Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  I called Marcy Carsey and proposed that she keep Bob Myer on the new show full-time. We didn’t seem to need him anymore, and there was hostility all around for deserting us in the first place. I could justifiably never trust him again because he had broken a solemn promise that he would inform me about everything by not telling me he had begun working on another show.

  For the past year or so Alicia Witt had been acting like a spoiled brat, so pouty and truculent that when she wanted time off to have a bump removed from her nose, Bob Myer said, “Get rid of her,” and some writers asked if they couldn’t write her out of the show. When Peter Krause was hired to play Rachel’s husband, he and Alicia became romantically involved and they barely spoke to me.

  In April Carsey-Werner received a letter from Alicia’s representatives, detailing her “creative concerns” about “character development and participation” and calling me tyrannical, abusive and demeaning. But her fit of pique turned out to be fair warning for her demand that she have time off to make a film. When we granted her permission and worked around her absence, she wrote me a note, this time detailing my “generosity.” I found out later that she got a raise after complaining about me. I also found out, by reading it in the press, that Christine had asked for a secret meeting with The Suit and subsequently got a raise too.

  Chapter Eleven

  “TO BE CONTINUED”

  THERE ARE TWO OR THREE DAYS OF MY LIFE I’D LIKE to rewind and say “I need another take.” One was the day that Christine Baranski walked off the set during the rehearsal for what would be the final episode of Cybill.

  I recognized the first real death rattle of the show quite circuitously when I asked CBS for a raise. Word came back from the network: “We’re already paying through the nose for that show. She doesn’t get another penny.” The rumor was that C-W had made an extraordinary deal in which they didn’t pay any money on my show until it went into syndication, making Cybill disproportionately expensive for CBS. Two things are curious about this deal: it was made while Peter Torrici was president of CBS Television; he later left to join Carsey-Werner. And it was made at a time when C-W had enormous leverage, having developed a new show for Bill Cosby that had to have been a useful negotiating chip with any network and, in fact, landed on CBS. Toward the end of the 1998 season, Marcy Carsey had assured me that Cybill would be picked up. “CBS doesn’t have anything else this good,” she said, “but Carsey-Werner will have to eat dirt,” meaning the company would finally have to pay its share of the bills.

  Marcy suggested that the CBS brass wasn’t really watching my show, and that the two of us might take some tapes to The Suit to show him how good it was. That never came to pass, although now I’m not sure it would have made much difference.

  The Emmy Awards were on CBS that year, and the second highest rated Emmy broadcast of all time had been emceed by Jason Alexander and me three years before. My manager called The Suit and said, “Cybill would love to host again.”

  “Bryant Gumbel is doing it,” he said.

  Okay. Bryant Gumbel had a highly promoted magazine-format show premiering on CBS. But this was the first time since my show was on the air that my own network was airing the Emmys, and I wasn’t even asked to be a presenter.

  “We’re not having stars from old CBS shows, only new CBS shows,” said The Network Representative.

  The network had been screwing around with our time slot almost from the start, as networks are wont to do. Twice episodes of Cybill were pulled off the air to be supplanted by a new series starring Jean Smart of Designing Women, but both High Society and Style and Substance were dropped after one season. There followed pilots for Faith Ford (of Murphy Brown) and Judith Light (of Who’s the Boss?), neither of which captured the public imagination. But in 1998 there had been relentless preempting: In February Cybill was replaced by both the Nagano Olympics and a new Tom Selleck show called The Closer. (I read about this change in the Los Angeles Times and a few days later on a talk show, I “accidentally” misspoke and called it The Loser.) Three times my show was pulled during “sweeps,” those weeks in November, February, and May when the networks schedule their most aggressive programming in an attempt to generate high Nielsen ratings and demand the best rates from advertisers. It was hardly a demonstration of support.

  When it seemed manifest destiny that the series was on its way out, Bob Myer came to me and said, “Could you ask Bruce Willis to come on? It might help.” I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, but Willis’ answer came back: too busy.

  During the last hiatus week before the filming of what would be the final two episodes, Christine Baranski’s forty-eight-year-old brother dropped dead of a heart attack. She was on the East Coast when it happened, and we didn’t know if or when she was returning.

  I had no intention of shutting down production. As John Wayne says in The Searchers, I knew as sure as the turning of the earth that this would be my last season, and for the sake of the fans I wanted to get in as many episodes as possible. It was not about money--I would have gotten paid anyway. Despite the stress and infighting, Cybill provided the best part, the most fun, and the biggest creative opportunity I’d ever had.

  I called Marcy and I said. “I’ve got the best writing staff in the business. Let’s put them to work. They can have Maryann on the phone from out-of-town, and her part can be edited in later. We’ve done this many times before.”

  ‘’Do you think you can get a good show?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I wanted to do a story line where my character was a talk-show host with a venomous cohost; a role I thought would be perfectly cast with Linda Wallem, not only a writer but a side-stitchingly funny comedienne. Cybill Sheridan was to lose her job when the talk show is canceled. Joking around with Bob Myer, I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have a network executive make a pass at me and cancel the talk show after I reject him?” Bob gave a cynical little laugh and said, “Yeah, right.” A few days later he relayed a message from CBS that they would never air such a show, and from now on, all plot outlines were to be submitted in advance.

  “How did they find out?” I asked.

  “I felt that I had to tell the network rep,” said Bob. Good ol’ “trust me” Bob.

  The week before Easter, in order to avoid working on Good Friday (which would have been prohibitively expensive), we were planning to condense the usual five-day workload into four days. That Sunday I was awake all night with stomach pains, but I went to work on Monday morning and later phoned my doctor, who told me to come in right away for some tests. “You don’t understand,” I said, “this is probably the last episode I’ll ever do. I have to finish.” Then I took some Maalox. Every single person on the set was fried--the actors, the crew, the writing staff, all in the final stage of burnout--and I was pretty sure my symptoms were stress related.

  The final episode called for the talk-show host to break down on camera and walk off the set, leaving my character alone to fill time. My idea was to have Maryann make a grand exit by calling her onstage, from where she was watching in the wings, and have her perform one of her ranting, raving monologues. I also thought that if my character needed to fill another five minutes, we could give Cybill and Maryann an opportunity to sing together one last time. Ever conscious of budget restrictions, I looked on my list of public domain songs and came up with “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” During rehearsal I asked Christine to sing it with me. She said, “No, you do it.” When I finished the song, I turned around to get Maryann’s reaction but Christine was gone. Everyone on the set was acting unnaturally calm, as if the elephant in the middle of the room had laid a giant turd. When we got ready to do a second run-through, Christine’s stand-in had taken her place.

  “My, you look different today, Christine,” I said, trying to leaven the moment. Nobody laughed.

  The stand-in was looking at her feet. (Clearly abashed, she said, “Christin
e just left.”) I was later told that she went to the warbe department with The Executioner, who told her, “Just pick out anything you want--it will make you feel better.”

  Early in my career, I learned that an actor had better be able to stand and deliver when the director says, “Action.” The audience doesn’t know that you’re inhaling the rancid fumes from frying potatoes in a scorchingly hot Times Square coffee shop, or your leading man is pissed because you rejected his affections, or your costar has walked out in the middle of your song. Before I chose Christine to play Maryann Thorpe, I’d been warned: watch your back. And now there could be no lingering doubt about her feelings toward me.

  The night of the final show I greeted the audience during the warm-up with palms upturned, as if I were holding my grandmother’s silver tea set, and offering them a gift. I knew it was good-bye. “This is a season of miracles,” I said to them, “whether it’s Jesus Christ dying on the cross and rising from the dead, or somebody passing over your house and not taking your firstborn. I’ve been in the business thirty years. When you get a pilot okayed to go on the air, it’s a miracle. When you get picked up for a season, it’s a miracle.

  I really consider eighty-seven episodes a mighty miracle. So like the Lone Ranger said: ‘Hi ho, Silver, and away.”

  That weekend was Good Friday, Passover, and Easter. On Monday my manager let me know about a call from The Executioner. “Carsey-Werner is exercising its right to final cut,” he informed her.

  “Carsey-Werner has always had that right,” I said to Judy Hofflund, my manager, when she relayed this conversation. “Why is it being specified now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Please find out,” I asked.

  She reported back to me that The Executioner had initially replied, “We want to increase the odds that the show will be picked up for another season.” But when Judy persisted, he opened a window into the collective thinking: “In order to protect the rights and interests of Carsey-Werner, and those of Bob Myer and Christine Baranski, Cybill will no longer be involved in the final cut.”

  Calls to The Executioner and Bob Myer went unreturned for twenty-four hours. When Bob finally called me back, he said angrily, “We have not collaborated in weeks.”

  “I had no idea you felt this way,” I said. “I wish you had said something.”

  “Oh, come on, Cybill,” he said, “you haven’t even made eye contact with me all week.”

  He was right about that. I hadn’t trusted him for quite some time. “Is this about money?” I asked. “I’m willing to come down to the editing room right now.”

  “No, it’s nothing to do with that,” he said. “I don’t want to work with you. I didn’t want to come in and do any more work on your show, I wanted to stay home with my kids for Passover, but they made me come in and do the final cut. So I told them, “The only way I will do this is if Cybill isn’t involved.”

  So. Those were Bob Myer’s interests. Christine Baranski’s interests seemed to involve the increasingly plausible rumors that a series would be developed for her at CBS. Carsey-Werner’s interest was making sure the company did not have to “eat dirt” if the show was picked up.

  The following Sunday morning I’d planned to hike up in the Santa Monica Mountains with a girlfriend. I put on shorts and a T-shirt, my hair was in a ponytail pulled through a cap, and I was just applying sunblock when I started to feel pain in my abdomen. I crawled into bed wearing everything but my shoes and told my friend I needed to rest. As the morning wore on, the pain intensified. Roark piled me into the car and drove at illegal speed to the emerge room. A battery of tests revealed a spiking white blood count and an obstruction in my small intestine. As I was prepped for surgery, the doctor said, “I’m afraid it’s not going to be a pretty scar,” and Roark started sobbing.

  The doctor made a five-inch vertical incision below my belly button for exploratory surgery. As he passed the length of my intestines through his hands like a garden hose (a procedure called the delivery of the bowel), what turned out to be two twists, untwisted, but the tissue was swollen and bruised--as if I had been kicked in the gut by a horse. I knew the name of that horse. The crisis over, I was sewn back up and awakened woozy, with Demerol dripping into my veins, but otherwise remarkably among the quick.

  Once the Demerol stopped dripping, I was dealing with the kind of pain and enervation familiar to anyone who has gone through major surgery. Riding home from the hospital, I was thinking: I know I can make it, but is it twenty or twenty-five steps up to my bedroom? When Ariel and Zack got back from their dad’s house, I heard Ariel squealing from the kitchen, “Mommy, Mommy, where did you get this adorable puppy!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. We didn’t have a puppy. I realized how wrong I was when a minute later Ariel came pounding up the steps hugging what looked like a fur covered black slug. Later I learned that Clementine’s crisis mode involved purchasing (for $1,200 on my credit card) a female pug dog so pitifully ugly that Clem figured no one else would buy her. Petunia, as she was christened, didn’t look like she could possibly survive a week, her legs seemingly too small and skinny to support her weight. “I can’t take care of a puppy,” I yelled. “I just got out of the hospital.” I refused to hold her and insisted Clementine return Petunia immediately. My initial assessment of Petunia turned out to be correct: she had less than one functioning kidney, and the store offered us a $400 credit if we brought her back. But by then, all of us had fallen in love and wouldn’t allow her return, envisioning a pug-size version of the glue factory.

  About a week after I got home from the hospital, Roark called from the studio where he was working on the music for the last episode. “The show looks great,” he said, “but ‘Rockabye Your Baby’ was cut. And there’s a card at the end that says, “To be continued....”

  By mid-May, I was officially notified that Cybill was not on the fall schedule. For months I had the feeling that somebody was stalking me from behind with a plastic bag that would be placed over my head. I finally felt the moment of suffocation.

  The next day I called Marcy Carsey. “Now that the show isn’t picked up and nobody could possibly care one way or the other,” I said, “it would mean a lot to me if we could put my musical number back in the last episode.”

  “I thought it was in,” she said. “We talked about doing it as a tag. But it doesn’t make sense because of the ‘To be continued’ card.”

  “Can’t we take that off?” I asked. “There is no ‘To be continued....’”

  “Let me look into it,” she said. A few days later she called back. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “Christine is just sitting there in the background.”

  For eighty-seven episodes I always made sure that we had good “coverage” shots, so if an actor (including me) did something distracting or unhelpful to the scene, we could cut it out. I took particular care to do that on the last episode, since Christine had walked out during the rehearsal of my musical number. Out of four camera angles, there were two where she wasn’t seen. I’d like to think that if Marcy had actually seen the scene without Christine&rsuo;s scowling, she would have stood up for it. But she said, “No, I like it the way it is.”

  And that’s how the series ended: “To be continued.” Maryann Thorpe had her last rant, but Cybill Sheridan did not have her last song. When I was feeling well enough, I called Marcy and asked to recut the film with the song for my own personal archives.

  “I don’t see a problem with that,” she said agreeably, “especially if you’re paying for it.” And she suggested that she’d have The Executioner call me back.

  “I don’t trust him,” I told her.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “He’s crazy about you.”

  The Executioner’s voice was saccharine sweet. “Cybill darling,” he said, “I think I can do it for you cheap.”

  “How cheap?” I asked.

  “Not a penny more than twelve thousand dollars,” he sai
d, “but it’s going to take a little while. The footage is buried in the salt mines of Utah.” Along with say, my career?

  Paul Anderson, the show’s editor, had a different idea when he returned my call. “Is this piece of film for broadcasting?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “it’s just for me.”

  “Then it won’t cost you anything,” he said. “I have the whole thing on computer disk.” On a Saturday morning, I pulled into the front gate of the studio. I could see a maintenance man on scaffolding near the roof of Stage 19, spray painting over my name. But the twenty-foot-high CYBILL was such an intense bright blue that it was impossible to completely eradicate it. It will be a ghostly presence until the building is restuccoed.

  At its demise, Cybill was CBS’s highest-rated sitcom for women, number two for young adults, and we finished under budget. The people responsible for the death of a series doing that well should have their heads examined. After the show was canceled, Roseanne called me at home to commiserate. “I knew your days were numbered by the people they kept throwing at you,” she said. Roseanne had done a voice-over on my show, and I had always admired her strength.