First, though, I’d have to survive it.
* * *
The first exposure I had to the multifaceted force of nature that was Cybill Shepherd was just a couple of episodes after my arrival. We were doing a clip show at the time. Clip shows are what TV shows do when they are short on story ideas so they come up with some conceit which will allow them to string together various clips from past episodes. This system requires relatively little in the way of new filming and gives everyone—crew, cast and writers—a chance to catch their breath.
Well, the idea for this episode, “It’s a Wonderful Job,” was that Rona Barrett, the famous gossip maven, comes with her camera crew to do a story on the Blue Moon Detective Agency, because of all the “rumors” about David and Maddie not getting along. An amusing idea, twisting reality in that Moonlighting way to counter all the rumors about problems on the set with Bruce and Cybill, which were, of course, all true. The cold opening was particularly funny. Rona barges in after David and Maddie have had a fight and bangs on Maddie’s door. The door opens to reveal a distraught Maddie, eyes red and swollen, hair disheveled. She is visibly shocked at the appearance of Rona and the cameras. “Oh, Rona! Just a minute.” Closes the door. Stage wait. Then the door is opened and there stands Maddie, with a big fake smile, holding a sheet of scrim in front of her face.
“Hi, Rona!” Cut to opening credits.
This was really a marvelous inside joke. The scrim was a great gag, representing the camera filters that old-school cinematographers like our own Gerry Finnerman used on their actresses. They were intended to “soften” the features of actresses who were not, shall we say, in the first flush of youth. The effect, one of Gerry’s specialties going back to his work on the original Star Trek, was pretty dated by the time we were doing Moonlighting. The end result was risible, but some stars of a certain age still swore by it and Cybill was no exception. I was actually kind of impressed that Cybill would go along with a joke like this.
Well, we had finished this shot and Cybill was sitting there while cameras were moving around, apparently lost in thought, the scrim sitting on the desk in front of her. Suddenly her face darkened. She snatched up the piece of scrim and stared at it.
“Hey!” she yelled. Everyone froze.
She held up the scrim and her voice took on a menacing tone. “I just got it!”
* * *
My position as the new kid on Moonlighting was a peculiar one. The politics of the set were complicated then and they were rapidly to deteriorate as time went on. But everyone I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis—Bruce, Cybill, Allyce, Glen—all looked at me as someone as yet in no particular camp but who could, with a little care, be annexed into their own. I felt at times like a comet being pulled into one planet’s orbit, and eventually flung out again straight into a different planet’s orbit and on again.
I understood fairly quickly that there was friction between Bruce and Cybill—long before I witnessed any personally. That had happened some time after my arrival, when I was standing outside Maddie’s closed office door waiting for my cue to enter, while David and Maddie had a scene inside. Then the scene broke down and some sort of dispute began. It escalated rapidly, ending with Cybill flinging a briefcase against the door with a force that shook the set. The two disappeared (probably for the day) while the rest of the Blue Moon employees were hustled off the stage.
I realized there was a problem between Cybill and Glen during a visit to Glen’s office shortly after I had become a regular on the show. There had been problems roiling the set and we were having a cautious conversation about them. Glen, at one point, gestured behind me.
“I mean, look at that,” he said.
I turned and saw a dartboard on his office wall with Cybill’s face on it. I looked back at Glen with wild surmise, not sure what I should say.
“Does that help?” I asked.
“No!” he said, sadly. “That isn’t mine. That was her Christmas present to me. What do you do with a person like that?”
That was a question I was asked often by different people, about different people. I do honestly believe that Cybill struggled with a “boys’ club” mentality on the show. Glen had gone on the record as saying he created David Addison as a reaction to the so-called “Alan Alda–sensitive-feminist-male” type of character that was allegedly flooding the culture following the success of M*A*S*H. As a feminist myself, I hadn’t been struck by this phenomenon, but some swore it existed. Bruce and Glen were obviously close, which seemed natural enough, but whether Cybill’s outsider status was a result of that or whether it was an attitude she had brought with her, I was never able to determine.
The first time I had a real encounter with Cybill was shortly after I started on the show. It was a late-night shoot—we frequently shot fourteen- or even sixteen-hour days—and I had left the soundstage on my way to my trailer. Cybill was also outside and we practically ran into each other. I had never actually had a private word with her at that point. The night before, I had seen a recent episode in which her work was well done and this seemed like a good time to tell her so.
“Oh, Cybill,” I said, “I saw you in the episode the other night and—”
“Stop. Just stop,” she said, turning abruptly to me. “You’d better not say anything nice to me. If you say anything nice to me, I’ll probably cry.”
There was a brief pause while I considered what my next move should be. On the one hand, she didn’t seem remotely upset, so maybe she was just kidding. But you couldn’t know with Cybill. I thought about saying, “Okay, never mind!” and just continuing on my way but that seemed wrong. Or I could’ve tried the jokey route and said, “Something nice? You kidding?” but again, that seemed to strike a wrong note. As we stood there in the darkness, it was clear we were at an impasse. She wasn’t going anywhere and it was my line.
“Well,” I said carefully, “no, I was just going to say that I thought you did some wonderful work in it.” And with that, there was a gasp and a rush and the next thing I knew, she was in my arms, sobbing into my neck.
It probably didn’t last for more than ten seconds or so, but for the time being my world consisted mainly of unusual tactile sensation. She was dressed in some sort of shiny, satin-like fabric that felt to my hands like a prom dress. Her hair was coated in some kind of aromatic product that guaranteed a completely unmussed look no matter how many character actors she threw herself at. I was considerably shorter than she was and was conscious of her having to sort of bend over to reach my shoulder.
And there we were. It seemed a little like a tableau in a Victorian melodrama in which the ingénue flings herself into the arms of her estranged lover at the Act 3 curtain. I felt I should say something, like “There, there,” but again that seemed like an impertinent thing to say to Cybill Shepherd. I could imagine her pulling back suddenly and snapping, “How dare you say ‘There, there’ to me! Do you know who you’re talking to?!” So I contented myself with a couple of cautious pats on her shoulder pads. It was like patting a box of books I was shipping somewhere.
After a few moments, without another word, she pulled herself away and ran into her trailer. The Teamster whose job it was to sit outside her trailer on guard whenever she was there had seen everything that had transpired. I stared at him as if begging for confirmation that what I thought had happened had, in fact, happened. He merely stared back at me, his face totally void of expression. I figured he’d seen way odder things.
Later, I was called back to the set to finish the scene we had been shooting. Cybill was of course not called until the rest of us were in situ, and ready to roll. I had to admit to a little uneasiness. What would happen when she got there? Cybill was tough, she’d been around and people who crossed her did so at their peril. And yet, in a moment of vulnerability, she had revealed her innermost self to a mere character actor. What would happen when she saw me? Would I get a meaningful glance that would speak volumes? Perhaps a discreet brush of her han
d upon my arm? Maybe even a softly murmured “Thanks?”
I was prepared. After all, we had just shared an emotional moment and I would let her know with a wink, a warm smile or a squeeze of her hand that she could count on me. I would always be there.
Then she came sweeping onto the set, laughing with her makeup and hair people, beautiful, unaffected, her old self—and looked through me as if I wasn’t there. From that time until the last day I ran into her coming out of an elevator years later in Vancouver, there was never a hint that she had ever revealed anything to me that night. She may not have.
* * *
At the point that Glen Gordon Caron created Moonlighting for Cybill Shepherd she had already enjoyed a career spanning almost two decades. She had worked with Peter Bogdanovich, Elaine May, and Martin Scorsese among many others. I had gazed at her nude scene in The Last Picture Show at the Berkley Theatre in Michigan with a kind of awe. But by the time Moonlighting came around I frankly admired her as much for her resilience as her talent or her beauty. After all, beauty can fade and having talent is no guarantee of anything but a multi-decade career in Hollywood demands respect—especially for someone who started out dismissed as a model who got lucky. She had had a couple of career turnarounds and simply refused to allow anything to slow her down. Bruce was my age when she stepped out on that diving board in Last Picture Show, and I was in high school. She may have been tough and often impossible, but that kind of behavior isn’t created in a vacuum. When it came to casting the show, Glen had essentially two fights on his hands: he had to fight for Cybill because of her reputation and he had to fight for Bruce because he didn’t have one yet. Despite some off-Broadway and episodic television appearances, Bruce was mainly known as a bartender in New York at the same place John Goodman used to hang out.
Bruce had started out on the show as one of the boys. I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but everyone on the crew told me about it. Cybill was always impossible, they said. Cybill, they said, was always a bitch. (The men in particular told me that.) But Bruce—BRUCE!—BRUNO!!—he was one of us, whoever the “us” was they were referring to. In those early days, it was really difficult to tell where Bruce ended and David Addison began. Bruce partied. So did David. Bruce joked. David had a wisecrack for every occasion. Bruce was a swinger in the old-fashioned, pre-feminist, New Jersey–born-and-bred definition of the word. (One of his favorite jokes: “Why did the feminist cross the road? To give me a blowjob.”) He was a one-man Rat Pack. When he was in a good mood, it was as if the sun shone on Stage 20 exclusively. When he was in a bad mood, everyone else got in a bad mood, too, and then blamed Cybill for it. When he finally sobered up, later in the show’s run, he was generally considered a lot less fun. Everybody told me that, too.
He rapidly amortized his success on the show into a quirky and briefly notable venture into rock and roll as a fictional character named Bruno. This is pretty much the dream of every actor everywhere who isn’t satisfied just being an actor. As a rock star, Bruce was as highly qualified as any actor in the world who was pretending to be a rock star. Moonlighting showcased him in the famous “Atomic Shakespeare” episode, in which he performed a creditable cover of the Rascals’ old hit “Good Lovin’.” He got a band together eventually and did a highly publicized concert at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood. The concert, which was attended by the crème de la crème of hip Hollywood, was turned into a Spinal Tap-like documentary called The Return of Bruno, which featured painful cameos by legends like Ringo Starr, who claimed that without “Bruno,” the Beatles would still be electrician’s apprentices in Liverpool.
By then Bruce was riding high with Moonlighting, as high as he could get with a mere television show. Movies, as he had said to me that first day, were now his goal. His first two films, which no one remembers, were both directed by famed director Blake Edwards. Sadly, Blind Date and Sunset were two of Edwards’s weakest films, and the light comedic touch that served Bruce so well on television did not transfer successfully to the big screen. One more flop, and Bruce would’ve been relegated to television for life. At this point, fortunately, Joel Silver entered the picture and the third time was the charm. Die Hard buried Bruce’s false starts in movies forever. Unfortunately, it buried Moonlighting along with them.
I was never part of Bruce’s inner circle. I probably had two lunches with him in three years. He had a nickname for me (“Curt-eye”) but he had nicknames for everyone so I don’t think that meant much. I don’t believe I ever saw the inside of his trailer. My position with Bruce as a person was really similar to Viola’s with David: that of hapless sidekick.
An example: not many people remember this but Bruce started out as a Democrat. It was only when he reached the Joel Silver period and started hanging out with guys like Schwarzenegger and Stallone that he came roaring out of the Republican closet. But in the H. W. Bush campaign against Mike Dukakis, Bruce was still decidedly on the side of the angels. Most of young Hollywood at the time were going to be stumping for Dukakis all over the state by bus and plane. People like Robert Downey Jr. and Rob Lowe, Katey Sagal, Michael Gross, Moon Zappa, Elizabeth Perkins, Hart Bochner, LeVar Burton, Morgan Fairchild … it went on and on.
But Bruce Willis, Cher and Sally Field weren’t going to get stuck on a smelly bus with a lot of mad young actors for three days. So they just showed up before we all boarded to give statements to the press and look like they were boarding the bus. Then as the bus left they were sneaked off back to their cars and back to Malibu in time for brunch and a quick swim.
Bruce and I were sitting together before the scrum started. “Good to see you here, Bruce,” I said.
Bruce nodded, squinting off into the distance. “I’ll tell you, Curt-eye,” he said, “people might think people like us don’t have a right to get involved, you know, that we just take everything for granted. We make our money and go home. But it’s really time everybody wakes up to the direction we’re going in this country…”
And more and more in the same vein. Don’t recall the exact words, but it was stirring stuff and I was impressed. This election clearly meant something to Bruce. I was surprised, as I didn’t think I’d ever heard him speak at such length on any subject that didn’t have a dirty punch line. Finally the press were all brought up and the A-listers, like Bruce and Cher, were put through their paces.
As Bruce started to talk I had a feeling I’d heard what he was saying somewhere before:
“You know, people think that we just take everything for granted,” Bruce was saying into the mikes. “We make our money and go home. But it’s really time everybody wakes up to the direction we’re going in this country…”
As he went on and on I was thinking how funny it was that some actors can always find gullible schmucks like me they can run their lines with, while at the same time giving them the illusion of a personal moment!
* * *
For Christmas at the end of my first year on the show, I gave Bruce an album of pornographic thirties-era blues recordings called “Copulatin’ Blues” and Cybill a new book about Rodgers and Hammerstein. Both gifts were accepted without comment. The closest I got to having actual quality time with Bruce consisted of one night when we were shooting extensive scenes driving around Los Angeles together. The episode was called “Blonde on Blonde” and we wound up being stuck in this car until at least three in the morning. It was during this interminable night that he intimated to me that there had been one disastrously ill-conceived “thing” between him and Cybill, early on in the show’s run. While not going into explicit details (for once), he made it clear that that kind of mistake was one I should be sure never to make. I told him I didn’t think it would be an issue.
We were setting up at a little park just off of La Cienega and I was wandering around, waiting to be called to set. It was one or two in the morning and the neighborhood was deathly still—no one around. Then I saw a young woman walking toward me. When she saw me, she came up and asked what was go
ing on. It seemed odd that anyone who lived in Los Angeles could mistake a location shoot for anything else, and it turned out that she had indeed just moved here. We started chatting.
She was very pretty and was apparently just getting off work and had been driving home when she saw our trucks. She asked what show we were working on and I told her Moonlighting. She had heard of it but never seen it. I was getting coffee and offered her one and we wound up having an in-depth conversation about what it was like being transplanted to a strange city, and I was thinking how strange it was that I should come across someone like this in an empty part of town in the middle of the night. Sometimes my naiveté astonishes me.
We were strolling along when suddenly, Bruce appeared out of nowhere, walking past us on his way to his trailer. I was in the middle of saying something to my new friend when I realized she wasn’t beside me anymore. I looked back just in time to see her walking with Bruce into his trailer.
Whatever happened in his trailer that night took long enough that we were considerably delayed. Finally, about forty-five minutes later, Bruce emerged with her, she disappeared into the darkness and he slipped into the car beside me. As we were pulled into traffic to start filming our scene, he looked at me with that sly Bruce Willis smile, his eyes looking a little glassy.
“I’m tellin’ you, Curt-eye,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction. “I am never gettin’ married!”
* * *
Allyce Beasley, from the beginning, was something of an angel. She and I had become close almost instantly. At that point, she was beginning to struggle with the success of Moonlighting. It had all started so well, a show in which she had been cast as one of a colorful, unique threesome. It’s important to remember that, in American television, there really never was a character on a show quite like Allyce Beasley before Moonlighting. Afterward, there were as many as you could shake a stick at, all of them variations on the cheerful, sympathetic, sincere, loyal, quirkily attractive DiPesto. Now, as it progressed into its first season, she was finding her role being steadily diminished as Bruce and Cybill became the topic of conversations at water coolers all over the world and she was stuck doing her signature rhymes when she answered the phone. In addition, though I was unaware of it at the time, she was also struggling with a doomed marriage, which gave us something in common other than the sense that we were two children in a dysfunctional family, covering our ears and crying out “MommyandDaddyloveeachother!! MommyandDaddyloveeachother!!” while Mommy and Daddy screamed at each other and threw briefcases.
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