Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  “Name, please,” said the woman, consulting her master list without looking up.

  “Cary Grant,” he said.

  The woman glanced up over half-glasses. “You don’t look like Cary Grant,” she said suspiciously.

  “I know,” he said apologetically, “no one does.”

  ORSON WELLES CAME TO COPA DE ORO FOR DINNER one night and stayed two years, intermittently with an elegant actress of Hungarian and Croatian descent named Oya Kodar, who had perfectly formed eyebrows and spoke in a thick, high voice, like the way a child would imitate a snooty librarian. She seemed too remote and exotic to be a pal, but we shared the same sort of alliance with bossy, self-involved men. Once, when the four of us were eating in a Paris restaurant,rson and Peter were completely excluding us from the conversation, so we set our menus on fire with the candle on the table. Fortunately we got their attention before burning the restaurant to the ground. Orson was always broke--despite the accolades, his films weren’t profitable, and for years he had put all his money into his work. He never slept through the night, but he napped off and on around the clock, and I was instructed not to knock on the door of his room for any reason, day or night. Once he summoned me inside where he was playing with the cable TV box, channel-surfing by punching at a long row of numbered buttons.

  “Come and look at this,” he said, his heroic voice heavy with excitement. “It’s the most brilliant show on television.” The program that had elicited such praise was Sesame Street. His second favorite was Kojak. ‘The most frequent noises emanating from his room were the gurgles of Big Bird and Telly Savalas saying “Who loves ya, baby?” But he also encouraged me to study opera, which I did for three years. Working with a voice coach, a drama coach, and a language coach, on top of having a movie career, nearly did me in, and Orson finally told me, “You have to choose or you’re going to have a nervous breakdown. Opera or film.” One of the reasons I chose the latter was that when I sang opera, people either stared as if they were watching Mount St. Helen erupt, or just laughed.

  It was Orson too who helped me with the talk show. circuit, where I kept making wrongheaded attempts to be clever. It took me a long time to figure out that the host must score with the first big laugh at my expense, that I was supposed to be smart and cute and funny, but not smarter, not cuter, and certainly not funnier than Johnny/Jay/Dave/Mike/Merv. “All you have to do,” Orson instructed, “is ignore the audience and have a conversation with the guy behind the desk.” Carson could really bring out the risqué in me: on one occasion, he put on a pair of horns, got down on his hands and knees, and let me lasso him. Another time he knocked a cup of coffee over on his desk, and I said, “If you’d spilled it in your lap, I could have cleaned it up.” On Leno I used my hands to approximate the position of breasts that are not surgically lifted. (They’re so much more versatile with age--you can have them up, you can have them down, side to side, round and round, or you can swing them over your shoulder like a continental soldier.)

  Letterman posed a different challenge. “Don’t hug Dave too hard,” warned his stage manager right before I was announced. (Same thing happened when Tony Bennett came on the Cybill show. Perhaps I have a reputation as a particularly effusive hugger?) Once when I was scheduled for his show but wasn’t traveling directly to New York, I had the suit I planned to wear sent ahead. Dave hung it on the set, poking fun at it every night for a week as a kind of countdown before my appearance. When I heard about the stunt, I decided I’d be damned if I’d wear that outfit and instead came out wrapped in a bath towel. Years later, during another appearance on his show, Dave did pay up on a $100 bet that I couldn’t lob a football into a canister after he’d missed it nine times. When we went down to the street with the former Super Bowl champ Joe Montana to see who could throw the ball through the window of a passing taxicab, I became Diana of the hunt. All those years of tossing a ball with my father paid off, and Dave was gracious in defeat, especially after I accidentally stomped his foot.

  Since Peter worked more than either of us, Orson and I were often left in each other’s company. One day we were drinking wine, sitting in the living room under a painting of Native American dancing. “You know,” said Orson, looking up at the inspirational images, “there was a time when God was a man.” I told him I knew about Cybele from the Sistine Chapel, and he suggested I read The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, a kind of dictionary of religious stories throughout history. Reading that book cover to cover intensified my spiritual quest to learn more about the so-called Great Goddess.

  Orson ate my leftovers off the plate in four-star restaurants, especially if he had insisted on my ordering something strange and previously unknown to me such as tripe (I had no idea it was intestinal matter) or whitebait (I didn’t know the fish would come complete with heads and bones, curled into a position that looked like jumping). At home he would throw fits if we ran out of his favorite food.

  “WHO ATE THE LAST FUDGSICLE?” Orson would bellow. Everyone knew that he’d eaten it, but we were too polite to say so. “That’s just balls,” he’d yell in a voice that sounded like God chastising Eve for eating that apple. “Everything you know is balls,” he’d say. Then he’d make an omelette as an act of contrition, standing barefoot by the stove in a voluminous black kimono. One day in the laundry room I came across a pair of silk boxer shorts, three feet wide and custom-made on Savile Row, draped over the washing machine like the Shroud of Turin. He taught me how to cut and smoke fat, foot-long Monte Cristo A’s, obtained from Cuba through European connections, holding the smoke in my mouth without inhaling and tossing out the last half, which he considered slightly bitter.

  One afternoon I smelled smoke in the house and followed the smell to Orson’s room, right below mine. Standing outside the door, I tapped timidly and called to him.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” he roared. “It’s all taken care of. Go away.”

  I didn’t know what “it” was until later. Orson had shoved a still-smoldering cigar into the pocket of a robe, which he dropped on a mat when he got in the shower. The cloth caught fire and burned into the rug before he realized the danger. The next day, as an apology, I received The Victor Book of the Opera, which he had inscribed with a play on an old nursery rhyme: “Ladybug, ladybug, go away home, your house is on fire and your houseguest, a hibernating bear, is too.” The illustration was of my house leaping with flames, the smoke smudged, he said, with his own spit.

  In August of 1972, Peter and I were invited to meet Richard Nixon at a fund-raiser in San Clemente for the president’s Hollywood supporters. Our disinclination toward Republican politics paled in comparison to our annoyance that The Last Picture Show was deemed too racy to be screened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but nobody turns down an invitation to meet the president, even if it was Nixon. I ransacked my closet and came up with a full-length gown by Jean Patou that was as close to an American flag as a dress could be—a red-and-white-striped skirt with a blue bodice. The invitation had read, “Less than cocktail dress,” but this was the president of the United States (even if it was Nixon). When we stopped to ask directions at a Shell station, the attendant simply pointed to the sky and the huge khaki green helicopters circling above an estate surrounded by chain-link fence. Granted admission, we felt like the Mel Brooks joke about going to a party where everyone is a tuxedo and you’re a brown shoe. There were Clint Eastwood, Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger with Jill St. John, Debbie Reynolds, Glen Campbell, Charlton Heston, and Jim Brown. Peter introduced me to John Wayne, who mentioned his admiration for The Last Picture Show. “But I’ll tell ya the truth,” he said in his signature drawl, “I was a little embarrassed. I mean, my wife was there.” Nixon gave a stuffy little speech paying homage to Wayne. “Whenever we want to run a pransack Camp David,” he said, “I always say, ‘Let’s run a John Wayne picture.’” Wayne, who had a drink in his hand, probably not his first, raised his glass and said, “Keep those coming’.
”

  An aide-de-camp informed us that the men should precede the women in the reception line on the grass, where the president was standing. When we came face-to-face with Nixon, I smiled and said, “I wore this dress especially for you, Mr. President.”

  “And you look lovely, my dear,” he said. Then, directed at Peter, “You ought to put her in a picture.”

  “I did,” Peter said. “It’s one you haven’t seen.”

  Nixon looked perplexed. “What’s the name of that production?’’ he asked with great formality.

  “The Last Picture Show,” said Peter.

  Musing over the title, Nixon said, “That’s a black and white production, isn’t it, the one that takes place in Texas?’’

  “That’s right,” Peter said, genuinely surprised.

  “I saw that,” said Nixon. “That’s a remarkable picture.” Then he turned to me and, touching my arm in a kindly manner, said, “And what part did you play, my, dear?”

  Nearly stuttering, I finally got out the word “Jacy.” Peter, who was enjoying my discomfiture way too much, added, “She’s the one who stripped on the diving board.”

  Nixon and I both turned crimson. His hand kept patting my arm lightly while still maintaining eye contact with Peter as he said, “Well, everyone gave a remarkable performance in that film. And of course, I remember you very well now, my dear.”

  Not long after, we were invited to visit the legendary director Jean Renoir, then in his eighties and living in Beverly Hills. Jean had repeated his father’s predilection for angering his compatriots: the French threw rotten vegetables at the Impressionist exhibit where they first saw Auguste Renoir’s paintings, and years later Jean Renoir’s film La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) would be so severely panned that he would say he was either going to quit making films or leave France.

  When we first entered his home, the only thing I could see was a luminous portrait of a young man in the woods holding a rifle (a painting that now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). So distracted was I by this glorious work of art that I didn’t even see Renoir himself until I heard a strange motorized sound and saw a sweet-looking old man being raised up to a standing position by an automated chair. He took a faltering step toward me, and I saw the bluest of eyes in a pale crinkly face, right out of the painting. His wife, Dido, who looked to be about thirty years younger, served white wine in short, very cold sterling silver cups that formed refreshing droplets of condensation, delightful in the heat of the summer day. We mentioned our visit to San Clemente, but naturally the talk turned to filmmaking. We were having an animated conversation with Dido, who had served as her husband’s script supervisor, about the unfortunate necessity of dubbing. Suddenly the great man looked agitated, his pale face flushed, and he started rising out of his chair again. “I have the answer to Richard Nixon,” he said excitedly. “Nixon is dubbed! And in a civilized time, like the thirteenth century, men would have been burned at the stake for less!”

  IT IS FACINATING TO WATCH, ALTHOUGH I COULD hardly do so without passionate self-interest, as a budding career becomes a meteor. I’m talking about Peter here, not myself. Equally fascinating is the chronicle of the roads not taken. (Orson said, “Your career is made more by what you don’t do than by what you do.”) Before The Last Picture Show had even opened, it was enerating an expectant buzz in the industry, and Peter got a call from Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount, which had just bought a book about the Mafia by Mario Puzo. Peter had no interest in directing a film about organized crime and its peculiar ethos of la famiglia. Ten years later, Evans was still chastising him for bad career choices.

  “Hell, you even turned down The Godfather,” said Evans.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Peter.

  “Yeah, you did,” said Evans, recounting their conversation. But Peter was able to do some reciprocal reproaching because Evans’s bad judgment had cost him his marriage. He had tried to recruit Peter once again, this time to direct The Getaway with Steve McQueen. Ali MacGraw, then Evans’s wife, was to costar, but the part was written for a barefoot southern girl, a prototype of which just happened to be living with Peter. “Ali MacGraw can’t play this,” he insisted to Evans. “Isn’t she from Bennington, Vermont?” McQueen didn’t want me either (it’s much harder for the leading man to make a move on the leading lady if she’s the director’s babe, since the director is omnipresent). Disagreeing with the casting, Peter turned down the assignment. MacGraw got the part, and McQueen got MacGraw.

  When Evans began producing his own films, he asked Peter to direct a detective story in the Raymond Chandler tradition starring Jack Nicholson, with whom Peter had a friendly personal rivalry. (I’d made one date with Jack to spite Peter for going to a film expo with his ex-wife, which I took as a sign to the world that we didn’t really exist as a couple. When Peter called and apologized, I canceled the date. Jack has never spoken to me since, except for “Hi” at a party.) Again Peter wanted to cast me in the femme fatale role opposite Nicholson, but Evans declared me too young. He wanted Faye Dunaway, so Peter said no to Chinatown.

  I WAS BUSY MAKING MY OWN MISTAKES. THERE ARE whole chapters of my life that can be written with the postscript, “And the part went to...” The exalted director George Cukor had been acidly flattering about The Last Picture Show--he’d told Peter, “You’re going to put us old-timers out of work.” Cukor was the undisputed king of comedy for brainy, beautiful women, and I had practically memorized his oeuvre--Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday. I was honored even to get an audition with him. But when I tried out for a small part in Travels with My Aunt, he said, “That was a really bad reading. Why don’t you take it home and study it? You can come back and try again tomorrow.” Peter and I spent two or three hours on it, and the next day I went to Cukor’s office for another reading. I thought I didn’t do half badly considering that I hadn’t slept all night, visions of the bungled lines prancing before my eyes. But Cukor put down the script, looked at me over horn-rimmed glasses and said, “I’m going to give you some good advice, and if you have any sense, you’ll take it. You have no comedic talent. Never try it again.” (The part went to... Cindy Williams, who became the latter half of Laverne and Shirley, and I developed an irrational hostility for her from which I never recovered.) A celebrated director had gone out of his way to be brutally discouraging, and I whimpered, worried, agonized, and almost believed him. But even though I’ve given up lots of times in my life, I usually only allow myself a week or two of sulk. Like the little engine that could, I get back on track. Ultimately no public or private humiliation has ever stopped me.

  Orson Welles had given me the novella Daisy Miller, about a rich, spoiled, brash but naive young woman frm Schenectady, New York, trying to infiltrate nineteenth-century European society. “Henry James wrote this for you,” he said, slipping me a slim volume bound in faded red linen. “You act wonderfully on camera just like Daisy, but you overact in real life. And either Peter or I should direct it for you.” Peter got the job, and he filmed the book almost verbatim--there were perhaps three words in the dialogue that James didn’t write. Daisy chatters on, and on, and on, about her mother’s dyspepsia, about her nettlesome little brother, about strangers met in railroad carriages. Her manner of conversation and free spirit are judged harshly--one character says of her, “I don’t think she is capable of thought at all.” Since people often felt the same of me, it seemed perfect typecasting. In 1972 I was doing essentially what Daisy did in 1865: pushing the limits of polite society and ruining her own reputation.

  Cloris Leachman gave one of her extraordinarily compelling performances as Daisy’s mother--permissive, whining, perpetually flustered--and Larry McMurtry’s son James (in his first acting job) was the bratty little brother who drones on like a fly that won’t be swatted away. The story is told completely from the point of view of Fredric Forsyth Winterbourne, the achingly co
rrect young man who is infatuated with her but horrified by her defiance of curfews and convention. Peter had spoken to Jeff Bridges about casting Barry Brown (they had worked together in Bad Company), but no one realized that he was in the last stages of an addiction that would cause him to take his life just a few years later. He was glum and withdrawn, and his breakfast of champions consisted of beer, coffee, and Valium, a pattern that couldn’t help but affect the shooting schedule. Twilight is frustratingly evanescent for a film-maker--there are endless hours of preparation for a small window of opportunity--and Barry once staggered onto the set so drunk that we couldn’t shoot the scene before we lost the lovely light. Since he was in practically every scene, replacing him would have necessitated trashing all the film that had been shot and starting from scratch. “If he reaches for another drink,” Peter yelled to an assistant, “break his fucking arm or I’ll shoot him.”

  As the filming dragged on into the heat of tourist-clogged Rome in August, Peter and I both became rather brooding and testy. Daisy Miller necessitated meticulous period details and locations in Italy evocative of the society that wealthy Americans wanted to invade, but it was to be Peter’s first movie without Polly as set designer. The wardrobe was made by Tirelli of Rome, the penultimate movie costumer, and the only liberty taken with historical authenticity at the suggestion of costume designer John Furness, was to move the time forward by five years so the women didn’t have to wear such huge, exaggerated bustles. Fittings took eight hours, and I developed chronic back pain from the tight corsets of the period, which stretched all the way from the bust to the hip, creating a perpetual swayback. There were times when I had to stop and be unlaced or reach for the smelling salts to keep from passing out.