Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  My friend Jane Howard was visiting for the holiday, and walked around the crowded streets looking for a shop with dead poultry hanging in the windows. We hadn’t heard another peep out of that turkey--I think it had conceded its fate. An accommodating butcher took the box from my hands with little fanfare and five minutes later, handed me a parcel wrapped in brown paper, no longer moving. The turkey was cooked by my housekeeper, who brought it to the table, according to her family tradition, with its two claws crossed upright. And it was tough as shoe leather. Give me a Butterball shot full of chemicals any day.

  It was extraordinary for me to be working on a studio lot like the ones where the movies I’d watched with Peter were shot, and the day I found out for sure that Yellow Rose would not be picked up for another season, I went over to the Warner Bros. Burbank studios and walked around the set sobbing. Movie camp was over, and I thought I’d never work again--not an irrational thought considering the sobering statistic that something like 90 percent of the Screen Actors Guild members are unemployed.

  When you bump into people you haven’t seen for a while in Hollywood, they seldom ask the mechanical “How are you?” They ask, and they really want to know, “What are you doing now?” I had no answer.

  Chapter Nine

  “TV’S SEXIEST SPITFIRE”

  GLENN GORDON CARON SAYS THAT HALFWAY THOUGH THE pilot of Moonlighting he realized he was writing the character Maddie Hayes as Cybill Shepherd. He asked if there was any way he could get a meeting with me. When my agent sent me those fifty pages, I immediately recognized the part I’d been hankering to do for a long time. For years I’d studied the screwball comedies directed by Howard Hawks, especially Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl Friday (1940). These films glorified Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell—they talked fast and acted sexy, smart, and funny.

  Glenn was only thirty but no wunderkind. He’d done a couple of failed pilots, and his main credit was for Remington Steele. I was invited to meet him and his colleague Jay Daniel at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Glenn was boyish, charming, portly, clearly excited by the presence of Maddie Hayes incarnate and not afraid to show it--he later said that his negotiating strength had been hampered when his chin hit the table and his tongue hit the floor. He remarked that he’d seen me in a movie wearing “that dress” (the bias-cut satin from The Lady Vanishes). The first thing I said to Glenn after hello was “I know what this is--it’s a Hawksian comedy.” He had no idea what I was talking about, so I suggested we screen my three favorites to see how overlapping dialogue was handled by the “masters,” and he agreed. We talked about the way the Moonlighting script played with my image as a spoiled bitch, although Glenn claimed to have been largely unaware of my reputation as the most clobbered actress in Hollywood.” There wasn’t an actor in the world who hadn’t been in an ill-suited movie, he said. I’d just had more than my share.

  City of Angels is run, none too efficiently, by a character named David Addison, whose creed is “Live fast, die young, leave clean underwear,” and who convinces Maddie to become his partner, renaming the agency Blue Moon after the shampoo for which she was a well-known spokeswoman in her modeling days. Addison is described as an emotional adolescent, cocky and sexually aggressive, whose humor puerile charm ameliorate his obnoxious behavior and language. Apparently there were three thousand men who saw themselves with those attributes because that’s how many actors answered the casting call. Chemistry between actors is either there or it isn’t. I’m not sure you can act chemistry on-screen any more than you can in real life when your well-intentioned cousin sets you up on a blind date with a troglodyte. I thought it was imperative that the chemistry between Maddie and David be genuine, since the show was driven by snappy, overlapping banter and palpable sexual tension. I had casting approval, and when the pile of resumes from David-wannabes was winnowed down to a lean half-dozen, I went to meet them.

  ABC’s offices were located in a tall glass tower in Century City, and the casting sessions took place in a long conference room with a wall of shuttered windows. Several candidates came and went, but nothing especially magical was happening. By mid-afternoon, I was weary, picking at bits of tuna arid lettuce from the salads that had been brought in for lunch, when Bruce Willis entered the room.

  He was, I would later learn, five years younger than I, wearing an army fatigue jacket, several earrings, and what looked to be the compensatory three-day beard of a man with a receding hairline, the rest of his hair punkishly cut and moussed. There was a careless, desultory way he walked around the perimeter of the big table, keeping his distance from me and sauntering over to Glenn and Jay. His eyes were crinkled and his lips pressed into a mocking smile, a composite that was to become the signature David Addison smirk.

  Bruce had been earning a living as a bartender in New York, sharing a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen with large rats while playing mostly uncredited bit parts, like “courtroom observer” in Paul Newman’s legal drama The Verdict or “diner customer” in a Frank Sinatra movie, The First Deadly Sin, and he had just been turned down for a role in Desperately Seeking Susan that went to Aidan Quinn. Unlike the other actors who’d auditioned, he didn’t especially flatter me; in fact, he actually avoided eye contact, directing most of his vaguely smart-ass male-bonding comments to Glenn, like “Just got off my shift at the bar.” But there was definite chemistry between us, and it escaped no one--the temperature in the room jumped about twenty degrees. After he’d left, I leaned over and murmured, as much to myself as to Glenn, “He’s the one.”

  “Are you sure?” he responded. Glenn knew it would require Herculean effort to convince the ABC brass that this quirky, attitudinous guy with negligible professional experience and rather unconventional looks was perfectly cast for a prime-time hit on their network, which was then third place in the ratings. The suits saw him playing “heavies,” declared he was “not leading man material” and asked me to read with better-known actors. The part was actually offered to a clean-cut actor named Robert Hayes, who turned it down in favor of I don’t know what. The only way Bruce Willis would be considered was if I agreed to do a screen test with him. With the camera rolling just as we were about to do the scene, he looked at me with perfect satisfaction and said, “I can’t concentrate. You’re too beautiful.” The suits were convinced.

  The week before we shot the pilot, Glenn, Bruce, and I watched His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, as I had suggested. They were the gold standard for the overlapping dialogue we were going to use in Moonlighting. When we showed up on Stage 20 at 20th Century-Fox for the first time, it felt as if both of us were playing roles that were custom-fit by a meticulous tailor. The first time my face is seen is in a montage of photographs on the wall: real Vogue and Glamor magazines, Cover Girl and Clairol ads fm my modeling days. Maddie Hayes would be the ultimate bitch goddess who gets her comeuppance, with a nemesis who engenders conflicting feelings of outrage and attraction. The character of David Addison was bearable, even likable, precisely because he just loved being a jerk, as, I was to discover, did Bruce Willis.

  In the pilot’s climactic scene, we were being chased by a diamond thief onto the roof of the historic Eastern building in downtown Los Angeles, where I was suspended from the minute hand of a clock face twenty-five feet above the fourteenth floor. I’m a gung-ho girl, and I declared that I wanted to do enough of the stunt so the audience believed it was really me. Half a dozen crew members were lined up single file on the narrow plywood platform of a steel scaffold that was swaying in the Santa Ana winds. The hairdresser was terrified of heights and had declared in the lobby, “I’m going to have to do your hair down here,” but my makeup man, Norman Leavitt, gamely came up to the roof, passing powder puffs and lip stick stuck into a Kleenex box out to me from his precarious perch. The director of photography, Michael Margulies, was communicating via miked headphones to the four camera crews. Suddenly I panicked, and grabbing two handfuls of
Michael’s brown leather jacket from behind, I screamed, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” But he couldn’t hear me. When he felt the tug, he turned around and said, “Did you say something?”

  “No, I’m okay.” And, having momentarily vented, I was.

  For two weeks of shooting, Bruce was upbeat, lighthearted, fun. But it wasn’t long before his mood darkened, particularly during visits from his girlfriend, the former wife of Geraldo Rivera, who sat in the wings with her arms crossed, looking as if she had smelled something bad. (“She disapproves of me doing television,” he confided one day.) Her visits became less frequent, eventually ending altogether, but he remained cranky and aloof. Almost automatically, we had off-camera spats just before our scripted ones, but they seemed like a harmless way of working up to the emotion of the scene. It did not escape me that the growing attraction between Maddie and David mirrored what was developing between the actors who portrayed them. After one particularly heated rehearsal, I walked off the set with him and said, “Are we going to do something about this or what?”

  He looked startled but not unpleasantly so, and then squinted his familiar half smile. “Why don’t I come over to your place tonight?” he said.

  There was a bottle of Gentleman Jim in his hand when he knocked on the door of my apartment, and it wasn’t long before we were passionately sucking face. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” I said, feeling ambivalent and aware of the potential complications. “We might be working together a long time.” But we were quickly too far gone in a lusty, missionary embrace, leaning halfway back on a La-Z-Boy lounger that tilted almost to the point of toppling over.

  Suddenly he stopped, arched his back, and looked at me with lines creasing his forehead. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, grabbing the wide arm of the chair for support as he pushed off and stood up. Rearranging himself as well as his remaining clothes, he announced, “I think I’ll go to the bathroom.” When he returned, he picked his jacket up from the floor where it had landed, mumbled something about getting a good night’s sleep, and was gone. Maybe Bruce liked the chase better than the catch. Maybe he preferred the character to the real woman. We never did finish what we started in private, but anytime we had a kissing scene, he stuck a big camel tongue halfway down my throat.

  For the pilot of Moonlighting, my hair was sleek and unteased. Before every scene, I’d bend forward and brush it out, but Glenn and Jay said that took too long, so for some of the later episodes, my hair was teased and sprayed into an effusive helmet that looked like a wig. Unsolicited, Bruce commented that my hair was “dippy,” which I assumed to be a derisive colloquialism from his New Jersey boyhood. No one had taken such an interest in my hair since my mother obsessed about my darkening blonde tresses. Certainly L’Oreal thought enough of me for all those commercials in which I purred, “I’m worth it.” And Bruce was on thin ice: his own bare scalp was filled in with greasy dark cosmetic pencils for the camera. After one too many sarcastic remarks, I snapped, “At least I have some hair.” Turns out he did too, just not on his head. Bruce liked to moon the crew, and I got so tired of seeing his hairy ass that I finally said, “Could you give me some warning so I don’t have to look at it every time?”

  I averted my eyes from the lively procession of young women in and out of Bruce’s motor home, until he met Demi Moore and settled into some version of monogamy. (I can attest to the fact that she taught him how to kiss.) But I was hardly in a position to judge anyone else’s personal life. A cousin was getting married in Memphis, and I had no prospects of an interesting escort for the wedding. (If the tabloids had only known the headline they were missing: FORMER BEAUTY QUEEN DATELESS.) I asked a friend to set me up with a warm male body, and her suggestion turned out to be a broad-shouldered, six-foot-four cycling champ who’d missed qualifying for the Olympics by a millisecond. He picked me up wearing Clark Kent glasses and a tailored tuxedo jacket over a tartan kilt, complete with sporran, the furry-pouch that substitutes for a pants pocket. (What are men supposed to be carrying around in there anyway?) He had impeccable manners, spoke with ease about a variety of subjects from sports to feminism, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that real Scotsmen don’t wear anything under their kilts. But I was thirty-five and he was eighteen.

  If the ages had been reversed, our romance wouldn’t have caused so much as a ripple of censure. As it was, we were a perfect sexual match. We ignored public opinion and defied our families by continuing to see each other for the duration of my stay and on subsequent visits. When he picked me up at my mother’s house for a bike ride wearing the kind of cyclist shorts that hug the thighs and leave little to the imagination, Mother took me aside and chided, “Cybill, he’s nasty in those pants.” After a few months of long-distance romance, he left his job in the family business and followed me to Los Angeles. He rented his own apartment, but I couldn’t prevent Clementine from developing a five-year-old’s crush on him, getting into my makeup and doing a pretty good imitation of a mini-femme fatale when she knew he was coming over. His affluent father stepped up the campaign to separate us by implying that I was a gold digger, even offering to retire if his son came back to run the company, and finally issued an ultimatum: the business or the blonde. It was up to me to decide my young lover said, and I couldn’t ask him to stay. I didn’t want to get into another situation where I was supporting a man, I had no interest in marriage, I couldn’t even promise fidelity. I suppose I was really waiting for some grand gesture from him, something along the lines of “I don’t care what my family says, you’re the only woman in the world for me.” Asking me what to do was tantamount to telling me he wasn’t ready to commit. I relinquished any hold.

  I left home at 5 A.M. each day. Moonlighting scripts were close to a hundred pages, half again as long as the average one-hour television series. Almost from the moment the cameras started rolling, we were behind schedule, sometimes completing as few as sixteen episodes per season and never achievi hug the standard twenty-two. It became customary to make up time with a “tow shot”: loading a car onto a trailer and pulling it. Since we were just sitting in the car, there was no need to rehearse or “block” our places during the scene. We literally cut up the pages of script and taped the scraps to the dashboard--no time to memorize. The only respite was when the writers gave long speeches of “exposition” to guest stars, but Bruce and I were so exhausted that while we listened we often looked as if we were sleeping with our eyes open. Some of our highly touted innovations--like “breaking the fourth wall” and speaking directly to the camera in a prologue or a postscript--were born of necessity, to fill time, since we spoke the dialogue so quickly.

  At $1.5 million per episode, Moonlighting was reportedly the most expensive show on television at the time. But it was one of the first in-house productions at a network, one of the rare hits for ABC (still in third place), and nobody was going to tell Glenn Caron how to run his show. His reputation, an image that he enjoyed and cultivated, was that he thrived on deadlines. In a Time magazine article that called the show “ABC’s classiest hit and biggest headache,” he blustered, “It sounds pompous, but maybe it’s irresponsible to bring a television show in on time and on budget every week and have it be on nothing.” (There was a private joke in an episode that featured a tabloid parody called The National Pit with a headline claiming: “Dr. Caron Discovers Antidote for Stress.”) He often went to the studio before dawn to write a new scene, handing us pages of dialogue when we showed up later that morning. The writing was inspired and edgy, and I’ll take last-minute changes that good any day. But the routine was grueling. We’d start on Monday at 7 A.M. and work until 9 P.M. Union rules stipulated the length of time actors need to break before reporting back to work, and we had to be paid an extra $1,000 if we didn’t get a twelve-hour turnaround--it’s called a “forced call.” To avoid that expensive penalty to the producers, we’d start on Tuesday at 9 A.M. and go until 11 P.M. Then on Wednesday we’d start at 11 A.M. and go until 1 or 2
in the morning. And I’m not a night person. Plus there was a different director every week because the previous week’s director was in the editing room. It took me ten long years to make my comeback and only one to feel trapped by my success.

  As soon as I found out we were to do a mammoth food fight, I went directly to Glenn’s office and asked him if Bruce and I could get hit in the face with pies. Glenn laughed and told me that if I wanted to be hit in the face with a pie I would have to ask Bruce myself, which I did. Bruce chuckled for a minute and then asked, “Who’s going to throw the pie?” I suggested someone neutral like our stunt coordinator, Chris Howel, and Bruce agreed. He and I clocked in a twenty-two-hour day for that food fight with the reward at the end being a refreshing pie in the face, accurately heaved by Chris. It was one of the finest moments for all involved.

  BURNOUT IS A GIVEN IN SERIES TELEVISION, BUT IT doesn’t come with a warning label, and my experience is that it doesn’t bring out the best in people. I’d recover a little less each weekend until finally I never recovered, feeling the kind of fatigue that depletes every resource, including civility. Once when we were filming at the Ambassador Hotel, a woman in the lobby approached me for an autograph at just the wrong moment and I snapped. “Leave me alone,” I said dismissively, and when she looked rightfully aghast, I countered, “I have a right to be a bitch.” I really lost it at the end of one fourteen-hour day when I was called down to a basement on the old 20th Century-Fox lot for looping: redoing dialogue that hasn’t been recorded clearly or doesn’t have the right inflection of voice. The sound engineer was late, and I finally said, “Get another sound man.” Then for an hour the bucktoothed associate producer gave me line readings on how to improve my performance (“Do it faster, now do it slower, really be angry, now a little less angry”). It was a manipulative power trip to make me jump through hoops. I was furious, and thrashing my arms in lieu of tearing out my hair, my hand came smashing down on the script stand, sending it crumpling to the floor.