Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  An anthropology course imparted a daring bit of knowledge: somewhere in the world there were women uncovering their breasts with impunity and covering up their ankles. I knew the stereotype that you could identify a woman’s nationality by noticing which part of her body she tried to hide if naked: an American would cover her breasts, a European would cover her genitals, an Arab would cover her face. Whatever part a woman believed she’d be struck down dead for exposing depended on country, culture, god, or tribe. The idea that there was nothing inherently right or wrong about nudity would justify one of the most important decisions in my future.

  Stewart Cowley’s attorney’s best friend had a best friend whose best friend was John Bruno, a wealthy restaurateur who raced Ferraris and ran a family-owned steakhouse called the Pen and Pencil. He seemed both suave and down-to-earth to me: ten years older, Italian, born and raised in Manhattan. On one of our first dates he put on a white lab coat and took me into his meat locker, showing how he had inspected the beef himself, stamping it in purple ink with the restaurant’s insignia. One night we parked half a block from the restaurant after it closed to spy on employees who were stealing meat. (John said that all employees steal, that part of running the business was figuring out how much he could afford to have stolen and still make a profit.) He loved New York, and I got my feet permanently planted in the granite, in the subway and the theater, in Central Park and in the fountain on the plaza of the Seagram Building, where we went wading on a deserted Fourth of July when it felt like we had the city to ourselves.

  I was sharing an apartment on Sutton Place with three other models (two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two locks on the door). When I got a bad srep throat, John brought me an Italian chicken soup called stracciatella and held me until I fell asleep. I’ve always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal, going from soup to... nuts, and we consummated the relationship when I recovered. Leaving the apartment, a chorus of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” ringing in our ears, we danced our way toward the East River, not caring that the sky was gloomy and certainly not noticing the piles of steaming dog shit before we stepped in it. (Pooper-scooper laws were not yet in effect, but I later learned the traditional theatrical superstition that stepping in dog doo on the way to a performance will bring luck.) Eventually I asked John to help me find a small apartment of my own and moved into a studio in the East Sixties, with a sleeping loft and a pullman kitchen that cost $500 a month (my day rate was up to $60). I indulged my innate disordered slobbiness, with nothing in the refrigerator but unrecognizable leftovers. (Could it be that the green fuzz ball was once a piece of cheese?)

  I’d never even heard of brownstones, the nineteenth-century town houses built from the stones of river quarries up the Hudson, until I saw where John lived on the Upper East Side. When he led me up the spiral staircase for the grand tour, I gasped at a room with grand gilded mirrors, plush curved couches, and Victorian bibelots. “That’s where my mother lives,” he explained. “I’m upstairs.”

  He lives with his mother...? I was reassured when I saw his own bachelor quarters, complete with bearskin rugs and leopard upholstery, even as a cover for the bathtub. And John’s mother turned out to be one of his best assets. Frances Bruno was a good head shorter than I and shaped like a Sumo wrestler--she looked as if she could roll right over anyone who got in her way. She had a big nose, short brown hair, and the gravelly voice of an ex-smoker, with an earthy, unedited laugh. She was involved in almost every aspect of the restaurant business, and no task was too insignificant: she had even reupholstered the chairs in the powder room herself. She suffered from bad arthritis and sometimes joined me in the basement swimming pool at the Barbizon, even after I was no longer living there, wearing a thick white rubber cap (although she didn’t put her face in the water) and a bathing suit with a “modesty panel.” Her street wear was more fashionable. Years before, she’d been the head fitter at Saks Fifth Avenue and took me to see how, in the days before computerized everything, the salespeople would send a customer’s money up to the cashier through a system of polished brash pneumatic tubes. She loved to shop, sometimes handing me a suede jacket or a pearl necklace with an apology: “Forgive me, I just had to buy this for you.”

  Everything Frances did seemed sophisticated too, not just going to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center but eating afterward. (Dinner was at six o’clock when I was growing up.) She ordered steak tartare and so did I. I didn’t know from tartare; I figured it was steak, and how wrong could you go? When the plate of ground raw meat arrived at the table, I didn’t want to admit that I had no idea what I’d ordered. I took a bite, managed to swallow, and asked, “Isn’t this too rare for you?” Frances always poured water into her wine, saying, “... or else I’ll be tipsy.” And she was so easily, physically demonstrative. I felt that her hugs were untainted by any envy or reservation. That time had passed with my own parents, who conveyed a subtle discomfort about physical affection. Puberty and lies had distanced us.

  Christmas 1968 should have been a triumphant homecoming for me. When the Commercial Appeal was delivered to our house, I was on the cover of the magazine supplement. After dinner, my father and I took one of our traditional walks around the neighborh, where a suburban building boom had created lots of new construction. We hadn’t gotten out of our yard before he said, “Your mother doesn’t turn me on anymore.”

  Long pause. My first thought was: I don’t want to hear this. I felt as if I was outside the scene, which looked small and distant, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. But I said, “So who does?”

  And he answered. “Her name is Ellen. She’s my secretary. She’s quite a bit younger than I am.”

  My father was never supposed to leave, no matter what his behavior to my mother, no matter how she might have failed him. They were, after all, the best jitterbuggers in Memphis. For years I asked my mother, “Why did you and Dad stay together if you were incompatible?” and she always answered, “It was a perfect relationship. We were so in love.” I remember reading somewhere that the urge to defend your failures can be so strong that you invent another world to inhabit, a cocoon of denial in your own head and in the public eye. My mother had invested in a kind of fantasy goodness about my father, and it wasn’t until years later, when I’d confided the worst heartache of my life, that she acknowledged her futile convictions about her husband and the societal pressure to stay married. You get to know the bad mask of a person, she would say, and you stay, hoping there is a good person underneath who really loves you and will never leave.

  My father always said he left Memphis with nothing but the shirt on his back. In truth, he drove away in a white Ford LTD, with a nice severance package, having failed to usurp control of Shobe, Inc., from Da-Dee. He married Ellen, then divorced her, then remarried her, and along the way they had a daughter, Mary Catherine. They were living in St. Louis and he had stopped paying my mother alimony. I begged her not to have his wages garnisheed, which got him fired because of the corporate policy at the company where he worked. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with his liver, and the doctor said he’d be dead within the year, a censure that seemed to impress him. He stopped drinking, and when he rented a vacation cabin in Ponca, Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks, I went to see him. The opposite of in vino veritas is that liquor can camouflage the true person, and in sobriety my father turned out to be lively, kind, intelligent, unpretentious, fun. But mostly he was alive.

  JOHN BRUNO LIKED SKINNY MODELS, BUT HE FED ME A little too well. He belonged to the oldest gourmet society in the world, called La Chaine de Rotisseurs, and wanted to eat in a different restaurant every night. The meals were glorious--silken smoked salmon with fat capers at The Colony, foie gras and duck a l’orange at Quo Vadis--but disastrous for my figure. The paradox of modeling was that I represented the cynosure of female beauty, selling an illusion of perfection, and the tacit promise of an ad or commercial with my likeness was that those products and servi
ces would make other women look like me, but in my private life, even I couldn’t look like that me. The moment the Model of the Year contest was over, I started gaining weight, back up to my prestarvation pounds. On weekends I went running around the Central Park reservoir with John, but he couldn’t join me on the days he worked, and I felt unsafe going alone.

  Every week I’d pass thinner, younger, prettier girls on go-sees, and John made disparaging comments about my ample hips and thighs, even as he was ordering a Grand Marnier soufflé from one of his gourmand buddies. Twice I stuck my finger down my throat after a meal but fortunately found the experience too repulsive to make it a habit. The average model of my height weighed no more than 108 pounds (110 was considered fat), and I weighed 150. Nothing ever fit. I didn’t fit. On a photo shoot for Vogue, the editor had to cut the dreses up the back and affix the butterflied pieces to my skin with Scotch tape.

  Sometimes when we were shooting on the streets of New York, the magazine would rent a big black limousine, the driver would look the other way, and that would be the changing room. I’d jump out, do the picture, and jump back in again. Once when I was doing a Glamour shoot, the editor handed me a long-sleeved shirt that would not go past my elbows and pants that would not go past my knees.

  “What size are these?” I asked, poking around for a label.

  “These clothes are French,” she said with a sniff.

  “Well, these are not French shoulders,” I said. “My elbow must be the size of a French woman’s thigh.”

  “You can go home,” said the editor with a sigh. Getting paid to go home was one of my favorite days of modeling.

  On a shoot in Saint Martin, the other model had spent much of the past year in Mexico, obviously sitting in the sun with iodine and baby oil, and it was the middle of winter in New York. When we lay on the beach together, we looked like the black and white keys on a piano, and I was told to stay out in the sun so we would “match.” I had baked myself for years, but this time I had an allergic reaction, and the next morning, my eyes were swollen shut. I stayed indoors for twenty-four hours with compresses of wet tea bags, but it didn’t do any good. I got paid for not working that time too.

  Most models casually took appetite suppressants that were pure speed, professing satiety after nibbling what I considered hamster food. Practically everyone smoked, a habit I’d avoided because of childhood pneumonia, with the added incentive of my mother’s hacking cough as morning reveille and evening taps from her three packs a day. On location for Glamour in Key West, my roommate was a former Miss Universe who convinced me to try her prescribed amphetamines.

  “Are you sure they won’t make me feel weird?” I asked. “And aren’t they addictive?”

  “Not at all,” she answered. “I take them every day.”

  She assured me there’d be no unpleasant side effects, and I’d watched her sleep sound as a baby, so I swallowed a few pills. I lay a wake all night, sweating and staring at the ceiling, my heart pounding as if it was going to pop out of my chest and my teeth gnashing like a hungry beaver. When she woke up and asked, “Would you like--” I quickly said, “No, thanks.”

  The photographer on that shoot was a man named Frank Horvath—scruffy and obese, partly shaven before it was chic, wearing supersize dark army fatigues, utterly unappealing and initially interested in me. At our first meeting, in a dark room at the magazine offices, he’d looked me up and down for about two seconds, shrugged, and muttered, “Okay, she’ll do,” and left the room. We were working at Hemmingway’s house in Key West, with a resident collection of six-toed cats living in the garden, and Horvath didn’t bother to knock when he came into the room where I was being dressed by the editors, demanding of no one in particular, “Is she ready yet?” We were working on a second-story veranda, and he hadn’t even shot a whole roll of film before he said, “You’re not very good at this.” I stared at him, struck dumb by his blunt candor. “Stop posing,” he said. “You’re trying too hard, and you’ve developed some bad habits. Just think, be in the moment, actually see what you’re looking at.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was giving me my first acting lesson. The camera captures what you’re thinking, so it had better be something besides: if I hold my hands like this, I’ll look thinner. Jimmy Cagney said that acting was stand up tall, look the other guy in the eye, and tell the truth. what Horvath led me to that day was a kind of photographie veriti.

  Glamour put me on the cover and used 101 photographs of me inside that issue (my grandmother counted) followed by seven Glamour covers that year. The era of Twiggy and Jean (“the Shrimp”) Shrimpton was over, and there seemed to be a little window of opportunity for a healthier look, personified by Tiegs and me. Everybody is supposed to have a better side, and I was always photographed from the left for covers, but Richard took this as a challenge. “Let’s try the right side,” he’d say each of the half dozen times we worked together, but his “cover tries” were never used because editors were unaccustomed to seeing me that way.

  Sometimes the photographs looked like another person altogether. By the time they’d been retouched, there were no flaws, asymmetry of any kind. Things you didn’t know you had were eliminated from your face. I’m still shocked at what Kodak did on the full-length cutout of me that stood in drugstores to introduce the first Instamatic camera--there wasn’t a dimple or ripple of flesh. The countertop version had a mechanical arm that swung the camera up and down, rubbing an unfortunate line across my face. I inherited the cutout that my grandmother kept in her garage (she said “Hi” to it every time she pulled in), and one year my caretaker stuck a Santa hat on its head and a sign that said MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL. I still have my original “Breck girl” portrait too, an idealized vision of a woman, all misty and dew-eyed like a Stepford wife. These relics seem to migrate to my home in Memphis. Maybe they talk to one another when I’m not around, like the toys in Santa’s workshop that come alive at night.

  I was clueless about the future beyond modeling, but not out of contentment with the status quo--I was frantically trying to figure out what was my Job in the universe. Stewart Cowley was opening a talent division to maneuver models into lucrative television and film work. He suggested that I meet a man who’d made a violent, low-budget, successful movie and was preparing to direct the sequel. The gold-leafed hotel suite was far more sumptuous than I expected for a B-list mogul. Stewart brought me upstairs but left quite abruptly, whispering “I’ll be right back” while I arranged myself on the sofa. As we were talking, Mr. B-list took my elbow and steered me to one of the tall windows overlooking Central Park. Then his hand moved from my elbow to my shoulder, he leaned in close and thrust his tongue down my throat. Naively, I asked what was going on.

  “‘This is a scene in the new film,” he said. “I thought we’d rehearse.”

  I pushed him away saying, “I don’t think this is working for me,” just as I heard a knock at the door signaling Stewart’s return. I made an excuse about needing to be somewhere else, and the moment we were in the hallway, I hissed, “Don’t ever leave me alone with one of those creeps again!” I never knew whether his sudden departure was prearranged or an innocent mistake.

  With the memory of that lechery still fresh, I learned with some trepidation that Roger Vadim had offered me a screen test for a film called Peryl, and I insisted that a chaperone accompany me to Los Angeles: my booker at the agency, Donna DeCita, whose sister is Bernadette Peters. We stayed in the grizzled old Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where some of the regulars were wandering around the lobby in their bathrobes. Because there was no script yet, I was instructed to rehearse a scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I sat on the lawn reading lines with Vadim’s assistant, who then drove me to Malibu for the screen test. Vadim was tall and slender with thinning hair, a creamy shirt that he said was made of Egyptian cotton. Three years of Memphis high school French didt help me understand a word as he conversed with a French actor named Christian Marquand (also tall and slend
er with thinning hair), whose home we were using for the audition. I definitely knew what the term ménage a trois meant and was glad for the chaperone.

  Most of the test consisted of filming me, with no sound, dancing to the Rolling Stones singing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” (The old-time Hollywood producers, many of them German, would refer to this as “M.O.S.”--mit out sound.) The film never got produced; I was told that the financing fell through. But I had started something interesting with the assistant (younger, hairier, and shorter than either of the Frenchmen), and as my friend Wanda used to say, “How do you know if a shoe fits unless you try it on?” A few weeks later, I lied to John Bruno and flew to San Francisco for the weekend. The assistant picked me up on a motorcycle and strapped my suitcase to the back. I kept looking over my shoulder as we rode, expecting to see the highway littered with my bras and underpants. Vadim later offered me a role in Pretty Maids All in a Row, but the character was set to die, early and gruesomely, in the girls’ rest room of a high school. I declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat, and my acting career was stalled at the gate.

  Chapter Five

  “MAKE SURE THERE’S A LOT OF NUDITY”

  IT’S A NOD TO THE HYPERREALITY OF THE FILM BUSINESS that everybody in Hollywood knows the maxim: no names on location. Cast and crew conspire in an implicit acceptance and discretion about the phenomenon of musical beds, about who is seen emerging from which star’s trailer or which grip’s room at the Motel 6. The set is like an office Christmas party, where indiscretions are absolved when the party’s over, or like the miniature village around the model trains that I coveted as a child, a bantam community assembled for fun. Everyone has a common purpose, everyone is paid to be creative, and everyone can pretend to be someone else. It’s a dreamscape of sorts, basically free of familial and adult responsibilities. I was twenty years old when I entered that world, mischievous and recklessly self-absorbed.