Unlike many younger leading ladies, Stone grew up in front of very few people. She did not star as Annie on Broadway. She didn't play a preteen hooker in the movies. She was not the little girl in E.T. When Instinct opened, she arrived at stardom fully formed and chrome-plated. Stone's exposure to show business while maturing quietly in Meadville, Pa., the daughter of a tool and dye manufacturer and his accountant/ wife, was limited to the plays she produced in her family's two-car garage. She attended Edinboro State College for three years and left for New York City at 19 to try her hand at modeling. By 1980 she was earning around $5,000 a day for posing. But acting, she says, was "my destiny. Like a river. I could either look at the river go by, or I could just jump in and see where I went. But I knew it was my river." % She started with a tiny part in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980). Soon she was making two or three movies a year (like Deadly Blessing and Police Academy 4). The films were cheap but lucrative; in a good year she made $750,000, padded by the occasional modeling stint. There was a failed 22-month marriage along the way-to TV producer Michael Greenberg, whom she divorced in 1987. Professionally, she first drew attention playing a dumb starlet in 1984's Irreconcilable Differences, and was rediscovered briefly in 1990 with a role in Total Recall and a Playboy layout. Still, she was unprepared for the post-Instinct Sharon-mania. "Celebrity is a pretty stunning and horrifying thing," says Stone. "But when it first happened I was like, 'They love me!'" She raises her arms, mocking herself, waving as if she had just stepped out of a Rolls-Royce. "'Everybody loves me! Oh, I love them, too!' And suddenly, I was up there tap-dancing on my pedestal and it was whack! Facedown in the dirt. I was like, 'Well, that hurt, but this is kind of a relief, because I couldn't do that forever.'" Nonetheless, the public caning continued for the next two years. Among the highlights: *Sliver. The 1993 thriller starred Stone as a book editor seduced into a life of voyeurism by Billy Baldwin. "I turned it down and turned it down," she says. And though producer Robert Evans says she took the role only after he threatened to give it to Geena Davis, Stone claims other concerns: "I made this deal with my manager and agents that if I did Sliver, they wouldn't give me any grief about doing Intersection," a low-key romantic melodrama that proved even less commercial. Soon after shooting on Sliver began-long before the poor test screenings, the reshoots, and a howling battle with the ratings board-Stone says she realized the film was in trouble. "I was like, 'Well, get back, Sharon! Sit down and shut up, because you're f---ed!'" On the way to work, she often parked her BMW on the side of the road and sobbed. On the way home, she cushioned her depression with take-out feasts from Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in L.A. "I gained 16 pounds making that movie," says Stone, "as we can see (on film) when the fat's falling over the top of my tights as I look for my clothes on the floor." *Bill MacDonald. As you'll recall from the supermarket checkout line last year, Stone was said to have taken the 37-year-old Sliver producer from his wife, who eventually landed in the arms of the movie's screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, but not before the wife stood before the cameras of A Current Affair, announced she'd had a miscarriage, and called Stone a "home wrecker." The story unreeled in the tabloids like a low-rent remake of the 1958 Liz- Debbie-Eddie scandal. "I got painted as a home wrecker over a guy I never even dated till he was separated," says Stone. "Not a single date. But he decided he wanted out (of his marriage) and used me as a crowbar." Did it hurt Stone's feelings? "Yes," she says, "because it hurt my parents' feelings. They would call me, heartbroken, saying, 'Why don't you stop these people?'" *The Quick and the Dead. Even though Stone calls the film "the most fun I've ever had making a movie," the experience may not have a happy ending. Besides starring as a good-gal gunslinger circa 1878, Stone also signed on as a coproducer for the TriStar film. She put up $125,000 of her own money in order to hire 1993 Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape). And she claims that she agreed to do a week of overseas publicity with the movie's release because the bean counters said it would generate enough ticket sales to pay for costar Gene Hackman's hefty salary. But now Stone is involved in a showdown with the other producers, claiming they have frozen her out of the postproduction process. "I had to fight and cajole to get to see the picture at all," she complains. "I guess I learned a big lesson on that. Starting with, I didn't charge a producer's fee." Invited to respond, Joshua Donen, one of three principal producers, says, "This is the first I've heard of this. I don't believe anybody froze her out." Fortunately, Stone tends not to repeat her mistakes. Ever since her "big surprise" in Basic Instinct, Stone has demanded total contractual control over all of her scenes containing nudity. As testament to an impressive lack of inhibitions, she gave her enthusiastic blessing to a steamy shower scene with Stallone in The Specialist. "Sly was chivalrous, funny, gentle," she recalls. "He was very protective. No one was more surprised than me." Stallone buffered the shooting experience with humor; a month before filming the scene, he began an ominous countdown, warning her to get in shape. "Sixteen days, time to stop brushing your teeth with cannoli," he told her. "Do you know what exercise to her is?" he says with friendly exasperation. "Three pieces of Dentyne. And then one day before (shooting the shower scene), typical Sharon Stone, she says, 'I bought a Butt Blaster and shoulder machine, worked out last night and I'm ready.' This is confidence." As Stone finishes her lunch, she glances over the galleys of Lauren Bacall's new autobiographical book, Now, and reads silently a long passage about the emotional perils celebrities face when traveling solo (" I have often felt somewhat uncomfortable sitting alone, being stared at "). Stone's eyes begin to mist over. "Mmm, it makes me feel like crying," she says softly. "Ooh. Wow. Yes, I feel exactly like that." While Stone is trying to get a handle on Hollywood, Hollywood is struggling to get a handle on Stone. Unlike any other under-40 actress working today, she seems to be a product of Bacall's era, when female movie stars were still available in extra-strength. She has the humble beginnings and exquisite fashion sense of Joan Crawford; the bald, playful sexuality of Marilyn Monroe (she once appeared on Good Morning America in a pink bathrobe); the man troubles of Lana Turner (Stone compared one of her boyfriends, country crooner Dwight Yoakam, to a "dirt sandwich"); and the take-no-prisoners glamour of Elizabeth Taylor. Last June Stone filed a reported $12 million suit against Harry Winston after the jeweler took back a $400,000 necklace he claims he only lent her for her Sliver publicity; she claims he had agreed to give it to her if she wore it in public. This is not the kind of behavior one expects from, say, Winona Ryder. But vulnerability is the quality that Hollywood prizes most in its actresses today-and frankly, Stone seems about as helpless on screen as Nancy Reagan on a tear. The Specialist, for example, works best when she's slugging a woman who won't relinquish a cellular phone. But it doesn't seem right that Stallone gets to drive the boat while she sits passively behind him; you expect Stone to knock him overboard and take over the wheel. Her toughness can bewilder the industry: The ending of The Quick and the Dead was shot several ways because of fears that Stone wouldn't be likable enough. "It's like, 'Excuse me,'" says Stone, irritated. "'I just spent two hours chasing the f ---er all over the desert. Can't I just shoot him now?' I don't understand, now that Basic Instinct has made a half billion dollars. Hello? They like me when I'm killing people right in front of their eyes! I don't think a nasty glare is going to piss anybody off." As a former hooker married to the Mob in Casino, she's hoping to get as | nasty as she wants to be. "I mean, this character is really, really out on a limb," she says. "And I don't think (Scorsese) is going to worry if I'm likable, you know, when I tie my kid to the bed so I can go out and get loaded." Later that night, sipping lemonade by the pool of Phoenix's Arizona Biltmore, she quietly recounts some advice she received from the highly regarded acting coach Roy London, who died of AIDS complications in 1993. "He said to me, 'All the things that people don't like about you-that's your gift.'" Stone, dressed now in a blousy white cotton shirt and white baggy pants, kicks off her sneakers and begins rummaging through a leather pouch packed with her short stories. Using just the moonlight, she first reads from "I Shoulda Killed Him," a funny, country-flavored bit of prose tracing the thoughts of an unrepentant, pickup-driving woman just released from prison for the attempted murder of her spouse. For her next selection, she recites one of her few completed stories, in which a lonely woman sits in her study, late at night, missing her long-lost husband, who never returned from the war. "Lola was a strange bird," the story begins, "all preening beauty on the outside, tattered and worn on the inside; clipped wings "
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