Truth Behind ‘These Walls’

She has two children--one of them, it seems odd to say this now, named Chastity--but the thing for which Cher may have become better known than her maternity is the two abortions. The shame for those--if she hadn’t felt it already--was all but lacquered to her, along with some of the other, more baroque aspects of her celebrity, by the tabloid covers: nose job, boob job, abortion. Two abortions. CHER’S SHAME.

“Even if there’s no shame involved,” she is saying now, “I think women are creatures who are supposed to nurture life; they’re not really supposed to kill it. It goes against our nature. I don’t think anybody’s all that happy to say, ‘Oh, I killed my child today.’ It’s not something to be proud of. It’s just something that you might have to make the decision to do one day.”

Her feet are curled under her on a chair so that it is just possible to see the serpent tattoo peeking out at the ankle of her jeans. She has come to the requisite four-star hotel suite to make the requisite round of celebrity blah-blah about her latest project, HBO’s “If These Walls Could Talk”--a trilogy of stories about abortion in which she stars with Demi Moore and Sissy Spacek and that premieres at 9 tonight. Only this is Cher, and now she is talking about abortion. Her abortions.

“I made my choice and I live with it,” she says, recalling decisions she made more than a decade ago. “I’m not going to beat myself over the head for it. I’m not one of those women who have awful flashbacks and nightmares. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s still not something that you’re going to feel good about. That’s one of the reasons women don’t really talk about it. It’s not a fun subject, so no one wants to talk about it like a new recipe, or a dress, or the best movie.”

As women have struggled to reconcile their legal rights with their own moral and emotional equivocations about abortion in America since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, words have often failed them.

“I think that when people hear the words ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life,’ they’re just words,” Cher says. “The word ‘abortion’ can’t begin to express what the actual experience is.

“It’s like going to the electric chair,” she continues. “When you go down that long road and you sit in that thing, it’s only you sitting there. Nobody else can come with you, nobody can hold your hand. The experience is yours and yours alone.

“You’re the one who has to make the decision, who has to go through the experience. And you’re the one who has to live with the decision afterward. It should really be called ‘hard-choice,’ not ‘pro-choice.’ ”

“If These Walls Could Talk” is meant to convey some of the realities of abortion, legal and illegal. It’s the story of how three women, unrelated but living in the same house during different decades, deal with unplanned pregnancies.

Cher, who plays an abortion doctor, also makes her directing debut in her segment, which is set in 1996. At 50, she was able to bring to her work with Anne Heche, her 25-year-old co-star, a sense of the emotional toll an abortion can take.

“I was explaining to Annie how I felt going through it,” she says. “It was very weird. I was lying there, as a grown-up with a very rational mind, knowing that this is what I had to do having made the decision I had made. And as I was lying there, tears were just rolling out of my eyes. It’s the ultimate no-win situation.”

It is women Heche’s age and younger, still infants when the Supreme Court made its landmark ruling, who may be most startled by the film’s first story, with Moore playing a widow who has accidentally gotten pregnant. The time is 1952.

“I think there’s a whole segment of our population that doesn’t remember what it was like,” says Spacek, who plays a mother, beleaguered by a houseful of children, trying to go back to college in 1974. Spacek is old enough, at 46, to remember a time when young women didn’t get pregnant, they got “in trouble.” And the worst I was lying there, as a grown-up with a very rational mind, knowing that this is what I had to do having made the decision I had made. And as I was lying there, tears were just rolling out of my eyes. It’s the ultimate no-win situation.’

Cher

trouble of all was a life of possibility sundered to the endless homecoming bawl of an unwelcome maternity.

“More than anything, I remember as a child [knowing of] situations--unplanned pregnancies--where people’s lives were altered profoundly,” Spacek says. “And I remember thinking things had just ended for them.”

Those who had the resources to avoid the dreaded “back alleys” were often whisked away on some unexpected family vacation.

“I knew about girls who had problems and went away to Puerto Rico,” Cher says. “People were always going away somewhere.”

Alone among the film’s three stars, Moore remembers none of this. She is 33, a child of the more permissive ‘70s.

“I am of a generation that really didn’t know how difficult it was for women,” she says. “But I can tell you, my knowledge of the pain, and of the lives lost, has expanded greatly. There are books with lists of women who died from self-inflicted or back-alley abortions that would stagger you. In the ‘50s, the shame was enormous, whether it came from the medical world or from your own family. Women just had nowhere to turn, no emotional support. And we’re talking about women of great creativity and intelligence, women whose lives had such possibility. Women that we lost.”

Moore seems an unlikely conscript to the muddy battlefields of gender politics, having been seen most recently waving the white flag of her G-string in the movie “Striptease.” Film critic Gene Siskel was so outraged by her sexual brazenness that, in a kind of hussy fit, he demanded: “What’s next? Demi has a baby on camera?”

If he had known how far in the opposite direction she was prepared to go--that what was next was Demi has an abortion on camera--he might have thought better of the question.

She is five years past the Vanity Fair cover for which she posed nude while great with the second of her three daughters--a year later came a kind of Braque’s candy in body paint--but still trying on different identities for herself: Hester Prynne one minute, Erin Grant the stripper the next, exploring her own sexuality in this very public way.

There are two particularly harrowing scenes of abortions in her segment of “If These Walls Could Talk,” scenes that, in their way, seem more graphically violent than anything Moore’s husband, Bruce Willis, has ever done on screen. The scenes are so powerful that five people fainted at the film’s New York premiere, and another at the first Los Angeles screening.

“It’s very painful to watch,” she says, “and obviously shocking for people. I didn’t want to glamorize what an abortion is. What we did want to illustrate is that there is a difference between an illegal and a legal abortion. And yet neither is anything that’s a wonderful experience. So I feel the graphic nature of it really drives an important emotional element home. I don’t think--and I hope no one feels--that we’ve been exploitative. The fact that we get so inside the women is something that people really haven’t had a chance to see.”

Fortunately for Gene Siskel, Moore is talking about getting inside the characters’ heads and hearts, though there is a pivotal scene in Cher’s segment during which the camera, like the procedure itself, becomes invasive, remaining in the room--listening more than watching--during a clinical abortion. The removal of the fetal tissue involves several moments of mechanical suction that remain indelible in memory long after the credits have rolled. This will likely be particularly true for male viewers.

“I think a lot of men have no idea what happens,” Cher says, “what the consequences are. They just hear some words, and then you leave, and eventually you come back. Well, you know what? It’s important for you to know these things. You read a magazine, and you feel bad for the other person when she comes out. But you have no idea what she’s just gone through.

“I showed my film to a few of my male friends while I was working on it,” Cher adds. “They were so startled when the procedure started. And they all said, ‘Well, of course I’ve heard the word before, but I never thought what it meant. I didn’t know what you had to do.’ ”

As one of the film’s executive producers, Moore says, she considered softening two scenes, less because they are likely to be controversial than because they are difficult to watch.

“HBO had very few elements that they wanted us to rethink,” she says, “and the two were the close-up of the knitting needle [in Moore’s segment] and the sucking sound [in Cher’s segment]. And in the end, our feeling was that to pull back from that would be to shy away from the very education and understanding of the experience that we were trying to show. I think that sensory element of the sound really is driving it home for people. I don’t think any of us realized it would be so powerful, but I think intuitively we knew it was important.”

Moore’s intuition always remains precisely attuned to which way the zeitgeist is blowing, so even when she is making a film whose entire budget doesn’t approach the $12-million salary she received for “Striptease,” whether she is a serious actress, or merely a celebrity with interesting upholstery, is a question that seems to remain perpetually open. And it may be that she likes it that way.

“You know, one doesn’t preclude the other,” Moore says in a telephone interview from the Long Beach set of “G.I. Jane,” the picture for which she recently shaved her head. “For me, it’s all important, all interesting. Whether people want to make my efforts seem less important, I have no control over. All I do know is that success and failure ride solely within me. It is not what anybody else’s opinion wants to dictate. Box office does not dictate to me. Nor do critics dictate to me. Because I walk away knowing that the best thing I take with me is the doing. That’s what I truly own.”

The danger in being too long out there on the edge is that one day you will either fall off or begin to feel that people you can’t even see are trying to push you off.

“The nature of what I do is that they want you to be a little bit bigger than life,” Moore says. “But if you get too far away, that makes people scared. So in essence, if you start to do well, which is what they need you to do, as quickly as they put you in this elevated position, they need to start bringing you down. Just because they need to make you more connected by finding faults in you. But regardless of what people think, you have to chalk it up and move on. So every crappy thing they say about me, or about Bruce, or about us together, we have no desire to defend.”

The film’s air date was selected for its proximity to the November elections, though its political weight seems questionable, particularly in a year when nobody seems to be discussing abortion rights.

“[Choice] seems really imperiled right now,” Suzanne Todd, Moore’s producing partner, insists, pointing to Bob Dole’s pre-New Hampshire declaration that he is personally “pro-choice” and politically antiabortion as proof of how complex the issue remains.

“There’s a notion in the ‘90s that we think may be a little off, that because abortion is legal now and readily available, it’s gotten so easy for women,” Todd says. “So many people have little sound bites of facts and statistics. Everyone has his little bit of information that fully informs them, so what you have is people who are pretty much totally uninformed believing that they’re in a position to make a decision and be absolutely right. Because they have three sound bites that they heard on three different channels saying this, that or the other thing.”

In the end, the filmmakers emerged with few conclusions about the long-term outlook for constitutionally guaranteed choice.

“When you look at the whole movie, you think, ‘Wow, is it really any better in the ‘90s than it was in the ‘50s?’ ” Todd says. “It’s a little scary. At one point we talked about trying to do a piece set in 2010, and we had gone to a couple of providers trying to stir up ideas. As we got closer to this upcoming election and what has been going on in politics in the last year, the outcomes seemed pretty bleak. So bleak that we dropped the idea of trying to predict what the future might be, because it didn’t seem rosy at all.”

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“If These Walls Could Talk” airs at 9 tonight on HBO, with additional airings Tuesday and Oct. 21, 23, 26 and 30.