Cybill Disobedience Read online

  Cybill Disobedience

  HOW I SURVIVED

  BEAUTY PAGEANTS,

  ELVIS, SEX,

  BRUCE WILLIS,

  LIES, MARRIAGE,

  MOTHERHOOD,

  HOLLYWOOD,

  AND THE

  IRREPRESSIBLE URGE

  TO SAY WHAT I THINK

  Cybill Disobedience

  Cybill Shepherd

  with Aimee Lee Ball

  From wholesome beauty queen to saucy cover girl, from heartbreaking movie star (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, TAXI DRIVER) to one of television's most loved comediennes (MOONLIGHTING, CYBILL), Cybill Shepherd is renowned as sassy, shocking and sexy. In CYBILL DISOBEDIENCE, she opens her heart with the wit and honesty of a star who's seen and knows it all.

  “A fun, dirt-flinging read” TOTAL FILM

  “A blistering autobiography” NEWS OF THE WORLD

  “Wild and wicked” WOMAN’S OWN

  “Amazingly frank” THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

  “Her finest piece of work to date” DAILY EXPRESS

  “A riveting, candid, fresh and self-revealing book.” LIZ SMITH

  “Gutsy.” SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

  “Nobody kisses and tells like Cybill Shepherd.” NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

  COPYRIGHT © River Siren Productions, Inc.

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA:

  Shepherd, Cybill

  Cybill Disobedience/ Cybill Shepherd with Aimee Lee Ball

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: HarperCollins

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Patty Cornelia Shobe Shepherd Micci, and my father, William Jennings Shepherd Jr.

  Thanks for falling in love.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One. “Who’s the Fairest of Them All?”

  Two. “Stay Puuuuure Vanilla”

  Three. “Going All the Way”

  Four. “And the Winner is...”

  Five. “Make Sure There’s a Lot of Nudity”

  Six. “White Boys Don’t Eat...”

  Seven. “I Need a Cybill Shepherd Type”

  Eight. “The Cybill Sandwich”

  Nine. “TV’s Sexiest Spitfire”

  Ten. “I’m Cybill Shepherd, You Know, the Movie star?”

  Eleven. “To Be Continued”

  Twelve. “We’ll Make This a Comedy Yet...”

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Los Angeles, California, Oct. 30, 1999

  6:17 P.M.- In 123 minutes I’m appearing onstage in my cabaret act at the Cinegrill of the fabled old Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. However, right now I’m on the Hollywood freeway in bumper-to-bumper traffic. At this pace, one inch every five minutes, I’ll just make it at eight-thirty in the year 2004.

  7:12 P.M.- Turning off Highland onto Hollywood Boulevard, we’re rear-ended by a station wagon.

  7:14 P.M.- I have no choice. Leaving my driver, Tom, to take care of that situation, I take off running, dragging behind me a rolling suitcase filled with my costume, makeup, and sheet music. I’m wearing a black leather cap, black high-tops, black jeans, and a bodywear top that I hadn’t exactly planned on publicly displaying in an area of town where this kind of cleavage can either get you arrested or hired. Heading west toward Mann’s Chinese Theatre, a greasy-looking wino calls out “C’mon, baby, gimme some of that!” Without breaking stride, I holler back, “Normally I would, but right now I don’t have time.”

  7:16 P.M.- Reaching the north corner of the intersection of Orange and Hollywood Boulevard, I look up and freeze in fear. My name is not on the marquee. This is not good. Could it be I’m here on the wrong night? I dart through traffic and leaping safely onto the far sidewalk, quickly glance down at my star on the Walk of Fame. I notice a wad of gum on it. I try to kick it off. Now I’ve got a glob of purple goo stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I yank off the shoe and hobble into the Roosevelt lobby.

  7:20 P.M.- To my enormous relief, I see a placard that says Cybill Shepherd is performing here tonight. Carrying my shoe, dragging my suitcase, I hurtle across the lobby and pound on the elevator button. The doors open almost immediately, but the elevator is full. I jam myself, my shoe, and my suitcase in anyway, gasping for breath. A woman behind me squeals, “Are you who I think you are?”

  “I certainly hope so,” I answer, trying to maintain some semblance of composure.

  7:25 P.M.- My assistant, Jason, anxiously paces at the door of my fourth-floor dressing room as I rush in and begin frantically unpacking my bag.

  “Your hairdresser’s stuck in traffic on the freeway,” Jason says, taking in my disheveled appearance, trying hard to hide his horror. The eighteen-hour makeup that gives my face and arms a flawless resurfacing has leaked out over everything in my bag: brushes, rollers, makeup, hairspray. It’s time for prayer, “Please God, let my hairdresser get here in the next five minutes.”

  7:29 P.M.- The stage manager knocks: “One hour, Cybill! Do you need anything?” I want to say yes, I need my hairdresser to be here. I need my makeup to be scraped out of the bottom of the bag, I need my sheet music to be dried out, but I can’t say any of that because my cell phone is ringing.

  7:30 P.M.- It’s my older daughter, Clementine, calling from the car. She and my younger daughter, Ariel, are stuck on yet another freeway taking our beloved black pug petunia to the vet. Obviously, Clementine and Ariel are going to be late for my show. I understand. They have their priorities too.

  7:35 P.M.- My twelve-year-old son, Zachariah, rushes in from the adjoining room with a look of consternation. He has forgotten until this very moment that tonight is the biggest party of the year, thrown by his best friend. “Can you please take me right now, Mom?” Before I can answer, the doorbell rings. It’s Cathy, my hairdresser. Right behind her is a woman I’ve never seen before, who grabs me by the arm and gushes: “Oh, Cybill, I can’t wait for your book to come out. My marriage is falling apart, my kids are driving me crazy, and I’m premenopausal too. I take one look around me--at my pleading son, my ringing cell phone, the accoutrements of my soon-to-be onstage self strewn all over the floor, and my only thought is But clearly I’m writing more of a How-Not-to book.

  8:20 P.M.- “Mmmraahhh. Mmmmmmrraaahhhh.” I’m vocalizing. While Cathy teases my hair, I console Clementine on the cell phone about the state of Petunia’s kidneys, and the stage manager pops in with the ten-minute warning while I try to remember the lyrics to “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

  8:30 P.M.- “Please, Mom, can’t you take me now,” Zach implores as I slop on some makeup and throw on my clothes.

  “I love you,” I say, trying to remember the lyrics to “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show,” “but Mom has to work now and I can’t go anywhere except onstage in about thirty-eight seconds.”

  8:33 P.M.- Outside the door of the Cinegrill, the stage manager hands me my microphone as I slip into my shoes. I’ve mollified Zach. He’s upstairs doing his homework. Petunia’s kidneys have resumed functioning. And Clementine and Ariel are on the way. The band jumps into the intro of “That Old Black Magic” as the announcer intones, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... direct from polishing her star on Hollywood Boulevard... Cybill Shepherd.

  Chapter One

  “Who’
s the Fairest of Them All?”

  PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER LIVED THROUGH AN EARTHQUAKE assume that one of its salient features is noise--the sounds of splintering glass, the symphony of physical destruction, the uncanny moaning of buildings as steel and wood and concrete are strained to some implausible degree. But that’s quickly over. Far more shocking is the eerie quietude: the power failure that eliminates the humming of air-conditioning and refrigerators, the absence of music, the traffic that has come to a standstill. It’s as if a mute button has been pushed on the world. That’s what it’s like when a television series ends. The lights go out, the people scatter, the magic has died. And the Cybill show did not go gently. I did not go gently.

  Over a thirty-year career, I had died before--cacophonous, public, psychically bloody deaths engineered at the box office and hands of critics--but this demise was singularly painful. I’d given my name and much of my identity to the series, blurring the line between real life and fiction, much more than is customary in television. (Murphy Brown was not called Candice, and the character didn’t grow up with a wooden dummy for a brother.) Every door on our CBS soundstage had a plaque with CYBILL inscribed inside a blue chalk star, just like the one used under the opening title that pans across the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Gunsmoke was produced on that stage for eighteen years, but there was no trace of iconic piece of American television history in the wings. As I drove off the lot for the last time, I knew how quickly my presence would evaporate, how soon the studio maintenance department would remove those plaques and the billboard-size CYBILL on the side of the stage.

  The eulogies were not kind. While the real reasons for the show’s demise were never made public, I was accused of professional paranoia and megalomania, of being, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously said of Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” I was labeled a jealous egomaniac, a self-promoting bitch, and a few other well-chosen words whose invocation would have gotten my mouth washed out with Camay in my Memphis childhood. I preserved all the poison-pen notices as a record, hard evidence of what I had survived and the proof that I wasn’t paranoid. I had clearly made people exceedingly angry, committed some unpardonable transgression. It was not the first time.

  What got me in trouble, what has always gotten me in trouble, was disobedience. On the Cybill show, I had been 57 different kinds of disobedient. From the beginning, my strategy was to challenge--always with humor--the conventional wisdom about “appropriate” subjects for television audiences. I was the first baby boomer to have a prime-time hot flash, and we skewered the injustice of a culture that pretends women over forty are invisible. I persuaded the writers to incorporate ideas from my own odyssey of discovery, like cultivating a reverence for three symbolic states of a woman’s life: maiden, mother, and crone. (Okay, okay, there’s a brief cheerleader phase in there that can’t be ignored.) I had the temerity to become a grandmother on American television, one experience not replicated in real life, but when my character cooed to her TV daughter, “And you even got married first!” it was a mocking reference to my own pregnancies before marriage. When my character’s two ex-husbands happened to be in the living room just as her date showed up on the doorstep, art was mirroring my life, as it was in an episode about male impotence (delicately referred to on the show as “failing to perform”).

  Strange to think that these themes were considered radical by network executives and reviewers, but women who represent the cultural gamut of sizes and ages aren’t too welcome in any media. After nearly a decade of murmuring “I’m worth it” for L’Oreal, I was fired because my hair got too old--approximately as old as I was. It’s okay for Robert Mitchum to get up early in the morning and look like Robert Mitchum, but it was not okay for me to wake up in the morning and look like Robert Mitchum. Fans are always asking why Bruce Willis and I don’t reprise our Moonlighting roles for the big screen. The answer is: studio executives would consider me too old for him now.

  With few exceptions, American television has become the Bermuda Triangle for female over forty. There was a wide variety of middle-aged women on the air in 1998, and they were all gone by 1999. Not only Cybill, but Murphy Brown, Ellen, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman all disappeared the same year. It’s true that these shows had been around for a while and may have run their course, so this chorus of swsongs takes on a deeper significance when we see the replacements: Felicity, Darma & Greg, Moesha, Ally McBeal, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and those very skinny Friends. No one over thirty need apply.

  But I had defied convention beyond my approach to Cybill’s subject matter. From the start, I let it be known that I wanted an ensemble cast, that everybody’s part should be great. I meant me too. I wanted the star of this show to have funny dialogue, clever story lines, and interesting dilemmas, without dumbing or dulling down the other characters. In insisted on having the grown-up female friendship that was the centerpiece of the show, a relationship with a side-kick rich in outrageous comic potential perhaps last tapped when Lucy Ricardo got Ethel Mertz to work in the candy factory. But that show was called I Love Lucy, not Lucy and Ethel. When I acted as an advocate for my character, trying to take the show in certain directions and expressing concern that the humor had become predictable, my efforts were viewed as territorial, the demands of an overblown ego afraid of being overshadowed. Three of my producers left, all rancorously: one said he had failed to save me from myself; another called me insensitive, bordering on anti-Semitic (rather ignoring that his replacement was Jewish and that I have two half-Jewish children); the third was dragged from my presence screaming “I’m a better person that you are.” The studio producing my show cut me off at the knees the minute I was off camera, arrogating my authority as executive producer. And my costar, handpicked for the role and richly rewarded for her good work with money and accolades, walked out on the rehearsal of the last episode.

  It was a clusterfuck of a year. Ten days after filming the last episode of Cybill, I found myself in the hospital with a gut-wrenching pain. A doctor I’d never seen before was telling me that I needed emergency abdominal surgery and that the scar wouldn’t be pretty. My intestines, it turned out, were twisted into something resembling fusilli marinara, and I can’t help making metaphysical metaphors about the gut being the site of intuition, about literally going under the knife at the same time that I was being cut and killed off on CBS. As it happened, my worst turncoat was much closer at hand, and a few months later, with stunning surgical precision (last metaphor, I promise) I was eviscerated by the man I thought would be sharing my dotage and my denture cup at the Old Actors’ Home. He was my lover, my friend, my colleague, and my supposed life partner. But he concluded his business with me, after making sure he was paid, and announced that our relationship was over. In the blink of a Saturday afternoon, he was gone.

  THE LONGEST, DEEPEST STREAK OF DISOBEDIENCE in my life has been about sex. Although the strictures of southern womanhood were honed to a fine edge in my family and I followed some of them flawlessly, I never observed the sexual canons. I did exactly as I pleased, and what pleased me was sex--early with a man I naively thought would be the love of my life, later with a dispensable succession of partners. Sex became politicized and endorsed by my generation, made safe with the advent of the Pill, even though such behavior was still a moral issue for lots of people, including my parents. I was a very, very bad girl, living out the epiphany of the 1970s for women: that sex and love aren’t necessarily the same thing.

  I don’t know if I’ve accrued more than my fair share of lost loves, but I’m something of a haunted person from the damage. Many times I was confused about the men I slept with, not knowing for sure whether I was genuinely attracted to them, or if the impetus was their attraction to me. I had to be kicked in the head by a few mules; now I’ve given up riding. In one of life&rquo;s little full circles, I have become a creature of the sexually retrograde 1990s, just as I was of the sexually voracious 1960s. S
ociety has been reindoctrinated to idealize monogamy and all the other virtues our mothers preached, but these days I’m sleeping alone. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, put on blue eye shadow, and try to learn country line dancing in front of the TV. At least there are other people on the video.

  Not until now have I realized how supremely important it was for me to confront and embrace my lifelong sense of profound loneliness, to stop making choices based on avoiding that demon. There’s loneliness in being the child of parents whose own problems divert their attention, as mine did. Now that a grown daughter has already left the nest and her younger siblings have their wings spread, I’m facing down the devil once again, wondering what will be next? Is it okay for a woman to be alone? Is monogamy necessary? Will I only feel safe with a partner if there’s a clearly delineated “yours”, “mine”, and “ours”? Can I trust someone who doesn’t have as much to lose as I do? And who would that person be?

  Three decades ago I fell in love with a married man who turned his life inside out because of me. He would be one of the most significant people in my life, a mentor and lifelong friend, but I was deemed a “home wrecker”, someone who showed up unbidden with self-aggrandizing motives that bordered on the immoral and violated cultural bylaws. Forever after, it seemed, I was slated to be the bad girl. People said, “She has no right to_____,” and fill in the blank. I decided I had to trust myself, which has led to some ungainly ups and downs. I’ve had two failed marriages and a few real-life soap operas. There are people in Hollywood who won’t return my calls or run screaming from the room at the mention of my name. I’ve been in a few films that could serve as paradigms of the form, and more than I care to count of the straight-to-video kind.

  I can’t escape the conviction that fate has something to do with appearance, with the perception of personality or merit based on veneer. I earned by living on my looks for a long time, and it taught me that the accident of beauty incurs resentment --why should something that requires no effort or skill be rewarded? People seldom let their envy show so blatantly as a teaching assistant in an English class who once gave me a C for a poem that her supervisor later upgraded to an A+. At eighteen my looks were as close to perfect as they would ever be, but I was deeply insecure because I knew that appearance constituted my sole value, and eighteen is ephemeral.