Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  When production started on the new season of Moonlighting, I received a “personal and confidential” letter from the lawyers for Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., as did Bruce Willis. Attached was a list of “guidelines” regarding production, stating the network’s right to cancel episodes or the series if the guidelines were not strictly followed. (Bruce and I would be responsible for the loss of revenue in such an event.) The normal day onstage, the memo stated, was from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., but night work was at the producer’s discretion. The production company would make every effort to deliver scripts one day in advance of shooting, but the script was nevertheless to be learned. The producers were to maintain a written record of the actors’ work pattern during each day of production, including the time elapsed after being called to the set, which was not to exceed five minutes. Bathroom breaks were also limited to five minutes.

  My lawyer responded to this demeaning memo by reminding ABC that I already had a contract governing my services; that nowhere in my agreement was the network given the right to impose additional terms and conditions, particularly those more suitable to a reform school; that I resented any attempt to impute to me responsibility for their cost overruns; and that such insinuations were defamatory, injurious to my reputation, and the cause of severe emotional distress.

  One more letter arrived from ABC. Dispensing with the legalese, the gist of it was “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And with such posturing, the tempest was over.

  In the fall of 1988, Glenn Caron left the show, stating that it was him or me and he didn’t think the network would choose him. What had begun as an alliance between Glenn and me, as well as a newcomer named Bruce Willis, had turned into Glenn and Bruce against Cybill. Not only David Addison but Bruce Willis had become Glenn’s alter ego and I became the troublemaker, the difficult one out to get them (whatever part I had in creating this I will forever regret). Recently, the pilot of Moonlighting was released on DVD. The disc includes almost nonstop commentary on the making of the series by the creator, Glenn Caron, and the star, Bruce Willis. Needless to say, I was not thrilled to be excluded, but now there can be no doubt that there had been and still is a boys’ club to which I’m not invited. Glenn describes himself and Bruce as being virtually the same. They have similar backgrounds, the same things disgust them, and the same things make them laugh. The only ng that really matters is that a whole new audience is enjoying Moonlighting on DVD as well as nightly on the Bravo network. And I’m really proud of the good work we did together. In any case, Jay Daniel took over as executive producer, and Roger Director, already working on the show as promoted to head writer. (He later wrote the roman a clef A Place to Fall, about a neurotic, petulant actor, and Bruce Willis threatened to punch him out.) The show lasted for two more years, and Peter Bogdanovich made a memorable guest appearance in an episode about all the men in Maddie’s past. But with the success of the Die Hard movies, it became clear that Bruce was ready to move on, that he had outgrown Moonlighting. He was so disdainful of the material that he often hadn’t bothered to read it before arriving on the set. He was impatient about any time I spent in the trailer with the twins, although he increasingly wanted to leave early himself. I put up a punching bag on the set, suggesting that we hit it instead of each other. One day, when filming threatened to delay his early getaway, the whole set started to vibrate from Bruce’s pummeling. Thank God for that bag.

  One day, as nursing time for the twins approached, I asked to be released for a twenty-five-minute break. The first assistant director kept delaying it, so after about an hour, my motor-home driver turned on the walkie-talkie so that the whole set could hear the two screaming infants and announced “Cybill, it’s time!” After that, I was free to go.

  The final episode surely echoed the sentiments of viewers. “Can you really blame the audience?” a silhouetted producer asks Maddie and David. “A case of poison ivy is more fun than watching you two lately.”

  I was breaking up with two Bruces at once--Bruce Willis and Bruce Oppenheim. I will always regret that I never got to raise kids beyond the age of two with their fathers present. Children don’t know from incompatibility. They only want Mom and Dad to live together in love with each other and with them. When Bruce got angry, he shouted, and when I got angry, I ran away. I’d never heard my parents have an argument. I observed their brawls and mutually cold, silent treatment. I had no sense of two people being able to negotiate conflict and come to a reasonable compromise. Operating under a veil of exhaustion and frustration from work, I gave up on my marriage.

  Bruce and I were forced to work with a court-appointed counselor, both of us legitimately afraid that divorce would mean seeing the children a lot less. Our separation was the catalyst for what was surely long overdue therapy for me. I wheeled a big rolling rack of baggage into the therapist’s office and took out one suitcase at a time, asking, “Is this because I’m an asshole?”

  Not long after the separation, I was walking on the treadmill and watching MTV. A video came on of a song by Martha Venessa Sharron, Ronald Lee Miller, and Kenny Hirsch called “If I Could.” The lyrics moved me instantly to tears: “If I could. I’d teach you all the things I never learned / And help you cross all those bridges that I burned.” I started weeping so profusely that I had to push the emergency button on the treadmill to keep from falling down.

  Chapter Ten

  “I’M CYBILL SHEPHERD, YOU KNOW, THE MOVIE STAR?”

  I WAS TERRIFIED ABOUT MY PROSPECTS WHEN MOONLIGHTING ended, and it didn’t help to hear Joan Rivers dismiss me on her talk show as the head of the “Fucking Lucky Club.” It seemed like my luck was running out. I spent several years doing projects of no particular consequence, playing a collection of wives, nurses, bitches, and sociopaths.

  The 1990 TV movie, Which Way Home was based on a true story about a nurse who rescues five orphans from a refugee camp substituting Thailand for Cambodia. I asked my doctor for something to help me sleep on the long flight over, and he gave me Halcion, a potent narcotic that can erase short-term memory. When I arrived, somebody had to tell me where I was and why I was there. But I have distinct memories of a location shoot fraught with water problems. We were filming several hours south of Bangkok, staying in a city called Hua Hin (nicknamed Whore Hin by the crew for obvious reasons), and I swam in the soothing warm waters of the South China Sea, which glows at night with bioluminescent plankton. During one swim, some terrible creature wrapped itself around my calves, and I ran shrieking from the water to discover that my attacker was a plastic bag used to wrap the beach towels.

  The ceiling, floor, even the wastebasket in my room were made of teak, and I kept thinking: This is where the rain forest is going. The water in my shower contained some chemicals with interesting special effects. A week into shooting, the director of photography requested a private meeting. “I’m sorry to mention this,” he said, “but your hair appears somewhat greenish on camera.” I squeezed every available lemon in Southeast Asia on my head and sat in the sun.

  When we moved farther south to Bang Sephon, the floor, walls, and ceiling of my hotel bathroom were tiled. There was no shower curtain because the drain was in the middle of the room. I noticed that whatever was deposited in the toilet each morning would still be there at night. Not a good sign. When I returned at the end of the first day of shooting, covered from head to toe with sand and who knows what else from slogging through murky lagoons, I got into the shower and turned on the water. There were a few weak sputters and then nothing. Other crew members confirmed that they were experiencing the same drought, and I placed a call to the producer. “I’m a trooper,” I said, “but I draw the line at a hot shower and a functional toilet. If the water isn’t restored, I’m leaving for someplace where I know the plumbing works, like Southern California.” The next day, in the predawn light, something that looked like a cement truck rumbled into the parking lot and disappeared behind the building. There were noises of plumbing and pipe fitting, and I had a trickly but wet sho
wer.

  What I loved best about Thailand was the food: savory soups for breakfast, midmorning snacks of cashews freshly roasted over fires, sticky rice with mangoes that look green but are lusciously ripe. There are a hundred different fruits never seen outside the country, and the familiar ones are as abundant as apples. You can hail a boat coming down the Chaou Praya River in Bangkok and buy a sack of fresh litchi nuts from the farmer (although I never did develop the local enthusiasm for one fruit whose name translates into “tastes like heaven, smells like hell”). What I didn’t love about the location was my dressing room: a bus with the seats taken out and furniture that rolled around as if on casters. I literally couldn’t fit into its minuscule bathroom, so when I had to use the facilities, I cleared everybody out and stood in the hallway hoping for the best as I launched my ass back toward the toilet.

  PETER BOGDANOVICH HAD THE RIGHTS TO LARRY McMurtry’s book Texasville, a return to the characters of The Last Picture Show some thirty years later. (The frontispiece of the 1987 novel reads “For Cybill Shepherd.”) Miraculously the entire cast from Picture Show was reassembled.

  The friendship between Peter and Larry had always been shaky--like two unfixed dogs, they snarled at each other from separate corners--but Larry and I were friends for life, or so I thought. A month before I went to Texas, he stopped returning my phone calls essentially vanishing from my life. It was odd to be filming the bo he had dedicated to me and not even know if I might turn a corner in Archer City and bump into him. There were other reasons why it wasn’t my happiest experience: I felt like I was confronting the ghosts of the mistakes Peter and I had made, wreaking havoc in everyone’s lives and not even ending up together. But the worst part of it was a custody court judge ordering my twenty-month-old twins to fly back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles every other week to see their father, accompanied by a nanny. This forced separation meant that I had to stop nursing, which was physically and emotionally traumatic for me and the babies.

  Larry McMurtry was the first person who’d ever sent me lilies, and he used to send them regularly. About a year after Texasville, a huge vase of cut lilies arrived at my home, and I ripped open the gift card with excitement, hoping that his long silence was broken. The flowers were from someone else, but they inspired me to write Larry a note about how much I missed him and our friendship, and he finally responded. That was when he explained why we weren’t friends anymore. He thought I had acted too hastily in divorcing Bruce, accusing me of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” somehow he turned himself into the rejected “baby”). When he realized he couldn’t protect me from my “recklessness,” he bolted. I resented his implication that my unhappiness wasn’t real. Just became I had a pattern of being with the wrong man didn’t mean I should stay with the latest wrong man.

  In 1992 I was in Monte Carlo to shoot the feature Once Upon a Crime. One day I was sitting across from Sean Young, one of the other actors. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something... missing Was it possible? Good God, she wasn’t wearing underpants. I finally said to her, “I’m shootin’ squirrel from where I’m sitting.” She smiled and crossed her legs, an agreeable colleague.

  We were shooting at night, beginning when the last customer had left the grand casino and ending before the first customer arrived the next morning. While we waited for the casino to empty out one night, the cast went gambling. I didn’t bet, but every person I stood next to lost. The next night, after I had filmed a scene with George Hamilton, he asked, “How would you like to come with me for breakfast?” The casino restaurant was closed, but George is a high roller, well known to the management, so they opened up just for us. We were still wearing our movie costumes--he in an immaculately cut tuxedo (his teeth blindingly white against his ubiquitous tan) and me in a Versace gown. We had raspberry soufflé and Louis Roederer blush champagne.

  As we walked through the restaurant’s double doors, there was a roulette table. “I’m going to prove to you right now that you’re not a jinx,” said George. “Pick a number.” I stood next to him breathless with worry and watched as he racked up $5,000, $10,000, $25,000, $50,000--in wins, not losses. “Let’s go to Cartier and I’ll buy you a watch,” he suggested. I declined. I already had a watch.

  AS SPOKESPERSON FOR VOTER’S CHOICE, I WAS invited--along with many others, including Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas and Whoopie Goldberg--to Washington, D.C., to lead the March for Women’s Lives. At the fund-raiser the evening before I was seated next to a political consultant, born and raised in Chicago, who had stayed in Boston after law school and had become a kind of consigliere to the younger generation of Kennedys. He was a smart, funny, athletic feminist who had massive amounts of curly brown hair with glints of red and gold. I fell.

  He was also G.U.--Geographically Undesirable. It was a struggle to find time together, and when I decided to build a house in Memphis he thought I was insane, suggesting Nantucket or Aspen as more appropriately exciting places. Though I had lots of family and old friends in Memphis I would have never considered building a home there if I hadn’t made new, close friends: one is Sid Selvidge a brilliant folk singer and songwriter who produced my fourth CD, Somewhere Down the Road (which featured a duet with Peabo Bryson, one of the great voices of pop music); the other new friend was Betsy Goodman Burr Flannagan Belz. Like me, she’s had three children with two different men. Betsy is a beautiful woman, and I find in her friendship a refreshing lack of envy. With Sid and Betsy, I gained a new brother and sister.

  I finally got to build my dream house in downtown Memphis, up on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and the local newspaper chose my home as one of the three worst eyesores in the city of Memphis. The other two are Pat’s Pizza, which has been closed for twenty-five years, and my favorite junkyard on Main Street, filled with old carbine wheels, tow trucks, and patinated pieces of machinery.

  In the fall of that year, I agreed to speak in San Francisco at a fund-raiser for Ann Richards, who was running for governor of Texas. The Consultant agreed to meet me there. It was the same day the Giants were playing the A’s in the World Series at Candlestick Park. I got to the hotel first and had champagne and oysters waiting in the room. We had just started to make love when the earth moved, literally.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “An earthquake,” I said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Get under the bed.” Of course, there was no way to squeeze under a box spring for protection, and we huddled in the doorway until the earth stopped moving. The phone wasn’t working, and we didn’t know what kind of pandemonium we’d find outside, but my first thought was: Who knows when we’ll get to eat again? So we quickly polished off the champagne and oysters before walking downstairs to the lobby, dimly lit with emergency lighting. I looked over at the bar and thought: If I’m going to die, I might as well die happy. Several margaritas later, we poked our heads outside, aware that the sounds of the city had been silenced, and saw a long black limousine parked in front of the hotel. I knocked on the driver’s side, motioning for him to lower the window.

  “Excuse me,” I said deliberately, uttering words I had never used in my life, “I’m Cybill Shepherd. You know, the movie star? Could you please let me use your phone so I can call my kids and tell them I’m okay?” From the back of the limo, I heard a man’s voice. “Cybill Shepherd? We’re from Memphis. We’re here for the World Series. Come on inside.” We got in the car and saw the collapsed Bay Bridge on the tiny TV. Returning to the hotel, we were each handed a lit candle for the walk up seven flights, and all night long we listened to the repetition of inexplicable noises coining from Union Square: pop, pop, crash. Pop, pop, crash. It turned out that many of the windows in the Neiman Marcus building had cracked, and maintenance crews were knocking out the shards of glass before they could fall on pedestrians. The moment it was light, we made it to the airport. San Francisco survived the earthquake; our relationship didn’t. But The Consultant will a
lways be my favorite mistake.

  Sometime in October 1992 I got a call from a mutual friend involved in the women’s movement. There was going to be what turned out to be the largest march in history for gay and lesbian rights in Washington, and I immediately agreed to attend. As the April 1993 date approached, the march began to garner a good deal of publicity. I was told that because Roseanne was planning to charter a jet and bring a plane full of Hollywood celebrities, they really didn’t need me. I asked if they had a seat for me on the plane. The answer was no. I called Paricia Ireland, the head of the National Organization for Women, to check to make sure I shouldn’t go. She said that I should definitely go and, furthermore asked if I could attend a major fund-raiser the night before for the Human Rights Campaign Fund. I said sure, and the night of the event we raised a lot of money and lifted a lot of spirits. It turned out that Roseanne and her plane full of celebrities never materialized. The only Hollywood personalities whom I remember being there were Judith Light and myself. On the day of the march I was told that only gays and lesbians would be allowed to carry the banner. I staged my own little protest. I asked them, “Do you think Martin Luther King would have refused to let me carry the banner with him because of the color of my skin?” So I was allowed to carry the banner. It was a great honor, and it was one of my proudest moments as a parent when my thirteen-year-old daughter Clementine told me that since she felt so strongly about the issue, she wanted to march with me.