Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  In the spring of 1970, there was a mounting pile of scripts in one corner of my apartment, so daunting that I virtually ignored them. I was content to give the movie business a wide berth anyway. The Hollywood people I’d met so far were creeps, and every model I knew was taking acting lessons. I was determined to be different. My friend Jim Rogers offered to help sift through the scripts and found one he thought I should consider. It was called The Last Picture Show, from a coming-of-age novel by Larry McMurtry about the lives of small-town Texas teenagers in 1951. I would be considered for the part of Jacy Farrow, the character whose imprudent promiscuity wreaks havoc with her friends and neighbors.

  I went to meet the director, Peter Bogdanovich, in his suite at the Essex House facing Central Park, and my deportment conveyed an intentional lack of interest: jeans and denim jacket streaked and softened in the washing machine with rocks and bleach, Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals, and a paperback book. Zen philosophers talk about hitting the target without aiming at it, is surely what I did. I hated the idea of playing Jacy, a self- absorbed ice princess whose persona had often been assigned (erroneously, I thought) to me. She stings men and moves on, making them sexual objects as men traditionally do to women, but she never finds anything satisfying. Plus the script called for two nude scenes, which seemed anathema. Nudity as an inherently moral concept is one thing; actually dropping my skivvies was another.

  Peter opened the door to his suite. He looked to be thirtyish, six feet tallal lack a high forehead, dark eyes, a shock of thick near-black hair, and a goofy smile. The immediate attraction was so strong, I was flummoxed.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “Dostoyevsky,” I said.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “War and Peace.” I was so unnerved, I might have fumbled my own name, let alone Tolstoy’s. But we both laughed out loud, and he invited me to sit down. As he headed for the couch, I curled up on the floor next to a coffee table with a tray that held the remains of a room-service breakfast and a small crystal vase with a single red rose. During the course of our conversation about the film, I picked up the flower and slowly plucked the petals off one by one, making a little pile of vanquished foliage. Peter later told me that he imagined Jacy could do to any man what I had done to that rose.

  Pages of a new script shuttled between Peter in California and Larry McMurtry in Texas, a virgin screenwriter who typed scenes on cheap yellow paper. They established a basic construction for the story that was not in the book (a year that spanned from one football season to the next), added some important material (like a graduation scene), and began casting pivotal roles. Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn were to play two middle-aged women assuaging loveless marriages with infidelity. Ben Johnson, who’d played opposite John Wayne in several of John Ford’s seminal westerns, turned down the part of Sam the Lion, the ethical heart of Anarene, Texas. He didn’t like the four-letter words in the script, said he didn’t talk that way in front of women and children. So Peter had Ford call him.

  “Are you gonna be the Duke’s sidekick for the rest of your life?” Ford demanded.

  “Well, they’ve got to rewrite the dialogue,” said Johnson.

  Peter complied and called to tell Johnson that some of the objectionable language had been removed. “I hope you understand,” Peter said assuredly, “you’re going to get an Academy Award for this picture.”

  “Goddammit,” Johnson said, “I’ll do the goddamned thing.”

  Peter chewed on toothpicks in those days, part of his program to quit smoking, and had stopped to pick some up at a Food Giant in the San Fernando Valley. While standing in the checkout line, he saw my face on the cover of Glamour, my hair in tendrils over the collar of a pink and white shirt imprinted with the words “I love you” over and over. There was a fresh sexual threat in the photograph that made him think of Jacy Farrow. He’d considered two Texas girls for the part: one was Sissy Spacek, and the other was named Patsy McClenny until she started working in soap operas and reinvented herself as Morgan Fairchild. But I learned much later that his immediate reaction to that magazine cover was the kind of disorientation that Jacy engendered in men. If anybody ever projected an image of completeness when at the core was emptiness, it was Jacy Farrow. Peter couldn’t know it was also me.

  He was convinced that not only would my lack of acting experience not prevent me from playing the role successfully, it might even enhance my work because I wasn’t coming into the process with preconceived notions about the character. I was a blank slate, fresh clay. He didn’t want me to do a screen test, but the producer, Bert Schneider, was less assured. He even dug up the test I’d made for Roger Vadim in an effort to convince Peter that I didn’t have enough innate talent to compensate for my amateur status. It was the only time Peter would ever doubt me. I was asked to do a reading in California with Jeff Bridges, who’d already been cast as Duane Jackson, the callous boy on his way to war, and two young actors who were up for the part of the more sensitive and vulnerable Sonny Crawford: John Ritter, son of the country music star Tex Ritter, and ChriMitchum, son of Robert Mitchum. Eventually the part went to Timothy Bottoms, who had just played the lead as a quadruple amputee in Dalton Trumbo’s World War I film Johnny Got His Gun.

  My modeling agent Stewart Cowley arranged for his Los Angeles representative to pick me up at the airport, where he announced, “For your first lunch in town, I’m taking you to Pinks,” a local landmark for chilidogs. I’d been to L.A. before on modeling assignments, but this was Hollywood. Tinseltown. Take the sunshine, mix in a little smog, and the city actually looks tan. I was anxious, excited, and hungry, wolfing down several chili cheese dogs with sauerkraut and mustard. I was fumbling in my purse for breath mints when we got to the BBS office. A young man with a lean face, receding hairline, and dazzling smile was reclining in a swivel chair with his feet on the desk, smoking a joint. I’d seen Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces so I recognized Jack Nicholson, who lurched to his feet and made an elaborate attempt to bow in greeting, making jokes I didn’t get but laughed at anyway.

  I got the job but not without Schneider’s growling insistence to Peter, “Make sure there’s a lot of nudity.” My entire salary was $5,000 for twelve weeks of work, an amount I could have earned in a week of modeling, but by this time I began to believe that the compelling story of these teenagers whose options seem so limited by their dusty small town would be painful but important to tell. By thinking back to the paintings of the bare-breasted women I’d seen in the great museums of Europe, I’d determined that the nude scenes had nothing to do with morality. But my boyfriend, John Bruno, had other ideas. “You do a nude scene and I will never marry you,” he declared. “If everybody in the world sees my future wife naked, you won’t turn me on anymore.” This from a man supposed to be so sophisticated? I was never really interested in marriage to John or anybody else: it represented a kind of indentured servitude, and I was hardly alone in rethinking the institution. The atmosphere of the late 1960s was one of sexual libertinism, from the bumper stickers that said MAKE LOVE-NOT-WAR to the newly endorsed forms of socializing (mate swapping, orgies, and “key parties--couples played grab bag with their car keys, throwing them in a bowl from which the wives fished out a set and went home with the owner).

  I don’t need to hear Billie Holidays “God bless the child who’s got his own” to know that I had to make sure I could take care of myself in the world so I wouldn’t be beholden to men. I was disturbed by John’s possessiveness and his insistence, from the beginning of our affair, that if either one of us was in the mood for sex, the other had to comply--not a great basis for passionate lovemaking. But it was Frances Bruno who provided the final impetus for me to leave. “If you wanna do this movie, you gotta do this movie,” she said. “You know I love ya, but don’t let Johnnie hold you back.” I knew enough not to do Pretty Maids All in a Row and enough to do The Last Picture Show.

  Production began that October in north ce
ntral Texas, a time of golden Indian summer sunlight combined with fierce freezing winds. To a large extent, we were persona non grata in the community. The locals resented Larry McMurtry’s portrayal of their foibles--when Peter met Larry’s father, the elder McMurtry said, “If you’ll pour kerosene on him, I’ll light the match--and the real town, called Archer City, was given the pseudonym of “Anarene” for the film. Our provisional home was the Ramada Inn in Wichita Falls, a two-story construction of red brick built around an unheated pool. Every day for two weeks I worked with an accent coach in my cheerless room right next to the soft-drink machine and rehearsed in the optimistically named Presidential Suite, an orange nightmare that Peter shared with his wife, Polly, the film’s production designer. Peter was twenty-three when they married, and just three weeks before filming began, she had given birth to a second daughter, Alexandra, who was left in the care of Peter’s parents in Arizona along with three-year-old Antonia.

  I sometimes ask guests in my home to take their clean hands and touch the patina on my treasured canvases from Borislav Bogdanovich, Peter’s talented and eccentric Serbian father, a painter who worked in his pajamas and allowed no one to touch his hair. His wife came from a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, and though many of her relatives perished in the Holocaust, she managed to escape to America in 1939, already pregnant with Peter. Her first child had died after a horrifying accident, scalded by the hot soup she was making and succumbing to anaphylactic shock. Peter knew that an elder brother had died, but Herma Bogdanovich mentioned it to him only once toward the end of her life, barely able to get the words out, and I can’t help but think that Peter suffers from survivor’s guilt.

  Peter once had a perforated ulcer and has had to be very careful about what he eats ever since, so he didn’t accompany the cast and crew each morning as we ate eggs and grits at the motel diner, opened especially early for us. We rode to Archer City in a circa-1950 bus--the chug of its diesel engine in the predawn stillness was my wake-up call. I spent twenty-five dollars on a used bicycle with fat tires and no gears so I could explore the area, but there wasn’t much to see except trailer parks and junkyards. We had so much time on our hands that I read voraciously Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. These three feminist books revolutionized my thinking and put his-story into perspective. I was born again as a radical feminist, and began a search for her-story.

  My dressing room was on the second floor of a seedy old hotel whose street-level space was a hamburger joint--the burgers were put in paper bags that would be dripping with grease within moments. My wardrobe consisted of thin cotton dresses from a vintage clothing store and a pair of jeans from the Columbia wardrobe graveyard erroneously labeled “Debbie Reynolds” — many inches shorter and pounds lighter than I.

  For my first scene as an actress, I was in a convertible parked in an open field, making out with Timothy Bottoms, who was to reach under my halter-top and grab a handful of breast. There was a rumor that Tim refused to bathe in protest before his love scenes with Cloris Leachman, but he smelled fine to me and seemed almost as nervous as I was, furiously chewing gum all during rehearsal. The mid-autumn sun of the Texas plains was so blinding that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and it seemed like half the town was recruited to hold blackout flags made of a heavy opaque material called dubatine to block the glare. Right before he said “Action” Peter leaned in close to me and instructed, “No tongue.” I disobeyed.

  But for the most part I listened attentively to everything Peter said: how to do a double take or overlap dialogue with another actor, how to brush my hair lightly between takes so it would match in the next scene, how a task (called a piece of business) or an article of clothing or the town itself could help to capture and reflect the character. Casually taking Sonny’s milkshake away from him, loudly slurping the last drops out of his cup, all the while professing my devotion, showed in a humorous way that Jacy always gets what she wants--like a spider sucking the innards out of her victims. Peter often repeated Orson Welles’ dictum that a good director presides over accidents. During the scene with Sonny and Sam the Lion at the water tank, the sun was doing gymnastics, in and out of the clouds several times. Instead of saying “Cut!” Peter motioned for everyone to keep going. He loved the moody chiaroscuro created by the contrasting light. It became his homage to the great American director John Ford. More than twenty years earlier, when Ford was filming She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (with a much younger Ben Johnson), a terrible rainstorm approached. Ford liked the threatening look of the dark sky and decided to shoot anyway. Fearing for his reputation the director of photography wrote directly on the celluloid, “Shot under protest.” He won the Academy Award.

  I witnessed the quintessential oblivious wielding of power of a passionate director: in one outdoor scene, two children were playing behind a house that was in the camera’s frame, and Peter called to them, “Hey, you kids, get out of your yard.” With each passing day I began to feel more and more invested in every scene, worrying: Oh, God, is he going to get this take? or Has it stopped raining so we can finish this scene? Every chance I got I stayed up all night to watch the shooting, drinking Dixie cups of coffee and brandy to stay awake. I loved to see the cables snaking across the wet streets (always hosed down for night filming because the reflection makes them more visually exciting), the huge wind machines that had to be moved by three brawny grips, the smoke wafting out of chimneys above the bulbs of the arc lights in the cold night air. Peter had decided to shoot the film in black and white because it would portray the 1950s more convincingly and because color can distract the audience. Gradations of gray allow people to concentrate on dramatic content and performance, rather than the tone of red in an actress’s lipstick or dress. The sharpness and depth of field in black and white have never been surpassed in color photography.

  Several weeks into the shooting, Peter got a request from Bert Schneider: Could Stephen Friedman visit the set? He was a producer only because he owned the movie rights to the book and Peter reluctantly agreed to let him observe for a few days. Friedman asked me to take a walk with him one afternoon and gave me notes on my performance. Returning to the hotel, I saw Peter.

  “Do you think my acting is enthusiastic enough?” I asked.

  “Who’s been talking to you?” said Peter. When he learned that it was Friedman, I thought smoke would come out of his nostrils. Then, crossing the lobby, he ran into Ellen Burstyn.

  “Who’s this Friedman character?” she asked. “Is he a producer or what?”

  “Well, he’s a nominal producer,” Peter said.

  “He’s giving me line readings,” said Ellen. “He told me about one of his favorite lines in the book, how he always imagined it being said like—”

  Peter exploded and ran for a phone to call Bert Schneider. “If that cocksucker isn’t out of Texas by tonight,” he screamed, “I’m going to borrow a hunting knife from one of these good ol’ boys and kill him.’’

  Friedman was gone the next morning, and we didn’t see him again until the Academy Awards, where he was dressed in a green tuxedo. When a still photographer on the set talked to me about my scenes, Peter sent him packing too. The joke was: if you want to get fired from this picture, talk to Cybill Shepherd.

  Jacy makes her initial appearance in the movie theater where Father of the Bride is playing. Sonny is necking with his girlfriend in the back row, keeping one eye on Elizabeth Taylor, whom he really wants to be kissing, and Jacy walks up the aisle with Duane to ask teasingly, “Whatcha’all doin’ back here in the dark?” I was sitting in a row just ahead of Peter as we waited until the shot was lit to the satisfaction of the Oscar-winning director of photography Robert Surtees. Peter leaned ovsquo;he worn velvet seat and spoke in a low voice right next to my ear.

  “How are you doing?” he said.

  “I’m a little nervous, but I’m okay “I answered. “How are you?”

 
He bent an elbow on the seat and rested one cheek in his hand. “I don’t know who I’d rather sleep with,” he said, “you or the character you’re playing.”

  The moment was so intense that I covered my face with my hands to hide the rising color. Just then I heard from the back of the theater, “We’re ready for you, Cybill.”

  Even if he hadn’t meant it, Peter’s words would have been terrific motivation for the scene. I felt sexy, playful, inspired. And I couldn’t stop thinking about him, about the corners of his mouth as he spoke before I covered my eyes.

  Not long after, Polly was away scouting locations, and Jeff Bridges had left for a week of army reserve duty. As we wrapped for the day, Peter said, “I guess you’re going to be alone tonight.” It was his first reference to the open secret that Jeff and I had been keeping company after hours.

  Jeff was adorable, but nobody could compare to Peter. What he had to offer was authority, maturity, guidance, and a palpable attraction. The force field that had started in the Essex House, when I didn’t know what book I was reading, would grow to the point that even Polly remarked on it--she said facetiously that Peter was always drawn to women with big breasts and small feet (neither of which she had).

  There was a moment of silence and expectation before I responded to Peter’s comment.

  “I’m alone every, night,” I said. It was as if the lighting in the room changed, everything fading to black until there was just one spotlight on the couple.

  We made plans for dinner that night at a cowboy steakhouse outside of town that we hoped would not be frequented by any of the cast or crew. I nervously tried on every outfit in my suitcase, finally settling on blue jeans. It was the time of night when the ambient temperature in Texas seemed to drop like a stone, but the shiver I felt down the back of my neck as I saw Peter at his car wasn’t meteorological. In that flat country, the sky gets bigger and the sunset surrounds you like a dome. We stopped and stood by the bridge that crosses the Red River, watching the ball of fire drop behind the horizon. He sang a cappella to me in the car on the way home—“I’m a Fool to Love You” and “Glad to Be Unhappy.” No suitor had ever serenaded me like that, and it felt like the most romantic kind of wooing. When we got back to the motel, we both went to my room.