It wasn’t until the re-release of that film that I was credited with a performance of any merit--at the time I was still the no-talent dame with big boobs too closely associated with Peter Bogdanovich. Julia Phillips, one of the film’s producers, declared in You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that the only reason the Italian Scorsese had cast me was my big ass.
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, A SERIES OF STROKES had disabled and silenced my grandfather. Still physically capable of speech, he mostly sat in a chair seeming rather docile and lost, as if he didn’t know quite where he belonged, until he was summoned elsewhere, like the dinner table. Moma took him to Romania for monkey-gland injections, which, to the surprise of no one else in the family, did nothing to help. I’d gone home to see him propped up for their fiftieth wedding anniversary party. Failing in memory and strength, he spent the last year of his life in the Rosewood Nursing Home and died in the fall of 1975.
My reaction was curiously impersonal and detached, more an acknowledgment of a milestone than a true sense of sorrow. I thought, in all naiveté, that Da-Dee had ceased to have any power over me or my direction in life. His funeral was to be the first I ever attended, not counting the time that our dog Freckles unsuccessfully tackled a car on Highland Park Place, a far more traumatic event in my life. I didn’t even want to go home, but my mother insisted, and it would have been unseemly to take Peter. He had not seen my mother since her insults at the premiere of Picture Show, and Peter is nothing if not grudge holding. The Producer volunteered to come along, and his twisted humor got me through the day--we exchanged irreverent glances about the wavering vibrato of the buxom redhead singing the gospel that Moma loved, along with the absolute latest in dying offered by the Memphis Memorial Gardens. There were three panels of automated curtains: the first opened to reveal the coffin to the immediate family; the second revealed the coffin to the larger group of mourners; the third revealed the family to the mourners. I stared at the folded freckled hands of the man in the open coffin, the only part of him that looked as elegant as in life, his once vibrant face shriveled and masked with makeup, his ungainly ears oddly flattened against his head by the mortician, and I thought I might throw up.
My grandfather’s last words, according to my brother, were, “Don’t let the hens getcha.” He had never placed much faith in Moma’s business acumen, and I remember more than one occasion when she’d say, “Cybill, darlin’, rush to the bank with this cash. I’ve just bounced a check, and I don’t want Da-Dee to find out.” Trying to ensure that my grandmother would never get control of Shobe, Inc., he named the bank as trustee, but Moma fought his posthumous bully pulpit in court for six years and won the right to run the firm herself. For the following twenty years, she used the company letterhead for all her correspondence, simply writing “Mrs.” in front of her husband’s engraved name.
A few months after my grandfather’s funeral, I was alone with Peter at Copa de Oro. It would be the first time we listened to my album Mad About the Boy together. Peter had already heard it and wanted to be free to give me notes, so he requested that The Producer not be present. That night I was talking to a friend on the phone when I heard a strange click on the line. Immediately I had the thought that someone was in the house. (We’d had two intruders there: an overzealous fan who walked ough the gate behind a deliver), truck, with a picture of me in his wallet, and an escapee from a mental institution who ran through the halls screaming, “Where am I?”) I quickly dialed the emergency number for the Bel Air Patrol, then went and got Peter from his office, and we locked ourselves upstairs, me wishing I’d been willed part of Da-Dee’s arsenal. When the security police arrived, they searched room by room, suddenly yelling from the basement: “We’ve got somebody. Says he knows you.”
My heart nearly stopped when two security men in gray uniforms brought The Producer upstairs, slumping, with a firm grip on each of his arms. He had his own set of keys to everything in our lives and had let himself in. “It’s okay,” Peter said, “we know him.” Once we declined to press charges and the cops left, The Producer gave us an explanation about being there--he had wanted to hear Peter’s unexpurgated comments about the Getz album, and he adamantly denied being the telephone eavesdropper. I was sure that Peter would find out about our secret past, but he seemed to accept the theory that The Producer had been temporarily wiggy and stressed out too.
But I was growing weary of amorous subterfuge that smacked of my teenage years and remorseful about my duplicity. Having sex with another man’s business associate is pretty much beyond the pale. And living with a lie is a prescription for going crazy. Chekhov wrote that the quickest way to reduce the stature of a man is to lie to him. I had done that with both Peter and The Producer.
Feeling the stress, I started grinding my teeth at night until my doctor prescribed Valium. I was dreaming about a clean slate, starting fresh, not lying. In a moment of unprecedented candor, I sat with The Producer in a Westwood coffee shop and told him it was over. He had been such a significant presence in my life--maybe not the creative partnership I had with Peter, nor the irresistible flame of Elvis, but an enduring passion. We used up half of the thin folded napkins in the metal dispenser as surrogate Kleenex.
It would be so easy to dismiss the next decade of my life as the lost years, defined by unremarkable or irredeemable projects. There was a movie called Special Delivery with Bo Svenson, who introduced himself to me by knocking at my dressing-room door and dropping his pants. I couldn’t even get Michael Caine to kiss me as an adulterous sex kitten in Silver Bears. The first time I saw him coming across the ornate lobby of the lakeside hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, he seemed to glow from within--here was a real movie star. But shooting our love scenes, his mouth clamped shut, and a damp line of perspiration formed on his upper lip. The lack of heat was so obvious that the director, Ivan Passer, came to me privately and asked if I couldn’t warm things up.
“He won’t kiss me,” I protested.
“Well, you know what to do,” said Passer. Actually, I didn’t. But once the production moved to London, Caine’s attitude changed: he was frisky, enthusiastic, inspired.
“Am I imagining it, or is the difference apparent?” I asked Passer.
“Sure,” he said, “Shakira’s in town.” It seemed that Caine was a more passionate leading man when he could look past the camera and see his own wife on the set. But Silver Bears suffered the fate of being Columbia’s “other” movie, released in 1978 at the same time as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Almost no promotional efforts or finances were put into it, and the film disappeared.
There would have been no problem playing love scenes with the cameraman, since we were acting them out privately. All my resolve about fidelity didn’t amount to a hill of beans. I saw, I wanted, I took. In my long career of sleeping with charming cads, he was among the charmingest and caddiest, a married rogue with long black hair and a goatee who liked to drive his Mercedes at a hundred miles an hour. During one lusty encounter, he sucked my chin so hard that the next day, I looked like a bruised peach, and when he viewed me through the camera lens, he started to laugh. When we were scheduled to shoot some footage in Las Vegas, I made sure I got to the location early so we could have some time together. The first night I came down to meet some of the movie people for dinner and saw him already sitting at the table, nuzzling another blonde. I could hardly justify outrage that a married man was not only cheating with me but on me. For several days, I lay around my room at Caesar’s Palace nursing a broken heart, writing self-pitying poems and listening to a constant odd hum that turned out to be the lights on the building’s facade. As much as I liked to believe, even announce, that I could have a relationship that would be purely physical, not emotional, I got hooked. Miserable and looking for distraction, I went to see Sinatra perform and found him strangely wooden and listless. I found out that he had chartered a plane to bring his mother out to Vegas--the same plane that had been used for the shooting of Silv
er Bears the previous day--nd it had crashed into the side of a mountain.
Since I knew I had a lot more to learn about acting, I sought advice from Orson Welles. “I don’t know which direction to take,” I said. “I may have an offer to do a revival of the play The Philadelphia Story in New York, or I have a definite offer from the Tidewater Dinner Theater in Norfolk, Virginia, to do A Shot in the Dark, or I could go study with Stella Adler in New York.”
“Do not take acting classes,” he said. “When you walk through the door, you will be envied and despised because you are already more famous than most of them will ever be. Learn by doing theater, and do it anywhere but Los Angeles or New York. Just make sure that you talk loud enough so that people in the last row can understand what you’re saying. Nobody will support you, but it will be the most important thing you ever do. It will give you an opportunity to fall on your face. The audience will teach you what you need to know.”
The only person who thought this was a good idea was Gena Rowlands. “Oh, Cyb,” she said, “it’s easy, and you’re going to have the time of your life.” Everyone else acted as if there might be the need for an intervention, including Peter. (Stella Adler actually supported the theater plan, with a caveat. “No more ingénues,” she said. “Play what you haven’t lived. It will help you with your life.”) I went to Virginia, reprising Julie Harris’s murderous role in A Shot in the Dark. That’s when I really fell in love with acting. What I discovered is that film is more a medium for the director and the editor, but in the theater, the writer and the actor have more control. The preparation is intense, but once the performance starts, there’s no one saying, “Cut,” or “That was a little over the top, Cybill, take it down a peg.” Every night, from the entrance stage left to the final curtain, there is a full dramatic arc to follow. After opening night I felt: Not only do I have wings, but I can fly.
In 1978 Peter was still depressed about the failure of Nickelodeon, thinking that his career was going to hell in a hand basket, even without me. He was set to direct Saint Jack, the book whose rights I’d won as part of the settlement in my suit against Playboy. There was never a part in it for me, but I thought it was an unusual story and even wrote a first-draft script.
I was starting to feel an impetus for another kind of production, but Peter had always rejected the notion of his ever having another child. If I had been asked even a year before whether I wanted children, I would have sai no. I was afraid it would keep me from doing what I wanted to do in my life. But at the age of twenty-eight, I began longing intensely for a baby.
The last time I’d broached the subject with Peter, we had just made love. “Please don’t bring that up again,” he said with mood-killing finality, grabbing a robe at the end of the bed and sitting down at his desk with his back toward me. Part-time single fatherhood was one long unending battle for Peter, and pushing the issue probably meant unconsciously scripting the end of our relationship.
Sensing a last hurrah, a few months later I joined him on location for Saint Jack. I flew to London and then on to Singapore, where we stayed at the fabled Raffles Hotel--romantic in a slightly seedy way, cooled by ceiling fans reportedly invented for the hotel in the late 1900s by the Hunter Fan Company of Memphis, Tennessee, which had given me one of my first modeling jobs. One night we were sitting in the lounge drinking potent Singapore slings when I realized that the fans were no longer spinning, but the room was.
There was a small part in the film played by a beautiful young Asian actress named Monika Subramaniam, who lowered her eyes when she met me and lit up like Las Vegas when she saw Peter. I didn’t confront him. He didn’t have to confess. I just knew. Our relationship was limping to an end anyway. This didn’t help.
TWO THINGS HAVE ALWAYS SAVED MY LIFE: READING and singing. Books and music have comforted me, informed me, helped me define myself. It’s impossible to overstate their importance to my mental health, spiritual sustenance, and survival on the planet. The difference, of course, is that while reading is private, personal, unexamined, with no need to explain or justify, singing is quite the opposite. I put my voice out there to be examined, reviewed, sometimes reviled, as I’ve done since childhood, when my parents would ask me to sing for company and I always felt that people seemed a little disappointed. But I always come back to it. Every song has at least one character--and I don’t need a movie studio or TV network to finance it. Cabaret is an opportunity to tell stories around a fire. From an early age, long before the benefit of therapy, I have felt my heart healed by singing. But it takes the most courage of all. For the performer it’s like being stripped naked, and for the audience it’s like being in the performer’s living room--really torturous if you don’t like the person. I’ve had some mean things said about my voice. No matter: even if I felt that my singing was utterly unappreciated, it would remain a necessary component of my life.
I was feeling disconnected from Peter, even though nothing had been articulated between us, and I had no movie or TV offers. So I went to New York and sang on Sundays at a glorified hamburger joint in Greenwich Village called the Cookery. The rest of the week belonged to the extraordinary blues artist and fellow Memphian Alberta Hunter, who had learned the music that played on the gramophone in the St. Louis brothel where she went to work as a ladies’ maid when she was eleven years old. She wrote Bessie Smith’s first hit “Down-Hearted Blues” (‘’I’ve got the world in a jug and the stopper right here in my hand, and if you want me pretty papa, you better come under my command.”). Her performance was so moving, so dignified, so authoritative. Music is about the pauses as much as the notes, and even her breathing between the phrases was powerful. Alberta called me “Memphis” and always greeted me with tremendous warmth, which was more than the audience did. I stood at a microphone in front of a small room, singing over the sounds of conversation and cutlery banging against crockery. Nobody wanted to hear me--one woman approached the stage and asked quite loudly, “Where’s the rest room, honey?”ays at >During the two weeks of my engagement, I slept in a tiny room at the Pierre Hotel with three different men in quick succession: one was the sexy young waiter at the Cookery, who roamed the room in a figure eight moaning “Woe is me. I’ve been in love with you my whole life, and now I can’t get it up.” Two was an agent I met, a married father of five. (I know, I know.) Three was Charles Grodin. My Heartbreak Kid costar, who I had found distant, humorless, and unappealing, called when he heard about me performing and shocked me by making me laugh. Either he got funny or I finally had a sense of humor. We went to dinner at a dive not listed in any guidebook, the sort of dark and clandestine place that is the culinary equivalent of the No-Tell Motel. Our one-night stand never went beyond the morning after, when I found out that he was living with someone else.
Suddenly, and rudely, my life as a sexual libertine caught up with me. The only protection I’d ever been taught was abstinence, based on an archaic morality. Condoms had become antiques--at that time there were no sexually transmitted diseases that couldn’t be treated out of a prescription bottle. When I moved to Los Angeles with Peter, I had been on the Pill since I was sixteen. When I was twenty-seven, I had a notoriously gallivanting Copper-7 IUD, which eventually got “lost” and X rays were required to locate and retrieve it. By the time I was in New York, I was using a diaphragm. But it was not fail-safe.
Even a woman who feels passionately that abortion should be safe and legal does not terminate a pregnancy with an easy heart. For me it was testimony to another kind of failure, like going back to the sexually secretive dungeon of high school. I checked into a clinic under a false name on a Saturday when there were no other patients and vomited from the anesthesia by myself in the recovery room. I told no one what I was doing.
The female body gearing up for pregnancy is a hormonal roller coaster. The hips automatically tilt forward; the body has more blood and fluid. (When I later became pregnant with twins, I needed a retainer because my bottom teeth started moving around.) The
aftermath of my abortion was like hitting the wall. Along with the feeling of relief was a nagging wonder: will I get another chance? Regardless of how important and correct the choice was at the time, a woman always wonders about the child she didn’t choose to bring to life.
Women will always end unwanted pregnancies, safely when they can, unsafely when it’s the only option, and several hundred thousand die every year as a result. I’ve marched for the right to choose, and I know, deep in my bones, that pregnancy as punishment is bad for both women and children.
I knew I had done the right thing. But I was feeling the emptiness of sex with men who didn’t matter, feeling like I didn’t matter to them either. I actually felt like a hooker when the owner of the Cookery paid me for singing by saying, “Here, baby,” and stuffing some crumpled twenty-dollar bills in my hand. Like a wounded animal, I called my mother, who listened, mostly silent, as I poured out my unhappiness. I heard my voice rise and soften like a little girl through sniffles and sobs. Finally my mother spoke, strong and reassuring. “Cybill,” she said, “come home.” She had gone through her own miserable and lonely post divorce odyssey, finally carving out a busy, optimistic life. At fifty-three, she met a charming and high-spirited widower named Mondo Micci which is pronounced “Mickey” in Memphis), a former Golden Gloves champion who used to climb up the fire escape at the Peabody Hotel to sneak into the rooftop dances there. For the first time in her life, she was being protected and cared for by someone else, making it so much easier for her to protect and care for me.
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