Dishing with Sharon

Sharon Stone has a voice like honey poured over a night of whiskey and smoke. She makes an answering-machine tape--"Leave me a message and I'll get back to you"--sound like an invitation to seduction. Now that she has finally grown into it, she likes that voice but candidly admits that it was somewhat embarrassing when she was a teenager in a two-traffic-light town in Pennsylvania. An appetite for adventure and better food than she could get at the local diner drove her from Meadville to New York City. Her drop-dead good looks and that seductive voice didn't hurt. She modeled for Eileen Ford, studied with an acting coach--and waited. Not, as it turned out, for long. Woody Allen cast her in a small but pivotal role--that of the blonde goddess he glimpses on a passing train--in 1980's Stardust Memories. A role as the delectable waitress turned petulant movie star in Irreconcilable Differences, opposite Shelley Long and Ryan O'Neal, followed. Some 15 films later, Sharon still looks like an ingenue. A rich ingenue. She drops a wad of cash in Giorgio Armani's the way other people in L.A. drop names. It's a town where, as she's the first to admit over dinner, "people are more concerned with being fashionable than with being decent." Sharon says what she thinks--and she thinks a lot. "Just when I think I've reached capacity--ploop!--another bizarre concept drops into my head, where I was positive I had no more room, and my mind is stretched. I'll bet the inside of my head looks like a pregnant woman's stomach. I shudder to think what I am preparing to deliver. Probably another smart remark." Some men don't understand Sharon. Others adore her. Buck Henry says, "Sharon has the kind of face I'd leave my wife for. Since I'm not married, I'll have to leave someone else's wife." Sharon is a piece of work. Great long legs. Clairol-commercial blonde hair. White, sparkling teeth. But she laughs off compliments. "Some men used to think I was a bit formidable. Unfortunately, I was too young to realize it at the time. But I've reached the age at which they're starting to look at me as a breeder. They say, 'I want those genes. I want those long legs and that blonde hair and those white teeth. I want them now!' Of course, those men are usually short, dark and nearsighted, which is lucky for me, because that happens to be my type." Meanwhile, there's her acting career, which has always gone well but somewhat unevenly. She characterizes the two pictures in which she co-stars with Richard Chamberlain--a remake of the H. Rider Haggard thriller King Solomon's Mines and its sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold-- as "those awful African movies."

Although Sharon has worked with such stars as James Caan and Martin Sheen, she has also shown up in some middling fare (Police Academy IV, Action Jackson, Above the Law). After winning plaudits as Robert Mitchum's philandering daughter-in-law Janice Henry in the ABC miniseries War and Remembrance, she has started rising, like cream, to the top. Total Recall, in which Sharon plays Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife, is due for nationwide release June 15, and she has three more films--Personal Choice, Scissors and a remake of Blood and Sand--wrapped or in progress. As if that weren't enough, she has also landed a cosmetics account--for which, typically, she interviewed sans make-up. "I didn't wear any for the Playboy shoot, either," she says. "The photographer wanted me as I am, and that was just fine. Wet hair, no make-up, no clothes. That's about as naked as you can get. A director once said to me, "The reason men want you to wear make-up is that when you don't, they feel they have to be honest with you because you're honest with them.'"

Sex is so much more in the mind than in the body," Sharon says. "I like a man whose brain is more expansive than his penis. Lips really do it for me: big, full lips. When I was fourteen, this boy told me he'd teach me how to kiss if I'd meet him in the auditorium during our free period. He sure taught me how to kiss, how to feel it, how to give someone room to kiss you back. I was very young and sexually immature then." Mischievously, she adds, "I was always a great student, however." She tosses that blonde mane. "Masculine men are an endangered species. We've endangered them by not experiencing our equality as women but by trying to be like men. It's an enormous mistake. And we're so afraid that if we reveal ourselves sexually to a person, he will steal our soul. So we pick people who could never possibly do that, people who are bad for us." She sighs. "I heard that Kathleen Turner's husband told her, 'I may not be the best lover in the world, but I know what you like.' That's being the best lover in the world!" Twirling her fork, Sharon laughs. "This is a pretty sexy conversation. Do we get to have a smoke when it's over?"