“I don’t know if any marriage could be harder than when both people do the exact same f–king thing, when they are, in the eyes of the world, big shots—celebrities, superstars, whatever you want to say,” Bruce told journalist David Sheff for Playboy in 1996. “We both do the same thing, both travel all the time. We both average 300 hours a year on planes. On the other hand, when I come home after a day at work, how many people are really going to understand what I’ve been through? She’s one of a few.”
While you could try to poke holes in their union anywhere along the way amid all that fame and inevitable tabloid scrutiny, Demi shared in her book that their marriage actually hit a major speed bump early on. When Bruce was about to leave for Europe to shoot Hudson Hawk in August 1990, she recalled, he said to her, “I don’t know if I want to be married.”
So “things were in a very precarious state” when he left, Demi wrote, and her first visit to see him was “tense” and “weird.”
But right after he wrapped that movie she got pregnant with Scout, Demi continued, “and it was like we’d never had that conversation about his ambivalence.”
By the time she made G.I. Jane, however, she wrote, “we were disconnected from each other emotionally. Our life was all about logistics surrounding the kids.” And while Demi knew her husband was proud of her success, she added, “I don’t know that he was always comfortable with the attention that came with it.”