Earlier that day in Los Angeles, Peter was driving on Santa Monica Boulevard when he noticed a billboard announcing Elvis’s Vegas engagement. He’d been hearing me say that I was fascinated with Elvis (Peter deemed him boring) and had a purely intuitive feeling that I was with him. He called the Hilton, asked for me, and when I answered, he screamed, “You’re a goddamned liar!” Then he hung up. I called back to hear more of his invective. “You know what happens to liars?” he shouted. “They get their mouths washed out with soap. You get your ass back here, and I’m going to wash your mouth out with Ivory Soap.”
I only heard that he wanted me back, that the damage wasn’t irreparable. When I got home, he screamed and stomped so hard that the fake crystal chandeliers of the apartment shook, then issued a summary judgment: “That’s what I get for being with an actress.” Fortunately, he wasn’t home a few days later when I got a call from one of the Memphis mob saying that Elvis needed to talk to me.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“He’s right around the corner,” said the bubba. “Do me a favor, just talk to him because he’s really upset.”
When Elvis pulled into the oval driveway at Sunset Towers, he seemed sulky and remote--no kiss in greeting, no concern about my disappearance of a few nights before, just a statement of intention and an ultimatum.
“I really enjoy spending time with you, but you’ve got to get rid of this Dogbanovic guy,” he said, mangling the name a little. “It’s either him or me.”
I was thinking: What’s he talking about? Watching someone pass out cold when I was expecting a rollicking sexual rmp was not my idea of fun. Perhaps it was a bit of posturing from a wounded ego, an attempt to regain control after my rejection of his ring and his drugs. Later I learned that I was a temporary filler for Linda Thompson, who was Miss Memphis State, Miss Liberty Bowl, and Miss Tennessee--a self-described virgin who quit college twelve credits short of her degree, gave up her acting ambitions, and let Elvis make all her decisions, even changing her sleeping habits to become what his buddies called a “lifer.” Elvis was a goody I couldn’t resist, but I had a life with Peter I wasn’t about to give up. I wanted to make decisions, some of them foolish, on my own.
Well, that’s it for us,” he said. Those were his last words to me. We circled the block in silence until we got back to Sunset Towers, and he paused at the curb barely long enough for me to exit under the yellow and white awning. I said “Good-bye,” but he didn’t answer. I never saw him again. Five years later he was dead. Peter, unrepentant about his opinion of Elvis, said it was the best career move he ever made.
WHEN PETER WAS ENVISIONING DIRECTING A McMurtry western, he wanted Polly Platt to do the set design, but only on the condition that she knew I would be in the movie, and in her face. The western never got made, and instead they began working on Paper Moon, with Ryan O’Neal playing a Bible-selling con man and his daughter Tatum as the sharp-witted progeny he never knew about but unwittingly befriends. In the late fall of 1972, days before principal photography began in Hays, Kansas, Polly announced to Peter, “I can’t handle Cybill coming to the set.” It was the end of any pretense of civility between them, and their relationship never healed, although I schemed to defy her, wishing I could make her deal with my presence just once. Peter’s whole life was his work, and I was excluded from it because he was working with his ex-wife again. She wasn’t even his ex-wife yet. (Their divorce would not be final for three years.) I spent most of my time driving around the depressed prairie towns, photographing dilapidated buildings, railroad yards, and old men’s faces, practicing my tap dancing on the linoleum flooring of our hotel room until the people below pounded on their ceiling with a broomstick. We were staying in the utilitarian Pony Express Motel in Elwood (still resting on its laurels of being the first Pony Express station in Kansas) because Polly and the crew were in the marginally better Ramada Inn. The tension must have gotten to Peter because the next to last day’s worth of footage was shot with a hair stuck in the “gate” as the raw film passed through the camera. (That’s why someone yells “Check the gate” after every take.) All these scenes appear slightly soft-focus in the movie, since Peter enlarged every frame just enough to eliminate the hair, but he refused to go back and reshoot, declaring, “It beats spending another day in that hellhole with Polly.”
Peter met Marlene Dietrich on his way to Kansas--the plane stopped first in Denver, where she was doing a one-woman show. He was not the sort of man who imagined that women were coming on to him when they weren’t, and he knew she had something in mind even before he walked into his Kansas hotel room. The phone was ringing: Dietrich saying in a smoky voice “I found you.” When Paper Moon was completed, he invited her to its New York premiere, and she was not pleased when she saw me in the limousine, obviously anticipating a “date” with Peter. She sat between us, cooing into Peter’s ear and digging her left elbow into my side. Marlene Dietrich was the closest thing I had to a role model--a working mother who created sexually powerful roles (she wore pants before Katharine Hepburn) and ended her career with a triumphant cabaret act. I was so excited to be in her presence at I was happily impaled.
The next day, a bellman knocked at our suite in the Waldorf Towers. “Flowers for Miss Shepherd,” he said.
I opened the door and saw him struggling with an arrangement so large that there was no table that could accommodate it and it had to sit on the floor. The card read “Love, Marlene.” Well worth being ignored.
It was about this time that I joined a unique sorority: ever since the release of The Last Picture Show, Playboy magazine had tried to get me to pose nude by throwing money at me. First I was offered $5,000, then $10,000, then $50,000, to no avail. Then they figured out how to get me for free. My unwelcome Christmas present that year was my naked likeness in the magazine’s year-end “Sex in Cinema” issue, also featuring Jane Fonda and Catherine Deneuve. Technology provided a method of making a frame enlargement from a 35-millimeter print of the movie that had been borrowed for a screening at the Playboy mansion. I called a lawyer and sued for the right to control my image, insisting that there was a difference between the legitimate press and a magazine like Playboy. The suit claimed that I was a young woman of “dignity, intelligence, modesty, and artistic and personal integrity”—a legally accurate if not quite apt self-description.
The case dragged on for five years. Playboy started out treating it like a nuisance suit, using their local lawyer in Los Angeles, who coincidentally had been my lawyer’s professor at Stanford. When they realized that I was serious, they brought in the head of their Chicago law firm. My lawyer was looking through their files, and either they were pretty dumb or extremely honest because he found a smoking gun: a handwritten memo from Hugh Hefner to his secretary that said, “I’ve been stymied in every way to get pictures of Cybill Shepherd for the ‘Sex in Cinema’ issue. I’m screening The Last Picture Show tonight, so have [Mario] come up here with his magic machine.”
Hef was willing to settle after that. But instead of asking for a shitload of money, I wanted a book that Playboy had under option, a novel by Paul Theroux called Saint Jack about an amiable Singapore pimp. Hefner came to my house, offering a formal apology and informal arrangements for a settlement. The standard Screen Actors Guild contract now includes a protective clause that prevents unauthorized use of movie frames for still photographs. It served as excellent protection for actors until the world of cyberspace, which is proving impossible to police. Not long ago, I discovered that anyone can pay fifty dollars and go to a Web site where my head is stuck on some other woman’s naked body in the anatomically graphic poses favored by smut magazines. If I decided to sue, I’d have to do it country by country because there’s no international law in this area, and the fabricated photos would just resurface in another form.
I WENT TO THE PETER BOGDANOVICH SCHOOL OF Cinema. Peter didn’t want to exercise, sweat, get dirty--he only liked to watch movies, and he watched with a curat
or’s eye. When we went to a movie theater, he was always quick to tell the projectionist if a reel was out of focus. In our apartment, the focal point of the living room was a rebuilt 16-millimeter projector aimed at a blank wall. Several times a week we went to a studio screening room that smelled as if it hadn’t been opened since Fatty Arbuckle was thin. We’d eat moo shu pork out of paper cartons while we watched The Merry Widow--the silent Erich von Stroheim version with Mae Murray and John Gilbert (and an extra named Clark Gable)-- then the 1934 remake with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, and the other Ernst Lubitsch musicals: The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour with You. When we moved to a house, the first thing we added was a screening room that right red carpets and plush white couches with ottomans, the walls covered with classic movie posters. The film department at UCLA would let us borrow silver nitrate prints of the golden oldies, even though it was illegal to screen them at home: the film is flammable and explosive if it breaks, and the law stipulated two projectionists and a double-insulated flameproof projection room. But screening the only 35-millimeter print of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant that existed at the time was like seeing the way God sees: a face in sharp close-up, scenery in the distance, and everything clear in between. The expression “silver screen” comes from the actual silver in the film itself, which shimmered. All of modern technology can’t achieve that brilliance and depth of focus.
My endurance level didn’t approach Peter’s (often a triple feature), and I sometimes fell asleep during the third movie. I learned that all kinds of acting can work: the broad energy of James Cagney or the minimalisim of Gary Cooper. The only important question is: do we believe the actor? Can we suspend disbelief? Movies demand a leap of faith from the audience, a willingness to forget that what it’s seeing is fake. It was said that when Jimmy Stewart appeared on-screen, he annihilated disbelief.
I would ask Peter, “You sure you don’t mind seeing this again? You’ve seen it twenty-seven times.” He would say, “I’m looking at it with new eyes.” Every week he’d mark the TV Guide for the films I should watch. Anything directed by John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Jean Renoir became required viewing. Living with Peter was like inhabiting these movies. We developed a private language, borrowing bits of dialogue, like “I close the iron door on you” (John Barrymore in Twentieth Century), or “Don’t you think it’s rather indecent of you to order me out after you’ve kissed me?” (Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey). And we weren’t above quoting from The Last Picture Show (“Comb your hair, Sonny--you look like you smelled a wolf”). Sometimes when we were out, I’d stomp my feet and pound my fists, and people in the restaurant would think I had lost my mind, but Peter would crack up, knowing that I was doing one of Lombard’s tantrums from Twentieth Century.
We were living in Bel Air at 212 Copa de Oro Drive, a Mediterranean-style house with a red-tiled roof that had belonged to a newlywed Clark Cable and his bride Kay Spreckels. I found that house in 1974, and Peter bought it with money borrowed from Warner Bros. against his next project. We moved in with only a mattress on the floor and filled the rooms with furniture by spending a whole day at a Beverly Hills store called Sloans. Each of us had a bedroom suite upstairs, connected by a large closet: after years of unlocked doors and a sister who pummeled me out of bed, I readily embraced Virginia Woolf’s fine idea about a room of one’s own. Peter’s room had a niche in the wall for an antique Italian daybed covered with champagne-colored raw silk. Mine had a waterbed with a patchwork quilt we bought in Big Sur. Every wall was white and hung with Peter’s father’s paintings.
Peter and I were the couple du jour in Hollywood, but I often felt like an impostor among the real denizens of the film world, and I tended to be quiet in their company. When Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove, he sent me the galleys with an inscription that said, “You were the seed of so much of it. I started it fourteen years ago with Lorena’s silence--the silence of a woman who won’t give her voice arid heart to the world because she had concluded that the world would not hear it or understand it or love it. I felt such a silence in you.” People often acted as if my brain was blonde and watched rather than listened when I spoke, as if wondering where the viloquist’s hand went.
Even my agent, Sue Mengers, seemed to perceive me that way. “When you go to a meeting, don’t talk,” she’d instruct. “Just wear a lot of makeup and do your hair.” Sue was never known for her tact. She spoke very slowly to me, as if I needed extra time to process the information, Peter would get annoyed and tell her, “You don’t have to talk to Cybill that way.” She’d speed up to normal for a while, then decelerate and say, “I’m so sorry, I did it again.”
My first real Hollywood party was at Sue’s faux chateau in the Hollywood Hills, at the end of a series of hairpin turns on a thrillingly narrow road. We had to park in what seemed like another town and arrived somewhat breathless to see Gregory Peck straddling a chair, drunk as a skunk. I felt as if I had entered a parallel universe in which my idols turned into their evil twins. I didn’t have the courage to start a conversation with anyone, and the only person who approached me was a producer who said, “So you’re an actress. Who are you studying with?”
“Nobody,” I answered.
“That’s a mistake,” said the producer with a sniff. “You’d better start soon because you’ll need all the help you can get.”
I put down my wineglass, fled outside, and was halfway to the car when Peter came to retrieve me.
“They’re all phonies,” I said. “They’re all horrible.”
“I know,” he said, “but we can’t leave.”
When I did open my mouth, my irreverence sometimes backfired. Sue Mengers was hoping to foster the notion of my working with Dustin Hoffman, another of her clients, and she gave an intimate dinner for Peter and me, Dustin and his wife, Anne, and Sue’s husband, Jean-Claude Tremont. Entering the small dining room, Dustin sat down just long enough to look up at me, my rather long torso extending well above his, and then pushed up on his arms, as if trying to make himself taller.
“Why don’t you ask Sue if she has a couple of phone books?” I said with misguided humor.
Dustin looked as if he’d just been hit but didn’t know how to fall down, and the evening never recovered. The Hoffmans made a flimsy excuse and left early.
Foolishly trying to mitigate that sin, I went to the set of Marathon Man, taking an inch-thick Beverly Hills phone book. I delivered it to Dustin, saying, “This is what I meant.” He mumbled “thanks” and walked away. Perhaps this was one of those times when he stayed up for days to look appropriately scruffy and exhausted for a scene, prompting his costar, Laurence Olivier, to ask, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”
It would be an understatement to say that I failed to impress Marlon Brando. On a warm summer night Peter and I drove the great acting coach Stella Adler to a party in her honor at Brando’s home atop Mulholland Drive. There were Japanese lanterns strung through the trees, and I was seated on a garden bench next to Brando, but for once I was chattering away rather than deferring to the conversation of others. Brando was holding a beer bottle when he looked at me with unsubtle disgust.
“If this girl doesn’t shut up,” he said to no one in particular, “I’m going to hit her in the face with this bottle.” Then he turned to me and said, “Would you get up and go over there so I can watch you walk away?”
Years later, when I was doing the Cybill show, Brando was the only celebrity the writers knew they could malign with impunity. I’d say, “Just make it Brando, and I don’t have a problem with it,” so the joke would become, “One bee sting, and I swell up like Marlon Brando.”
PETER TOOK EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO SIT AT feet of great filmmakers, and I usually got the big toe. In 1972 he readily agreed to interview Charlie Chaplin for a documentary conducted at his home in Vevey, Switzerland, but Chaplin was in his dotage. At lunch, he suddenly stopped eating and said, “You know, my daughter Geraldine is very rich.”
We’d been there four hours, and those were the first words I’d heard him speak. “Really?” I replied. “That must be nice for her.” Then I went back to my soup.
One day Peter came home from a visit with Alfred Hitchcock, badly in need of black coffee and aspirin. Peter has little taste or tolerance for drink, but he had arrived at the great man’s hotel suite to find him pouring whiskey sours. Although Peter tried unobtrusively to nurse the drink, Hitchcock kept noticing and chastising him in that sonorous voice, “You’re not touching your glass.”
By the time the two of them left for dinner together, Peter had a nice little buzz going. They were descending in the hotel elevator full of people when Hitchcock turned to him and said, “So there he was, sprawled on the floor, blood pouring from every orifice and seeping into the carpet.” Peter reeled. He was a little drunk, but had he blacked out momentarily and missed the earlier part of this conversation? Everyone else in the elevator was rapt as Hitchcock went on, “The music that had been playing in the next room stopped, and I could hear a scratching sound.” Just as the elevator reached the ground floor, Hitchcock said, “So I kneeled over him, asking, “My God, man, what happened to you?’ He grabbed my shirtfront, pulled me down and...”
Just then the elevator door opened in the lobby. The other people were hanging back, straining to hear the end of the story but Hitchcock sailed past them, with Peter in tow, and began discussing the restaurant plans.
“But Hitch,” Peter said, “what happened to your friend?”
“Oh, nothing,” Hitchcock said, “that’s just my elevator story.”
In 1973, John Ford was to be given the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the first filmmaker so lauded. The public knew him as the director responsible for such classics as The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers. I knew him as a neighbor, living across the street, and as a flasher. By this time he was mostly confined to bed, dressed in a pajama top and a bedsheet that he liked to rearrange for shock value, often after drinking one of the two daily bottles of stout he was permitted. (Mary, his wife of fifty years, once told me, “Never believe anything you hear or read, and only half of what you see. And make sure the back of your skirt is clean because that’s where they’ll be looking.”) On the night of the award ceremony, outside the hotel, Henry Fonda had to fight through the anti-Vietnam picketers led by his daughter. Cary Grant was standing on line ahead of us, and as we got to the reception table, he said to the ticket taker, “I’m terribly sorry, I’ve forgotten my invitation.”
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