Just how determined is Stone to stonewall media snoops? So much so that she recently phoned her local paper, the Meadville Tribune in Pennsylvania, to urge former neighbors not to discuss her pre-Hollywood days with reporters. (Ironically, her plea for privacy was splashed on the Tribune's front page.)
But to the 14,258 residents of Meadville (40 miles south of Erie) and the 1,067 denizens of nearby Saegertown, where Sharon went to school, it is a request not easily honored. After all, Stone, a former local beauty queen, has been Conversation Piece No. 1 for years.
What her neighbors remember most clearly is that stardom was always on her agenda. The second of four children of Joe Stone, who owns a tool-and-die business, and his wife, Dorothy, a homemaker, Sharon was only 16 and a student at Saegertown High School when "she told me she was going to replace Marilyn Monroe," recalls former assistant principal Richard Baker. Adds his wife, Pauline, a librarian: "Sharon always had the big A, for ambition."
Considered a better-than-average student, Stone was one of a group of 11th graders who spent part of each day attending nearby Edinboro College. But where she really excelled was onstage in her high school's theater productions.
She was not, unfortunately, terribly popular among her peers. "Sharon was pretty, and she knew it," says Linda Bidwell Simcheck, now a nurse's aide. "I'm not saying she was conceited, but she was a little." Still, classmate Randy Schlosser, now a physical therapist, on whom Stone had a teenage crush, thinks the girls in the class were just jealous of Stone's looks and smarts.
Her escape from small-town obscurity began in 1975, when she entered the Miss Crawford County beauty pageant. For the talent segment, she chose to recite the Gettysburg Address, but "it was kind of tough getting her to pull it off [with conviction]," recalls retired Meadville eye surgeon W.T. Holland, her coach. Finally, his wife, Hap, took Sharon aside and started explaining to her the horrors of the Civil War. "She was hanging on my every word," says Hap. Then, she says, Sharon solemnly interrupted: "Mrs. Holland, may I ask you something? Should I wear sparkly stuff in my hair?" She went on to win the title.
Chaperoned by her mother, Sharon quit her undergrad studies at Edinboro in 1977 to launch a modeling career in New York City, where she signed with the prestigious Ford Modeling Agency. TV roles followed, including a part as a baseball player's wife in NBC's short-lived Bay City Blues in 1983. (In real life, Stone was wed the following year to TV producer Michael [MacGyver] Greenburg; the couple divorced in 1987, citing irreconcilable differences.) She achieved her first big-screen success playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's treacherous spouse in the 1990 sci-fi thriller Total Recall. Then came Basic Instinct.
Not all her former neighbors are thrilled by Stone's good fortune, and some suspect that she is equally indifferent to them. Belying that chilly image, though, was the compassion Sharon showed the night before she gave her alma mater's commencement address in 1989. At a reception in her honor, Stone kept her fans waiting while she went into a room alone with Dick Baker to console him about his 34-year-old son Richard's suicide two years earlier. "I was deeply moved that she took time from the public," Baker recalls. "She was truly a good listener and was trying to help me."
Stone probably got the most attention back home when she posed on the streets of L.A. for a 10-page topless photo spread in Playboy in 1990. "She was very adventurous, not wimpy," recalls photographer Phillip Dixon. In fact, he says, Stone "got into the shoot so much, she was suggesting even more risqué things than I wanted to do." He agreed to shoot her as she began to scale a narrow fire-escape ladder on a 40-foot building clad in only spike heels and panties. "I said it was dangerous," says Dixon, "and she said she wanted to do it anyway."
But some risks she thinks twice about. When horror director Wes Craven asked her to let a tarantula crawl on her chest for a scene in 1981's Deadly Blessing, Stone insisted that Craven, who is arachniphobic, have the spider crawl on him first. "She was a no-bulls—t girl," he says admiringly.
Indeed, Stone has a reputation for standing up to her directors. J. Lee Thompson had a few verbal tussles with her on the set of King Solomon's Mines in 1985. "She can be outspoken and a pain in the ass," he says, "but she's worth suffering because she has the talent."
MICHAEL A. LIPTON
CHARLOTTE HAYS in Saegertown, TODD GOLD and CRAIG TOMASHOFF in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Charlotte Hays,
- Todd Gold,
- Craig Tomashoff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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