Sharon Stone arrives for lunch wearing a buttoned-up business suit, her posture charm-school erect, her smile cool and polite, her tresses severely disciplined in a tight blond helmet. With her tweed jacket adorned by a beribboned medal identifying her as a chevalier dans Vordre des arts et des lettres (knight in the order of arts and letters), an honor bestowed on her last fall by the French minister of culture, she looks ready for the rigors of a receiving line at the White House, let alone those of an interview at a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

"It has been my experience with journalists," Stone says, pausing over her black-pepper shrimp to stifle a ladylike yawn, "that they already know the story they want to write before they come to see me, and they just ask you to fill in the blanks. So," she goes on, fixing me with a gaze the approximate temperature of liquid nitrogen, "what story do you want to write?"

Could this be the Sharon Stone? The same celebrity who memorably granted an audience while being pounded and kneaded by a masseuse alongside her equally prone male interviewer? Who so frequently employed the word "fuck" with the press, in so many permutations? Who openly discussed with perfect strangers her apparently steamy love life and her preference for male rather than female sex partners ("It don't mean a thing," she once told this magazine, "if it ain't got that schwing")? And who in her last close encounter with Vanity Fair, three years ago, was topless, and preening in front of a makeup mirror while she chattered on about the size and shape of her breasts?

FLESH AND STONE Stone reportedly threatened the producer of her new movie Diabolique with a sexual-harassment complaint when he insisted on a nude scene. "People want to look for some drama with me, and I really don't want to get into it," she says.

Is this the same actress who achieved her stardom as an icon of female lust and power? Whose sex-bomb image exploded on the popular culture with her 1992 breakthrough movie, Basic Instinct, indelibly stripped to its bare essentials: a pair of uncrossed legs and an ice pick?

Well... no! For today, anyway, Stone seems to have clothed herself in a brandnew persona, tastefully designed in the muted style of gravitas and self-restraint.

"I don't think I regret anything," she says about the immoderate image of her past. "But if I knew then what I know now, I think it's not a great idea to do nudity. I could obviously walk down Sunset Boulevard in my briefs, and when it's appropriate for the work, it's appropriate for the work. But it inspires a kind of avarice and irrational greed in some people who believe that's why a film with me in it will make money. That it will make more money if I take my clothes off than if I leave them on."

Never mind her tough-gal reputation (Sharon "Stones," a studio wag once dubbed her), she is suddenly that most fragile of Hollywood creatures—a movie star in transition. As she looks forward this month to her 38th birthday, and calculates her strategy for stardom in middle age, Stone is striving to reinvent herself—to move from moaning siren to serious artiste. The transformation is not always seamless.

This particular afternoon, Stone, a seasoned survivor of the publicity wars, seems oddly off her game, and coming down with a cold to boot, as she struggles to get control of the part she appears to have assigned herself: the Pamela Harriman of Hollywood.

"I've met the Clintons on a number of occasions and find him to be a very decent person," she declaims, launching into what she seems to intend as a political-science lecture. "It's like swimming upstream, you know? A little respect and support and people would be in a lot better shape. I don't think they understand how much they work against themselves when they oppose the president, even when it's not the president of your choice. He's been, you know, the leader of your nation, and deserves your respect and regard." Newt Gingrich, take note.

When I stop to admire her faux-leopardskin shoes and matching purse, and inquire as to whether any endangered species were sacrificed for the cause, this is her cue to muse earnestly, as though struggling with a deep philosophical dilemma: "I think that people who have fur coats from before, I don't know, what do you think? Is it wrong? If you have them and these animals have died already, shouldn't you wear them in honor of the animal that died?"

The most awkward moment comes during a discussion of her recent visit to her ancestral Ireland, where, she declares, "the earth is very rocky and the foliage is very hardy and the people are very solid." When I suggest that Ireland is also a country of depressed and brooding writers, she is prompted to gush about one of her favorite "Irish" authors: "I have to say, Dylan Thomas just cuts me to the bone!"

"I get nervous," Stone admits, regarding the tango of public relations. "I think that's why I was about 10 minutes late. I was thinking about that in the car. I really think I'm late because I have nervousness about going and jumping into it. Because you never know how it's going to go."

This business of movie-star realignment is, to be sine, a delicate, difficult, uncomfortable process, full of pitfalls and fraught with peril, like attempting a triple axel while the whole world watches. It's a precarious moment of instability and possibility, turning on the central question: Yes, but can she act?

"If a role required an actress to turn an audience on, casting Sharon Stone was putting money in the bank," says producer Steven Haft, who cast Stone in the decidedly unglamorous role of a double murderess on death row in director Bruce Beresford's The Last Dance, due out in May. "The surprise is going to be that this blonde seductress turned out to be a Gena Rowlands, a Patricia Neal, a Faye Dunaway. That is, she turned out to be the real thing—an actor with all of the moves, tremendous range, emotional depth, somebody who can rip your heart out and not just turn you on."

"I think she'll improve as an artist," predicts Dunaway, who was on hand last November for the installation of Stone's star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and sees the actress as a kindred spirit. "We're cut from the same cloth. It's kind of a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase, courageous, strong, tough, but also vulnerable spirit, and one of pushing the edge of the envelope. In my generation, I played roles on an edge. Sharon is a little bit behind me, but I think she is beginning to attract those roles of gutsy, strong, interesting women."

So far Stone's makeover looks promising. Her critically acclaimed tour de force in last year's Casino, Martin Scorsese's three-hour Las Vegas epic, in which she shined opposite Robert De Niro as a hustler with a heart of chrome, won her a Golden Globe award for best actress in a drama and put her in contention for Oscar consideration.

"When she walks on the fucking screen, she's a Movie Star!" says James Woods, who plays Stone's ne'er-dowell boyfriend inCasino,his second film with her. "What makes her a movie star is her slightly wounded, really self-involved quality. About 80 percent of it is healthy narcissism, and 20 percent is really unhealthy narcissism in her case. A lot of the unhealthy stuff is something that no one else would like, but also makes you want to save her and take her to bed."

Woods adds that in his work with Stone, both in Casino and in the 1994 movie The Specialist, in which he plays a sadistic mobster and she plays a vengeful victim, "a lot of the turbulence and tension between us comes from the fact that Sharon doesn't just have to steal every scene, she has to win every scene."

"I can only relate it to how she commands the frame that she's in, how the lens deals with her, the sense of stature and the sense of control that she has," says Scorsese of the actress's magnetism. "So that when the lens is on her, the audience is looking at nothing but her, and she resonates with that intangible thing—that very intangible and very mysterious thing. Some have it and some don't. Some of our greatest actors don't have it— wonderful actors, but ultimately they lack something. It's real special. It's really part of her. She reminds me in that sense of Susan Hayward, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly: all of those people had that command."

"I knew she would do very well," says De Niro, who at one point favored former porn star Traci Lords for the role of Ginger McKenna in Casino, which Stone ultimately snagged. "She really wanted the part and she was very excited to get it. She worked very, very hard. She was very professional and willing to try things. Sometimes it was a hard part for her to do physically. But we all had a lot of laughs during the fight scenes, like the one where I was dragging her on the floor. She was a good sport about it."

"Good sport" isn't the first thing that comes to mind where Stone's M.O. is concerned. The filming last fall of Diabolique, a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 psychodrama, in which Stone re-creates the Simone Signoret role of a headmaster's murderous mistress, was marred by bad publicity about her allegedly bitchy behavior, including an ugly encounter with producer James Robinson. When Robinson pressed Stone to do the obligatory nude scene, People magazine reported, she threatened him with sexualharassment charges and threw him out of her trailer. Robinson didn't return phone calls on the subject, but Stone, who is nothing if not smart about internal Hollywood politics, pointedly doesn't deny the incident. "People want to look for some drama with me, and I really don't want to get into it," she says. "That's not my job. It doesn't really interest me."

'Sharon doesn't just have to steal every scene, she has to win every scene," says actor James Woods

"It does not have the nude scene," says Diabolique director Jeremiah Chechik, whose movie will be out in late March. Although he declines to discuss Stone's battles with the producer, he says, "One cannot expect actors of any note to behave in sedate, normal, controlled, dull ways. They're very emotional. . . . One thing about Sharon is that she's a mythic character of her time, and the image from Basic Instinct is a burden for her to carry. But she doesn't want to carry that as an artist and an actress for the rest of her life. After paying a tremendous amount of dues and doing all kinds of wacky movies, the need for legitimacy, and the need to protect herself against repeating and repeating, becomes more and more intense. She is looking for a way to dimensionalize herself."

Last Dance producer Steven Haft, who got on well with her, says Stone is different from most other stars. "In my experience they're fairly quiet people, involved in everything but their professional lives. They're trying to keep their families together, trying to have a life, waiting for a good script, and leaving the mechanics of their professional lives to the mechanics— their agents and managers."

But not Stone. She has a manager but hasn't used an agent in years. "This is somebody who likes to be in control of events around her and in control of herself," Haft says. "She's had to build up her armor to do the roles that she's done, which are all about somebody in control, somebody who controls the men in her life and the events in her life. That's how she has come to be known as this icon 'Sharon Stone.' She is absolutely in control."

Chaos Productions, ironically, is the name of the all-women company she formed a few years ago to control her career. "When I became famous, I was an artist, not a businesswoman, and suddenly overnight I went from having a little business I could run out of my house to having this big international company with all these demands, and no idea how to do it," says Stone, whose per-movie fee is in the $7 million range. She recently signed a development deal with Miramax, giving it a first look at any of her projects. "You're running a business, and you're the commodity of that business, and if you're going to do that with pride and integrity, you have a lot of work to do. But now I can keep it pretty smooth."

'I've had an unsuccessful love life for my entire life."

Lunch being over and done with, she informs me that I am to accompany her on a shopping spree. Nearly finished decorating her grand new house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, she has arranged to meet her landscaping consultant at a pottery studio. Stone's fulltime chauffeur, a redheaded young woman in a pin-striped suit, drives us there in a black sedan worthy of a German industrialist. Stone is very much at home in the richly leathered, buttery interior—the back windows blocked to prying eyes by protective mesh netting.

"Fame is a big yellow dinosaur who lives with you," she pronounces epigrammatically.

"Thank God it's not a purple dinosaur like Barney," I volunteer.

"He's more famous than me—really famous."

"And Barney's naked the whole time."

"And, see," Stone replies with a thinning smile, "nobody puts him down for that."

At the pottery studio off Melrose, Stone snaps up a Japanese Buddha head and several large urns for her backyard garden. She falls in love with a massive decorative door—but frowns when the owner quotes a price of $2,400 seconds after a lower-level salesperson had estimated $1,200 to $1,400. "One look at me and they double the price," she observes, not without bitterness.

"This one," the owner says, pointing out a pot, "has the Chinese symbol of long life and happiness."

"Does it have the Chinese symbol of long life and a good deal?" Stone demands. "The more it has those symbols, the more I can buy today. I have a whole house to do, and a budget to do it in." In the end I watch her write a check for several thousand dollars. A few minutes later she takes me aside. "I noticed you saw my home address. You're not going to publish it, right?"

We repair to some more shops around the comer. At a ceramic boutique, she briskly orders the owner to stub out his cigarette, and after she asks repeatedly, he eventually complies. She buys another designer pot for her garden. The expenses are accumulating.

"I think I'll do a movie about the manager of a nudist colony," she sighs to her landscaping adviser, "so I can get paid $20 million."

In an Oriental-carpet shop, the proprietor, a slender young man in an Armani suit, immediately recognizes the actress. He steers her toward a pile of carpet swatches that have been stitched into saddlebags—from the border of Iran and Afghanistan, he says.

"You're welcome to take one as gift," the starstruck shopkeeper invites her. Stone appropriates one for herself, and magnanimously bestows a complimentary saddlebag on her chauffeur, her consultant, and, after my mild protest, on me. "You're allowed to accept a gift, aren't you?" she chides. (I later returned it to the store.)

Then she spots two needlepoint runners, perfect for her butler's pantry, she announces.

STONE FACT: Stone likes to drive with her knees so she can "put on lipstick and talk on the phone." Above, she rides in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce on her way to a reception given by the couturier Valentino in Paris, October 1995.

"How low will you go for the pair?" she asks the owner. Two hundred and eighty dollars each, he tells her. "Oh, come on! It'll make you feel good to be nice." She holds up five fingers at him. "How about that for the two of them?"

"On one condition," the young man replies. "You know what I need?"

Stone giggles. "I'm not so sure." Her voice is low and sultry—the voice of the sex goddess. She flashes a comehither smile and switches her baby blues on high beam.

"Now I'm blushing," the poor shopkeeper mumbles. This is true. He is blushing a deep red. "I didn't mean anything like that," he stammers. "Just an autographed picture," he trails off.

"I think we can do that," Stone says, still flirting.

Then she briefly refocuses on me. "You're not writing down these prices, are you?"

At length she perches atop a Louis XV-style desk and places a phone call to a business associate. "I think we should push off this writer meeting till we read the other script," she instructs whoever's on the other end of the line. "Make sure that letter gets sent out to them before the writer meeting—and to Arnold. If you do that, I'll be at the meeting. Did we get the script yet? Groovy."

As she leaves with her purchases she confides to her chauffeur, "He was far and away the cutest rug dealer I've ever met."

The hour grows late. We skip a planned tour of Chaos Productions, and Stone directs her driver to drop me off. "I'm beat, I gotta go home," she says. When I tell her I'd appreciate another chance to speak with her, she simply stares at me. "Look," she finally says, not bothering to mask her impatience, "why don't you figure out what you want to ask me, and we can do something over the phone."

In due course I call Stone's office to make the arrangements, but a member of her entourage informs me that the star is now unavailable. The official explanation is that, after shooting three movies back-to-back over the past year and nary a moment to herself, she is just too exhausted to field further questions.

'Come on, get inlet's have lunch on the beach!"

A beautiful woman driving a jetblack Jeep has pulled up to a curb in West Hollywood, 20 feet from where I'm using a pay phone. She actually seems to be calling my name. Yes, now she's waving at me, her mirrored sunglasses glinting at me, her voice low and inviting—a dangerous-looking blonde in a bomber jacket.

I hang up the phone mid-conversation, without saying goodbye. Her windblown curls dangle at lovely angles. She leans over to open the passenger door, and playfully slaps the empty seat. She is smiling a luscious, lip-glossed smile. Feeling giddy, I obediently climb  in next to her.

It's Sharon Stone.

Four weeks after our first encounter, she has summoned me back to L.A. for a tete-a-tete. "Throw your coat in the back, throw your bag in the back. Make yourself comfortable," she purrs, pulling into the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and heading for the Pacific Ocean.

I tell her that, contrary to everything I've heard, she is obviously a conscientious driver. Sometime later I can't help but notice that she's operating the steering wheel with her knees.

"After I complimented you on your driving," I point out, "you took your hands off the wheel."

"I figured you were ready to move into the next phase," she explains. "It's true, I like to drive with my knees. So sue me! Otherwise, how can I put on my lipstick and talk on the phone?"

We make it only as far west as Brentwood before Sharon spots an Italian restaurant called Toscana and, using her hands this time, swings into valet parking. "I had forgotten how much I liked it until we were driving down the street," she says. "I was thinking, Oh, we'll eat on the beach, but now I think we should go down to the beach for dessert, because you're not going to eat like this on the beach."

Although the dining room is crowded with well-heeled patrons at reserved tables sporting crisp white linen, the owner gives us a prime spot, and we comfortably settle in. Producer Joel Silver (Die Hard, Action Jackson) brushes past wearing a safari shirt, and he and Stone exchange a quick hello, belying their history of romantic involvement.

"I didn't know this was like a business spot all the way down here," Sharon marvels. "It didn't use to be. When I lived out here, nobody came but a bunch of great Italian people."

Producer A1 Ruddy (The Godfather), a graying man in a baseball jacket, and a pillar of the Hollywood establishment, sidles up to our table.

"Ooow!" Sharon shrieks with pleasure. "Are you following me, honey?"

"I've got about 20 votes if you want 'em," Ruddy tells her, patting his jacket pocket.

"All right."

"You deserve them all," the producer says.

"Thank you very much," Sharon replies.

"Was he talking about votes for the Oscars?" I ask after Ruddy leaves.

"I don't know," Sharon says dreamily, her cerulean eyes glistening. "I think he's just trying to be loving."

Our entrees arrive—pasta garnished with truffles. "Oh my God!" Sharon crows. "That's a lot of truffles. Thousands of pigs snorted for this. Usually you don't get this many truffles. They're really being nice to us."

"Excuse me for interrupting," says Creative Artists Agency deal-maker Rick Nicita, a slim man sporting a thin mustache. He crouches down to coo sweetly into Sharon's ear. "You were just great in Casino. I'm really happy for you. Really happy."

"That was generous," Sharon remarks when he withdraws, explaining that Nicita is the husband of Paula Wagner, her former agent at CAA.

"Was she upset with you when you left?"

Sharon bursts out laughing. "Ohhh, let's not go there, shall we?"

Dustin Hoffman, dressed for a hike in the great outdoors, comes in and takes the adjacent table. "Hey you!" Sharon calls out as he prepares to sit down. When he doesn't respond, she yanks hard on his shirttail. Hoffman turns to see who or what is molesting him. But as soon as he recognizes Sharon, he grins and gives her his full attention.

"How do you see us?" he asks her teasingly. "How do you see us in a movie?"

"Romantic comedy," Sharon replies. "I chase you. You keep turning me down."

"Why would the Short Jew turn down the Shiksa Goddess?"

"Power," Sharon says.

"Why would the Shiksa Goddess chase the Short Jew?"

"Power," she laughs.

Turning warm and avuncular, Hoffman, too, congratulates her on Casino. "Now," he says portentously, "they have to reckon with you!"

"Just before my ass hit the floor," Sharon says.

"See?" Hoffman smiles. "Timing!"

SHARON SHARK ALIKE Stone wearing the medal she was given by the French minister of culture when she was made a chevalier dans Vordre des arts et des lettres (knight in the order of arts and letters).

But, for Stone—who had appeared in 16 feature films before Basic Instinct made her an international sensation, only to follow that triumph with a series of critical duds until Casino—timing hasn't been as crucial as sheer force of will. A small-town girl from Meadville, Pennsylvania, she was the second of four children born to a tooland die-maker and his wife. Sharon staged theatrical productions and entered beauty pageants as a

teenager, and seems never to have doubted her destiny, even when fate and circumstance conspired against her.

"She completely willed it to be so," says her best friend, Mimi Craven, who met Stone when horror director Wes Craven (now Mimi's ex) cast her as a screaming, scantily clad coed in the 1981 slasher movie Deadly Blessing. "There's no other place for her to be, and she never even looked elsewhere. Because if you want to be anywhere else, it's the sort of career that will totally destroy you."

Dropping out of college, Stone waited \-) tables and managed a backgammon store in Manhattan before establishing herself as a model in New York and Europe. She first met De Niro when he auditioned her for the role of his girlfriend in Scorsese's Raging Bull—the part that went to Cathy Moriarty—and got her first movie break when Woody Allen put her in his 1980 film, Stardust Memories. It was a nonspeaking part as the gorgeous dream girl planting a luscious kiss on a train window. She went on to do a comic part as an egomaniacal starlet in Irreconcilable Differences—a. deftly funny performance—but then played various damsels in distress in a string of bad-to-middling action movies. Two of her worst were Indiana Jones knockoffs that were filmed over a year in Zimbabwe with co-star Richard Chamberlain and the man who was briefly Stone's husband, producer Michael Greenburg.

"When I first came to town," she says, "I auditioned for General Hospital and the producer told me that I couldn't have the job, because I had no mystery."

"Was mystery a big requirement for General Hospital. " I ask.

"Clearly."

"Weren't you devastated by these judgments?"

"You mean, 'too tall,' 'too short,' 'too fat,' 'too thin,' 'too blonde,' 'too brown,' 'no talent,' 'too talented,' 'too strong,' 'too weak'?" She smiles. "And they wonder how I got so tough!"

"She's a very ambitious woman in a business in which a lack of ambition is a death sentence," says James Woods. "This is a woman who came here and succeeded against all odds. To be blonde and beautiful in Hollywood—well, welcome to the troopship!"

Jump-starting her career by posing for Playboy, Stone finally cut through the clutter with her darkly comedic performance as Arnold Schwarzenegger's homicidal, kick-boxing wife in the 1990 Paul Verhoeven science-fiction thriller, Total Recall—a role that led to Verhoeven's casting her in Basic Instinct as his ice-pick-wielding, sexually omniverous leading lady.

"She had the right opportunities and then she shined when she had them," says Schwarzenegger (who touted Stone for Total Recall after deciding that "she showed talent and didn't act like a bitch"). "She went all-out, and there was no lack of willingness to work 24 hours a day and kick some butt."

But just as Stone was poised on the launchpad, she totaled her BMW in a head-on collision. She spent months recovering from the accident, unable to work. Other hard knocks, physical and emotional, included her freak near strangulation by a clothesline while trying to break a horse (the scar on her neck is still visible despite plastic surgery); last year's brouhaha over her apparent claim, in a speech to the National Press Club, that she cured herself of cancer by cutting down on caffeine (when what she meant to make clear was that she was misdiagnosed); and the death from AIDS in 1994 of her longtime acting coach, Roy London (of whom she is still unable to speak without a tremor in her voice).

"I am a survivor. I'm definitely not a victim," she says. "I've been through all kinds of hellish experiences, and I choose to have them make me stronger, not crush me in two. The minute you surrender, it's over."

Stone's messy and very public affair with Bill MacDonald, the married associate producer of Sliver—a sexually suggestive film she made in 1993 to capitalize on her Basic Instinct success—damned her eternally to tabloid hell. Her love life has not thrived since, she says.

"I've dated some good guys and I've dated some knuckleheads, you know. So who hasn't? But I've stopped going to stuff with guys. I go alone. I don't need this drama." The last time we met, she mentioned a "beau in New York," but now she says she's not seeing anyone. Stardom, she has found, is "isolating."

"People look at you like a stunned trout, you know," she says. "I sometimes have to say, This person can't take it, it's not good for this person, and I have to let go and sometimes have them be mad at me in the process. Because some people just get crushed by the weight of it."

Pondering further, she adds, "But since I haven't even been famous for a minute, and I've had an unsuccessful love life for my entire life, I think it would be inappropriate to throw the blame there—much as I would like to."

"We've had a running gag for eight years," Woods says. "She says, 'You never asked me out—how come?' And I say, 'Look, Sharon, maybe everyone can't wait to get it in there, but once they get it in there, the big problem is getting it out again. You're a Cuisinart with legs and a million-dollar face.' She thinks that's very funny."

Sharon says she finds emotional support in her network of close women friends. Faye Dunaway, she says, "is high-strung and brilliant. Faye's a big shtar. She's a babe. . . . You know who else I really like is Roseanne Barr. I'm just getting to know her now, and she's a great girl. She's so smart and has so much clarity of vision."

"Sharon is a real working-class, down-to-earth girl," says Roseanne, who met her last year when she played a trailerpark siren on Roseanne—a role Stone bought at a charity auction. "She's smart and unstoppable, and totally fearless—in her life and in her acting. Women don't often get to play psychopaths. If they do get that kind of role, they're scared or they're vulnerable or they're likable. And Sharon does it, and it's great. She's like 'Yeah, I'm an ice-pick carrier!' "

"I think people really wanted the glamorous movie star, and when I even neared that arena, everybody was so happy and got very invested in my being that thing," Sharon says. "I don't always feel like glammin' up, but I really enjoy pursuing my craft—and if that's the exchange, I mean, how bad is that?"

She says she's learned to be philosophical about the bad press she gets, in which each and every one of her missteps (as when, out of pique at the presence of tabloid television, she recently declined an award from a 10-year-old homeless girl at a fund-raising dinner for Planet Hope, the charity that Stone founded with her younger sister, Kelly) is reflected by the media through a fun-house mirror.

"I hear about all the things people say about me," she says. "I think some of them really are funny and some of them are camp and some of them are tough. And then some of them cross the boundaries that have no taste at all. You just have to keep your chin up. It's not pretty. That's part of the machinery of it, you know. You can't go in one direction forever. It's a dance—and it's not very interesting to be benign.

"The price you pay is: no space," she says of the movie-star media machine. "Everywhere you go, there's no space."

"It's leeched on to you," I venture.

"And you've leeched on to it," she adds. "As long as they give a shit about me! And when they stop writing, then I'll probably realize that they're done with me. Good, bad, or indifferent, as long as they're talkin' you're still in the game."

Sharon, meanwhile, says she's begun to O experiment with writing of her own. "I've written about 50 short stories," she reveals. "I keep 'em in a bag. It's bizarre. But it was a weird set of circumstances. I had this stalker. So I moved to a hotel, and this was the same period that O.J. was driving down the freeway in the car, so my psychosis was escalated by current affairs. So I wasn't sleeping much, and I had grabbed a couple of books from my library and the one that really pulled me in was the collected stories of Dylan Thomas. And, man, I just loooove the way this guy writes. And so I wondered if I can write anything myself.

"And some of them are tiny, two-page stories. They're a little like little flashes, some of them. There's only one really long story. My tales seem to tell themselves in brevity. They're just total imagination. When I start writing them, from the first sentence I don't even know what they're about until it's done. I don't make them up, is what I mean. They seem to make themselves up.

"And it just became such an incredible joy and relief and inspiration. And the kind of fearless, nonedited, nonjudgmental way that I was addressing it helped my acting so much, because I saw in my writing that the really great stuff came when I was just freewheeling and not stopping the train. . . . With Casino it really gave me, aside from the obvious thrill of Bob and Marty, it gave me the ability to go to that raw place and go, O.K., so maybe it's not pretty. I don't care."

She says she's already laying the foundation for a rewarding career after the glamour fades.

"I still think I'm on my learning curve— which will probably work out nicely—because for a few years now maybe I'll get to work with directors who will continue to teach me. And then when I become less populah"—she gives the word an over-thetop movie-queen spin—"I can start working with some of the younger people."

Can Sharon Stone really envision the demise of her stardom?

"I would say there's an enormous possibility that it might occur," she says, "although I would accept the great good fortune of passing it by. But I'm not convinced that any of this is gonna last forever."