Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  An emotional archaeologist might speculate about how much bought into the mythology of The Last Picture Show and a character who represents the height of narcissism: damaging other people but focusing on how bad it makes her feel. Jacy was doing that in the film, and I was doing it in real life, aware of the pain we would cause but unable to resist causing it. The inability to tolerate the truths about oneself is an essential element of narcissism, and I had a blithely unexamined life. The participants in a love triangle are often neatly categorized as innocent victim, faithless destroyer, and erotic enabler. But the roles are mutable, and I don’t think you can play one without ending up playing them all.

  When Polly returned from her scouting expedition the truth became impossible for her to ignore. We weren’t doing anything obvious--on the contrary, we were even more guarded, trying to stay away from each other--but the energy changes when an illicit affair is consummated. Polly would later tell Peter that she knew for sure when she saw a box of pralines in their room that were not meant for her, even though they were her favorites. One night she was eating dinner in the restaurant at the Tradewinds Motel when she saw us come in. Kning it was best not to have a confrontation until the work was done, she crawled out of the restaurant on her knees. She moved to another room at the Ramada Inn, hoping that she could resurrect her marriage after a location affair had lost its heat.

  On those charts that measure stress in life, where the death of a spouse rates 100 and a bad haircut is a 3, Peter was hovering near the top, and he went off the chart entirely when he got the news that his father lay in a coma after a catastrophic stroke. He went to Arizona for the weekend, but three days after he returned to work, Borislav Bogdanovich died.

  Peter’s father’s death drew us closer together as I made myself available to hold and comfort him. But it would have been completely inappropriate for me to accompany him to the funeral--I was the chippie who had broken up his marriage--and Polly declined to go, so he had no support for the trip. When he returned, he had to shoot the funeral scene for Sam the Lion, a brutal piece of bad timing. It would become one of the most powerful sequences of the film, informed by Peter’s personal loss and infused with an extra dimension of raw emotion that affected all of us.

  All my life I’d been told I could use my beauty, but it had been slippery footing: I was never thin enough, my breasts were not the right shape, and the area under my eyes was too puffy. But in 1970 I had the right look for the right time—a genetic roll of the dice in my favor. If I had resembled one of Modigliani’s fragile waifs rather than Botticelli’s ample voluptuaries, maybe nobody would know who I am today. Peter told me, “Don’t you dare lose weight,” and for the first time in my life, I felt confident about my looks. But I was still petrified by the thought of the striptease on a diving board at a midnight pool party and the deflowering at the Cactus Motel that has all the romance of root canal.

  An assistant director was given what he considered the plum assignment of going to talent agencies in Dallas and finding a body double for me, in case I refused to do the nude scene. But I wouldn’t let him see me naked or pose for photographs, so I was put in the bizarre position of describing my breasts to him. (Wildly embarrassed, I said “eggs over easy.”) Peter kept reassuring me that there would be only a skeletal crew, that none of the other actors would be present when we filmed, and that it wouldn’t mean the end of my career before it even started. A friend had pointed out to me that once an actress appears nude on film, the stills often fall into the wrong hands, and I wanted a signed affidavit from Peter and the producer Bert Schneider that no still photographs would be printed. I continued to nag Peter about this until one day he snapped, “If you ever mention this again, I will never give you another piece of direction.” I never did speak of it again. The day we shot the diving board scene, I wore two pairs of underpants so I could remove one and still be covered. My anxiety was impeccable motivation, since Jacy’s bravado covers up sheer terror.

  I had another naked moment of truth in the scene at the motel. As an impotent Duane keeps mumbling, “I dunno what happened,” Jacy finally explodes, “Oh, if you say that one more time, I’ll bite you,” throwing her panties at his head. Since Peter was framing the shot for a close-up, I was thrilled to get to put my bra back on. There’s a comic juxtaposition of music and action in the scene, a florid arrangement of “Wish You Were Here” mocking Duane’s inability to get it up. Nudity and comedy in the same scene is a rare combination in film.

  (Years later, when Peter reedited the movie for a new release, he reinstated a scene where Jacy has sex on a pool table with “Abilene,” a callous older man who works for her father and has an affair with her mother. The sex is not violent or coerced but so cold and bloodless that it seems tantamount to an act of aggression against Jacy, stopping just short of rape. Including this scene makes my character more sympathetic, gives her more dimension. The original sound had been lost, so I had to go into a studio and rerecord the audible implications of lovemaking, looking at footage of myself from twenty-five years earlier while Peter stood next to me giggling.)

  At the time I thought that God was going to strike me dead for appearing nude in a movie. But the morning after, I got up and ate oatmeal and realized that I was going to live. I thought surely I’d be struck down after I had sex with a married man. But the morning after, I woke up quite healthy. I knew the affair was wrong, but I rationalized it by thinking that I hadn’t exchanged any vows with Polly, and that I was only doing what men have been doing for eons, taking their pleasure wherever they find it. John Bruno, who had come for one visit, sent me a pithy present: a shiny steel heart-shaped dog tag on a chain that said: MY NAME IS CYBILL, I BELONG TO NO ONE. Now it seems like an estimable motto, but at the time it saddened me.

  When a film wraps, the actors often like to keep some of their props or wardrobe as mementos. I wanted the heart-shaped locket and the brown and white saddle shoes that Jacy wore, but Polly was in charge of costumes and wouldn’t give them to me. I guess she figured I had enough of a souvenir: her husband.

  Peter and I had made no promises to one another beyond the boundaries of Texas. I’d never experienced anything so powerful before and didn’t know where it would lead. I still thought of marriage as an outdated institution left over from the era of chastity belts, but Peter said he had to give his own marriage a chance. I went back to Memphis before returning to New York City and Peter and Polly returned to their home in Los Angeles. Right away he began sneaking out to phone me, and Polly finally said, “If you can’t stay away from her, why don’t you just go with her?” He called me from his room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

  “Do you want to come out here and live with me?” he asked wearily.

  “Okay,” I said, the calmness of my voice belying the joy and trepidation in my heart. “When do you want me to come?”

  “On the next plane,” he said.

  We rented a furnished apartment on the seventh floor of a landmark Art Deco building on the Sunset Strip. But many nights I camped out on the couch at the production company, living on those chili dogs from Pinks and watching Peter edit The Last Picture Show on an old Moviola. Since he had no assistant, he assembled the raw footage himself--twenty-four frames per second, like twenty-four still photographs. He marked with a white wax pencil between the frames where he wanted to cut. Then he rolled his chair over to a splicer table, reassembling the film with a special Scotch tape that had sprocket perforations. He would then run the scene for me, demonstrating the powerful effect of adding or removing even a single frame to the “head” or the “tail” of the shot. Watching Peter work was an education in film, and it served me well when I got involved in the editing of the Cybill show. I like it when I hear this process called “montage.” It seems to convey the hope that the whole will add up to even more than the sum of its parts. Film is visual music. It’s put together with more than logic and announces when it’s right. Many a performance can be made or des
troyed by what is left in or cut out.

  Columbia fought hard to rename The Last Picture Show, afraid it would be confused with The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider that was to be released just a few weeks earlier. Studio executives submitted about five hundred alternative titles, all of which were resoundingly rejected--it was, after all, the title that had originlly attracted Peter to the project. Bert Schneider called with the disheartening news that the picture had been given an X rating because of the nudity, but Peter said, “I don’t see how we can cut any of it. Tell them to look at it again.” Bert appealed to his brother, Columbia’s head of production, who had been an earlier advocate, arguing against the corporate executives who questioned why anybody would want to see a black and white film, much less make one. The rating was changed to R. We never knew why this happened.

  My mother’s response to the news about Peter and me was “If you’re going to be with a married man, you might as well be a whore.” But her moral stance didn’t prevent her from accepting my invitation to the premiere at the New York Film Festival or from sharing the suite reserved for Peter and me at the Essex House. (In a romantic gesture, he had tried but failed to get the same suite where we first met.) There was only time for brief introductions because we had to leave early for the requisite media interviews and Mother was not happy that she didn’t get to ride to Lincoln Center in the same limousine with us and share the glory. I was ambivalent about her presence: I wanted her to participate, but she’d already declared me a harlot, and I knew she’d have a hard time watching a movie featuring my bare breasts.

  The Last Picture Show starts in silence that continues for a long time—no music, stark black lettering for the credits, and a slow pan during which the only sound is a blowing wind. The first voice you hear is Peter’s, as an off-camera disc jockey with a thick Texas drawl introducing Hank Williams’s recording of “Cold Cold Heart.” Peter and I held hands as the lights dimmed. I didn’t relax until Jacy’s first line—“Whatcha’all doin’ back here in the dark?”—for the first time, I felt the magic of an audience laughing at something I said.

  There was a postpremiere party at Elaine’s, a popular place with the New York media crowd. When I walked into the room on Peter’s arm, people stopped talking and snapped to attention. But I was also aware that they weren’t much interested in what I had to say. I felt like a paper doll: I looked good on a flat surface, but if I turned to the side, I wasn’t there, like the cardboard cutout of me used to sell Instamatic cameras. I listened rather than talked for most of the evening, burying myself in my lamb chops. When we got back to the hotel, my mother was standing slightly out of the doorway to her darkened room, wearing a bright floral robe.

  “What did you think?” Peter asked.

  She directed her answer to me, as if I had asked the question. “Maybe you’ll do better next time,” she said, then turned her back and shut the door. I giggled a little uncomfortably (after all, we’d gotten a standing ovation), but Peter winced, as if he’d been slapped in the face and muttered “shit” under his breath. They never spoke again.

  Newsweek called The Last Picture Show “a masterpiece... the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.” It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two, for Best Supporting Actress and Actor (Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson). It won seven New York Film Critics awards, three British Academy awards, one Golden Globe, one National Society of Film Critics award, and was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry. Although the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture went to William Friedkin and The French Connection, I had become an actress under the tutelage of a great teacher. Like the song about dancing with the man who danced with the woman who danced with the Prince of Wales, I was taught by the man who was taught by Stella Adler who was taught by Stanislavsky. He surrounded me with peole who were the best in the business, helping me avert the kind of early career embarrassment that comes back and bites you in the ass. My ass didn’t show teeth marks until later. As Orson Welles said about his career, I started at the top and worked my way down.

  Chapter Six

  “WHITE BOYS DON’T EAT...”

  MUTUALLY AND ENTHUSIASTICALLY, PETER AND I rejected marriage vows—but both of us will always regret not having had a child together. When we moved into Sunset Towers, there was a period of time when he went “home” each night to put his two young daughters to bed. He usually returned beaten down by Polly’s recriminations. Later his girls would visit us on weekends, and for the first twenty-four hours, I was the enemy, but I never tried to woo them or be their mother, just included them in games of Parcheesi and croquet and took them swimming. Eventually, we would all relax just in time for them to go back “home.”

  I had no more than the occasional bloodless telephone conversation with their mother. Polly was a great help to Peter in his work, but when the marriage was over, their behavior toward each other reinforced a sense of the singular creative hostility between them, still fresh in recent interviews. According to Polly, she not only discovered the novel of The Last Picture Show but also me. When Peter began work on What’s Up, Doc?, a screwball comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal intended as an homage to Bringing Up Baby, he decided to hire Polly, who accepted the job of set designer on the condition that I be banned from the set, bravely joking that she refused to be “Cybillized.” I visited in San Francisco anyway but was relegated to swimming laps at the Nob Hill YWCA and hearing stories about la Streisand secondhand. (Peter asked her to cut her famously talon like fingernails, but she would only comply on her right hand, so in most of the movie, she’s holding a raincoat or some other prop in the left.) The closest I got to the set was watching the “gag reel,” Peter playing Barbra’s part to show her what to do in the scene where she sings “As Time Goes By.” He hides under a drop cloth and slithers off the piano, stopping just short of kissing Ryan on the mouth.

  My relationship with Peter felt as if it was built on shifting tectonic plates. Our only rule was “Don’t ask me what you don’t want to know,” and the corollary was “Never cheat on me in the same city.” I’m sure part of my appeal for Peter was that I was attractive to other men. He’d watch from down a drugstore aisle or across a theater lobby as some guy would circle in preflirting formation, then he’d appear beside me with a smug kiss or gesture of intimacy that announced squatter’s rights. I wonder now if he didn’t unconsciously condone me having relationships with other men.

  The summer of 1972, while back in Memphis, I got a call from George Klein, the local television host who’d emceed the Miss Teenage Memphis pageant. A friend of his had admired me in The Last Picture Show. He was an actor too. And he lived at Graceland.

  I’d been crazy jealous when my sister got a record player and a small collection of Elvis Presley 45s back in the mid-1950s, playing “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” nonstop and singing along in a tinny voice that I tried to overshout. Everybody in Memphis felt jingoistic pride in the native son who hung out with the black musicians like Big Joe and Ivory Joe Hunter in the juke joints of Beale Street, adapting their moves and their music. (It was Willie Mae “Big Mama” ‘Thornton who recorded “Hound Dog” first, and she was talking about men—“You ain’t lookin’ for a woman, all you lookin&rsqor is a home.”) Sam Phillips, who engineered the radio broadcasts on the Peabody roof, had started Sun Records, signing up Jr. Walker and Little Milton and B. B. King, and he was looking for a white boy who could sing like a black one. A local disc jockey at WHBQ named Dewey Phillips was playing black and white artists on the same station for the first time. He’d spin anything from Hank Williams to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and he put Elvis on the map. But when Elvis went from radio to television and live performances, his music wasn’t considered polite (you never saw Sinatra bump and grind like a stripper), and I could recall with clarity the furor when Ed Sullivan consented to show him only from the waist up, fearful for the overwrought lib
idos of the nation’s youth. In 1972 I was not too interested in Elvis Presley or his moves. He’d become a little passé, supplanted by Motown and the British invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But he was, after all, the King.

  “He’s got to call me,” I told Klein, “and he’s got to pick me up himself.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  One of his people tracked me down at Jane’s house. “It’s for you,” she said, handing me the receiver with demonstrative boredom. “Some weirdo pretending to be Elvis Presley.” When she grasped from my stunned mien that this was no impersonator, she pressed her own ear to the receiver next to mine, the two of us listening to a voice that sounded like melted Kraft caramels.

  “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time,” he said, “ever since I saw you in that movie.”

  “That was two years ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”

  He gave an appreciative little laugh. I’d like to see you sometime,” he said.

  “Are you sure you’re not still married?” I asked. Like the rest of the world, I knew about Priscilla and their daughter, Lisa Marie, and I’d already taken hits for breaking up one marriage, but he assured me he was separated and in the throes of a divorce. He asked me to join him for a movie that evening--Elvis regularly rented local theaters at midnight for his entourage, unflatteringly known as the Memphis Mafia. Jane was flailing her arms in a silent entreaty, “Take me! Take me!” I asked if I could bring my best girlfriend. Sure, he said. Elvis never did have a problem with two girls.