As a young actress, Oscar favorite Demi Moore documented her innermost thoughts on life – including her spiraling cocaine and alcohol addiction and wild sex life – in an incredibly personal diary.
Her musings were so intimate that the journal was locked away in a hangar that her second husband Bruce Willis used as a storage unit at Santa Monica Airport.
But years after their 2000 divorce, Willis – who is now suffering from dementia – had the hangar cleared.
Demi’s diary was unceremoniously tossed into a dumpster in a manila envelope marked ‘Demi Private Memoirs’, where the loose leaf pages were discovered by an airport worker.
Now as Moore, 62, is hotly tipped to add an Oscar to this year’s Golden Globe and SAG awards, The Daily Mail can reveal the private thoughts of the ambitious actress when she was in her early 20s.
Demi wrote unsparingly about her wild youth in her best-selling 2019 autobiography, Inside Out, but not in as much detail as the revelations she jotted down in handwriting that quite possibly reflected the mind-altering substances she was taking. At times it was neat and tidy, at others barely legible, sometimes dated, sometimes not.
The diary was written in the mid-eighties, at the time Moore was dating actor Emilio Estevez after her first marriage to musician Freddy Moore had broken down.
Demi Moore’s long-lost diary has been unearthed amid a career-defining moment for the actress who is up for her first Oscar next month
Demi began dating second husband Bruce Willis in 1987, months after she and actor Emilio Estevez called off their romance. They attended the Emmys together that year
She reveals she cheated on them both, including on the night before she married Moore in 1981.
‘We had lived together for two years, his divorce was final, and he wanted to get married right away – I had just turned eighteen,’ she wrote of Freddy, who was 12 years older than her.
‘The night before my wedding I took a bottle of champagne, I went over to this guy’s house who I was doing a film with at the time – well he woke me up at 10:30 the next morning and I was supposed to be ready by one.
‘Late, hungover and guilty was how I faced my wedding day – the next three years didn’t get better – I drank more and started doing coke – had quite a few affairs which were all just a part of getting away with something and not getting caught.
‘I feel so disgusted with myself – not only using drugs but people too. I never realized how selfish and unfair I was.’
Moore, who is Oscar-nominated for her role in The Substance as an aging actress who takes a mystery serum to get back her younger self (with horrifying consequences), wrote movingly of the depth of her love for Estevez.
The son of actor Martin Sheen and one of the Eighties ‘Brat Pack’ of up-and-coming young stars, she dated him between 1985-1986.
Every time he called ‘it would make my heart jump’, she wrote and when she was expecting him to visit ‘I was so happy I couldn’t stand it’.
The private journal was discovered in a manila envelope by an airport worker in Santa Monica after Willis cleared out a hangar he had used as a storage unit following the couple’s divorce in 2000
The diary entries, obtained by the Daily Mail, were written when Moore was in her 20s, at the time she was dating actor Emilio Estevez (left) after her first marriage to musician Freddy Moore had broken down
The actress describes taking a bottle of champagne over to a co-star’s house and cheating on her first husband, Freddy Moore, the night before their wedding in 1981
The next three years ‘didn’t get better’, she wrote, admitting she had ‘quite a few affairs which were all just a part of getting away with something and not getting caught’
But her substance abuse got in the way. The couple went on a cross-country road trip and in an entry dated January 23 1986, she blacked out after ordering a pitcher of kamikaze, a cocktail made of vodka, triple sec and lime juice, to their room.
‘So much for never drinking hard liquor again,’ she wrote. I found myself in a blackout then hungover, confused, alone and longing for that next high to get me out of my misery.’
She said Estevez ‘didn’t tell me what I did, and I didn’t remember’, but she repeated her performance a few days later ‘this time with a larger audience’.
‘I’m surprised he didn’t kill me on the spot,’ she wrote.
She eventually called off their engagement after a woman filed a $2m paternity suit against Estevez in 1986. (He admitted paternity of her two children a year later.)
Demi started her diary with the words: ‘I was f***ed over before I was born you see. My mother left my natural father [Charles Harmon] two weeks before I was born.
‘My name was to be Elizabeth Faith Harmon. Well, that soap opera was completely hidden from the rest of my life until I confronted my mother at fourteen.’
She’d discovered a marriage certificate dated February 1963 and she’d been born in 1962 so started asking questions.
In an entry dated January 23, 1986, she describes going on a road trip with Estevez and blacking out after ordering a pitcher of kamikaze. ‘I didn’t have cocaine and had forgotten what it was like to just be drunk,’ she wrote
The actress eventually called off her engagement with Estevez after a woman filed a $2m paternity suit against him in 1986
She went on to say her mother, Virginia Guynes, who was just 18 when she married, left Texas and returned to Roswell, New Mexico, ‘where her high school sweetheart was waiting’.
‘My name was changed – I guess to protect the innocent, meaning me, and the guilty, meaning my mom and dad, besides that he [Danny Guynes] wanted me to have his initials DGG.’
She documented a turbulent childhood marred by her parents’ heavy drinking, rows and frequent moves around the country – usually after being evicted.
One night she revealed that she heard her mother crying hysterically.
‘I got up and went to see what was going on. There was my mom trying to swallow a whole bottle of pills.
‘My dad was trying to stop her but two hands just wasn’t cutting it. When he saw me he said ‘I’ll hold her down and I want you to dig the pills out of her mouth.
Demi wrote that that was ‘the first of my suicide saves’.
The relationship between her parents remained tempestuous – they actually married and divorced twice before Danny committed suicide in 1980.
In the diary she says she and her mother regularly went to bars together, and describes how Virginia loved it when she was told she didn’t look old enough to be Demi’s mother.
‘I wonder why,’ she wrote. ‘I was a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old who looked twenty-five. I almost always got served.’
But too often Virginia would overdo it. ‘That all seemed like great fun until they started having me drag her out because she was too drunk and obnoxious.’
Demi started the diary with the words: ‘I was f***ed over before I was born you see. My mother left my natural father two weeks before I was born
She described losing her virginity after taking her first Quaalude at the age of 14
Demi was married to Freddy Moore from 1981 to 1985. At the time she had already been using his last name as her stage name and kept ‘Moore’ after their divorce. Moore died in 2002
Demi wrote that alcohol was a fact of life from a very young age.
‘Seeing grown-ups drunk was nothing unusual in my life. I’m not sure how old I was when I became consciously aware that what was in their glass sure the hell wasn’t in mine, but I was going to find out.’
She claimed she took her first swig of beer aged three and on a family trip an aunt gave her and a cousin a marijuana joint and a six pack when one of them was nine and the other 10.
‘I just thought I was so f***ing cute and oh so grown up,’ she wrote.
‘Later on in the trip we had a pow wow with a bunch of boy scouts, hippy types, and my family were all in a circle just passing joint after joint – me being the grown up that I was definitely joined right in.’
A few years later Demi and her family moved to Redondo Beach, California.
‘My new character was now a smoker, drinker and pot smoker.
‘My girlfriend and I didn’t care what we drank, we just drank to get f***ed up…I made friends with that white bowl let me tell you,’ she wrote referring to throwing up in the toilet.
At 14 Demi had her first Quaalude. She lost her virginity at the same age on a trip to Mexico, she revealed.
‘I found a guy I really liked. He was nice and a motorcycle champ – wasn’t I the hot shot.’
She said the sex didn’t mean anything. ‘But if that’s all it took not to be rejected, what the hell that was easy.’
In one entry dated January 20, 1986, she set out her goals for the future. They included getting married, having ‘maybe two’ children, staying faithful and honest and becoming a ‘highly respected actress with an Academy Award
In her autobiography, Moore described her love-hate relationship with her mother – they were reconciled before Virginia died aged 54 in 1998 – with brutal honesty, including a shocking incident when she was 15.
She recorded it in the diary, too: there was an ‘older, extremely wealthy man who wanted to go out with me’.
Virginia ‘jumped on this like a bat out of hell – to the point where every day after school he would pick me up and I would have to stay with him until my new acting class started.
‘I was going crazy,’ she wrote. ‘I had avoided having to sleep with him, but he finally trapped me one day.
‘I would beg my mom not to have to go, she just kept saying just for a little while longer. I wonder if she realized the degradation I was going through.
‘This man would sit there and say s**t like ‘you’re not good enough to meet my daughters, you don’t have enough class’.
‘Well, it ended up basically that I was whored by my own mother for five hundred dollars.
‘I felt so cheap and humiliated – as soon as she got her money I was gone.’
Demi lived with grandmother back in Roswell for six months before rejoining her mother in Seattle and moving to California where she enrolled in acting classes and signed with the Elite Model Agency.
Small film roles followed and a part in TV soap General Hospital – and all the while Demi’s drug-taking and drinking continued.
It finally caught up with her on the set of what was her breakthrough role in the ultimate Brat Pack movie St. Elmo’s Fire.
Starring alongside Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe among others, she played Jules, a fun-loving but troubled young bank executive – who was too fond of a drink.
‘I had finally won a role because of the quality of my work and not my looks,’ she wrote. ‘I was moving into a new league.’
But she was told any more drugs, and she would be out.
‘I must have really wanted to fail because I went right out and started using.’
Demi wrote of her wild young years in her 2019 book Inside Out, but nowhere near in as much detail as she jotted down in her diaries
Moore is now on track to snag her first Oscar for her performance in The Substance, which has already earned her multiple accolades
Eventually the movie’s director Joel Schumacher insisted she go to rehab, the film was a hit and Moore was on the road to superstardom.
Through much of the 1980s and 90s she was one of the most successful, well-paid actresses in Hollywood – earning her the moniker ‘Gimme Moore’ – with a string of box office hits including About Last Night…., Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure.
Her career took a backseat while she raised her three daughters with Bruce Willis, but she was never far from the headlines: her divorce from the Die Hard star; a six-year marriage to Ashton Kutcher who was 15 years her junior; and a relapse in her 40s after long-term sobriety.
And now a late-career renaissance that is winning her the critical plaudits that have eluded her to this point.
In her diary for January 20 1986, Demi set out her goals for the future. They included getting married, having ‘maybe two’ children and staying faithful and honest.
She also wrote of her desire to become a ‘highly respected actress’ – followed by the words ‘Academy Award’.
On Sunday night at the Dolby Theater in LA, that wish might finally come true.
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