Naomi Fry on the Marriage of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore
‘When I think about Kutcher and Moore, what comes to my mind is a vision of pure, halcyon happiness’
‘When I think about Kutcher and Moore, what comes to my mind is a vision of pure, halcyon happiness’
The mid-2000s wasn’t the greatest time – neither for America nor, really, for myself. We were, after all, into the second term of the dim and criminal presidency of George W. Bush, and I was vaguely muddling through a PhD in English without any real understanding of how I would ever bring it to completion. There was, however, at least one good thing. Love had blossomed between the actor Ashton Kutcher, who had recently grown famous for pranking celebrities on his candid-camera MTV show Punk’d, and the actress Demi Moore – one of the most bankable stars of the 1990s, mother of three, ex-wife of Bruce Willis and 16 years Kutcher’s elder. If we’ve learned anything from Colette, it’s that a union between a hunky young newcomer and a seasoned, besotted woman is not meant to last, and I never truly believed that Kutcher and Moore would be the exception to prove this cruelly Darwinistic rule: indeed, the two, who met in 2003 and got married in 2005, would eventually split in 2011. But, when I think about Kutcher and Moore in those early days, what comes to my mind is a vision of pure, halcyon happiness, perhaps all the more gorgeous because of its limited shelf life – that point where the couple’s respective powers and handicaps were just about equal, allowing for romance to flourish. Looking back at that time, I can choose to think of all the bad things – and, often, I do. But, sometimes, in my mind’s eye, I return to Moore and Kutcher, gazing at each other adoringly on the red carpet, one’s shiny dark hair, lithe, beautiful body and superior bone structure a perfect complement to the other’s. Thinking about this, a frozen moment in time, now long gone, reminds me that things hardly ever last: not the good stuff, but, come to think of it, not the bad stuff either, which I guess is at least a little bit encouraging. I never did finish that PhD.
