Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  Stewart Cowley had been a theatrical agent before World War II and had a certain flamboyant flair--there were framed photos of two large standard poodles in his suite. I didn’t know that his contest idea was contemptuously referred to as Stewart’s Folly by his New York competitors--my parents simply told him, “Maybe next year.” The first Model of the Year contest drew a huge audience when it was telecast on CBS--so much for Stewart’s Folly, although another man claimed Cowley had stolen the idea, and he spent so much time in litigation that he was known as Suin’ Stew. When he returned to Memphis the following year, I was planning to study art history at Louisiana State and was still disdainful of anything that smacked of a beauty pageant. My mother insisted that I show him the courtesy of turning him down in person, and I went to the hotel in defiant disregard for my appearance, wearing cutoff jeans, with skin tanned mahogany and unwashed hair too blond from the sun. We sipped sweet iced tea, a southern tradition with its overkill of sugar, whileCowley chatted about the rewards awaiting the contest winner: a contract with his agency and $25,000 guaranteed in modeling fees the first year.

  I’d rehearsed a smug little speech about having a higher calling to study Italian art. “I’m really not interested in being a model,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Cowley replied. “You have a good chance of winning here in Memphis and going on to New York.” There was a twinkle in his eye as he dealt his trump card. “And you’re a helluva lot closer to Italy in New York than in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”

  My father was cutting the grass and my mother was sitting on the front porch in a wrought-iron chair when I returned from the local Model of the Year pageant. There was a huge pile of yellow roses poking out the window on the passenger side of the 1960 Ford Fairlane I’d inherited from my great-grandmother, which required putting your foot flat to the floor every time you accelerated.

  “What in the world is all that yellow?” Mother called as I pulled in the driveway.

  “I won,” I said.

  Stewart Cowley tempered my victory with a dose of reality. ‘You’ll have to lose at least thirty pounds,” he announced and handed me a mimeographed copy of the grapefruit diet. I consumed two strips of bacon a day, plus meager portions of canned tuna and cucumbers, washed down with black coffee and Tab, each meal followed religiously by half a grapefruit (occasionally, for a hit of exotica, broiled). Perversely, during this starvation routine, I lay around the house reading cookbooks and a twenty-five cent booklet called “Count Your Calories” that detailed the difference between boiled pigs feet (185 calories) and pickled pigs feet (the way I liked them, at 230 calories). All I thought about was food. Once I sneaked into the kitchen at 3 A.M. to polish off some leftover lamb chops that hadn’t been ravaged to my mother’s satisfaction.

  I lost twelve pounds but claimed twenty-eight on the Model of the Year application, and that September, instead of registering for Art History 101 at Louisiana State University, I went to New York for the finals. I was familiar with the skyline from the movie King Kong, one of my childhood favorites, but nothing could have prepared me for my first view of the city as the plane circled La Guardia Airport: Manhattan on a platter, rising from its slim, precarious perch between two rivers, with the crush of people and their island mentality, all wanting access and egress at exactly the same time. The other contestants were registering at the Waldorf-Astoria with their mothers, despite the fact that they all seemed stunningly grown-up. I called home in a panic, and my mother was on the next flight. As she walked through the hotel lobby, she passed one willowy Miss Somewhere after another. “I swear,” she declared when she called my father to report her safe arrival, “I don’t know what Cybill is doing up here with all these beautiful women.”

  The walls of the Stewart Modeling Agency were covered with intimidating pictures of Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, and Marisa Berenson, behind the “bookers” with telephones attached to their shoulders and big volumes of rate cards for all the girls, who were never called anything but girls. (The stars didn’t have a rate. Their fees were unquestionable and unmentionable.) My outlook improved when I went to the CBS studio and started trying on various outfits. Looking in the mirror at my gold sequined bikini and long hot-pink cape with a hood trimmed in matching sequins by Oleg Cassini, I thought: Maybe I have a chance. I also thought: Losing is really a drag--let’s try winning for a change.

  I watched a tape of the pageant recently, and it feels like going on an archaeological dig, pulling up unfathomable shards of the past. The broadcast, which preempted Mannix, opened with a song: “Who’s that walking along the street, so cool, keeping a groovy beat.... She doesn’t mind you will have to stare, great in everything she wears.” A silver pleated curtain rose to reveal a group of go-go dancers writhing in front of the contestants, who stood, frozen, on a stepped platform. The helmet-haired hostess, Arlene Dahl, sat at a table behind a pitiful arrangement of carnations that seemed to be strategically placed to conceal her bosom. The dimpled and equally helmet-haired cohost, John Davidson, commented, “This is a girl watcher’s dream come true.”

  There was some speculation about the career ambitions of the contestants. “Do you think these girls always wanted to be models?” Davidson asked with some gravity.

  “Not necessarily, John,” answered Dahl. “Some wanted to be nurses, airline hostesses, and more often than not, movie stars.”

  The emcee, Jack Linkletter, summoned each girl to center stage for an interview, each of us having been instructed to do a little pirouette as we reached him.

  “Do you want to have a large family?” he asked one.

  “No,” she said without a touch of irony. “I think maybe six or seven.”

  He asked a girl from Iowa to make the noise of an egg-laying chicken and commented about another, “This is a very ambitious girl in the sense that she has a lot of ambitions.”

  Everyone was wearing so much eyeliner and shadow, such heavy false lashes, that we looked like sleepwalkers. Davidson and Dahl did the fashion commentary.

  “The accent this year is on chains,” said Dahl, “to circle the waist or wrist or just to call attention to a pretty face.” “Or maybe to keep a girl at home with the chains,” chimed in Davidson.

  When my turn came, I approached Linkletter, wearing a crushed red velvet coat with black gloves and boots and a cossack hat--actually a rather elegant look, considering the possibilities, which ran to tartan tam-o’-shanters and orange leather boots. I was terrified, exhausted, overwhelmed, and no doubt starving, and I looked it.

  “In last year’s Miss Teenage contest,” Linkletter said to me, “you were Miss Congeniality. And you got to travel to Europe.”

  “Oh, yes,” I gushed, “it was wonderful.”

  “Which do you like better: European men or American men?” “Oh, I like them booooooth,” I said in a breathy drawl.

  “Are they different?”

  “Oh, there’s all different varieties, American men and European men.”

  “See how congenial she is?” said Linkletter.

  Instructions were to walk as if I were floating, like a geisha, my heels never touching the ground, when I paraded down the runway in the “Fun” segment of the program. Other contestants were consigned to pseudo cowboy chaps and space suits. The girl who followed me was wearing a hat so hideous, all she needed was a dangling price tag to look like Minnie Pearl. I had practiced flinging open my sequined cape in front of every available shiny surface until I had the move nailed, and I sold that bikini. I thrust my hips into the turn at the end of the runway, exposing a slice of midriff that hadn’t been so flat since I was ten and never would be again. Winning was nothing short of a calculated decision, but it was emotional beyond my initial contemptuous expectations. All that sentiment had been held in check until the moment of triumph while I smiled and made the right turns. There’s something devastating about winning, almost like walking across the bodies of the others, feeling the responsibility of th
e torchbearer for the beauty Olympics. It’s almost too much to bear. When you see a pageant winner crying, those are not crocodile tears. You don’t cry that way when you lose.

  It was the lore about a young Graceelly, safely ensconced in the Barbizon Hotel upon her arrival in New York, that pacified my parents when Stewart Cowley suggested it as a place for me to stay. Perhaps Grace liked pink. My room looked like the inside of a Pepto-Bismol bottle, with a narrow single bed and a gigantic bathtub down the hall. The decision was made in haste: I won the contest on a Saturday night, and that Tuesday morning I was shooting on the sand dunes at Jones Beach for Ship ‘n’ Shore blouses. My starting rate was $20 an hour, and during my first month of work I made $6,000, but I spent a small personal fortune on the arsenal of beauty props I was expected to carry: self-adhesive nails, hot rollers, braids, falls, ponytails, hair spray, a ratting comb, and enough makeup to spackle a driveway. To haul it around, I bought a khaki fishing bag at Abercrombie & Fitch--a store on Fifty-seventh Street that celebrated patrician leisure activities--and took out the plastic lining meant for the fish. One of the women at the model agency informed me that I needed fur to look glamorous in New York and set up an appointment at Mr. Fred’s Fur and Sport, where I bought three, count ‘em, three coats: rabbit, possum, and curly white lamb. My shopping expedition was given six column inches in my hometown newspaper, but the midi length of the possum I’d chosen was deemed “overpowering for her delicate blond beauty.” (I wore it to wave from a float in a Thanksgiving Day parade in Charlottesville, North Carolina, much to the consternation of the officials, who were upset about not being able to see tit. and ass. They gestured frantically for me to remove the coat and reveal the skimpy gown underneath, but this particular set of tits and ass was freezing.)

  I quickly learned the art of the go-see: I was told to buy a little notebook for my appointments, and every day I’d call the agency for a list of perhaps a dozen magazine editors and account executives who wanted to look me over. Getting the lay of the land required reciting a mantra: the Hudson River is to the west, Greenwich Village is to the south, Fifth Avenue’s in the middle.... Often I’d realize that I was on West Fifty-fourth Street when I was supposed to be meeting a client on East Fifty-fourth Street. I felt a discomfort akin to the theme of my childhood, when I knew that physical attributes were all that counted, but my early foray into modeling was a wonderful opportunity to become accustomed to rejection. Sometimes I knew the reason, sometimes not. I never got the Dentyne chewing gum commercial that I went up for three different times. The ad agency executives ordered “Smile harder,” then “Wider,” then “Less.” Apparently I chew funny.

  One day I was summoned to the office of Diana Vreeland, the flamboyant editor of Vogue. She handed me a bikini that looked like three slices of bread strung together and told me to change in a closet. My ass hung out the back, which did not go unobserved--rather rude, I thought, since she had such an odd-looking body herself: all limbs with no waist and a face that seemed to have been ironed.

  What many people don’t know about modeling is that the editorial shots in fashion magazines are the worst paying jobs. Catalogs are the bread and butter of the industry, photographed in formulaic ways that were thought to show the cheap clothes at their best advantage. Usually we worked in a studio against a huge roll of paper called no-seam hung from the ceiling. If I tried to make an impulsive, spontaneous gesture, the clothes tended to wrinkle, and the photographer would bring me back to the standard pose-- “One hand on your hip, please, one hand on your throat.”

  Location shoots were more interesting, although there was seldom time to explore and enjoy the locations. I was required to make a personal appearance as Model of the Year in Caracas. (I mostly remember the sweet, thick coffee, which jolted me out of jet lag.) I made an Ul Brite toothpaste commercial in Los Angeles, staying at the Continental Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard, which got a reputation as the Riot House after it was trashed by rock groups in residence. (I mostly remember worrying about my eyes, puffy from crying out of sheer loneliness, plus I had a zit on my face that looked like a third eye.) I made a Cover Girl commercial in Bavaria, where the big brewing companies made extra-strength beer for Oktoberfest and waitresses carried three steins on each arm as people danced on tables in steamy beer halls. (I mostly remember wrapping myself in a feather bed in my freezing room at the inn.)

  I didn’t make many friends while I was modeling. Competition turned the other girls into enemies--even on a location shoot where we were all working, there was a sense of rivalry about who’d end up with more pictures in the magazine. On-camera “talent” must be protected, which made people suck up, but only until they’d gotten what they wanted. I didn’t trust the editors and account executives, who acted as if I was going to be their best friend for life while we were working together, and then vaporized when the day ended. In the beginning I was afraid to look at the camera for fear that the photographer would think I was looking at him and giving him sexual license. It took me a while to acknowledge that photographers didn’t necessarily want to sleep with me. I felt utterly intimidated about talking to northerners; many people took my thick Memphis accent as evidence of mild retardation.

  One who didn’t make those assumptions was a young executive at CBS named James Cass Rogers, newly graduated from Yale Drama School and assigned to the Model of the Year telecast. During a rehearsal break one day, I was sitting in a corner with my nose in a book when he approached. “You don’t look like the sort of girl who’d be reading The Confessions of Nat Turner,” he said.

  “Oh, really,” I said, “what does that sort of girl look like?” Our friendship is now in its third decade. Jim always gave me loving criticism--there’s probably nothing more valuable. And he understood that I felt diminished by modeling. It made me financially independent and was occasionally creative, but most of the time I was treated like a prize steer being groomed and readied for a county fair (except I wasn’t supposed to bulk up). He encouraged me to find out what delighted and excited me by taking some college courses, a proposal that was greeted with derision by everyone at my agency. “Models always say they want to go back to school,” said the same person who told me to buy fur, “but they never do. Modeling money is too good, and the life’s too cushy.” Removed enough from childhood tutelage about being a good girl, my new reaction to the words “You can’t...” became “Watch me.”

  Stewart Models demanded three days of work a week to fulfill my contract, so Jim suggested that I start with a single English literature course at Hunter College night school. Books had been my best friends in a chaotic household where people said they were happy but didn’t act like it. Books never talked down to me, didn’t care what color my hair was and, to this day, are my most treasured possessions. College was an opportunity to devour the classics, to live inside them: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I learned the tragic bargains people make for eternal youth and beauty.

  In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad exposed the sinister unexplored and unowned areas of my psyche. In What Maisie Knew, Henry James let me into the turbulent world of a girl whose parents, just divorced, compete for her affection and approval, a parallel universe to my own. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton seemed to speak directly to me about a beautiful outsider trying to fit into fashionable New York, recognizing “a new ta of peril.” (One book I couldn’t relate to was Beowulf, written in Old English, which might as well be Old Swahili.)

  The next semester I enrolled in the College of New Rochelle, a small progressive Catholic school for women in Westchester County, an hour north of Manhattan, which was more willing to accommodate my full-time work schedule. I spent only one night in the dorm, which seemed to vibrate with stereophonic noise. I tried blasting the opera Carmen to counteract Grace Slick down the hall and experimented with waxy earplugs that got stuck in my hair, but I had been out in the world too long to put up with the indignities of shared showers and toilets. I had moved out o
f the Barbizon (I wouldn’t last long anywhere that men weren’t allowed) to share an apartment with other models, so I made a reverse commute for my classes, taking the train up from Grand Central Station. Blessedly, I was excused from taking statistics and was allowed to bypass the generalized Introduction to Art, proceeding right to History of the Italian Renaissance. It was a highly charged time on campuses across the country, and I voted along with my classmates for a student strike against the Vietnam War--my first political protest. I was an anomaly: a passionate student who didn’t care about grades or earning a degree, and I wanted to learn. I was required to think, and it was one of the happiest times in my life.

  Feeling like a frog that needed a bigger pond, I enrolled at Washington Square College of New York University and switched my major to English literature. Studying art history means reading art criticism, much of which is dry as a bone. At least literary criticism uses the same medium it is commenting on. I wouldn’t be studying what other people said about the creative people, but the words of the creative people themselves. Sitting through a Shakespearean play had never been my favorite pastime, but my class on his works was a chance to read and discuss the universal Sturm und Drang still pertinent today--hardly a week goes by that I don’t refer to the lies and betrayal in the unholy trinity of Othello, Desdemona, and Iago.