She Was the 13th Choice.
Her Father Told Her
Not to Stop.

The Sharon Stone Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Sharon Stone grew up in a small Pennsylvania town where beauty had no currency and being too smart was a behavioral problem. Her father, Joe Stone - The Legend - saw all of it. When she was punished for helping in school, Joe picked her up, put her on his lap in the principal's office, and told the school it wasn't going to stop. She's been running on that permission ever since."

- David Begnaud

The Legend. The Principal's Office. The Ice Cream.

Joseph William Stone III had a nickname: The Legend. He was handsome, chivalrous, impossibly tough, and impossibly tender - a machine-shop laborer who wore three-piece suits and a fedora on weekends and pulled Sharon's mother's chair out for dinner every night. His own father was killed in an oil well explosion when Joe was four, leaving the family destitute. He and his brother lived in farm stalls as young children, doing chores to survive.

Sharon was six or seven years old, living in Saegerstown, Pennsylvania, when the school summoned her father from his swing-shift job an hour away. The offense: she had been teaching her classmates cursive and multiplication while the rest of the class was still on printing and addition. She had also recruited two other girls to do the same. The principal called it disruptive and said it needed to stop. Her father, Joe, listened, turned around, looked at Sharon and asked: "Is this true?" She said yes, sir, it is. He picked her up, placed her on his lap, and said to the principal: "Here's what's gonna happen. It's not going to stop. She's going to keep right on doing it. Are we all clear? We're going for ice cream. Do not call me away from my job again for this kind of shenanigans."

There was no further discussion at the ice cream shop. No lecture, no debrief, no conditions. He just took her out and fed her ice cream. But that was the beginning of a decades-long message: you are allowed to be exactly what you are. Don't fold yourself in to fit the room.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The principal's office and ice cream - ~8:20

The Confrontation on the Stairs. The Day He Stopped.

Joe Stone was also a hitter. Sharon described it plainly: like the Great Santini. Belt off, real whippings, stairs - the whole thing. He was harder on her than on her brothers, and she endured it until she was fourteen, when something shifted in her. He was yelling at her to come downstairs "right goddamn now." She walked down one step at a time - like the Queen of France, she said - walked up to his face, and told him: "Why? Do you need to hit me some more to feel like a man? Is that what's going on here? Cause if you do, let's get with it. But I will never love you again. I'm done."

He cried. He told her to go to her room. And he never hit anyone again. Ever. After that, she said, they started talking - really talking. They became very close, very quickly. Within a year Sharon had found her way to Buddhism, which began with reading Siddhartha and The Prophet aloud to an injured neighbor boy immobilized in a body cast in a motorhome, who needed someone to sit with him. The stillness of that experience, she said, planted something in her she had been looking for.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The confrontation at fourteen - ~13:36

The Phone Call with the Gun Cabinet. Going for a Walk.

Sharon was in her twenties in California when a boyfriend began physically threatening her. She locked herself in the bathroom and called her father in rural Pennsylvania. He told her to put the phone on speaker and open the door. She obeyed. Her father called out the man's name. The man, confused, asked who was on the phone. She said: my dad. He said: called your daddy? Her father then described, slowly, the sounds: the gun cabinet unlocking, two shells going into the shotgun, then his footsteps walking toward the airport. He told the man that if he didn't hear the door shut behind him right now, he was going to come out there and blow his ass all over the living room. Click. The man was gone. Her father then calmly told her to take a chair and put it under the door handle.

Near the end of his life, Joe Stone came to stay with Sharon for his final four months - exactly four months, to the day. She had spent weeks before his arrival cleaning her entire house on her hands and knees, emptying every cupboard, relabeling every can, painting every shelf, and quietly outfitting the guest house with hospital-grade safety features disguised as beautiful design: handles by the toilet and tub that looked like they had always been there, lighting inside every cabinet. She told her brother, she wanted it to be perfect. She didn't want him to hit his head on the fireplace.

Joe Stone had a practice he never told most people about. He called it "going for a walk" or "going to the hardware store." He would go out - to a park, to a store, wherever - and wait until someone came to him with a problem, and then he would help them. Before he came to Sharon's house, he told her he wasn't sure he was done. He didn't know if he could beat it, but he'd try. He said: when I'm four months out, be ready. He was four months out from the day he arrived. He died exactly four months to the day.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The phone call and Joe's final months - ~39:21

The Nine-Day Brain Hemorrhage. The Vanilla Milkshake in a Mason Jar.

In 2001, right after September 11th, Sharon Stone had a vertebral artery rupture. She was misdiagnosed for three days, dying on the operating table and being defibrillated before being transferred to a neurological ICU. She was on IV Dilaudid - synthetic heroin - for extreme pain, hallucinating, going in and out of a coma in which she kept falling through stacks of colored fabric, hearing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water on a loop, and seeing scenes from Cinema Paradiso. She had a 1% chance of survival. She had lost 18% of her body mass and could not eat.

Her mother sat outside the room like a sentry, still in the dirty gardening clothes she had been wearing when she got the call, refusing to wash them or leave. Her father came inside. He told Sharon she had to eat something - they were losing her, she was disintegrating. He asked if there was anything she could possibly eat. She said: a vanilla milkshake. He didn't go to the hospital cafeteria. He drove to Baskin-Robbins, bought French vanilla ice cream, found a mason jar (because that's what they drank out of growing up), made the milkshake at home, packed it in a cooler with ice, bought straws, drove back, and fed it to her through the side of the hospital bed because she couldn't move.

That milkshake got her to eat. And Joe Stone, who had once mocked her Buddhism, allowed her to guide him through a meditation practice when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given a 3% chance of survival. The tumor pulled back inside his esophagus. He had the surgery. His heartbeat was so strong during the operation that the surgeons had never heard anything like it - they called him The Bull. Sharon bought the hospital the machine they had to borrow to complete his surgery.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The brain hemorrhage, the milkshake, and healing her dad - ~45:03

The 13th Choice. The Part That Was Always Hers.

Before Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone couldn't get cast. Her manager told her flatly: they don't think you're sexy. She wasn't the obvious choice. She was, famously, the thirteenth choice for the role. On set, a line producer refused to learn her name and called her Karen. She spent every makeup test fighting to wipe off what she called the "bimbo overlay." None of it stopped her. She had decided the part was hers - and she went to extraordinary lengths to prove it, including arranging a Playboy cover shoot specifically to show casting directors what they couldn't see.

The film became number one in the world. She made five hundred thousand dollars. And when David asked her what the takeaway was - from fighting through every obstacle to claim a role no one thought she deserved - she answered without hesitation: "If it's yours, it's yours. When it's your number, it happens." She didn't say grind harder. She didn't say believe in yourself. She said: know the difference between what's yours and what isn't, and don't stop moving toward what is.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The 13th choice and Basic Instinct - ~1:00:06

I Work My Own Door.

When David asked Sharon what her father would want her to say - not to him, but to the people listening - she paused and then delivered a message she clearly had been carrying for a long time. There will be many people in your life, she said, who try to tell you who you are. Not just who you are, but how you're supposed to handle it, and what you're supposed to do with it. Only you know. Because only you can hear the divine speak not only to you, but through you. You are a divine messenger, and you must be willing to let it flow through you - for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

She talked about puzzle pieces. About that satisfying click when the last piece drops in. About how you can only feel that click - and let others feel it - if you are fully yourself, fully extended. If someone else has their hand up your back running your show, she said, it's because they are not fulfilling themselves. They are trying to run your show because they can't run their own. She looked at David when she said the final line. It had been her father's. It had become hers.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Sharon's closing message - ~1:05:00

Stories like Sharon's are what we do.

Subscribe to The Do Good Crew newsletter - free, weekly, and always worth opening.