While Tara's mother, Chong Son Chong, 36, a Korean émigré and former actress and model, putters elsewhere in the house, the father smiles with deep satisfaction, dipping a finger into one of Tara's white booties to touch her baby skin. "She can feel my heart," says director Oliver Stone. "She's made me a happy man." He speaks again, examining the word like a flower: "Happiness."
Wait, wait—who is this zen, beatific puppy? The Oliver Stone we know is an angry, self-described provocateur. The familiar Stone is the one who, a couple of years ago, dismissed those who doubted the baroque conspiracy theories behind his film JFK as "chick s-t." He is a director so notorious for on-set tirades that Anthony Hopkins, who plays the title role in Stone's latest dive into history, Nixon, has said he expected "a kind of caveman." But while Stone doesn't deny there are brutish aspects to his character, he insists they are mere brush strokes—not the whole portrait. "There's no appreciation," he says, "that there's another side of me."
Stone now wants the world to see that other side. Chastened by the acrimonious end in 1993 of his 12-year marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth, 46—who lives with the couple's two sons, Sean, 11, and Michael, 4—the director insists he has embarked on a fresh, clear path in life. He has a new child, and a new relationship, with Chong. In their generally positive reviews of Nixon, critics, while not defending him against persuasive claims that he has taken his customary liberties with historical fact, have praised Stone's newfound "restraint." A Buddhist since he embraced the religion while making his 1993 saga of the Vietnamese experience of the war, Heaven & Earth, Stone says he has also found a degree of spiritual tranquility. In short, Oliver Stone wants us to know that at age 49 he believes he is growing up.
There are some signs it may be true—one being his decidedly un-Stone-like response to criticism of Nixon. Before it opened—to very disappointing box office business—the late President's normally private daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox, 49, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, 47, read a script and issued a statement through the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., decrying the movie as "character assassination." Since then, seemingly every Nixon Administration official, and a number of historians and neutral observers, have weighed in in a similar vein. "It is a despicable fairy tale," says former Treasury Secretary William Simon. "This is a vicious attack on a man," says onetime White House Chief-of-Staff Gen. Alexander Haig. Though Stone hasn't shrunk from defending his work, his responses have been far more measured than in the past. He wrote this month to John Taylor, head of Nixon Library, to suggest he convene a symposium on the late President's image, adding, "I understand the feelings you have about [the film]." In his turn, Taylor—who calls the movie sadistic—says he will invite Stone to a planned conference on movies about recent U.S. history.
Ironically, there are numerous parallels between Stone's life and Nixon's. Nixon, no matter how successful, never found personal peace; Stone has seemed equally driven. Growing up in New York City as the only child of Louis Stone (a stockbroker who died in 1985) and his wife, Jacqueline, Stone, like Nixon, rarely received much affection from his father. "Louis would never kiss Oliver," says Jacqueline. "He would shake his hand." Stone says his mother was loving but caught up in New York's arty social whirl. "When she was [home], she was perfect," he says. "But it was continual abandonment."
Compelled, perhaps, by a child's sense of powerlessness, Stone sought control. "He was not like other children—he was conscientious, tidy," says his mother. At age 6 on family visits to France, she says, he called upon his cousins to perform in sketches he wrote—and charged adults two francs to attend the show. "Oliver was the leader, and his cousins did the work. Oliver likes to have it his own way."
Behind it all, Stone says, "I was very insecure." The feeling intensified in 1960 when Stone was sent off to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., where he never felt he fit in. "I was nobody special," he says. "I felt invisible." Then, in his sophomore year, his parents divorced amid accusations of mutual infidelities, and Stone learned his father was deeply in debt. Stone's biographer, James Riordan, sees this as a formative moment. "After that, the whole world is like his parents," says Riordan, whose authorized bio, Stone, appeared last month. "There's always something deeper than the surface truth."
Hoping to find that something deeper, Stone says, "I took off into the world alone." He left Yale after his freshman year in 1965 to teach English in Vietnam. But he became bored and, craving to know "the bottom of life," enlisted in 1967 as an Army infantryman and was sent back to Vietnam. After a few weeks, he says, "I was becoming a jungle animal. I started out cerebral and civilized, and within two months I was operating on instinct."
Like many other soldiers, he was also operating on a range of drugs, from marijuana to LSD. After his discharge in 1968 he returned to the U.S. a heavy and indiscriminate user—a problem that plagued Stone, he says, until 1981, when he kicked a cocaine habit cold turkey.
Soon after he came home, drawing on a talent for writing stories and looking, he has said, for a way to "channel my rage" at the injustice he perceived in Vietnam, he enrolled in New York University's film program, graduating in 1971. After years of writing while getting by on odd jobs, he hit it big, winning the Best Screenplay Oscar in 1978 with Midnight Express.
The rage didn't disappear. James Woods, who starred in Stone's breakout film as a director, 1986's Salvador (and who plays White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in Nixon), recalls how he and Stone would pound one another's heads on the floor of their Mexican inn over artistic disagreements. "He bends you out of shape," says Woods. "He keeps you on edge—but he gets performances you didn't know you had to give."
Anger has made an imprint, in one way or another, on every Stone project, from Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July to JFK, Natural Born Killers and, now, Nixon. Stone himself sees its source as fear. "It has taken many forms in my life," he says. "I can get a stab of fear anytime. Sometimes you can handle it, sometimes you can't. I can get moody and defensive." Or, friends say, turn it on others. When he filmed her autobiography in Heaven & Earth, says writer Le Ly Hayslip, Stone could be a bully. "His energy is too strong," she says. "He knows he can make people respect and fear him."
Which may be why he received such a comeuppance in his wrenching divorce from Elizabeth Cox, whom he met when she served as an assistant on his 1981 thriller, The Hand. (Stone's six-year first marriage to Najwa Sarkis, 56, an attaché at the Moroccan mission to the U.N., ended in 1977. They had no children.) During the last few years of their marriage, Stone had numerous affairs, and, in an act of colossal hubris—one Richard Nixon would sympathize with—Stone kept graphic accounts of his extramarital relations in his diaries. Elizabeth found them.
Today Stone's sense of chastisement is clear. "You lose your kids—it is so sad," he says. "I only get a little portion of them now." Then a bit of his old sense of grievance creeps in. "American divorce laws are very tough," he says. "For whatever reason, the system is geared to destroy people." Still, he hopes to rebuild some trust with his ex. "We're trying to work out a friendship," he says.
It is one project among many. He is busy revising an autobiographical novel he wrote at 19. There is Memphis, a film he is developing about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—lest we think the new Oliver Stone will be moving on to romantic comedy. And there is Tara, named for the Buddhist deity of compassion. As Stone plays with the child, his face splits in a gap-toothed grin. "I've got a bond with her," he says. "There's a special relationship between a daughter and her father."
Tara's mother, whom Stone met at a New York City nightclub in 1994, says little about herself, except that "the baby makes me happy." Their pairing is, for Stone, uniquely honest. According to Jacqueline, her son has been frank with Chong. "He's said he will not marry her." His need for love, she says, "has been filled by Tara."
Stone would agree. "Love kills the demons," he says, standing, as Chong enters the room and reaches to take the child. But Stone pauses, bends over and kisses their baby girl—once, twice, three times—on the forehead. "I love these moments," he says. "I just don't have enough of them."
GREGORY CERIO
LYNDA WRIGHT in Santa Monica
- Contributors:
- Lynda Wright.
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