Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  I dropped my demand about being picked up, since Jane and I were driving together. When we entered the Crosstown Theater, the phalanx of good ol’ boys wouldn’t let us past the lobby. So Jane and I started tangoing together in front of the popcorn machine, ignoring the people who were trying desperately to ignore us. Word that Elvis had entered the building through a side door filtered into the lobby like a game of whispering down the lane, and we were granted admission, sitting in a row with the bubbas. As if on cue, everybody in the row to my right got up and moved one seat over.

  I smelled him before I saw him, but I couldn’t for the life of me identify his cologne. Let’s just call it Eau de Elvis. His luminous olive skin glowed with what I later learned was bronzing makeup. He was chewing Fruit Stripe gum and offered me a piece, graciously sending another down the row to Jane. As others arrived for the screening, he pointed out a distinguished-looking man. That’s an eye surgeon,” he said. “He treated me for an infection by driving a needle straight through my eyeball, and I was awake every minute.” Then he opened his jacket and revealed a pearl-handled revolver stuck in his belt. “I carry this little girl everywhere I go,” he said. When these preambles were over, we watched Goodbye Columbus in silence, while I tried to sneak peripheral glances at him in the dark. There was a second feature scheduled, but partway through Sunday, Bldy Sunday, there was a kiss between two men. Revolted members of the Mafia yelled, “That’s gross, man,” and Elvis ordered, “Stop the movie.” And then he was gone, uttering a barely audible “See y’all later.”

  Jane and I had just reached the sidewalk in front of the theater when a white Lincoln made a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. Elvis strode toward us and asked, “Y’all want to come back to the house?” Jane and I exchanged glances, read each other’s thoughts, and declined. With the barest trace of good night, Elvis pulled away and proceeded right through a stop sign, within spitting distance of a motorcycle cop. We watched as the officer signaled the car to pull over and Elvis flashed his Special Deputy badge from the Memphis Sheriff’s Department. (Later I got a badge too. It lived in the bathroom drawer until somebody in the sheriff’s office was indicted on sixty counts of fraud and bribery, and all special badges were revoked. Fortunately I tend to get in the kind of trouble that doesn’t involve law enforcement.)

  A few days later I was invited to Graceland for lunch. One of the bubbas rang the bell of my childhood home while Elvis waited out front. Mother was oblivious to my caller, and my brother was in his “Everything in my life is terrible because you are my sister stage” I’d been in swanky homes of famous people (in fact, I now lived in one with Peter), but Graceland had a special glow behind its wrought-iron gates, with a tree-lined driveway winding up to a portico fronted by tall white columns and two white stone lions as palace guards. There was a rather formal dining room, but we ate in the kitchen with Elvis’s father, and with little conversation. (Southern folk are brought up not to talk with their mouths full.) The meal included the first three of the four southern food groups: salt, fat, sugar, and alcohol. Chicken-fried steak was cooked well done by a housekeeper who called me Missy and sent plates out to the bodyguards waiting by the cars. One of them drove me home shortly after dessert: slices of devil’s food cake colored an unnatural red.

  I was back for dinner the next day (deep-fried sandwiches made of peanut butter, bananas, and mayonnaise), and it was just the two of us. Elvis led me on a tour ending in his bedroom, all red and black with a fake leopard cover on a king-size bed, four TVs, and smoky mirrors on the walls and ceilings. I had no doubt about how the evening would end—there was soft kissing on my neck and arms, pulling off layers of clothing to reveal new naked places—while I kept thinking: Do I want to do this? I’d been treated like a hot piece of ass in New York, and I resisted the idea of being a notch on the belt of a renowned lover boy. But his kisses were so slow and deliberate, his skin so smooth—a little soft around the middle but hard in the right places. He nibbled down my body, virile and playful, then stopped abruptly at my belly button.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “Uhh, well, you see, me and the guys talk, and, well, white boys don’t eat pussy,” he said.

  This was an interesting concept: that the frequency and popularity of oral sex broke down along racial lines.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” I said playfully, emboldened by the prospect of shaming him into action with my sheer disbelief. “I’m used to men diving for it. Would you like me to show you how? “

  He warmed to the subject, as did I. But I had the feeling of being outside myself, watching. Sex with another man didn’t feel like I was cuckolding Peter—I figured I couldn’t cheat on someone I didn’t have, and Peter wasn’t mine in any real, permanent sense. I kept earnest, copiously annotated diaries in those days written in code in case Peter happened upon them. The musings of youthful self-absorbed angt are fairly insufferable to read now, but there’s one passage that still resonates: “Elvis’s stupidity is rejuvenating against Peter’s superiority. I don’t think Peter takes me seriously, but going with him has a lot of prestige.”

  I had fun in Elvis’s bed, but I couldn’t sleep in it. Shortly past midnight, he drove me home, my face rubbed raw from kissing.

  Although I’d made TV appearances as Model of the Year, The Last Picture Show really inaugurated what becomes almost a tangential career for any actor: working the talk-show circuit. At first I was stiff, calcified, afraid to open my mouth. Then I became awkwardly flirtatious, trying to amuse, drinking too much coffee and talking too fast. Then I would adopt Peter’s hauteur, minus his raconteur skills. One of my appearances almost derailed my career. In 1971 Neil Simon, the most popular American playwright of his time, had written his first screenplay called The Heartbreak Kid, from a short story, by Bruce Jay Friedman. Charles Grodin was to play the nice Jewish guy who falls in love with the classic icy shiksa of his sexual fantasies on his Miami Beach honeymoon and ditches his bride, played by Jeannie Berlin. (Director Elaine May had cast her real-life daughter as the jilted bride, although nobody knew they were related until filming had begun.) The shiksa role went to the dark-haired girlfriend of Freddie Fields, a powerful Hollywood agent who looked like an early Austin Powers. (“Let me give you some information, kiddo,” Fields once said to me, leaning uncomfortably close and breathing hot agency breath on me at a screening in his house. “It’s not the directors or the producers who are the real powers in this business. It’s the agents.”) The brunette had to become a blonde, and rehearsals had already started when her stripped and bleached hair began falling out in clumps. I got a call: could I go for a reading tomorrow?

  Although I didn’t learn about it until later, Elaine May had seen me chattering mindlessly on Dick Cavett’s show and decided I couldn’t play this or any part. (In partial defense, Cavett had started the interview by saying, “I haven’t seen your film, but it’s supposed to be very good.”) The reading for May and Simon took place in a small generic office building in New York. Most of the time when I enter a room for an audition, I know if I’ve got the job, and I didn’t feel like I had this one. But I started to read, and they started to laugh. As we said good-bye, Simon clasped my hand in both of his and said, “I always knew you’d be perfect.”

  Simon had a contractual guarantee that the dialogue would be used exactly as he’d written it, and we knew that not a word could be altered. (There’s nothing wrong with cleaving to good writing: Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy always said they were “script technicians” hired to make the lines on the page work.) But May liked to use improvisation as an acting exercise during rehearsals, although she didn’t call it that. She spoke about the exploration of subtext, the meaning beneath the lines. And she gave me a wonderful piece of advice that sounds dumb but works. “When you deliver a line,” she said, “say it as if you expect the other character to be hearing you, getting it.”

  May seemed to think that Grodin was hysterically funny
and laughed at everything he did. He had lost a lot of weight to do this role, so his skin was kind of hanging off his bones. In a scene where we were lying in bed together, the script called for me to play with his hair, but when I reached up to push a strand off his forehead, he blocked my hand and hissed, “Fake it. This is a rug.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, assuming that he was making a joke to catch me off guard and provoke an interesting facial expression. (I’d neverician within calling distance of a toupee before.)

  “No, really” he said.

  You can’t be serious,” I persisted.

  “I’m serious,” he said. The exchange did not endear me to him, or him to me.

  The Heartbreak Kid was a continuation of The Great Breast Hunt: I didn’t want to do the nude scene clearly indicated in the script, but if I’d said so up front, I wouldn’t have gotten the part. I still didn’t quite trust that stills from The Last Picture Show wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands and had no wish to enrich any celluloid archives that could haunt me in the future. I was bothered by the objectified use of naked women, an issue of power, not morality. If Harrison Ford had to expose his balls on-screen, I don’t think he would make as much money. In the past, when nudity was verboten, directors had to be more clever. Alfred Hitchcock hired a double for Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho, then used seventy-two different shots in forty-two seconds without ever exposing an erogenous zone.

  One of the producers of The Heartbreak Kid was Eric Preminger, the love child of the director Otto Preminger and the burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, who said of her career, “I wasn’t naked. I was covered with a blue spotlight.” Perhaps Preminger deemed to have a special affinity for female strippers because he was recruited to visit the Playboy mansion in Chicago to audition the bunnies, inspecting their breasts and selecting a body double for me. When he found the pair he’d dreamt of, he came to my dressing room with a contract and said, “Sign this right away.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but an actor has the right to give written approval of a body double, guaranteed by the Screen Actors Guild. I just knew not to sign anything without a lawyer looking at it (a precaution I have drummed into my children since they were old enough to hold a pen). When I finally saw the scene cut together, Grodin was shown looking at my chest, followed by a shot of the proxy’s breasts (nice ones, by the way) without my head attached. I. found the nudity disruptive, but there was a lot of pressure on me to approve the use of the body double, since Preminger had spent considerable production money on the Chicago trip and had paid the bunny. But I held my ground, and Elaine, the director agreed with me.

  Elaine May chewed No-Doz by the fistful to stay awake. Shooting in a frigid Minneapolis winter, her feet got frostbitten, and we got to keep warm inside, while her toes thawed out. The weather was more accommodating in Miami. I was staying with the rest of the cast at a low-rent Holiday Inn nowhere near the fancy beach hotels and got stuck in the decrepit elevator. I was more bored than scared--which is why, to this day, I never approach an elevator without thinking I should have a book with me, just in case. So it wasn’t just languishing for Peter that made me anticipate his visit so eagerly: for a few days I would get to stay in the Fountainbleu. Big breakfast buffet. Big swimming pool. Big Atlantic Ocean. Peter was not one for slumming.

  Larry McMurtry came to visit too. Peter had suggested that they collaborate on a new script, called at various times West of the Brazos which is a river), then Palo Duro (which is a canyon), then Streets of Laredo (which, it turned out, had been the title of a mediocre movie starring William Holden and Glenn Ford). “What kind of western do you want to make?” Larry had asked Peter.

  “Some kind of a trek,” Peter said. “As long as it’s not about cows because Howard Hawkes did the quintessential cattle drive in Red River.”

  From the beginning, the film was conceived as a vehicle for Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. Peter acted out all the parts while he and Larry wrote the script, and nobody does a better Stewart, Fonda, or Wayne excetewart, Fonda, and Wayne. But Wayne apparently asked John Ford’s opinion, and although Ford had been instrumental in getting Ben Johnson to do The Last Picture Show, this time he told Wayne not to do the film knowing full well that if he backed out, the others would follow “The old man doesn’t like it,” Wayne said to Peter.

  “That’s not what he told me,” Peter said, but for some reason he never confronted Ford. Maybe he didn’t want to ask another favor. But Peter would often repeat what James Cagney said about Ford after the director had knowingly let him crash in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by the character actor William Demarest, who had never been behind the wheel, “There’s one word to describe John Ford and the Irish: malice.”

  The ideas that germinated in the Fountainbleu were eventually reworked into Larry’s Pulitzer-winning novel Lonesome Dove. Despite the warning that cows had been done, the book centered on the last daring cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the late nineteenth century. But Peter was never given credit for many of the ideas generated at the hotel, which saddened and angered him. “Larry used every part of the pig,” he would say.

  I hadn’t heard from Elvis since Graceland. But when I was back in Los Angeles, he called, offering to send his plane for me for a weekend at the house he’d rented in Palm Springs. One of his henchmen picked me up at the airport, looked at my jeans and tie-dyed mirrored vest and said, “Next time we’re in L.A. we’re gonna arrange a shopping trip so you can get some nice new clothes because Elvis likes his ladies to look a certain way.” Only if I can help pick out his clothes, I thought. The house was luxurious in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic glow. All the King’s men were in residence, wearing pins that said TCB, code for Elvis’s catch phrase “Taking Care of Business.” They spent the afternoon competing to see who could make the biggest splash into a murky swimming pool. I really didn’t want to go near that pool but couldn’t resist one-upping the bubbas by doing a “can opener” leap I’d learned from the lifeguards at Chickasaw Country Club. The guys raced in dune buggies three or four abreast while shouting into walkie-talkies or sat around a long table with a thick top of beveled glass, eating their favorite deep-fried sandwiches. Elvis was the first person I ever saw drink bottled water, which he had imported from the Ozarks. “You drink enough of this,” he said, “and it’ll keep you regular.”

  I thought it was a little odd that he slept during the day, and I didn’t learn until many years later that he was actually terrified of falling asleep in the dark. He had heavy drapes, blackout shades on the windows, even aluminum foil taped to the glass to block out every bit of daylight. The sweet charm that I had seen in Memphis seemed to be draining away, replaced by unfortunate frat boy humor. When I emerged from the bathroom before dinner, he said, “I never knew a girl to take so many baths,” which caused great guffaws among the cronies, even though his own bathroom had a six-drawer black box of cosmetics--he wore more makeup than I did. We were hardly ever alone and didn’t talk much when we were, not about his music or his marriage or his daughter or the lunacy of spending $40,000 to fly his entourage to Denver for a certain kind of sandwich (this, from a man whose father was once sentenced to three years in jail for forging a forty dollar check). He didn’t seem too interested in anything I said either, and he acted as if I was putting on airs if I mentioned the book I was reading. I was seeing the morbid cheese ball side of him, and it made me slightly nervous, as if I’d better not displease him or I could get myself in troubleortunately, I was never asked to enact what I heard was one of Elvis’s favorite erotic scenarios: putting on waist-high cotton panties, eating cookies and milk, and wrestling with another girl.

  Toward the end of the summer, Elvis invited me to see him perform at the Las Vegas Hilton. I told Peter that I was spending the weekend with a girlfriend in San Francisco. The spectacle began with the orchestra playing the tone poem “‘Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Ri
chard Strauss, better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If ever there was music announcing the arrival of a god, this was it. A noisy procession of motorcycles swept onto the stage before Elvis appeared in a jeweled cape and jumpsuit--splendiferous but a little chubby. I’d always admired his voice, but now, I was moved in a way I had not expected, as if he were singing directly to me, and without thinking, I rose to my feet just like the rest of the audience. After the show, he sat at the piano in his suite and sang gospel songs with his background singers, wearing a custom-made blue velour lounging suit. Then he walked through curtained French doors into the bedroom and collapsed on an enormous four-poster bed.

  I didn’t know it, but what I was seeing was the full-throttle effect of drugs. I had an adjoining bedroom, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Any possibility of nooky had evaporated--seemed far away and woozy, his eyes half closed, his speech slurred. Holding out a handful of pills, he said, “Here, take these.”

  I was confused. “Are you going to take some of them?” I asked.

  “Oh, I already had mine,” he said. “These are all for you.”

  I went to my room and flushed them down the toilet. As I got into bed, I noticed a small black velvet box on the nightstand. I opened it to find a diamond and emerald ring that looked like a glob of porcupine bristles-too large, too elaborate, too hideous even for Liberace. I went to the desk and wrote Elvis a note on Hilton letterhead, thanking him but declining his generous and extravagant gift. Then I called the airline to change my return reservation.