Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  “We’re going to try this one more time, Cybill,” the director said through static.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. It was just too scary. (A short while later, the actor Vic Morrow and two young children would be killed in a helicopter accident on a movie set, and the director, John Landis, would face criminal charges. He was ultimately acquitted.)

  That same night I had to be tied up in Bronson Cave near Griffith Park, surrounded by gas torches. The prop man kept trying to light them, and the gas kept blowing the match out. I could hear the sound of the gas getting louder in the one next to me--whoooooosh, then a sudden explosion, like the gas grill years before, and I couldn’t get loose. Ever since then, I have had an extreme aversion to being tied up.

  The Return was eminently forgettable in every way, though I’ll always remember it just because I had the largest breasts and wore the tightest jeans of my career. (The fashion of the time dictated that jeans were supposed be so snug that you had to lie flat in bed and lift your hips up to close the zipper.) I was still expressing breast milk while I was working outside the house so that it wouldn’t dry up, so I could continue nursing Clementine. First I bought a breast pump at the drugstore, a fiendish device worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, with a lever that clamped down and sucked my nipple into an elongated clear plastic tube, a perfect realization of the expression “a tit in the wringer.” The La Leche League had taught me that the best breast pump is the human hand anyway, so I gave up the mechanics and stood over the sink, squeezing milk out like Elsie the Cow. When I’d ask the teamsters for yet another roll of paper towels to mop up the floor of my trailer, they’d groan, “Must be milking time again.” I’d long since given up the Los Angeles apartment, so I stayed at a motel in Santa Monica and took the baby for walks in Ocean Park with all the local loonies, like the guy who wore a cowboy hat and a black ski mask.

  It turned out that one of the most valuable experiences of life was not being able to get a job in television or movies. The shrunken celebrity that I hauled around was getting old in an industry where you are only as good as whatever you did twenty minutes ago, and failure begets failure just as surely as success begets success. So I went back to the theater. I did Vanities in St. Louis, staying in a high-rise Holiday Inn where the windows were sealed shut and it rained incessantly, so it seemed to be dark all the time. David was petulant and distracted. One night we went to Toronto, where I’d been asked to sing on a talk show. It was a far piece down the road for a one-night stand, but I wasn’t exactly in high demand. Returning through Customs, a Royal Canadian Mountie found a tiny reliquary pebble of hashish in David’s guitar case and made a big deal about it. I was strip-searched, and not gently, by a Mountie-ette, but my interrogation was conducted by a man.

  “How much do you make a year?” he asked.

  “None of your fucking business,” I said.

  “We’ve just arrested your husband,” he said menacingly,” and we’re trying to decide whether to charge him or not.”

  It was probably the wrong time to stand on a principle of constitutional rights as an American citizen, so I told him my income. He seemed disappointed, which, under the circumstances, worked in my favor. Perhaps he felt I could ill afford to miss a performance. “Consider this your warning,” he said, and let us go.

  When I did The Seven-Year Itch at Granny’s Dinner Theater in Dallas I was so nervous that I read the entire New Testament in the suite reserved for the “talent,” where the previous tenant, Robert Morse, had left a pair of Jockey shorts under the bed. Opening night I imagined Jesus floating in his robes in the fifth row of the theater. But I didn’t know why my costar, Joey Bishop, seemed so miserable. During a performance at the end of our first week, he said his lines, then cursed under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear, “Fuck you piece-of-shit bitch.” I was so shocked that I forgot my next line, and during the long silence I wondered what monumental atrocity I had committed. Later that night I asked another actress about the incident.

  “I’ve had that happen,” she said knowingly. “It’s a matter of one-upmanship, showing you who’s boss. If it happens again, stop, turn to him, and say loud enough for the audience to hear, ‘Excuse me, what did you say?’ That will shut him up.”

  Joey pulled his “asshole-piece-of-shit” act on me the next night, so I followed my colleague’s advice and asked him, pointedly and out loud, to repeat what he’d said. He froze, got momentarily lost, glared at me, and continued with his scripted lines. That night, he went to the theater manager and said he was having trouble working with me--I’d become too difficult. Luckily, it was a limited run.

  David showed promise as a jazz guitarist and had played with my band when I did cabaret at Reno Sweeney’s. But the dynamics changed when I was booked for a week at a New York club called Marty’s, sandwiched between appearances by Mel Torme and Tony Bennett, which finally made me think that my singing was giving someone besides me some pleasure. I hired a new musical director who selected his own musicians, and he wouldn’t have taken the job if told he had to work with my amateur husband. I had a sense of dread when I told David he was out, and his disappointment surely added to the tension and resentment in our marriage. I’ve often wondered if the power imbalance in my marriage was a reaction to, even a reversal of, my relationship with Peter. Perhaps it was my turn to be in charge.

  In our newly purchased mini-motor home, David and I drove from Memphis to New York, swatting mosquitoes the size of mice and plying Clementine with Cutter as we camped out in the national parks of the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Mountains (they seemed to be covered with snow, but in fact they were thick with dogwood blossoms). The day before my opening, I was diagnosed with bronchitis. “Don’t say a word you’re not paid for,” instructed the ear/nose/throat specialist who wrote “SILENCE” on his prescription pad, and I had to shut down for two nights. I was certainly craving some spousal support, but David went out both nights--he said he wanted to see the music scene in New York with my musical director, who was temporarily sidelined because of me. One night after I’d recovered enough to perform, one of the musicians asked, “Can I borrow your bathroom?” It wasn’t until Richard Pryor nearly burned himself alive that I realized the musician had been freebasing cocaine, which explained why his tempo was way too fast. I’d had half a beer (the only time in my life when I performed under the influence of any substance), which made me a little mellow. Rhythmically, we were on two different planets.

  Most photographs of family occasions from Clementine’s childhood include a dignified woman with burnished copper skin, silver hair pulled back in a French knot, and a thousand-kilowatt smile. This is Myrtle Gray Boone, who worked as a housekeeper for both my mother and grandmother. When Clemmie was born, I didn’t want a trained baby nurse. I wanted Myrtle, mother of thirteen children, grandmother to thirty-two, an indomitable presence in my family for as long as I could remember. (Moma said she’d be the best nanny in the world but railed against the generous salary I offered and warned that I’d “spoil” Myrtle if I paid her a penny more than a hundred dollars a week.) Myrtle could quote Robert Louis Stevenson and hum Bach. Had she lived at another time, she could have been an ambassador instead of a domestic. When I asked her to go on the road with me, she said no at first, then called me back the next day and said she’d changed her mind. “Everybody else always gets to travel,” she said. “Now it’s my turn.” But while we were in New York, we got the news that Myrtle’s mother in Memphis had died. Tears streaming down our faces, David and I put Myrtle in a cab bound for the airport and promised to follow the next day in the motor home. We were still crying when we returned to our room, though I didn’t know that he was crying about something else.

  I’m an expert liar, and sometimes I recognize when people are lying to me. I’d felt a funny twinge of doubt those two nights David was out when I was sick, and I checked out his story, obliquely, with my musical director, who didn’t know enough to cover for him. I didn’
t have the heart or the stomach to confront him for several days. But now I did.

  His words came out in soggy clumps. “Remember that actress who did Vanities with you in St. Louis?” he said. “She’s in New York. And I’ve been with her.”

  I’ve heard such moments described as a body blow. But hearing David’s confession was more like watching an egg fall and shatter in slow motion. I went to Clementine’s rented crib, lowered the slotted side panel and picked her up, needing to feel the warmth of her body. Only when I saw that her pajamas were wet did I realize I was still crying.

  “Are we getting divorced?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said David, sitting on the bed with his head in his hands.

  “How can I ever trust you again?” I asked.

  “I don’t even know why I told you,” he said.

  “I know why,” I said. “You want me to feel as bad as you do. People don’t like it when they do something rotten--it makes them feel terrible. And you think this is as much my fault as yours.”

  We slept fitfully that night, lashed to opposite sides of the bed. In the morning, we drove back to Memphis for the funeral, spending one night in the camper to save money. I lay awake, drinking beer and listening to Billie Holiday sing “Good morning, heartache, you old gloomy sight, Good morning heartache, Thought we’d said good-bye last night....” I’d never really appreciated the raw pain in her voice. Now she was singing for me.

  I’m told that marriages survive infidelity, but neither David nor I had the tools. We tried to reconcile for almost a year, but the damage had been done, and not just because of his affair. In the early stages of our relationship, I must have seemed like a big blonde trophy, followed shortly by the realization that life with me could be a drag--the long and odd hours on location, the lack of privacy, the subtly dismissive treatment of the celebrity spouse by that partner’s entourage. Everyone deferred to my needs, wants, schedules. I began to lose respect for David as I watched him squander this chance to develop his musical talent. He had the time and opportunity, but not the discipline. As Clementine got older, David told her that he hadn’t wanted the divorce, and I think that was true, that he wanted to be forgiven, which explained his initially bitter and vindictive behavior about division of property: he demanded half of all my earnings. (Two words sum up divorce: how much?) But my lawyer made a suggestion. “Get a legal pad,” he said. “Tell David you’re not promising anything, but make a list of everything he wants.” He backed down, managing to extract ome measure of revenge years later by selling a story about me to the tabloid press. I paid for him to move out to California and go to bartending school so he could be near Clementine, and to his credit, he has never tried to use our daughter as a pawn or bargaining chip.

  IN 1980 MY AGENT DIDN’T EXACTLY HAVE ME ON speed dial, inundated with offers of work, so I leapt when he told me about a chance to read for Sidney Lumet, who was directing a film called Just Tell Me W hat You Want. I wasn’t making much money to support my child, so it was a big deal to pay for my own plane ticket to California, leaving Clementine with her father. It was my first trip to Los Angeles since our marriage had dissolved, and we were still navigating a contentious divorce. When I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was so lonely that I sent flowers to my room, spending even more money I didn’t have. I called someone I thought was still my friend: The Producer. I didn’t know how to have a friendship with a man without being sexual, and we ended up in my hotel bed. The next day, he disappeared, never phoning or returning my call. (Actually, he returned the call years later, when he heard I was writing a book and asked me to sing in a show he was producing for the Atlanta Olympics. “I know I treated you badly that time,” he said, “and I wanted you to know why. I had just gotten involved with the woman who’s now my wife.”)

  When I showed up at the Universal lot and greeted Lumet, I got the feeling he wasn’t expecting me. “What are you doing these days?” he asked solicitously. When I mentioned reading for his film, he looked somewhat stricken. “Didn’t your agent tell you?” he said. “The role’s been cast.” It was the last time that agent had the opportunity to screw up on my account, although even the satisfaction of firing him didn’t make up for the expense of plane, hotel, and flowers. (The part went to... Ali MacGraw.)

  There are skewed friendships in Hollywood. People assume every phone call has a hidden agenda of exacting a favor or trawling for work, and usually they’re right. I felt uncomfortable contacting anyone from my old Hollywood crowd, and a call to my former agent Sue Mengers proved that my instinct was correct. “Honey,” she said, “I can’t get work for the ladies I already represent. Besides, you’ve been gone so long, you might as well be dead.”

  The near dead, it turned out, are offered the straw hat circuit. I had auditioned for the Broadway Production of Lunch Hour, reading for the playwright, Jean Kerr. (The part went to... Gilda Radner.) A few months later, I was having lunch with a producer at Sardi’s. A call came through for him, and a telephone was brought to the table (in the dark ages before cell phones). “I’m sitting here with Cybill Shepherd,” he said. Ten minutes later I was offered a part in the national tour of Lunch Hour.

  We toured from Colorado to Michigan to Maine—every-where but New York and Los Angeles, just as Orson had advised me to do. At the Cape Cod Playhouse, I was honored to put on my makeup in the dressing room used by Gertrude Lawrence, even if there was water oozing from the walls. But I absorbed much of what I know about comedy from the audience, which is the ultimate teacher. I learned not to work too hard at being funny, not to imitate myself from the night before, to try to make each performance as if it were the first time I’d ever done it. Somewhere between Detroit and Denver, I got funny. And I mastered a most important theatrical adage: always check your props. There’s a famous story about Stella Adler being onstage one night and reaching for a gun that the prop department had forgotten to put out. She pointed her forefinger and said, “Bang,” convincing everyone in the audience that she had a gun. Lunch /i> called for me to eat deviled eggs, made by the prop people in each theater. In Denver the eggs were perfect. In Detroit they were so dry, I almost choked. In Falmouth, Massachusetts, I threw myself on the mercy of the stagehands.

  “Can y’all help me out?” I begged. “It’s really important to get enough moisture in the egg yolk or I can’t say my lines.”

  “Sure thing, Miss Shepherd,” they said, and at the next performance, I picked up the egg to see the yellow part wobbling—a liquid yolk. I remembered the old actors’ rule: use it. If you’re miserable because you have to pee or your costar has skunk breath or the egg tastes terrible, use it, and I developed a repertoire of broad faces, burps, drools, and dribbles. Acting is about specificity. One moment is: I’m happy to have the egg in my mouth; the next moment is: I don’t know about this; and the next is: I’m going to hurl. Most of the time, the audience loved it, although there was an entire mountain range in the Poconos where not a single person in a sold-out theater laughed. I learned that you can never get too full of yourself as an actor--every night there are different ways to fail and to triumph.

  I became friends with one of my costars, getting together for a bite to eat or a glass of wine, and during our rehearsals in New York I was thrilled to be invited for tea one day to the home of his mother. But the thrill was brief. “You know,” she said dismissively as she poured from a silver teapot, “you’re really not one of us.”

  When the tour was over, The Costar and I drove to the Chesapeake Bay to visit his friends in their sprawling ranch house. Though we had become lovers, we quickly progressed to the imperfect phase of the relationship, what one friend calls the “congealed fat in the frying pan” stage. That night the four of us had Maryland crab cakes for dinner, and The Costar had quite a lot of vodka. We went into the guest room where we would be sleeping and he came on to me. I was revolted by his alcoholic reek and, pulling away from him, said, “Fuck you, I don’t have to fuck you.” I stormed in
to the kitchen, thinking I would find the car keys and leave, when he appeared behind me. “Don’t even think about going anywhere,” he said, “because I have the keys right here in my pocket.” Then he ripped off the delicate gold necklace that he’d given me, saying, “That doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Then he shoved me to the ground. I got up, ran down the hall, and banged on his friends’ bedroom door. “I’ll take care of it,” said the husband, grabbing a robe and trudging down the hall with a weary sense of familiarity. “It’s better if The Costar just drinks beer.”

  I sat with the wife until The Costar got quiet and fell asleep. We got up the next morning and drove in strained silence to Knoxville to see my friend Jane Howard as planned. Finally I said, “You knocked me down.”

  “You fell down,” he snarled. As soon as we got to Tennessee, I told him the relationship was over. No man I’d had sex with had ever made me fear for my physical safety before, and I didn’t want it to happen again. It took me many years to feel safe enough to spend the night with a man again.

  I hadn’t seen Peter Bogdanovich since he threw the crystal ashtray at me, but after my marriage ended, he began calling me every few months, taking blame for the end of our relationship, telling me he finally understood that I had been serious about wanting a child. When Peter called over the Christmas holiday of 1980, I had just spent several weeks writing, longhand on legal pads, a screenplay for a book called September, September by Shelby Foote, a haunting story about three white racists from Mississippi who kidnap the only grandson of one of America’s first black millionaires. I told Peter that I’d like to option it but couldn’t afford it. “Let me lend you the money,” he said, and sent me a generous check that allowed me to option the novel. Foote, whom I met at a Memphis wine-and-cheese party, had spent twenty years writing The Civil War: A Narrative and looked like a Rebel general himself. When I told him I’d love to play the white-trash woman in the trio of kidnappers, he said in his honeyed Mississippi drawl, Mah dear, you’re fahhhhhhh too young for the part.”