Sometimes I wore my looks like a mantle with a certain degree of discomfort. People, especially men people, happily inconvenience themselves for a woman so marked, but she’ll pay one way or another. I always knew that the power I gleaned from beauty dwarfed any other kind of achievement. No matter how hard I worked, I was credited only for the one thing that was effortless. The looks I was born with meant that I never lacked sexual partners but also meant that I could rarely discern who really cared about me. I learned from Yeats: “Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.”
The vain, murderously envious queen in Snow White poisons the young beauty but still doesn’t feel safe when told that her rival is dead. She continues to look in the mirror, asking, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” I grew up with this fairy tale and with the presumption of female envy. My mother absorbed this common cultural belief and passed it on to me, but I’d like to think that I’ve protected my daughters from it. When I look at my eldest now, I know absolutely who the fresh young beauty is, without begrudging her the role. I’ve already played it, and I’d prefer not to play the evil queen, in life anyway.
THERE’S A DIXIE CHICKS SONG WITH A WISE AND placating lyric that goes, “You gotta make big mistakes.” I’ve made my share, and I ask for no jeremiads. I’ve been blessed with success in public life. Early on I fed readily and greedily off the seductive culture of narcissism and celebrity worship that abandons and replaces its acolytes at warp speed. Sometimes I’ve failed to hold myself accountable. Now I’m looking at my own trajectory, hoping to discern Cybill the Good and Cybill the Bad, trying to understand in order to be understood. I want to figure out how I became one of the Furies --me, the same person voted Most Cooperative at Camp Pickwick in 1959.
Some people have asked why I’d subject myself to the scrutiny of public confession when there are so many reasons not to; it’s painful, I’m too young, I will be harshly judged. But events of the last year, symbolized by the not-so-pretty scar that means I’ve worn my last bikini, have forced me to realize that there are no guarantees about our time on the planet. Last year I went on Good Morning America, discussing menopause and a recently published list of sex symbols over the age of fifty. Just shy of my fiftieth birthday at the time, I didn’t qualify, but if I’m not on the list next year, I’m coming after them. (Hell, if Judge Judy can make the cut, I’d better be included.) Just before we went “live” with the interview, Diane Sawyer leaned over to me and said, “If you had to choose one song to sum up your whole life, what would it be?” I frantically mused for just an instant before the song popped into my mind: “For all we know, this may only be a dream; we come and go, like a ripple in a stream...”
So I’d like to tell my story now. I’ve actually been doing autobiography in front of the public for along time, but the standards of memoir are daunting. Memory is revisionist and selective by nature, and it is tempting to edit out the nasty, unflattering, what-was-I-thinking parts. “Tell it all Mom,” my elder daughter advised me. (Hell, no, I’d end up in jail.) I’ve given sobriquet to a few key players who don’t deserve to have their names spelled right. This is how I remember it. And if my mother objects to any reminiscence in these pages... it didn’t happen.
Chapter Two
“Stay Puuuuure Vanilla”
THERE IS AN IMAGE ENGRAVED IN MY MEMORY VIVID enough to evoke a smell (the red vinyl of a well-used armchair) and a sound (the flick of a cigarette holder against a metal ashtray): it’s the image of a twelve-year-old me, gangly and no longer a towhead, much to the chagrin of my mother, who seemed to greet the natural darkening of my blonde hair as a dereliction of filial duty. Also to her dismay, I was utterly contemptuous of most girlish playthings but fanatically preoccupied with horses. The school librarian looked squint-eyed at me for years, suspecting I’d stolen a copy of Olympic Horseman (I had), and I saved up the nickels allocated for orange Creamsicles to buy miniature plastic horses and Black Stallion books at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center. At times I morphed into equine behavior myself, cantering around the house with a jump rope in my mouth and a bath mat belted on as a saddle. I would make a steeplechase out of the hedges separating the yards on our street and neigh in response to questions. But owning a horse was an extravagance far beyond the middle-class means of my parents, for whom canned asparagus constituted a luxury. The necessary deep pockets were worn by my grandfather.
We called him Da-Dee (accent on the second syllable), and my grandmother was always Moma, resistant to the notion of being “Grandma” and relegating her ownr to the more formal “Mother.” Outside of the family, they were Cy and Tommy, both nicknamed for their fathers. Norville Shapleigh “Cy” Shobe, the son of Missouri poultry farmers, was an electronics wizard, just a boy when he made front-page news in Kansas City by assembling the first homemade radio in the state-- strangers from half a dozen counties drove right up to the porch in four-wheeled surreys to hear the raspy wonder of it. When the family moved to Arkansas, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old Gladys “Tommy” Toler, whose father owned a dry goods store, and married her within the year. (At the time, the term child bride was more custom than pejorative.) To the newlyweds, Memphis was The City, where the delta was said to begin in the gilded lobby of the Peabody Hotel, and it was the only place for a young man with prospects.
My grandfather was named for the hardware store where his father earned the money for the chicken farm, and it was with a letter of introduction from Mr. Shapleigh that he got a job interview in Memphis at Orgil Brothers Hardware, agreeing to be a salesman only if they would agree to sell radios. From there he started his own business distributing wholesale appliances, and it provided well: in 1950, the year I was born, Shobe, Inc., grossed $5 million, a fortune half a century ago. (The company logo, a rooster boasting “We’re crowin’ because we’re growin’,” was immortalized in various shades of red stained glass on the porch door of my grandparents’ house.) It was this honeypot that could yield the horse and riding lessons I wanted. “You go on into the sitting room,” Moma told me in a conspiratorial whisper, “and love up on Da-Dee’s neck. He’ll give you anything you want.”
My grandfather was a lank and looming man, the angular contours of his body seeking out the familiar dents and curves of the red easy chair that served as his sanctum sanctorum in the second-floor study. His cherished pastimes were shooting and flying, and he sat beneath a gun rack and a pilots’ flight map of the United States. There were hints of tobacco and chicoried coffee in his clothes as I climbed onto his lap, ludicrously big for such an assignment, and nuzzled against his neck with my request. At first he responded with a low growl, more theatrical than alarming, to my “pretty please with sugar on top,” and his right had tapped ashes off the Camel in its crystalline holder. Then the tiny pings stopped, and his muscular hands tightened around my skinny arms. He wouldn’t answer, and he wouldn’t let go. He held me down on this lap, his body stiffening. In some inchoate way, I knew to run from such an encounter, although I didn’t recognize that it represented an exchange of money for feminine charms and wouldn’t know until much later what such a transaction was called. All thoughts of a horse vaporized as I managed to wriggle out of his grasp. I ran from the room, his muffled laughter mocking my retreat.
Love up on Da-Dee’s neck. More than any other fillip of memory, those words summon up the paramount message and mandate of my childhood: I was pretty, and my looks were a kind of currency. Nobody would care what I did, what I said, what I read, but beauty had magical powers, a kind of legerdemain especially effective with men. It was like being taught double-entry bookkeeping. At that moment I was to hug my grandfather not because it was good to express affection but because I had blonde and blue-eyed assets that might get me a horse.
Rather ironic, considering that I was not even supposed to be a girl. My mother had miscarried twice in the four years since my sister was born (christened Gladys, for Moma, but called Terry). Her unexpected pregnanc
y was ascribed with a sacred duty to provide my father with a son, but it was deemed a washout the moment the doctor peered at me and said, “It’s a girl.” (When her did produce a male heir four years later, she triumphed in a rare practical joke on my father, bringing my brother, Bill, home from the hospital with a pink ribbon Scotch-taped to his bald head-- small “up yours” to the intimation that boys were better than girls.)
Perhaps I sensed in vitro that my gender would come as a major disappointment to my family. I was in no hurry to enter the world and literally backed in, rear first (never the smallest part of my anatomy). “You were easy to deal with,” Mother told me, “until you were born.” She had gone to the Methodist Hospital when her water broke, naturally expecting contractions to start. When nothing much happened, she summoned my father from the clouds of cigar smoke in the waiting room and, in true iron butterfly spirit, went to have her hair washed and set at Gould’s Beauty Parlor. She had just ordered mint tea and selected a pleasing tangerine frost for her nails when my position in the womb, called a frank breech, became apparent and progressed to a harrowing labor, for which Mother has yet to forgive me. I was born with a birth defect, a nerve tumor on the back of my neck that had to be removed. (Ironic that someone who would earn a living projecting an image of female flawlessness would get the first of a lifetime of scars before even leaving the hospital.) I remained “Girl Shepherd” for several days while my family debated what to call this female child, finally justifying my presence by combining the names of my grandfather (Cy) and father (Bill).
Well before I could have articulated it, I was instinctively aware of my assignment in the family: to be perfect. If I couldn’t be a boy, at least I could be the uber-female: pert, polite, charming, compliant, and above all, lovely to look at. (It was implicit that my sister was excused from this commission, being bigger, brawnier, and brunette.) Certainly I was not to say or do anything controversial or unladylike. “Siboney,” my grandmother would intone, making a pet name out of the unofficial national anthem of Cuba where my grandparents often vacationed. “Don’t go too far to the left or too far to the right. Stay in the middle of the road. Stay puuuuure vanilla.” I wore white cotton gloves with smocked floral dresses. Against my vehement protests, my hair was tortured into a frightening mass of deep-fried curls, which was considered more feminine than my straight hair with the recalcitrant wave in back. My godmother, Marie Hay, asked me to select my silver pattern (“Chantilly”) when I was ten, and I learned to dance by standing on my father’s black and white wing tips, swaying to “Just the Way You Look Tonight” while my mother primped for an evening out. There was a limited choice of destinies for a girl like me, with the distinct suggestion that life’s ultimate achievement was to be anointed the Maid of Cotton, fetching symbol of Memphis’s most important industry, or (spoken in reverential hushed tones) Miss America, a possibility that might have justified being born female.
All of which conflicted with my natural inclinations. I jumped from the highest branch of trees, hiked the old Shiloh military trail, and used a key worn on a lanyard around the neck to tighten metal skates, which left me with perennially bleeding elbows and knees. I declined to brush my hair until compelled to do so, and wore the same pair of tattered overalls until they disappeared from my closet (my mother quietly consigned them to incineration). To avoid getting dressed, I streaked naked next door and sat on the neighbors’ porch swing until my mother by assembling what I thought to be a decorous outfit: a pink dress with puffed sleeves and my favorite red sneakers. “Look Shep,” she called to my father, as if I had placed a lampshade on my head, “she picked this out herself.” My grandfather would grasp my hands with unedited distaste for my gnawed cuticlaying, “You can always tell a lady by her nails.” I rejected all dolls, especially the busty new Barbies coveted by my prepubescent crowd, all of us still wearing Fruit Of The Loom T-shirts over flat chests, and when my brother got electric trains (derisively telling me, “That’s for boys”). I sulked for weeks and contemplated various means of derailment. (He also got a cross-country turnpike set, a Rin Tin Tin badge, and a Fort Apache. I got talcum powder and a bath mitt).
The tomboy temperament that vexed my mother helped forge a bond with my father, even after my brother came along. He endorsed my interest in sports, didn’t think it was weird to toss a football with me on the front lawn, gave me a baseball glove, and shared the sacrament of rubbing the leather with oil and shaping it by letting it spend the night cupping a ball. He even exulted when I beat the crap out of a bully named Chris Crump (as much crap as a whiffle bat could extract), for holding my little brother’s hand in an anthill. In those years when I was a surrogate son, my father let me accompany him on Saturdays to the warehouse he ran for Da-Dee, when it was quiet enough to roll a secretary’s swivel chair up and down the aisles. He taught me to swim by buckling on an orange Mae West and dropping me off the end of the pier at my grandparents’ summer home.
For the great French writer Marcel Proust, the door of memory was opened by the taste of a Madeleine cookie. For me, it’s Dr Pepper: one sip, and I am returned to that summer house on a slender tributary of the Tennessee River in Alabama called Shoals Creek. It was built in the 1930s as a hunting lodge on a remote promontory near a forest of cedar, pine, and burr oak, but the original owner felt too isolated and sold the five-acre property to my grandfather for the 1950 bargain price of $35,000. As a toddler who couldn’t pronounce the letter l, I called it the “yake house,” and the moniker stuck with the whole family. On the four-hour drive from Memphis, we stopped at filling stations with green jars of sour pickles for sale by the cash register. (I could make a pickle last all day. The goal was to suck out the insides but maintain the outer shell so you could blow it up like a balloon, make it breathe. I’d find the jettisoned ends of pickles under my sister’s bed). Da-Dee arrived in a style more befitting the lord of the manor, landing his own twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza on an airstrip across the creek and announcing his presence by buzzing the house from the air so that Moma would be waiting on the tarmac when he touched down.
In the early summer mornings, before the humidity would slap down like a biblical plague, Da-Dee and I got up before the others to sit in penumbral shadow on the long screened porch and watch the choppy surface of the water become streaked with first light, which looked like thousands of glittering broken mirrors, so bright that we had to squint. We’d wad up some day-old bread, stick the gummy ball on a hook and line at the end of a cane fishing pole, then plop into the reclining chairs on the pier and wait for the bite of catfish and bream and crappie (a delicacy not yet appreciated by chic chefs). I was the only one in the family with enough guts to eat calves brains and eggs with Da-Dee. There was a huge black cauldron in a tarp-covered clearing near the house for deep-frying fish and hush puppies, the crisp puffs of cornmeal meant to placate dogs driven mad by cooking smells but appropriated by smart humans. Moma kept baby goats, which ate up the shrubbery, and peacocks whose shrill reveille I learned to imitate with ear-splitting accuracy, and hens that roosted in the trees at night, but these were more pets than livestock. Dinner was often an anonymous quail or duck shot by Da-Dee (there were usually a few vanquished carcasses hanging in the kitchen), and we never sat down to a summer meal that didn’t include tomatoes, often fried green matoes, even at breakfast. I took the red paisley bandannas that served as napkins and made streamers for my bike or slings for a fake broken arm.
It was there at Shoals Creek that my grandfather seemed most content, only vaguely morose. He would lapse into a private reverie, occasionally broken with an enigmatic aphorism (“Everything’s gonna be all right”) said as much to himself as to anyone else. I never considered his taciturn manner an indication of a dissatisfied soul-- he had every conceivable creature comfort and was coddled by the sort of wife who put the cuff links in his shirt every day. Years later my father told me that he imagined the wistful cast in Da-Dee’s eye was a woman named Daisy, ensconced in a downto
wn Memphis apartment with my grandfather’s name on the lease. When Moma found prima facie evidence of the affair, she sent his suitcase to the Peabody Hotel, then thought better of it. I heard that she threatened to study taxidermy and mount the stuffed and formaldehyded bodies of Da-Dee and his mistress alongside the deer head over the massive stone fireplace at the yake house. Daisy disappeared, as did a certain kick-ass vigor in my grandfather’s spirit. He mentioned her name in the narcotic musings of his deathbed, when I guess he felt he had nothing left to lose or hide.
Moma was not about to abdicate from the perquisites of an indulgent marriage, exemplified by more than a hundred pairs of shoes filling three closets--a tottering chronicle of fashion victimization that ranged from Duchess-of-Windsor bejeweled to Chiquita-banana tacky. Years later I learned about one source of her shoe fetish: back home for a visit, I was exploring the Memphis Yacht Club, the hyperbolic term for what was then a series of wooden boathouses strung together with steel cable and wired with yellow lights to keep the bugs away. I was shocked to see a sailboat tacking back and forth across the Mississippi River. Sailing on the Mississippi? What kind of nutcase would try that? There’s a constant traffic of enormous barges, several cit blocks long, that move huge amounts of water out of their way, and it takes these behemoths thirty minutes to stop, often sucking smaller vessels into their wake like helpless anchovies. The current runs strong only one way over treacherous whirlpools, and the depths of the muddy water can be deceptive. So it was axiomatic that nobody would try to navigate the river without a least one engine. The mad sailor turned out to be a devilishly handsome silver fox named Smith. When I reported our meeting to Moma, she got a dreamy look in her eyes and said, “Oh, that’s Smitty from the Julius Lewis Department Store. I must have bought fifty pairs of shoes from that man.”
Cybill Disobedience Page 2