Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  I had stayed in touch with Larry McMurtry ever since The Last Picture Show, and our bond was really secured when he visited the set of Daisy Miller (his son played my brother) and sat with me in the lobby of the Hotel Trois Coronnes. rubbing my feet and reading aloud the gruesome “Crazy Jane” love poems by Yeats. He was physically, one of the least attractive men imaginable, but as a friend he was everything I wanted: a renaissance cowboy, an earthy intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner who could take pleasure in a dive that served two-dollar tacos. He became my touchstone in life, and for a brief time our collaboration became sexual.

  Our friendship never faltered because we became sexual or because we stopped. Larry always managed to come see me, in Los Angeles or Memphis or just about anywhere else I was working. He was always flying off to a remote corner of the maritime Alps or driving through the Ozarks in a U-Haul truck, buying up private libraries for his bookstores in Washington, D.C., and in Texas. I didn’t even have to give Myrtle a menu—I’d just say, “Larry will be here about four o’clock,” and she’d say, “I’ll get the catfish.” He felt he had to spend all his money to keep his creative edge, and he never entered my house without gifts, not just for me but for Clementine and Myrtle. (Myrtle is in the dedication of his novel The Evening Star, the follow-up to Terms of Endearment.) In between visits he kept up a steady correspondence—long, literate, ardent letters usually typed (with mistakes xxxxxxxx’ed out) on the same kind of cheap yellow paper he used for his books and scripts:

  Interestingly enough, since I’m a somewhat analytical man and have analyzed plenty of relationships, I feel no impulse to analyze us. I trust my affinities and I like the quality of our companionship very much, without needing to examine the components....

  You have brought joy and fragrance to my life. Your human fragrance is as complex as your new perfume: partly dry, light, of the brain; partly wet, deep, of the heart and loins...

  Of course, when you love someone very much, you have a natural fear that they will stop loving you. It’s part of what makes the whole business of need-desire-attachment-freedom-dependence so complicated. Love is so easily bruised and ruined, or, even more often, simply worn out and lost in the repetitiousness of life. I often have these fears where you are concerned, and yet mostly I have a deep trust in us....

  You’re a very wonderful woman; you’ll compel the love of many men. As long as you can learn to roughly distinguish those who mean you well from those who mean you ill, that’s as it should be--there would be something wrong in nature if men didn’t love and want you. Only learn not to get yourself hurt. I know you have learned now that actions speak louder than words. what men do is important, not what they say.

  Larry called me “the lost zygote of my family and was always encouraging me to expand my horizons. In 1981 it was his idea that I apply for entrance to the women directors’ program of the American Film Istitute, and as part of my application for admission, I submitted my script for September, September. Partly to assuage my disappointment when AFI rejected me, Larry agreed to work with me on the script, and on the strength of his name, we were given a developmental deal at Carson Productions, which operated under the auspices of Columbia Pictures. After working on it for almost a year, we were granted a meeting with Columbia chief Craig Baumgarten. The moment we entered his office, he said, “This is a hateful story that no one would want to see, and we wouldn’t dream of making it.” We did get the go-ahead from Turner Broadcasting, although not with the director Stanley Kubrick, as Shelby Foote had hoped. (He declined with a nice handwritten note that ended, “Please say hello to the General.”) When I finally went with Larry to see Shelby Foote in 1991, ten years after our first meeting, he opened the door to his house, looked at me, and said, “You’re old enough now.”

  Chapter Eight

  “THE CYBILL SANDWICH”

  IN 1980 I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK, FINALLY READY TO TAKE acting classes with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio. I got a call from a Los Angeles casting director named Robin Lippen, offering me a guest appearance on the TV show Fantasy Island. To say that I was underwhelmed doesn’t begin to describe my qualms about this nadir of my career. I wasn’t even the lead guest star, and I didn’t get to arrive on the island as Tattoo shouted “The plane! The plane!” to Mr. Roarke.

  “Oh, Cybill, you should not be represented at a big agency,” Robin said. “They’ll want to cast Goldie Hawn or Sally Field—clients who are going to make more money. If you do this role, you’ll get five thousand dollars and a plane ticket, and while you’re out here, I will set up meetings for you with the top independent agents, who will turn your career around.”

  It was a great piece of advice, and with little to lose I accepted her offer. I checked into the Sheraton Universal, which I referred to as the Universal Sheraton because it sounded more important, and eventually met with an elfin and enthusiastic agent named David Shapira. The first job he got me was for a TV pilot called Masquerade produced by Aaron Spelling and distinguished by more takeoffs and landings of jets than any other pilot in the history of television.

  My second job was starring in the series The Yellow Rose. I was to play the widowed owner of a large Texas ranch, and Sam Elliott was the illegitimate son of my much older dead husband. I was called back to read four times, the last time to see if Sam and I had the right chemistry. When I walked into the production office, sitting on the couch, and waiting to read for the same part was Priscilla Presley. Hard to imagine a worse sign: There was, first of all, my history with Elvis, and I had no idea if she knew about it. It was like a marquee had been set up, flashing: “One of you will not get the part.” Both of us were uncomfortable, but we smiled and exchanged pleasantries.

  Shapira called with good news/bad news. “You got the part,” he said, “but you’ve been fucked.” Sometime before, I’d gone up for another NBC pilot about race car drivers. I didn’t get the part, but my agent at the time had agreed to a fee of $1,000 an episode. Even though other actors on Yellow Rose were demanding and getting much more, the network knew what it could get me for.

  The bargain-basement salary was maddening, but it was enough to put a down payment on a town house in Studio Village, with what I referred to as a view overlooking the Los Angeles River, which was nothing more than a giant concrete chute created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Most of the time there was just a trickle insignificant that kids would skateboard through, but a heavy rain could create a giant flow of rushing water. Beyond was a lovely field of wildflowers, my own Tuscan landscape, dotted by the soundstages of what was called the Mary Tyler Moore studio. I spent many afternoons looking longingly across the L.A. River wondering if I’d ever get a chance to work there. The loveliness of the setting paled when I learned that the condominium complex had been the site of two grisly murders by bludgeoning, including the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, whose friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan had been the stuff of tabloid headlines, sometimes alongside headlines about me.

  Sam Elliott and I were asked to come to New York to take part in the network’s announcement of new fall programming. But when we went to meet the producers for lunch at the “21” Club, I was refused admittance because I was wearing running shoes, a New Balance model that cost $150. I went down the street and paid $11 for black rubber flats, then made a grand show of sitting in the restaurant’s reception area to change, daintily doing a striptease with my socks. No sneakers allowed? Watch me.

  Exteriors for the series were shot in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles--wide open country meant to approximate Texas, with a panorama ranging from snow-capped mountains to the Mojave Desert. Sam seemed to grow even more despondent as the show sank into soap opera territory, a conspicuous imitation of the runaway hit Dallas, involving the kind of weekly intrigue, deception, and lust that couldn’t possibly take up the time of real ranchers or else we’d all be vegetarians. (Larry McMurty wrote to me, “There were not a few steals from Hud, I observed. The cook and th
e boy seem a little Patricia Neal and Brandon de Wilde-ish.”) Sam had signed on to do a TV series that was a western, while I had signed on to do a TV series that was a job. I had few complaints: it was the first long-term work I’d ever had, and I was getting paid to ride a horse. I talked to the show wranglers and got involved in choosing my own championship roper named Red that I could guide with my knees.

  Two weekends a month, the wranglers went out to practice their roping technique at Castaic Lake Arena and invited me to come along. Quarter horses are the fastest horseflesh on the planet for one quarter of a mile--they can outrun any thoroughbred at Santa Anita for that distance--and I could feel their power like g- force in my chest. The horse is backed up into a box with no door, a bell rings, and the horse and steer are released at the same time into the rodeo ring. The horse’s job is to line up the rider so he or she can swing and throw the rope, jerk the slack, and tighten the noose around the steer’s horns or neck. When you tie off the rope on the saddle horn, the horse stops, and the steer gets yanked to the ground. The most important rule, I was told, is: keep your thumb up when you’re tying off. Anyone who tried to teach me to rope had fingers missing, having gotten them tangled in the rope when the horse stopped but the steer kept moving.

  A dedicated actor wants to do as much of the stunt, safely, as possible to “sell” it to the audience, making it believable and giving the director the ability to edit in the expert. A movie set is really a construction site, an inherently dangerous place, with jagged pieces of wood and nails everywhere and huge sources of illumination called “nine-lights” tottering on skinny retractable rods. One day I was inside a corral, having done my side of the scene on horseback, but the director asked me to mount my horse to do the other side of the scene for the other actors (a professional courtesy called “off camera”). Horses can “shy” or panic because of the ways their eyes are placed, with a blind spot in the middle, so objects can appear to jump. I love them, but they have a brain the size of an orange in a two-thousand-pound body.

  I’ll never know what frightened Red, but he backed up and caught an electrical cord from a nine-light between his right rear shoe and hoof. It fell forward, bouncing and sparking, and he took off, dragging it around the ring. ‘There was no dismounting, and no one could approach--the camera crew went running for their lives when faced with a runaway horse.

  I used a technique learned in my horse-crazed childhood called “pulley rein,” gradually slowing the animal down to increasingly smaller circles, until R. L. Tolbert, the stunt coordinator, could get close enough to gently take the reins and let me dismount. That was the last time I was ever “off camera” on the back of a horse. From then on, it was a ladder for me.

  R. L. was a former rodeo champ with thick silver hair that formed a widow’s peak. He was a wonderful reference source about cowboys. He made gentle fun of the hat I wore for the show, which did not meet his standards. A proper cowboy’s hat has profound, immutable requirements, and much of the unwritten code is about brims. When you put the hat on a table, you lay it crown down so the brim isn’t misaligned. Your hat must never blow off (this constitutes a huge loss of face among peers). When you remove it, there had better be a deep red impression in your forehead, and hat hair is a badge of pride. I was apparently walking around with a scandalously loose, battered-brim hat, and he helped me pick out a proper one.

  One weekend he invited me to the rodeo at Santa Barbara. On a shining Saturday afternoon, we drove up the Pacific coast in his big white pickup truck (it was the first time I ever saw a date spit tobacco into a cup). When I see water, I want to swim, and I don’t go anywhere without a bathing suit in my bag. R.L. didn’t have one. “But I know a beach,” he said, “where we don’t need them.” I learned where the term redneck comes from: R.L. had a burnished tan on his neck and hands, but the rest of his body was fish-belly white. At the rodeo we bought big cups of 7-UP, drank them halfway down, and then filled them back up with Jack Daniel’s. When I started getting sleepy, he instructed, “You have to keep drinking so your blood alcohol doesn’t go down.” By the time we arrived at a crummy little beach motel, I was ready to test out R. L.’s private stunt work.

  Ever restless, I soon moved on to another stuntman. It was his idea that I learn Formula Ford racecar driving--I think he liked the idea of Miss Teenage Memphis chewing up the track with the big boys. I took a three-day course at Riverside to qualify for the Toyota Grand Prix, then remembered that I was the mother of a small child, so I never actually competed. But the training served one good purpose: I never again needed to drive fast for the thrill of it.

  The Stuntman was an energetic, imaginative lover. And in my sexual odyssey, this was the experience that confirmed something enlightened women know but men never quite believe: size doesn’t matter. There are all kinds of places inside a woman that a man can move a small penis, and he knew how to find them. One night, in a playful mood, we were talking about sexual fantasies, and I admitted that I’d imagined being with two men.

  “I’d like to make that one come true for you,” he said with a twinkle.

  “Don’t be crazy” I countered. “Do you have any idea how much the National Enquirer would pay for that story?”

  But he had a proposal: his close friend, another stuntman of guaranteed discretion. “If you ever meet again,” he promised, “there will see no indication that it ever happened.” I was intrigued, excited, and quite scared. An hour before the friend was to arrive, I said I couldn’t go through with it. The Stuntman said, “You don’t want to back out now. Have a little snoriteke.”

  There’s a real argument to be made that if you need controlled substances to make something acceptable, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. In the 1970s there was a sense of self-righteousness about drug taking, a supposition that it would be enlightening, that artists needed to expand their minds. In the “me decade” of the 1980s, everyone I knew was still getting high with some regularity. At parties there were sugar bowls full of cocaine (not yet considered addictive), and nonparticipants were regarded as weird. I was hardly a doper--on the contrary, I’d always been the safety monitor in my crowd, the one who insisted on buckling up seat belts and warned about the perils of cigarettes.

  “The Cybill sandwich” turned out to be a positive sexual experience. Having all the pleasure points being attended to simultaneously rather than sequentially made me feel adored, emancipated, and more relaxed about sex. Years later, an episode of Moonlighting called for a chain saw fight, and the fellow hired to train me turned out to be the ménage partner. True to his word, he was circumspect and discreet. “Cybill,” he said warmly, extending his hand, “I haven’t seen you in a few years.” He didn’t even linger over the word seen.

  The Stuntman started acting overly involved in my career, presenting me with too many ideas for merchandising tie-ins with The Yellow Rose, like my name on a map of Texas that he wanted to sell. He had the same obsession with ladylike hands as my grandfather, even to the point of offering to polish my nails. (This turned out to be surprisingly erotic. He brought three color choices, and it took hours.) One night while he was out, I was waiting at his house, talking on the phone to my gynecologist. We were admitting that we were attracted to each other when he was married and I was with Peter, and I told him I’d been close to having an orgasm when he put in my IUD. (I know, I know.) The next day, The Stuntman accused me of being depraved. “That’s revolting,” he said angrily, “to get off with your gynecologist.” There was no way. he could have known that secret, and I discovered that he was recording every phone call made to or from his house. I think his paranoia had more to do with his drug connections than with spying on me, but it was an alarm that signaled the beginning of the end of that relationship.

  Perfect opening (you should pardon the expression) for The Gynecologist. He was an attractive, man, and any sense of impropriety did not override my life motto: Why not? He lived in a contemporary palace high in the canyons with a collec
tion of modern art and a teenage son who hated me on sight, baring his teeth like a cat when he spoke to me. One night the doctor and I were eating steaks he had grilled on the barbecue. Suddenly his face went pale, his shoulders went up, and he wasn’t making any noise. Running into the boy’s room, I yelled, “Come quickly, I think your father’s choking!”

  He looked up without even feigned interest and said, “Give me a fucking break.”

  “Listen, you little worm,” I screamed, “you may hate me, but unless you want to inherit the Hockneys tonight, get your ass in here and help me do Heimlich!” The doctor survived, but the affair didn’t.

  My hairdresser on The Yellow Rose was a lively woman who raised turkeys on her farm—“all natural,” she told me, “none of those chemicals and hormones and poisons and shit—and she offered me one for Thanksgiving. On our last day of shooting before the holiday, she told me, “I brought you a beautiful bird. It’s out in my truck.” Peeking over the back door, I saw what appeared to be a small hatbox. That couldn’t be it, I thought. Then I heard the squawk. It was alive but packed so it couldn’t move, like sometng out of Boxing Helena. Undaunted, I called around to various restaurants, asking euphemistically, “Where can I have this taken care of?” and finally, someone suggested Chinatown.