Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  The Director was someone whose work Peter and I both admired, a craggy-faced man moran twenty-five years my senior who tended to wear long gold chains and a thick gold ID bracelet and was married to a famous actress. We were on the same Hollywood party circuit, making the occasional foursome for dinner.

  Peter was out of town when The Director called, and while we were talking, I somehow ended up on the bathroom floor with the telephone cord looped around me twice. When he asked what I was doing, I embroidered the truth into something more provocative.

  “I’m lying in an empty bathtub,” I said. “I often do that when I’m on the phone.”

  He responded with a well-timed laugh and the appropriate question. “What do you wear while lying in the empty bathtub?”

  “What does one usually wear in the tub?” I answered.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I never knew you were this crazy.”

  I mentioned the shrine to Buster Keaton at my beach apartment. “I’d love to see it,” he said. “Will Peter be upset if I take you to dinner?”

  “Surely not with you,” I said.

  We arranged to meet at the apartment. “You smell incredible,” he said when I opened the door. “What is that scent?”

  “Why honey, it’s magnolia oil,” I replied in my best southern drawl. As he stepped past me, he jingled the change in his pocket distractedly and squirted his mouth with Binaca breath freshener. When I saw him looking for a place to sit, I ran to the balcony for a wooden stool, then changed my mind. “Let’s go to the pier,” I said. ‘’It’ll be an adventure.”

  The Santa Monica pier was a faded relic of the Roaring Twenties, with a few seafood shanties, some rundown souvenir stands, and a wonderful carousel, closed on this chilly, foggy night. I was peering through the locked gates at its painted stallions when I heard change jingling again. It seemed to be The Director’s version of clearing his throat.

  “Are you ready to go back?” he asked.

  No, I wanted to walk all the way out to the end of the pier, deserted except for a few fishermen, who avoided eye contact. He walked along with me, grudgingly admiring my hitch-kicks over several garbage cans. As we got back to his car, he looked at me with a cold, self-assured expression. “If this was a scene,” he said, “I’d rewrite it.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’d have to sit at my typewriter,” he said. “That’s where the juices start flowing. I rent a house out in Malibu. It’s the only place in Los Angeles where I can breathe. Why don’t we go out there? You don’t have to worry. It’ll be perfectly all right.” I didn’t know if he was reassuring me that he had no designs on me, that he wouldn’t overstep the boundaries of his friendship with Peter, or that we wouldn’t get caught. I didn’t know which I wanted. But if you have to ask, maybe you shouldn’t do it.

  The beach house was so close to the ocean that it vibrated with each breaker, and a depressing dampness filled the rooms and every surface, even the toilet seat. “Will you excuse me a minute?” he said rather formally. He was gone more than a half hour, performing, I assumed, some preseduction toilette. (I heard a Binaca spritz at least once.)

  We went for a walk on the beach while he smoked a loosely rolled joint, getting red-eyed and more withdrawn. Then we sat on the sofa making excruciating small talk until he finally said, “It’s getting late. I’d better take you home.”

  He phoned the next afternoon. “I called my psychiatrist today,” he said. “We’re just friends now--I finished my analysis three years ago—and I mentioned the situation with you. He thought that I was confused and guilty and that it would probably be healthy to indulge my impulsesquo; ‘There was a lingering pause. “What kind of time did you have last night?”

  “Horrible,” I admitted.

  “Me too,” he said. “I wanted you, but I had no idea how you felt. I thought you found me unattractive, and I was afraid of being rejected.”

  I reassured him that he was every man’s idea of Adonis, and moved on to another card in the Rolodex.

  Peter and I were good friends of the director John Cassavetes and his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands. John was one of the world’s great flirts, but when I phoned him at his office one day, I couldn’t get him to play.

  “How are you?” I asked, an obvious siren call.

  “Why are you calling me here?” he said with irritation. “What are you doing?”

  Good question. I didn’t know what I was doing. I no longer believed that sexual desire meant love, but I was still convinced that I was out of control, therefore not culpable. I was using men and being used. (There is no coldheartedness toward someone else in which the cold heart is not also hurt.) As long as I didn’t get caught, I believed I was okay. I had learned early on that love is not about what you feel, but what you can get if you act lovingly, as I had with my grandfather. Men were supposed to want me, but I wasn’t supposed to want them. When I disconnected from my mother’s moral stance, which was based on the idea that my only value to the culture was sexual but I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it, I lost the protective, parental voice in my head, the voice that says: Cybill, what are you doing?

  It took years to gain some understanding of my desperate sexuality. I had to believe in myself as a person with value beyond the sexual, a person with boundaries, a person who can say yes when she means yes and no when she means no and know the difference Up until then, I’d been trying to save my life the only way I knew how: lying.

  Chapter Seven

  “I NEED A CYBILL SHEPHERD TYPE”

  AN OLD HOLLYWOOD JOKE (OFTEN REPEATED WITH THE substitution of different names) lists the five stages of an actor’s career. First: Who is Dustin Hoffman? Second: Get me Dustin Hoffman. Third: Get me a Dustin Hoffman type. Fourth: Get me a young Dustin Hoffman. Fifth: Who is Dustin Hoffman?

  In 1975, when I was twenty-five years old, my agent, Sue Mengers, got a call from a young director named Martin Scorsese who was casting a movie called Taxi Driver.

  “I need a Cybill Shepherd type,” he said.

  “How about the real thing?” she asked.

  I had to beg Sue to be truthful with me when we first worked together, and after that she was unfailingly, unflinchingly honest. “Just suck up to Marty,” she instructed when Scorsese agreed to see me (invoking memories of Moma’s suggestion to “love up on Da-Dee’s neck”). “Be a nice, sweet, innocent girl. Smile and look pretty. Don’t talk a lot, don’t make jokes, and don’t tell him he needs to sit on a phone book.”

  When I read the script that was sent over by messenger to my hotel in New York, I threw it across the room, trying to hit the wastebasket. The violence was so relentless, and my character, a political drone named Betsy, was such a cipher, that I couldn’t imagine breathing any life into her. My anxiety was palpable—what’s a Cybill Shepherd type anyway? With my little pilot light of insecurity fanned by a few years’ worth of scathing reviews, I thought: Maybe I’m not even good enough to play my own type. But I admired all of Scorsese’s films-Mean Streets was a searing portrait of small-time hoods in Little Italy, and the evocative Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore had resulted in an Academy Award for Ellen Burstyy mother in The Last Picture Show.

  In person, Scorsese was energetic to the point of manic--he talked as if his life depended on maintaining a certain velocity. One of the people he talked about was the talented young actress he was hoping to cast in the role of the child prostitute Iris.

  “This girl Jodie Foster is so young, I don’t know if her mother will let her do it,” he said. “You know the nature of the material. But she’s so good. And she looks just like you when you were fourteen.”

  Concomitant to the talks about Taxi Driver, Peter was planning our next project, entitled Nickelodeon, which would reunite him with Ryan O’Neal. Their friendship was improbable--Ryan was an enthusiastic participant in the recreational drug scene of Hollywood, while Peter rarely considered fogging his brain with even a cocktail. Ryan often greeted Peter by kissi
ng him on the lips and grabbing him by the balls, and he never considered their camaraderie an impediment to chasing me--on the contrary, he had a reputation for pursuing the girlfriends of all his friends. He pinned me against a wall at one of Sue Mengers’s parties, ran his fingers through my hair, and whispered, “Let’s fuck.” I giggled and slugged him in the solar plexus.

  One day I answered the phone to find Ryan on the other end calling Peter, who wasn’t home. “And how are you?” he inquired, all Irish charm. I’d just come from a dance class and told him that I was getting into shape. Carbohydrates had been my chief form of consolation after the debacle of At Long Last Love, and although Peter still liked me nice and round, I wasn’t sure about Martin Scorsese.

  “You’ll have to stop eating to lose weight,” said Ryan, his charm suddenly dissipating. “I couldn’t believe Peter putting you in nothing but white for At Long Last Love. You looked like a beached beluga. And everybody’s starting to wonder if he’s lost it. The sound of that flop is still echoing through the Hollywood hills.”

  Most other “friends” had been more tactful than to repeat such gossip to my face. I started to cry. “Look,” he said, both guilty and triumphant, “we’re supposed to work together. I’ll come pick you up, we’ll drive to my house at the beach and talk.”

  Red lights and warning buzzers should have been going off--STAND AWAY FROM THE DOOR, NOT A THROUGH STREET, TOXIC IF INGESTED--but I didn’t see or hear them. Since Ryan had just indicated he found me unappealingly fat, and since establishing some bond of friendship seemed a good preamble to working together, I agreed. Ryan barely acknowledged me when I got into his Porsche and almost knocked down the exit gate in his impatience to leave, giving me a filthy look as I buckled my seat belt. I couldn’t figure out if he was trying to keep me off balance by shifting his mood without warning. There was no possibility of conversation--was singing along to loud acid rock on the radio--he left the motor running with the music blaring when he pulled into a 7-Eleven. I could see him sharing some laughs with the counterman as he paid for a six-pack of Coors.

  Pulling up to his house off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, he touched a button on the dashboard and the garage door opened, revealing a wooden floor with a rich varnish like a gymnasium. I turned to comment on such unexpected elegance, but he had already vanished inside, leaving the door open behind him. I’d been in this house for a party once, had already seen the pool table, the stereo equipment, the brass-framed movie mementos (“To Ryan, with deep and sincerest affection, William Holden”), but then I was with Peter, and I’d stayed downstairs.

  “Ever seen my bedroom?” he asked. “C’mon upstairs. The view is fabulous.” WRONG WAY: NO OUTLET, DANGEROUS CURVES--I still didn’t see the signs.

  Climbing the stairs, we entered a bachelor pad, decorated in earth tones with a fur spread on the bed—the real thing, I think. Suddenly there was a clatter of bottles coming from the bathroom. Ryan ran in and emerged a moment later, with a pretty girl in tow. She was wearing a cheap cotton shift and rubber gloves. “This is Sarah,” he said familiarly. “She’s doing a little tidying up, but she’s going to come back later. Now beat it, honey,” he said, giving her behind a playful slap. As soon as she left, he turned to me and said, “I don’t know why I let her in here--she has no idea what she’s doing.” I didn’t know what she was doing either, but I had clearly interrupted something.

  Gesturing toward a couch, he said, “Have a seat,” but he stood near the window with its spectacular view of the surf, pointing out the various celebrity homes up and down the beach. “I can see everything that _____does,” he said, naming a well-known actor, “and believe me, he’s weird.” Then he came to the sofa, standing over me. “You know, you could be really good if you had the right parts,” he said. “Something has happened to Peter. He has to get back on track, and you’ve got more to do with it than anyone.” As he tallied, he periodically used both hands to cup his balls, which were right at my eye level, a gesture that, at the time, I didn’t know as checking his package.

  The whole scene was starting to give me the creeps. I stood up, saying that it was getting late and I needed to get back. He stopped me by putting his arms around my shoulder, drawing me close to his chest, and making little moans of satisfaction as we swayed back and forth, one of his hands on my neck and the other at the small of my back. I started to pull away and felt his muscles resist, stop me for an instant and then relax. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I came out, he was looking at his watch--another mood shift.

  “I’d better be going too,” he said irritably. “I’m supposed to pick my son up by six.”

  On the way home, he put a Vivaldi cassette in the car’s tape deck. “If you like this,” I said in a friendly tone, “I can turn you on to some music that makes this sound like shit.”

  He snapped his head around. “How can you say this is shit?” he snarled.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said hastily, seeing that I had insulted his tastes and not wanting to provoke him. “I just meant that there’s some beautiful Beethoven I’d like to play for you....”

  “I know about Beethoven,” he said, then popped out the Vivaldi and turned on the radio full blast, although it could barely be heard through the whoosh from the open sunroof. The Vivaldi turned out to be part of the soundtrack for Ryan’s next film, Barry Lyndon, and after I’d seen it, I sent him a copy of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4 with the inscription, “This is a fitting tribute to your superb performance.” He never responded.

  Both Nickelodeon and Taxi Driver were to be made for Columbia Pictures, whose president, David Begelman, announced that I had to choose between the two. It was a tough decision--Peter had written a part especially for me, incorporating my myopia into the character, which gave me an excuse to do a lot of pratfalls. But we were still in a public relations abyss--of the kinder assessments at the time labeled me “a no-talent dame with nice boobs and a toothpaste smile and all the star quality of a dead hamster.” We both knew that anything we did together in this vitriolic atmosphere was doomed. And not working with Ryan O’Neal was the consolation prize. It was a crushing disappointment to give up Nickelodeon. The part went to... Jane Hitchcockorating’d modeled with me in New York. And Begelman got busted for embezzling money from the studio.

  In 1975, Robert De Niro still had a youthful, almost preppy quality, the antithesis of his character in Taxi Driver, the psychotic Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle. We used the same technique of scrawling microscopic notes on the script, covering every inch of the page, but I’d never seen an actor immerse himself in a role at De Niro’s level of intensity. He actually got a hack license, and during the preproduction phase, when he was still filming 1900 in Italy with Bernardo Bertolucci, he would leave Rome on a Friday, fly to New York, and drive a cab for the weekend. He went to an army base in northern Italy to tape-record the voices of some soldiers from an area in the Midwest that he wanted to use for Travis Bickle’s accent. Once we started filming, he stayed in character all the time. Waiting for the cameras to be set up for our “date” in Child’s Coffee Shop (airless in hundred-degree heat and perfumed by years of lard for deep-fat frying), he stared at me with a goofy but menacing half grin so disorienting that I called over the hairdresser to change the dynamic to a less threatening threesome.

  Scorsese, who was given to wearing white straw fedoras with colorful hatbands, used the sights and sounds of New York City like a big palette of colors to create a mood, and he dealt with the limited budget by shooting at night with a minimal crew and high-speed film, as if for an underground movie. He liked his actors to improvise and videotaped our efforts with a handheld black and white camera during rehearsals in his St. Regis hotel suite, inserting the bits of dialogue that worked best into the script. De Niro is a master at underplaying, doing little and having it be effective. That’s part of what makes it so terrifying when Travis Bickle does go off the deep end. The first day of shooting, I remarked to Sc
orsese that De Niro epitomized Hitchcock’s advice to actors: Don’t put a lot of scribble on your face. “I think I should try to match that,” I said, and it became my pact with Scorsese.

  “Do less,” he would say. Then, ‘’Now do even less.” And then, ‘’Now. do even less than that.”

  One day, De Niro and I were walking up Fifth Avenue together at the end of the day.

  “Do you want to get some barbecue?” he asked, fixing me with a sexy half-smile.

  In approximately an hour, I was expecting The Producer on my doorstep, after an absence of three or four weeks, and I wasn’t about to blow off what I knew would be a torrid reunion, not for this intense, inscrutable man who still seemed to be vaguely in character. “I can’t,” I said. “I have someone, a friend, in town.”

  “Oh,” he said, “is Peter here?”

  “Not Peter.”

  He grew rather quiet, walked me to the door of my apartment, and said good night. Other than as Travis Bickle, that was the last time he spoke to me during the filming.

  At the end of the shoot, I had a special taxi key chain made and inscribed for Scorsese—it cost the larger part of my salary. I was so grateful for the opportunity, but it wasn’t until twenty years later when the film came out on video disk that I could fast-forward quickly enough through the savage finale and realize that I’d been given an extraordinary last scene. Of course, I remembered shooting it, but wasn’t sure that it made the final cut: I’m a wimp about movie violence, even though I know it’s really chicken blood or Max Factor Technicolor Blood Number 5. Recently, I saw those final rearview mirror shots of Travis and Betsy, who has unknowingly gotten in his cab. At the end of her last ride, she leans through the window and starts to apologize to Travis. She appears to realize there’s no point and dejectedly asks, “How much was it I feel a subtext between Cybill Shepherd and Robert De Niro, almost as if I’m saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a tumble,” and he’s saying, “You better believe you’re sorry, baby. You can’t imagine what you missed.”