what is going on?
 And they went, you don't have cancer.
 And I said, I know.
 And they went, yeah, but you don't have cancer.
 And I went, I told you, I know.
 And they went, it's unbelievable.
 Have you ever told a story before?
 Not really.
 And so I was so bandaged.
 And I was so messed up.
 That I was laying on my left side.
 Because the left side was so sore.
 Draining.
 And I couldn't move my arms when this happened.
 And so part of that, I think, saved my life.
 Because when the impact of this thing happened to me,
 I don't think I turned and moved the way a person normally would have.
 The vertebral artery didn't rupture all the way.
 When the impact of what happened.
 I don't know how much I can tell about this.
 I was hit from behind.
 By a person?
 I believe so.
 Yes. Because I didn't really know till 10 years later what had happened to me.
 When I woke up, I was unconscious on the floor.
 The two couches were sideways.
 The coffee table was all over the place.
 It was sort of upside down.
 Everything that had been on the coffee table was all over the floor.
 And I didn't know how I got there.
 10 years later, I went to a clinic.
 I was having a lot of problems with the back of my neck and my shoulders were so sore.
 And I went to a neck and spine clinic in the Marina Del Rey.
 And they had given me propofol.
 And they'd done a lot of x-rays of my front and back and all this stuff.
 They were going to do some kind of injections into what they thought was arthritis in my neck and shoulders.
 And they had done all these proliminary x-rays of my thoracic ribcage of my neck and my shoulders and my spine.
 And the doctor came in and he's like, we're not going to be able to do this surgery.
 I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.
 And he's like, your thoracic ribcage is all fractured and scarred back together.
 And it's clear that you were attacked.
 And that what happened to you was a felony.
 Sharon, who attacked you?
 And we have to report it to the police and to everyone.
 We have to report it and you have to report it to such and such.
 And there's a protocol.
 And I had a panic attack on propofol, which I think is probably unusual.
 And I was like, I don't know.
 But pretty classic for you.
 I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
 Where's the nurse? Where's the nurse? I need the nurse.
 And he was like, the nurse is here.
 Here's the nurse. The nurse is right here.
 Nurse, come closer.
 And he got on his knees.
 And I think he thought he was threatening me.
 He thought I thought he was threatening.
 He's like, I'm small. I'm small.
 And he got down on his knees.
 No one will hurt you. No one will hurt you.
 And he got down on the floor.
 You're safe. You're safe.
 I promise. Here's the nurse.
 She's going to help you. She's going to hold your hand.
 We're going to help you till you know.
 And because I was on propofol,
 they were able to take me back through the incident
 and help me understand what had happened to me.
 Who hit you?
 I'm not going to say publicly.
 But I am going to say that we did report
 and we did do everything.
 Was this person held criminally responsible?
 I had the opportunity to press charges.
 But because it had been a decade
 and because I'm a public figure,
 I decided not to.
 Do you regret that or stand by that decision?
 I feel that I would have had a hard time
 because it was a decade later.
 And because it happened to me from behind,
 I'm quite certain who did it to me.
 But I'm quite certain that I would have had a hard time
 and court a decade later.
 Was it domestic violence?
 And I'm quite sure
 that I had enough circumstantial evidence
 to make a sort of a case.
 But I did not want that to be my legacy.
 You thought it would overshadow what you've done.
 Everything else.
 In the course of my life.
 Have you talked at length like you are now about it?
 You were probably.
 But everybody in my life knows.
 Was it domestic violence?
 I'm not at liberty to say.
 Okay.
 But I will say
 many things happen to me
 where no one...
 First of all, no one at the hospital asked me
 what happened to me.
 I was not fully examined at the hospital.
 They let my husband sign me up
 for exploratory brain surgery
 without my knowledge or consent.
 And I had to stop it by standing on the gurney
 while bleeding into my brain
 and firing the doctor
 in order to get proper medical care.
 I wasn't treated
 thoughtfully and carefully.
 Then when I was in custody court
 I was never heard.
 No one ever asked me
 what happened.
 Your ex-husband took you to court
 six or seven times.
 Custody for your son.
 For my baby.
 For your youngest.
 Who was at that point of your
 unchanged age?
 And he won the custody.
 Repeatedly.
 Why do you think you lost?
 He was the editor of the only newspaper in that town
 that they need to get elected as judges.
 What somebody else would say
 but you're Sharon Stone?
 I didn't use that at court.
 How do you not use it?
 You show up as who you are.
 I was a broken woman recovering from a brain damage.
 Which they said made me incompetent.
 Even though I was finger-rolled twice
 by the FBI and immediately adopted two other children
 in another city.
 You have more stories about your life
 that sound like movie scripts
 than I've ever heard.
 And I've been interviewing people for 25 years.
 I don't have more stories
 than someone like Marilyn Monroe
 or any other woman
 that's ever been considered a sex symbol.
 And then squeezed up,
 used up,
 thrown away,
 and then had the world tell
 they were just dumb.
 They were on drugs.
 They were high.
 They were drunk.
 Not.
 They were smart.
 They were talented.
 They were beautiful.
 Those aren't the stories we hear
 about those super successful women
 who were sexy and beautiful.
 That's not the stories they tell.
 They tell they were stupid.
 They were high. They were drunk. They were this.
 They were that.
 They had to be killed early.
 Why?
 Oh, because they probably knew a lot
 about all the people
 that tried to come into their lives
 and take, and take, and take, and take,
 and take, and take, and take,
 and then they became inconvenient.
 Have you freed yourself from the takers?
 Yeah.
 Yes.
 You once said,
 I am not a sex symbol.
 That was the thing, right?
 People often say, like,
 the character in basic instinct,
 oh, she was a serial killer.
 Really?
 What series of people did she kill
 in the movie?
 She killed a person
 in the beginning of the movie
 to manipulate the person
 she wanted to control.
 If you look at other movies
 where a man does that,
 they don't say that guy was a serial killer
 in that movie, right?
 No, that guy killed that guy
 because he had to get through
 and do all these things he needed to accomplish, right?
 Not that guy was a serial killer
 in that movie, right?
 You look at how
 how different
 men and women are judged
 in same positions.
 Right?
 You know, you don't call
 an actor who is handsome
 and beautiful.
 A sex symbol.
 Why are they not a sex symbol?
 Why is Jacob a Lordy not a sex symbol?
 Every woman on the planet
 thinks he's the most beautiful man
 in Hollywood right now.
 If he was Julie a Lordy, he'd be a sex symbol.
 Are you resentful that you were
 seen as a sex symbol?
 No.
 If you had to do it all over again,
 would you?
 Here's the thing.
 Prior to that movie,
 you never get the part.
 Well, you were watching the 13th choice.
 Yeah, and I would ask my manager,
 Chuck, Chuck, why did I not get it?
 They don't think you're sexy.
 Why don't they think I'm sexy?
 I wanted that part,
 so I called my friend,
 Marilyn Grabowski,
 who was the photo editor of Playboy
 and I'm like, Maryland,
 no one thinks I'm sexy.
 I don't know what to do.
 She's like, come with me.
 Playboy shoot.
 I'm like, come watch one.
 She's like, yes.
 I want you to see what really happens.
 I went to a shoot.
 There was a naked girl standing behind
 leaning over a couch.
 She had duct tape,
 silver duct tape,
 under her bum cheeks
 and under her boobs
 up over her shoulder.
 Huge silver duct tape
 under her boobs up over her shoulder.
 Huge duct tape
 under her butt cheeks
 up around her legs,
 leaning over the sofa.
 I was like, no.
 She's got duct tape
 over herself.
 She goes, yeah, we airbrush it out after.
 You were shocked.
 She goes, you need to do a playboy shoot.
 I'm like, I'm not showing my bum.
 Did you do one?
 Did you show your boobs?
 I'm like, can you do it in black and white?
 She goes, yeah.
 I'm like, can I get a fashion photographer?
 She goes, yeah.
 Did you do one?
 I go, if you get have to give me the cover, I'll do it.
 She goes, she goes,
 she's not going to give you a cover.
 I'm like, he has to give me a cover
 and an interview.
 And if he'll give me a cover and an interview, I'll do it.
 I did it so I could get basic instinct
 because I thought I have to tell them
 way that they will understand
 that I am sexy.
 I'm not sexy.
 I'll be sexy.
 I can act sexy.
 I'm an actress.
 I'll be act sexy.
 So you're the 13th choice for the role.
 There's a line producer that called you Karen
 because he refused to learn your name.
 And you fought through every makeup test
 to wipe off the bimbo overlay.
 Right.
 $500,000.
 So what's the lesson from that?
 What's the takeaway?
 If it's yours, it's yours.
 Whether it's a movie part,
 or your boyfriend,
 or a job,
 or...
 Don't stop chasing it.
 No.
 When it's your number, it happens.
 I want to bring it home with the story
 about your dad.
 He calls,
 and he's coming to see you.
 And he said,
 I don't know if I can beat this one.
 I don't think I'm done
 with the work I need to do.
 Because we had started this thing.
 My dad would always say,
 I'm going for a walk.
 Or I'm going to the hardware store.
 And he would go out
 and he would do whatever it took,
 hardware store, grocery store,
 sit in the park.
 Until someone came to him
 with a problem.
 And then he would help them.
 And he called it
 going for a walk.
 Or going to the hardware store.
 And he said, I just don't think I'm done.
 But I'm going to try to beat it,
 but I don't know if I can.
 But I'll come to you when I'm four months out.
 You need to be ready.
 Right. Right.
 And when he called me with the,
 I think I'm getting close.
 I got on my hands and knees.
 I have a really big house.
 And I cleaned my entire house
 on my hands and knees.
 I mean, I took everything out of every cupboard.
 I cleaned every can of canned goods.
 By hand.
 I painted every shelf.
 I went to my guest house
 and I upholstered the front of the fireplace.
 People, why were you trying to a tone
 for something that we feel?
 No, I didn't want it to be perfect.
 And I didn't want it to hit his head
 when he leaned into the fireplace.
 I lit the insides of the cupboard
 so that when they opened the covers,
 I put those handles next to the toilet and the tub.
 But made them beautiful so you wouldn't know they were to help.
 I tricked it out the guest house.
 So that all the things look like they were always there.
 But it was like a hospital.
 Yeah.
 And I started doing it.
 I called my brother.
 I started gardening with a pair of scissors.
 I had my brother and all of his friends
 and we were redoing the garden.
 We were, we hauled truckloads of stuff out of the garden.
 We were paying.
 My brother came over and I was on my hands and knees
 cleaning these cans.
 And all the canned goods was on the floor.
 And my friend immediately got in the car
 and drove down my friend Lisa from San Francisco.
 We called her Redhead Lisa.
 And I'm on the floor
 and I'm cleaning these cans.
 And my brother came and he's like,
 what are you doing?
 And she went, what the hell does it look like?
 And he went, oh,
 oh,
 I'll call friends.
 And pretty soon everybody was on their hands and knees.
 I mean, we were like, there will be no germs.
 Everything will be perfect.
 We're going to be ready.
 It'll be the, doesn't look like a hospital hospital.
 So he comes and he says he's got four months
 and you hire a hospice team.
 A hospice nurse.
 For four months, right?
 That was the commitment.
 I was like, he said four months.
 We'll do four months and then we'll see.
 What happened?
 He died four months to the day.
 To the day.
 To the day.
 What would you,
 and I know you will appreciate this question.
 Some people get completely thrown by it
 or think it's weird.
 But what would you say to him?
 I think more about what he would want me to say to you
 and to the listening audience, please.
 Which is,
 there will be many people
 that try to tell you who you are in your life.
 And not only who you are,
 but how you're supposed to handle
 who you are
 and what you're supposed to do with who you are.
 Only you know who you are.
 And only you know your divine purpose.
 Because only you can hear the divine,
 speak not only to you, but through you.
 And you are a divine messenger.
 And you must be willing
 to have the divine flow through you
 in order to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
 And if you allow others to dissuade you from your journey,
 you will never be complete as the puzzle piece that you are
 in the great map of humanity.
 And all of those other puzzle pieces
 that are waiting to feel that sound,
 you know, when you click that final puzzle piece in,
 when you're doing your crossword or doing a puzzle and it goes click.
 And it just fits in
 and that satisfying feeling that you feel.
 You're never going to feel that nor is anyone else.
 If you're not reaching all the way out in your full self,
 they nor you are ever going to feel that satisfying click
 of you complete me.
 Because you will never complete them and they will never complete you.
 If someone else has their hand up your ass like you're somebody's puppet.
 Because they're not fulfilling themselves
 if they're trying to run your shell.
 I work my own door.
 I hope that you, this from me to you,
 are remembered not for the sex humble, but for that.
 Thank you.
 Because that is what can help change the world.
 Joseph William Stone, the third.
 Joe Stone taught me to work my own door.
 I will take instructions.
 I'm Sharon Stone and the person who believed in me
 beyond all reason was my father.
 Joseph William Stone, the third.
 I thought you might want to know,
 but this podcast is at the heart of a company I founded called Do Good Crew.
 I've spent 25 years telling stories.
 It used to be the bad news and now I want to focus on the good news.
 The everyday heroes who are doing extraordinary things.
 You can join us.
 We do live events, but we also have the newsletter.
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 You can sign up for it by going to www.TheDoGoodCrew.com.
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