Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  One day I fell asleep in my dressing room and showed up half an hour past my call. “You will never be late again,” Peter screamed. “I don’t care how big a star you become. Time is money in this business. It’s not only expensive, but it’s insulting to the rest of the cast and crew. Marilyn Monroe was fired from her last picture for being late.” His tirade made an impression. In that scene, my eyes are puffy from crying, and I played the scene with exactly the right pervasive sadness. (Maybe he did it on purpose. You know how these amateur directors are.)

  Despite the fact that this movie was a dream opportunity for us, Peter and I weren’t having a lot of fun together, on or ofset. He was exhausted, often not feeling well, and he didn’t want to leave the hotel. I wanted a playmate to make a midnight gelato run to the Piazza Navona. I wanted to make weekend excursions to cool Tuscan villages. I wanted to make love in Roman ruins. As always, I was better at acting out than talking out.

  The perfect accomplice for hooky was a deputy producer my own age who had gotten his start working on Peter’s movies as a gofer (go for coffee, go for errands...). Our friendship began during The Last Picture Show, and we had spent afternoons by the pool of our Texas motel, taking turns bouncing on the diving board and pretending to jump into the freezing water fully clothed. We shared a love of music and a childhood informed by alcohol: his father was a jazz guitarist who went off the wagon at John Ford’s wake and died of a heart attack. The Producer had thinning brown hair, which never mattered to me (my first erotic fantasies were about Yul Brenner), and still had the carefree demeanor of a Southern California surfer: athletic and game for anything. We quickly became buddies, both of us pretending not to notice the powerful attraction because it was beyond inappropriate.

  I had to go to New York to crown the new Model of the Year, and since Peter couldn’t leave, he asked The Producer to accompany me, oblivious to any potential threat. We were making a quick turnaround, Rome to New York and back to Rome in less than twenty-four hours, so Charles Bluhdorn, who ran Gulf & Western, the parent company of Paramount, got his friend Edgar Bronfman, head of Seagram’s, to lend us his private Gulfstream II. The jet was a libertine playground, all shag carpet and free-flowing champagne. We managed to behave on the flight west, but there was no way these two steam engines on the same track were not going to collide, about ten seconds after checking into the Waldorf-Astoria. When I had to go off to the pageant, I could barely walk.

  I sent daisies, for obvious reasons, to the Producer’s room, reminding him of our pact: That was great, and that was all. We’re not going to do this again. However... when the heating system of the Gulfstream sputtered and failed on our return flight, we rationalized that mile-high sex would be the most efficient way to keep each other nice and warm. Back in Rome, we had to cool way down, trying not to touch or even to look at each other for fear of being discovered. We would not be lovers again until the filming was over. But we were both screwing the boss, and I found the deceit, the subterfuge, and the recklessness thrilling. The blend of sex and lies was comfortable and familiar territory for me. Betrayal? Not in my vocabulary.

  The budget for Daisy Miller was just over $2 million, a paltry sum considering the overseas locations and period costumes. Peter was proud of the work but doubtful of the box-office potential. “It doesn’t feel like an audience picture,” he’d say over the dailies. His mood was not enhanced when he screened the rough print for Paramount executives.

  “It’s okay,” said Frank Yablans, the chief of production, with a shrug and little emotion.

  “‘Okay’?” Peter repeated, waiting for something more affirmative.

  “What do you want from me?” said Yablans. “You’re Babe Ruth, and you just bunted.”

  When the film came out in the spring of 1972, Newsweek raved and the New York Times called it “a triumph for all concerned.” We were invited to screen Daisy Miller at the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club. (We later found out that the student who carried our bags was Joel Silver, who would produce all the Die Hard movies.) But the movie critic Rex Reed recommended, “Go back to your blue jeans, Cybill.” That was almost laudatory compared to some reviews. At the start of production, Peter had been quoted in Time saying, “Ithought that if Henry James had gone to all the trouble to write a good part for Cybill, I should shoot it.” The Time film critic didn’t agree: “Among all the flaws in this movie--the numbing literalness, the flagrant absence of subtlety--nothing is quite so wrong as Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich installed her in the lead as if she were some sort of electrical appliance being plugged into an outlet.” I understand that reviewer is dead now. I had nothing to do with it.

  Daisy Miller was a box-office bomb, but it was our relationship, not the film, that most critics seemed eager to review. I believe that good reviews can be more dangerous than bad ones because it’s easier to believe them and stop striving. But there’s no way that actors don’t feel bad from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Peter and I didn’t have children, so our movies were our babies, and we were wounded by the reproach. We consoled each other by reading aloud from an anthology called Lexicon of Musical Invective, which detailed the critical assaults upon great composers. (“An American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it.” “Beethoven’s Second Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously rising wounded dragon that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”) We flaunted our solidarity, brazenly leaving a press junket to make love in the next room. We were the first live-in lovers on the cover of a new magazine called People, and on the inside pages we bragged insufferably about how living together was sexier than being married. We were arrogant and smug, the message being: we’re Cybill and Peter, and you’re not. He was constantly given credit for my career, as if he were Pygmalion sculpting Galatea, or Svengali controlling Trilby’s singing through hypnotic powers. (I jokingly called him “Sven,” but he wasn’t allowed to call me “Trilby.”)

  “Stop telling people you’re so in love and so happy,” Cary Grant warned Peter.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because people are not in love and not happy,” said Grant.

  “I thought all the world loves a lover,” said Peter.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Grant.

  It was around this time that I got a reassuring call from Cary. “Now listen, Cybill, you’re very intelligent and I can see they’re offering you really dumb parts, but don’t get discouraged. If I was still acting, you’re the kind of girl I’d like to work with. Whatever you do, don’t get depressed and start eating.”

  Peter had an aura of superiority about him and could be rude. When people didn’t understand something he considered basic, he would act as if they belonged in a day care center. Suddenly wealthier than he’d ever imagined, he changed the way he dressed, favoring brass-buttoned blazers and ascots, and drove a two-toned Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce with red leather upholstery. I bought him a quarter horse and a hand-tooled Mexican saddle with his initials on a silver horn; he bought me an Appaloosa jumper and a Hermes saddle; both arrived, draped with red ribbon, outside our house in a trailer on Christmas morning. We were disgusting.

  However I might be deceiving him in private, I carried professional allegiance to extremes. When I was asked to present the 1972 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, I thought I’d have a little fun. “The nominees are John Houseman for Paper Moon--I mean The Paper Chase--and Randy Quaid for The Last Picture Show--I mean The Last Detail.” I was astonished when I heard two weak chuckles and the dead silence of thousands. Billy Wilder wrote in Variety, “Hollywood is now united in its hatred of Peter Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd.”

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INSPIRED BY A LINE FROM GOETHE: “Whatever you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” With great qualms, I decided to invade another medium and record an album of standards called C
ybill Does It to Cole Porter. Peter agreed to produce the album, and his assistant, once again, was The Producer, who was conveniently living in an apartment less than a mile from our house. Peter had the idea to send advance cassettes to Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, and Frank Sinatra, asking for blurbs to be quoted on the jacket cover. The first three sent glowing, appreciative comments, and I was hoping for the same from Sinatra. I’d met him once after a performance at Caesar’s Palace.

  “I love you,” I gushed.

  He fixed his cerulean eyes on me. “I love you too, baby,” he said.

  But he sent a telegram after listening to the album: “Marvelous what some guys will do for a broad!” Peter tried to convince me we were just one typo short of a rave, that a misplaced exclamation point would have made the review read, “Marvelous! What some guys will do for a broad.”

  It was on the basis of this album that Peter convinced 20th Century-Fox to green-light our next collaboration, an original musical comedy called At Long Last Love that he wrote using Cole Porter songs, about a madcap but impoverished heiress who loves a millionaire playboy who loves a Broadway star who loves an Italian roue. In movie musicals, actors usually record the vocals in a studio long before the film is shot and then lip-sync to those tracks when filming, so the sound of their voices is perfected with millions of dollars of studio enhancement. Audiences are accustomed to hearing this kind of technical quality, which can’t be duplicated in live performance. But Peter was more interested in spontaneity than perfection. Inspired by the 1930s Lubitsch musicals, when it was impossible to record voice and orchestra separately, he loved the subtle changes in tempo afforded by musicians following the actors. He asked the sound department at Fox to invent a process by which he could record the actors’ voices live while we heard a pianist on the set through tiny receivers in our ears, the antennae wired through our hair. One night when we were filming in downtown L.A. the police got suspicious of this equipment and threatened to arrest Peter for unlawful broadcasting.

  Today many people actually love At Long Last Love--presumably it inspired Woody Allen to do a musical called Everyone Says I Love You. But when it came out, it was almost universally ravaged. We had four weeks of rehearsal (Fred and Ginger had six), and the stress took its toll: two or three times a week, Burt Reynolds would start hyperventilating and had to breathe into a paper bag. The last day of shooting I slammed three fingers in various doors (I still have a scar in my thumbnail where a studio nurse punctured it with the end of a paper clip that had been held in a flame). I bounced bralessly through the movie in 1930s-style silk-satin gowns that wrinkled so badly, I couldn’t sit down, so I spent the long shooting days propped up against an old-fashioned “leaning board.”

  Considering that this frothy cinematic cocktail was released in 1975, just as the country was reeling from a post-Watergate malaise combined with a serious recession, the timing could not have been worse. Though defending it in public, Peter and I privately referred to At Long Last Love as our debacle. There was a tremendous pressure from the studio to get the movie out in a hurry, and Peter felt he was talked into some bad editing choices, which he would spend $60,000 of his own money to correct. The film was one of the last to be shown before Radio City Music Hall closed its doors for years, prompting Orson Welles to chastise us, “You shut down the fucking Rockettes!” The film community was thrilled; they’d been waiting for us to fail. The movie critic Judith Crist called Peter before the picture was released and asked, “How is it?”

  “Pretty good,” said Peter.

  “It better be,” she said. “They’re waiting for you with their knives out.” When Gene Shalit reviewed the film on the Today show, said, “In this movie Cybill Shepherd appears as if she cannot walk or talk, much less sing.” Then he held up a sign that read BOMB and ended with “produced, written, directed, and ruined by Peter Bogdanovich.” Vincent Canby at the New York Times, who’d had such kind words about me in Daisy Miller, wrote that “casting Cybil [sic] Shepherd in a musical comedy is like entering a horse in a cat show.” Another critic, again reviewing the relationship. called Peter “an eager foil for Cybill Shepherd, his well-publicized but untalented girlfriend.” I was crushed, humiliated, asking myself: Is it possible I am talentless? There’s an expression that goes, “If three people tell you you’re dead, lie down already.” But I kept thinking: It’s not how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get back up.

  To that end, I met with the producer David Merrick and the director Jack Clayton, determined to have them cast me as another Daisy, opposite Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. But when they asked for a screen test, I haughtily refused. “Can’t they see I’m perfect?” I asked my agent. (And the part went to... Mia Farrow.) I passed on a chance to do Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, since I would have spent most of the film as a corpse. (The part went to... Lois Chiles.) Certain actresses would become my nemesis: When John Schlesinger declared me too old and not vulnerable enough for The Day of the Locusts, the part went to... Karen Black. And she got the part 1 was hoping to play in Family Plot, which turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock’s final film.

  I was also hoping to play the fictionalized Norma Shearer role in The Last Tycoon, a roman a clef about Irving Thalberg, which Harold Pinter had adapted from the final novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The producer, Sam Spiegel, and the director, Elia Kazan, asked to meet me at a Beverly Hills hangout called the Bistro Gardens. It was mid-afternoon (possibly they’d heard about my appetite and didn’t want to spring for lunch?) so the restaurant was almost empty, save for the waiters rattling cutlery as they set up tables for the dinner service. I knew that Kazan was a major Hollywood player, that he had cofounded the Actors Studio (birthplace of “the Method”). He introduced James Dean to the movie-going public in East of Eden, exposed union corruption in On the Waterfront, and assailed anti-Semitism in Gentlemen’s Agreement. I also knew of his controversial testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his part in the Hollywood blacklisting. When he named colleagues who were suspected of being Communists, Stella Adler said that he committed matricide and patricide. But the luxury of turning down jobs based on political beliefs is something most actors can’t afford.

  Kazan was quiet during our meeting, but Spiegel talked about working in Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and using the pseudonym S. P. Eagle when he first came to this country, thinking it sounded classy and American. He kept looking at the red and blue scarf double-wrapped around my neck, as if it were making him itchy and finally said, “Honey, take that thing off.”

  “I can’t,” I said with what I thought was amusing drama, clutching my throat, “I have a hideous scar.” Kazan perked up and exchanged a glance with Spiegel--if the scene had been a cartoon, the caption would have red: “How can she talk with her foot in her mouth?” (The part went to... Ingrid Boulting.)

  I went around serenading myself with a childhood rhyme that I would repeat with a certain self-absorption for years to come: “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms. Big fat juicy ones, little tiny skinny ones. Boy how they’re gonna squirm.” After my notices for At Long Last Love, it took granite ovaries to call the great jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and ask him to collaborate on an album called Mad About the Boy, named for the Cole Porter standard. The Producer produced the album. We were afraid to have Peter’s name anywhere near it, for fear of enflaming the critics, but the three of us financed it, putting up $10,000 each. Getz came on to me, and when I declined, he snarled, “It’s your fault if I go back to being a junkie and a juicehead,” ignoring me for the rest of the session. The album remained in limbo for four years, as I personally shopped it around and got turned down at the major record labels. (There’s nothing like rejection right in your face to keep you humble.) Miraculously, a few jazz critics actually heard it and liked it (being compared in the Los Angeles Times to Lee Wiley and Ella Fitzgerald is about as good as it gets). Eventually the album was relea
sed by a small company called Inner City Records, which went bankrupt a few years later. The company’s lawyer ended up with rights to the musical catalog, changed the name of my album to Cybill Getz Better, and informed me that the copies I requested would cost me an additional $10,000. I suggested he change the title to Cybill Getz Screwed.

  With Peter’s approval, I had decided to rent a room of my own, a tiny studio in a tall tower on the oceanfront in Santa Monica. It was decorated with photographs of Buster Keaton, a shrine to his comic genius complete with burning candles, and I had every surface except the floor covered with smoky mirrors. One drawer of my bureau was filled with naughty gifts from Peter intended to enliven our sex life--motorized erotic gadgetry, books about tapping the lower chakras for full sexual awakening, crotch-less panties from Frederick’s of Hollywood. (The toys were okay, but I’d just as soon go into the vegetable department of a store to find playthings, although the moral majority is probably working on legislation outlawing cucumbers.) Peter called the apartment the Love Pavilion (there was no place to sit except the king-size bed), and together we sang the lines about “our little den of iniquity” from a Rodgers and Hart lyric: “For a girlie and boy, a radio’s got so much class, and so’s a ceiling made of glass.”

  I don’t know if Peter assumed he was the only “boy,” but I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only “girlie” in his life. My dance instructor on At Long Last Love had told me about one of his flings. I was horrified, shocked, angered, and ultimately relieved. He never asked what went on in my apartment beyond his ken--we were still operating under our policy of mutual nondisclosure, and the apartment made it easier for me to see The Producer. But shuttling between two lovers did not preclude my taking a third, or fourth, or fifth. Perhaps my infidelity was a dysfunctional way of hedging my bets so I wasn’t as vulnerable as my mother, assuring I’d never be left by the man I loved. What was so unsatisfying about the relationship with Peter that I needed to do this? Was I trying to reclaim some control over the man who represented all the power, all the money, just as my grandfather had? Peter had given me sexual license, but he surely did not imagine that I would dare extracurricular activities quite so recklessly close to home, practically using his Rolodex as a personal dating service.