Cybill Disobedience

by Cybill Shepherd

  “Everybody’s treating me like a monster,” I said, “but I didn’t do anything monstrous.”

  “Well, I did,” Roseanne said. “I did everything they said I did, and I don’t regret any of it. I just wish I’d done more.”

  Maybe I should have. If so, my show might still be on the air. Orson Welles once told me a story about William Randolph Hearst. One day when Hearst was getting on an elevator an associate rushed in to join him. “Bill,” he said, “so-and-so is saying terrible things about you.”

  “That’s strange,” said Hearst, “I never did him a favor.”

  All through these difficult times, I was writing grateful notes in my journal about the support of “Howard Roark.” We’d never taken vows about “in sickness and in health,” but the way he rallied his support when I ended up in the hospital actually made me feel more sure of him. We had separate bedrooms in my home, an arrangement that has worked for me ever since I lived with Peter Bogdanovich, but we could hardly have felt more of an erotic connection. Looking back, I see how desperately I was trying to prove my lifelong theory that justified being sexual: if someone makes me feel this good, it must be love. Only in my forties did I begin to see that sex was scariest when I was vulnerable, when I admitted loving someone and waited to see if he would stay and love me back.

  When Roark and I went to therapy, I sometimes took a list of petty grievances, and he’d say, “Why do you have to bring up all these little things?” I thought that’s what therapy was for--to deal with ed.ttle things before they become big things. Five months after my health crisis, Howard said he had issues of his own and wanted to meet with the therapist in private. I paid for that too. Perhaps therapy taught him how to act loving when it wasn’t in his heart. His act ended on October 24, 1998. That Saturday, in the middle of our joint session, he said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Do what?” I asked. I thought by “this,” he meant therapy.

  “Go ahead and tell her, Howard, said the therapist knowingly.

  “My feelings have changed,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “What has happened?”

  “It’s over between us,” he said. “You wouldn’t even read that book on objectivism that’s been sitting on your coffee table for months. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

  I felt as if the familiar figure sitting across from me had suddenly sprouted fangs and turned into a werewolf. “All those declarations of love-- were they all lies?” I asked.

  “No,” he said glumly.

  “What did you ever love about me?” I asked.

  There was a long pause, way too long. “Well, you’re a good person,” he said.

  “Who’s going to tell my kids?” I asked.

  “I will,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Now,” he said.

  The therapist spoke up. “Cybill, I don’t want the kids blaming you for this. Would you like me to come home with you?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I said.

  We gathered around the dining room table with my three children. “This relationship between your mom and me isn’t going to work,” Roark said and started to sob. Whenever he cried in the past, I had thought: Great, he’s more open to his emotions than most men. But this time he just seemed to feel sorry for himself. We sat in stunned silence watching him. Clementine started to cry and said, “Except for my father, you’re the man I’ve known the longest.” Then she turned to me and said, “Men always leave.” Roark grabbed his jacket and ran out of the room. Crying myself, I apologized to my children for introducing this man into their life. Ten-year-old Zack asked the therapist, “Does this happen often in your work?”

  Somehow the family migrated together outside into the sunshine. When I looked down at my feet, I was wearing socks but no shoes, something I had constantly chided my kids about. We forgot about Zack’s tennis lesson, scheduled on the court in our backyard, until we heard the bell at the gate. Zack let him in.

  “How are you?” the pro asked.

  “Fair to middling’,” I said cheerlessly. You can’t tell someone who’s come to give your child a tennis lesson that your life has fallen apart.

  Afterward somebody said, “Let’s go see Howard’s room,” and we all crept down the hallway, opening the door as if peering over a precipice and looking at the chasm left by an explosion. There at the end of the bed, he had left behind a purple plastic yo-yo Ariel had given him for Christmas. And then I remembered that several days earlier, he had called my business manager and asked to be paid in full for his participation on the Cybill show CD, even though his work was not completed. I had sensed that he was low on funds and okayed the entire payment. I hadn’t sensed the real reason.

  My mother had always defended her marriage to my father as perfect. I didn’t find out the truth about his infidelities until I went through the deepest kind of betrayal myself. And I began to wonder: was my life with Roark a model my parents had shown me, presenting to the children and to myself a fantasy good man? That’s what wives were supposed to do. Was I a care taking facitator, as my mother had been, or just simply fooled? I had told my children: he can’t show the affection he feels for you, can’t hug you or buy you presents, but he’s a good man. He’ll always be there. He’s solid as a rock. We’d been living with the delusion that this man was honest and loving and committed. Once the impostor left, we all seemed to relax, and my own mother-daughter war had ended. I no longer felt that I had to defend my self in her presence or dodge her zingers. What finally brought us together was that she had been left flat, and so had I.

  Comedy writers talk about “schmuck bait”: it’s when a joke is set up to convince the audience that the actor is playing it straight so the punch line is an even bigger surprise. During my illness, Roark’s presence was schmuck bait. He gave me a few months to get better, but once I had physically recovered and he received his last paycheck he bolted. Had he stayed, I would have found out eventually that his love and support were just for show, but he made a preemptive strike. I thought I understood how relationships worked out--I had my list, didn’t I? But I was wrong. All I know is how not to do it.

  “Howard Roark” lives with his mother now. I know this because he sold at least one story about our time together to a tabloid, trying to embarrass me with intimate revelations and falsely claiming I owe him money. In the therapist’s office, he declared that he was leaving because I hadn’t read a particular book. Nine months later there would be a more complete list of grievances in the paper, including the complaint that I was selfish in bed. When I saw his most recent narrative detailing my fantasy about sex with two women, I tried to warn my ex-husband, who was on vacation with Ariel and Zack, to stay away from newsstands and supermarket checkout lines. Who knew that a Pizza Hut in Kentucky would sell such periodicals? My twelve-year-old son called saying, “I’ve seen the article and it’s really gross.” Long pause. “Mom, a threesome?”

  The possession of celebrity looks so desirable from the outside that observers tend to discount the attendant problems, but it’s hard to underestimate the celebrity’s life can become a marketable commodity. I’d made that bargain with the devil: if I can only become rich and famous for doing what I love to do, I’ll accept the trade--off, whatever it may be. I thought I’d be able to assimilate the invasion of privacy, the opportunism, the cruel gossip (which is never the truth: I’m both better and worse than what the public believes). It does pain me to know that so many people accept the National Enquirer as gospel, just as my grandmother did. (Moma would call my mother anytime there was a story about me, and no matter how outrageous the claims, she’d say, “I can’t believe Siboney would do that.” When told it was hooey, she’d say, “Oh, I don’t think they’d print it if it wasn’t true.”)

  When someone leaves, his ghosts cling to every corner of the house. On the wall outside my bathroom, we had recently measured and marked in Sharpie black ink the heights of the w
hole family with me just above Roark at the top of the chart. Noticing this memento mori after he left, I grabbed a red Sharpie off the nightstand to scribble it out, which only made matters worse. When I went away for the holidays, I asked my assistant to hire the best painter in the state of California and erase every trace of Roark’s name.

  Chapter Twelve

  “WE’LL MAKE THIS A COMEDY YET...”

  ONE OF MY FAVORITE SONGS BY MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER relates a universal sentiment, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” Having been squished my fair share, it’s time to take stock. If relationships, either personal or professional, keep ending the same way, you’d better examine your own culpability. (“Nothing is more terrible to a new truth than an old error,” said Goethe.) After ten years of therapy, four hours a week, I have deconstructed my behavior in every conceivable way, scrutinizing motivation, concerns, the possibility of an unconscious agenda--an excruciating process. Let’s see what I bring to the barbecue.

  I know this: in a company town, I have never been a company girl. I am too blunt and forthright. I will make noise and take chances. All my life I’ve been diving off cliffs with wings that I had no assurance would keep me aloft, and I’ve crashed any number of times. I have adapted behaviors that are maladroit, flippant, or unedited. I’ve sabotaged other people’s marriages, mortgages, promises, diets. I’ve been ignored or dismissed because of the way I look, and when I think I’m not being heard, my anxiety level rises like the mercury in a thermometer. Growing up, I learned a set of people skills that favored presenting a problem in a flattering light or couching it rather than resolving it, and it’s worked both for and against me. I was trained in the southern way of flirting, valued solely for its promise of sexual favor without obligation to deliver. I have definitely taken it to another, more public and more blatantly sexual level. It was, after all, the subtle erotic threat on the cover of Glamour that Peter Bogdanovich had recognized, and risqué or ribald innuendo has always been part of my persona and humor, as it was for Mae West. Perhaps the men I worked with so swimmingly at the beginning came to resent a “mere” sexual being having and using power. Perhaps there was some more complex combination of boredom and burnout, cultural or regional misunderstanding, and the kind of sexual politics that makes many men revert to the default position of implied male superiority.

  I come from chicken farmers who made it to the country club, and I always felt a kind of numbing despair that my mother was limited to the social imperatives of that set, where the only achievement that counted for a woman was being a homemaker. I’ve come to understand the inevitable repercussions for the daughter of such a woman. If a mother’s life feels uneventful, despite her pleasure in and support of a child’s success, she may resent seeing a daughter achieve beyond anything she felt she had the right to expect for herself. But outright envy is unacceptable, so she over-identifies with that daughter, imagining that you and she are one and the same, expecting you to live out her dream. You will inevitably fail to live it exactly as she would have wanted.

  Buddhists believe that narcissism is a stage on the way to enlightenment. It’s appropriate for a child, who should feel like the center of the universe. Ideally, a mother should hold a mirror up to her child, saying, in effect, “Here you are.” My mother couldn’t do that for me because her mother hadn’t done it for her. The image my mother reflected back to me in the mirror was herself, and I never saw me--the good, the bad, and the ugly. That’s a setup for misery, disappointment, and self-doubt. I’m not sure I know how to have a relationship. I’m not sure I know how to maintain friendships. But I do know how to mirror my children back to them.

  My mother’s competitive edge went away with Howard Roark. When you find a new trust and understanding with a parent, it’s like an unexpected gift. I’ve always wanted to be closer to my brother and older sister--we have that irrevocable common ground of childhood--but our life experiences have taken us in such different directions. There’s an emotional gulf that we haven’t been able to navigate in adulthood; money and fame seem to impede the strengthening of these fragile relationships. Ancient rivalries and jealousies are resurrected, played out on a different stage. To my sister, a big-hearted country girl, I may always be the “perfect” blonde child plopped down in the middle of her family, inviting odious comparisons. To my brother, a talented filmmaker, I have been both appreciated and resented as a conduit to business opportunities. Each of us has a litany of grievances, which someday I hope to ameliorate.

  My grandmother spent the final years of her life confined to a nursing home and heavily sedated. I avoided visiting her because she didn’t recognize me and couldn’t even acknowledge my presence. But she hung on despite all medical prognostications, and one day I was struck with the thought: Is it possible that she’s waiting to die until I come back to say good-bye? Sometimes when you ask such a question, you’re really answering it. When I went back to Memphis that Christmas, I told my mother I’d like to spend some time alone with Moma, but I didn’t tell her what I was going to say--I didn’t know myself. Holding my grandmother’s hand, I spoke to her.

  “I wish you could have protected me more,” I said, “from the discomfort I felt around Da-Dee, from my parents’ drinking, from the message that women were little more than adornment. But I know you did the best you could. And it’s okay, because you’ve given me so much.” She died a week later, on New Year’s Day. I hadn’t seen many people in coffins, but my grandmother looked so beautiful that I approached the undertaker (who looked young enough that he might outlive me) and said, “When I go, will you do me?” Moma had prepared an un-eulogy called “No Sad Tears for Me” that she asked to be read at the funeral. “I have done these things,” it said. “I have held a daughter’s hand, I have seen the earth from the sky, I have eaten new white corn on summer evenings, I have heard music that sweetened my heart, I have loved a man and was loved in return....” It only made us all cry more. I just hope it wasn’t plagiarized.

  IN THAILAND, THERE ARE TEMPLE DRAWING OF exquisite young men and women embracing, right next to figures in the exact same position as skeletons--an acute reminder of the ephemeral nature of love and beauty. Outside of my family, I became accustomed to gestures of warmth from people who were responding to my appearance, knowing that the gestures could be as transitory as the gift of beauty. The greatest leap of faith I ever had to make was trusting that love or friendship was predicated on something other than my looks. Beauty tends to be isolating, and people have no qualms about using you because surely you’ve used that beauty to get where you are. In an annoying shampoo commercial, a vacant young woman intones, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” There’s no way not to be hated. That’s why the evil Queen wanted Snow White dead. Now, whenever people refer to me as “glamorous,” I suspect that they’re setting me up to tear me down. They needn’t have compassion for someone who’s glamorous because she’s had it easier. And in some ways, no doubt, I have.

  THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF EXCUSES FOR SPITE AND intolerance, and no one is holding any telethons for fifty-year-old blue-eyed blondes. Last year in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, a publication distributed free at markets, there was a letter to an advice columnist from a man making demeaning, stereotypical comments about Jewish women. (“Gentile women, by and large, are just happy to be with you. Jewish women have to win.”) Illustrating the column was a photograph of me with a caption reading “A prime example of a non-Jewish woman?” Just because in 1972 I played the archetypal shiksa in The Heartbreak Kid who steals holdinge Jewish husband from his wife does not give the publication the right to use my image to represent everything Jewish women are not. This is a terrible thing to do to my son and daughter, who will have their bar- and bat-mitzvah next year.

  Perhaps I have karmic dues to pay for my participation in the cult of emaciated buffness. I had the serendipity of modeling during a temporary interlude between Twiggy and Kate Moss, when it was
actually okay for women to look as if we ate and enjoyed life. I was never emaciated myself, but I did play a role in the tyranny over women about body image, and little has changed in the cultural perception of the idealized female form. When will it ever be okay not to be Barbie? When will we love our female bodies, in all their different sizes and shapes? If we can’t do it when we’re young, we’ll have a hell of a time doing it when we’re older. And dare I resist the lure of cosmetic surgery?

  This is what fifty looks like, so far not surgically corrected (but never say never). Ancient artifact that I am, my pictures are still on the makeup counter at the drugstore, so I know the response to my lamentations may be: shut up, Cybill Shepherd. But I still have to confront the bathroom mirror--no retouching, no flattering lighting. As an aging beauty in America, I have an interesting perspective. I’m ready for my Shelley Winters parts now, and I have less vanity than you can imagine. My kids beg, “Before you pick us up, could you please comb the back of your hair?”

  I’ve chosen to work in a field that has brought me success and money, much of it by allowing strangers to know the most intimate things about me and by having every private moment examined with the precision of gemstone cutting. Demi Moore was castigated for employing three nannies on a movie set to care for her three children. Nobody asked about Bruce Willis’ whereabouts or the boundaries of his responsibility. The list of what’s required to be considered a good enough father is about pinky length, but the list for a good enough mother is the interstate. There are times when I don’t do a scene as well as I could because I’ve been up all night with a sick child, and there are times when I miss one of my kids’ basketball games because I have to be on the set. Interviewers have always asked me, “How do you do it all?” The truth is, I only appear to be doing it all. Every day I fail, but I’ve developed the ability to improvise. I have to force time to be relative; I have to make five minutes count for five hours. Those balls that I seem to be juggling so effortlessly are, in fact, dropping all around me. What the public sees are moments of perfection, all the balls in the air, frozen for that instant, like in a still photograph.