Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  When I finally insisted on being part of the show’s budget meeting, I discovered that Jay was blaming me for the high costs. In his considered opinion, Christine was a Xerox machine--she would say a line exactly the same way no matter how many times she did it. I was the exact opposite. I did it differently every time and took pride in surprising myself and the audience. Jay would say that I didn’t even warm up until the fourth take, and he considered himself the master hand, putting together the bits that he liked from each scene. I would often see his choices and remember another, better, funnier take (this was true for all the actors, not just myself). He seldom liked my most outrageous moments and felt that slapstick was appropriate only in isolated incidents, “I will not use your biggest, Lucy-esque takes,” he told me. “I will protect you from yourself.”

  In the fall of 1996, for an episode called “Cybill and Maryann Go to Japan,” Jay went over budget creating an unnecessarily large and elaborate Japanese garden, but he said we couldn’t afford a pond that would have provided me with a hilarious Lucy-esque moment (my character, dressed in full geisha costume, would fall in) so I finally agreed that Jay should go. When he left, eight episodes into the season, we were over budget. By the end of that season, we were safely in the black.

  Caryn Mandabach, the head of production at C-W, said that the only way the show would survive was to “poach” a great head writer named Bob Myer from his development deal at Tri-Star, who had refused to consider her offer until Jay was gone. And Bob did seem heaven-sent, literally the answer to my prayers, from our very first meeting. “I know that part of the problem has been a lack of communication,” he said. “But I promise I will be the first person you talk to in the morning and the last person you talk to at night. You will be kept so informed, you will get sick of the information and tell me you don’t need to hear any more.” Over time we even developed a private code. I hate it when someone says “Be good” as a parting salutation--I always want to say “What if I ain’t?” So Bob started signing all his notes to me with “Be bad,” “Be so bad,” or “Be ever bad>

  IT WAS ALWAYS INTERESTING TRYING TO DECIPHER THE peculiar logic of Standards and Practices at CBS. In the episode “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” during our second season, Maryann is in denial about the approach of menopause, referring to the herbal potions that Cybill is trying for hot flashes as “bark juice” and “the fungus of many nations.”

  Maryann: “Thank goodness this will never happen to me”

  Cybill: “Probably not. They say alcohol pickles the uterus”

  Maryann: “When you say you’re premenopausal does that mean your ‘friend’ has stopped visiting every month?”

  Cybill: “My ‘Friend’ what are you, twelve?”

  Maryann: “You know what I mean, Aunt Flo?”

  Cybill: “Just sat it out—period, period, period”

  In our fourth season, we did another menopause episode called “Some Like It Hot.” We were told not to refer to a woman’s biological cycles as anything other than her biological cycle, and were forbidden to say uterus, cervix, ovaries, menstruation, period, or flow. And why? Years earlier, Gloria Steinem had pointed out to me that the valentine heart was originally a symbol of female genitalia. When I repeated this to Bob Myer he was rightfully intrigued and said he’d like to build an episode around it, having fun with a different kind of “V” day. When CBS read the script, Standards and Practices forbade the use of the word vagina. I asked Bob to see if they’d agree to let is use labia. Remarkably, they said yes. We wondered if CBS knew what the word meant or thought no one else would. Although the episode got some of our biggest laughs and highest ratings, that’s when the network began to crack down on any element of the show regarding female anatomy or bodily functions. I had the distinct feeling that they thought we were trying to be lewd or shocking, but our insistence on using those words came from political awareness. Knowing the proper names as well as the slang for body parts is one way for women and children to protect themselves from sexual abuse, as well as open themselves to sexual pleasure. It’s astonishing that in daring to describe female anatomy accurately we were breaking new ground in television. At the time, I had no idea that Eve Ensler had won the 1997 Obie Award for her one-woman show called The Vagina Monologues. I didn’t know about her hilarious, eye-opening tour into the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman until I read an article in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times in 1999, a year after my Valentine’s Day episode was aired. I rejoiced at the public acknowledgment that her play was an important groundbreaking work, yet I was saddened that similar groundbreaking work on the Cybill show had gone unnoticed by the press. But, like menopause, the issue of a woman’s identity in regard to her genitals was still taboo in the media at the time we were dealing with it and reaching a huge prime-time audience.

  It was Christine’s idea to do an episode about mammography, but the show became a source of contention for us. Last-minute changes were not her thing, and she perceived improvisation as ambush. But even flubs often prove to be the funniest moments. In the episode called “In Her Dreams,” Maryann goes for a worrisome mammogram. It was scripted that she would cry, but when we came to do the scene, I started to tear up too. Working up the emotion for the scene, I had been listening to “Come in from the Rain,” Melissa Manchester’s song about friendship (“Well, hello there, dear old friend of mine...”). I was imagining a breast cancer scare not for Cybill Sheridan’s best friend but for Cybill Shepherd’s best friend, and I started to feel the moment for real. I’ve been there, sitting on turquoise vinyl seats in hospital waiting rooms with loved ones, waiting for scary biopsy reports, and my friends never cry alone--we cry with and for each other. But when Christine saw the tears in my eyes, she went cold Before the second take, Bob Myer came to me and said, “You know Christine doesn’t like these surprises.” Then she had her manager call him. Christine, it seemed, felt quite strongly that we not use the first take when I had cried. In fact, she wanted to participate in the editing to ensure that the first take was not used. Bob denied her request, explaining that we used parts of every take, showing each actor to his or her best advantage.

  Early in 1997, Bob came into my dressing room, practically chewing up the furniture and spitting it out with fury. “We’ve just gotten a call from the producer of 3rd Rock,” he said, who insists that he needs Christine next week.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Carsey-Werner wants her to do a cameo,” he said.

  “Why didn’t we know about this earlier?” I asked.

  “Didn’t they tell you?” he said. “Oh, those people don’t know how to talk to anybody. I’m going to call them and say they can’t have her now.”

  “You do that,” I said, “and furthermore, we want a trade-off: let’s get one of their actors to come on Cybill.”

  A few weeks after Christine did her cameo, Marcy and Caryn sent me a note: “If we would have had a brain in our heads, the right thing for us to do would have been to have told you directly about Christine’s appearance on 3rd Rock.... We value your work and your friendship more than you know and hope you can forgive us.” I also heard from a Carsey-Werner executive known privately as The Executioner because he was always mentioning his uncle Ivan. (If somebody was being rude to you, he would offer, “Uncle Ivan could bury his feet in cement.”) His note to me was contrite: “I’m sorry if I caused you any problems regarding Christine and 3rd Rock,” he wrote, signing off, “Your loyal production slave.”

  One of my concerns with the direction of the show was that Maryann Thorpe had a new romantic interest, while Cybill Sheridan had zippo. Bob kept talking about the difficulty of finding the right actor to play opposite me, so I suggested that my character date lots of men--they might all turn out to be ax murderers, as they often do in real life, but the odyssey would be rich loam for comedy. For the third season closer, he came up with a story called “Let’s Stalk” that ends with Ma
ryann fearing she has killed Dr. Dick, but in the first episode of the upcoming season she was to discover she hadn’t killed him. Dr. Dick would suddenly appear and be played by a recognizable guest star.

  The opening and closing episodes are two of the most important of the year, because of the promotion and media attention, and it’s crucial to have a cliff-hanger that practically ensures the audience will watch to see the resolution when the new season begins. It was a bad idea to have two such crucial episodes dependent on the casting of a guest star, who might or might not materialize. There was always pressure from the network to have cameos, because such appearances generated good buzz, but I objected to the idea when it came to Dr. Dick. I thought he should be seen only in the imagination of the viewers, a device used successfully throughout television history, from the invisible Sam as the answering service for “Richard Diamond” (it was Mary Tyler Moore’s voice), to the off-camera Charlie of Charlie’s Angels (John Forsythe spoke his lines), to the ent Maris, sister-in-law of Frasier. CBS continued to push for John Lithgow to play the odious Dr. Dick, but he had already turned the role down, sending me flowers with a note that said, “Quite apart from feeling wildly overextended these days. I’m following a firm personal policy of concentrating all of my sitcom energies on 3rd Rock. If I did any other show, it would be yours, but for the moment, I’m doing none. If it’s any consolation, you’ll never see me turning up on Friends.”

  Timothy Dalton and John Larroquette also declined the honor of playing Dr. Dick. Don Johnson didn’t even bother to respond. Just days before we were to begin shooting, I told Bob Myer, “Forget about getting somebody’s idea of a name. Just cast the best actor.”

  “I want you to trust me on this,” Bob said. “We’ll just shoot the segments that don’t require Dr. Dick, and by the time we need him, we’ll have somebody great.”

  Everyone knows the joke about the three biggest lies in Hollywood: “The check is in the mail,” “The Mercedes is paid for,” and “It’s only a cold sore.” And they’re all preceded by the words: “Trust me.” Dr. Dick was never cast, the story was rewritten, and we shot in bits and pieces for several months, never resolving the cliffhanger. Bob admitted that he had been badly mistaken in building the opening and closing episodes around uncertain casting and sent this note to the cast early in the new season:

  Dear Everybody,

  Because we waited until we found just the right casting for Dr. Dick to complete the filming of the episode that featured him (#401), we’ve had to make certain adjustments in the production schedule. If you remember, we preshot two scenes from episode #403 to make room for the two Dr. Dick scenes in #401 that we postponed. Therefore, the following pages represent the scenes from episode #403 that have not been shot, as well as the remainder of the scenes from episode #401 that have not been shot.

  Confused? There’s more.

  The pages that are included under separate cover contain material that needs to be shot, as well as the material that it relates to, which has been shot.

  Still with me?

  Robert Stack appears in one of the pickup scenes from #401 that formerly featured Dr. Dick. No, Robert Stack is not playing Dr. Dick. He is playing Robert Stack, a friend of both Maryann and Dr. Dick.

  What’s more...

  I ask nobody to actually understand this. Just remember, we’re having fun.

  Trust me,

  Bob

  P.S. We never did find Dr. Dick, which turned out to be a good thing. Really.

  Audiences have always enjoyed seeing me send up my image as a perfectly groomed mannequin. But the network wanted me to be more ladylike: no more burping or spitting olives back into the martini glass. The message, delivered by Bob Myer, was “Can’t Cybill leave the sloppy stuff to Drew Carey?” What were they afraid of? That my show might get ratings as high as his? My sloppy eating, talking with my mouth full, and scenes of occasional burping consistently garnered some of my strongest laughs from the studio audience and those episodes always generated the highest ratings.

  That November we filmed an episode called “Grandbaby” in which my character becomes a grandmothor the second time and is saddened that her daughter’s family is moving away to Boston. I had the idea of using as a lullaby to my new granddaughter “Talk Memphis to Me,” a song Tom Adams and I had written about my missing Memphis. I wanted to expand the lullaby moment into a brief music video showing what my character hoped she’d get to do with her granddaughter in Memphis if ever given the chance to take her there. The video included shots of my granddaughter at different ages as we visited our favorite places there. It had already been well established that Cybill Sheridan was born and raised in Memphis like I was. Also, the singing of the song became a reconciliation between my character and her first husband, who was also the grandfather of the newborn girl. That impromptu duet, which reflected their history of singing together, was a creative and emotional resolution to their prior conflict in the episode.

  At first, Carsey-Werner refused to finance the video and I agreed to pay for it myself, but once they saw the footage, they loved it so much I never had to pay. What they and the network wanted cut, however, was thirty-five seconds of a helicopter shot pulling back from a steamboat on the Mississippi River showing a crowd of black and white Memphians rocking out to the song. The studio and the network said that it took us too far out of the story, that nobody would understand who those extras were, even though no one had ever questioned the presence of the extras who sat in the trattoria scenes on the show every week.

  This was the seventy-third episode of the show. It was the first and only time I would ever try to pull rank and go higher up to an executive at CBS. I placed a call to The Suit in hopes of getting a chance to explain why that thirty-five seconds of blacks and whites dancing together should stay in. After six hours of waiting with no word from the executive, I received a frantic message that Bob was on his way to the stage and I was not to speak with anyone about this until he had spoken to me. When he arrived there, he told me that it was no longer a creative decision. Standards and Practices, the watchdog department for the network objected to the use of all the Memphis footage, saying it was a conflict of interest (meaning it was blatantly advertising my CD, Talk Memphis to Me).

  I asked Bob, “So you’re saying we have to cut the whole song?”

  “No, no. Just any of the footage shot in Memphis.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical if their point is conflict of interest. Then they should insist the song be cut in its entirety.”

  “Well, they’re not asking for that,” Bob replied.

  That’s when I realized that it was not really about creative differences or conflict of interest. It was a conflict of power. Who was going to decide what stays in or what is cut out? It was not going to be Cybill Shepherd.

  There is never a doubt in any sane person’s mind about who really has the power in the television business. It is and always has been the networks. But when an issue begins as a creative one, moves on to become a racist one, and finally ends up as a conflict of interest, it does not bode well for a star/producer or her show. I knew my days were numbered at CBS. I absolutely believe that if I had simply cut the thirty-five seconds that the studio and network representatives originally had requested, the issue of conflict of interest would never have come up and the lovely, moving footage of my character taking her granddaughter to the beautiful landmarks of her youth would have been included in the episode. When I asked Bob if he thought that was the case, he said most likely it was.

  “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” I began to hear a death knell in my heart for this show to which I had given so much. I knew starting in November 1997 (less than six months before cancellation) that it was only a matter of time. Two things came of this--a constant sense of dread and a constant sense of gratitude that I was getting to do the show at all.

  When I returned from the Christmas break, my line producer
, Henry Lange, told me he had gone into his office over the holidays to pick up messages and been surprised to see Bob Myer’s car on the lot. He was even more surprised when he went in to say hello and was told that Bob wasn’t in his Cybill office, that he was working on a new Carsey-Werner production starring Damon Wyans.

  I was stunned. So much for my getting sick of all his information. “I heard there was a memo about it right before the hiatus,” Henry told me.

  “Have you seen this memo?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, “but I’ll see if I can get a copy.” Until Henry showed me the memo, dated the week before Christmas, I had no idea my head writer was undertaking a new assignment that would mean being gone more than half the time (while continuing to draw 100 percent of his salary). It was unsigned, and no one would ever admit having been the author. With tears streaming down my face, I confronted him, asking if he was deserting a sinking ship. He didn’t dispute the time allocation but pledged his continuing commitment to my show. The only difference, he said, was that he would take my notes from the Monday table reading of the script and give them to the writers, then go to the Wayans show leaving the writers to work out the material.

  This was not a good idea. The people who created my dialogue, essentially translated my voice, needed to be hearing my notes directly from me. So I asked for several writers with whom I could communicate personally in Bob’s absence. He seemed to be okay with this and asked “Who would you like?” I chose Linda Wallem and Alan Ball, both of whom had been on the show the longest. Bob added two new writers, Kim Frieze and Alan Pourious, and the four choices felt like a good balance. The first story line they pitched involved having the gay waiter at the trattoria come out. I had pitched this story line months before to Bob and he had rejected it because he felt that gay characters coming out was happening so often on television that it was becoming a cliché. What I didn’t know was that Alan and Linda had pitched the same thing to Bob and had also been turned down. Bob bowed to the pressure of being outnumbered on this issue and we got our waiter coming-out episode after all. But when it came time to assemble the episode, it didn’t seem as good as the others. Editing had always been one of the things Bob did best. We had worked happily side by side for most of our collaboration. Perhaps in this instance he was biased by his original rejection of the material. I felt we needed the input of Alan and Linda who had actually written the episode, but Bob declared that it was unnecessary. I insisted.