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Cybill Disobedience - полный английский текст

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  • Аннотация:
    Мемуары Сибилл Шепард, актрисы сериалов "Детективное агентство "Лунный Свет"" и "Сибилл". Полный текст НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ.
   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
  
  COPYRIGHT ? CYBILL SHEPHERD
  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
  ONE "Who"s the Fairest of Them All?" 5
  TWO "Stay Puuuuure Vanilla" 13
  THREE "Going All the Way" 37
  FOUR "And the Winner is..." 5
  FIVE "Make Sure There"s a Lot of Nudity" 85
  SIX "White Boys Don"t Eat..." 103
  SEVEN "I Need a Cybill Shepherd Type" 149
  EIGHT "The Cybill Sandwich" 189
  NINE "TV"S Sexiest Spitfire" 199
  TEN "I"m Cybill Shepherd. You Know, the Movie star?" 233
  ELEVEN "To Be Continued" 271
  TWELVE "We"ll Make This a Comedy Yet..." 285
  Acknowledgments 293
  
  
  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 at the 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 swan songs 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"s little full circles, I have become a creature of
  the sexually retrograde 1990s, just as I was of the sexually voracious 1960s. Society 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.
  Sometimes I wore my looks like a mantle with a certain degree of discomfort.
  People, especially men people, happily inconvenience themselves for a woman so
  marked, but she"ll pay one way or another. I always knew that the power I gleaned from
  beauty dwarfed any other kind of achievement. No matter how hard I worked, I was
  credited only for the one thing that was effortless. The looks I was born with meant that I
  never lacked sexual partners but also meant that I could rarely discern who really cared
  about me. I learned from Yeats: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone
  and not your yellow hair."
  The vain, murderously envious queen in Snow White poisons the young beauty
  but still doesn"t feel safe when told that her rival is dead. She continues to look in the
  mirror, asking, "Who"s the fairest of them all?" I grew up with this fairy tale and with the
  presumption of female envy. My mother absorbed this common cultural belief and
  passed it on to me, but I"d like to think that I"ve protected my daughters from it. When I
  look at my eldest now, I know absolutely who the fresh young beauty is, without
  begrudging her the role. I"ve already played it, and I"d prefer not to play the evil queen,
  in life anyway.
  
  THERE"S A DIXIE CHICKS SONG WITH A WISE AND placating lyric that
  goes, "You gotta make big mistakes." I"ve made my share, and I ask for no jeremiads.
  I"ve been blessed with success in public life. Early on I fed readily and greedily off the
  seductive culture of narcissism and celebrity worship that abandons and replaces its
  acolytes at warp speed. Sometimes I"ve failed to hold myself accountable. Now I"m
  looking at my own trajectory, hoping to discern Cybill the Good and Cybill the Bad,
  trying to understand in order to be understood. I want to figure out how I became one of
  the Furies-me, the same person voted Most Cooperative at Camp Pickwick in 1959.
  Some people have asked why I"d subject myself to the scrutiny of public
  confession when there are so many reasons not to; it"s painful, I"m too young, I will be
  harshly judged. But events of the last year, symbolized by the not-so-pretty scar that
  means I"ve worn my last bikini, have forced me to realize that there are no guarantees
  about our time on the planet. Last year I went on Good Morning America, discussing
  menopause and a recently published list of sex symbols over the age of fifty. Just shy of
  my fiftieth birthday at the time, I didn"t qualify, but if I"m not on the list next year, I"m
  coming after them. (Hell, if Judge Judy can make the cut, I"d better be included.) Just
  before we went "live" with the interview, Diane Sawyer leaned over to me and said, "If
  you had to choose one song to sum up your whole life, what would it be?" I frantically
  mused for just an instant before the song popped into my mind: "For all we know, this
  may only be a dream; we come and go, like a ripple in a stream..."
  So I"d like to tell my story now. I"ve actually been doing autobiography in front
  of the public for along time, but the standards of memoir are daunting. Memory is
  revisionist and selective by nature, and it is tempting to edit out the nasty, unflattering,
  what-was-I-thinking parts. "Tell it all Mom," my elder daughter advised me. (Hell, no,
  I"d end up in jail.) I"ve given sobriquet to a few key players who don"t deserve to have
  their names spelled right. This is how I remember it. And if my mother objects to any
  reminiscence in these pages...it didn"t happen.
  
  Chapter Two
  "Stay Puuuuure Vanilla"
  
  THERE IS AN IMAGE ENGRAVED IN MY MEMORY VIVID enough to
  evoke a smell (the red vinyl of a well-used armchair) and a sound (the flick of a cigarette
  holder against a metal ashtray): it"s the image of a twelve-year-old me, gangly and no
  longer a towhead, much to the chagrin of my mother, who seemed to greet the natural
  darkening of my blonde hair as a dereliction of filial duty. Also to her dismay, I was
  utterly contemptuous of most girlish playthings but fanatically preoccupied with horses.
  The school librarian looked squint-eyed at me for years, suspecting I"d stolen a copy of
  Olympic Horseman (I had), and I saved up the nickels allocated for orange Creamsicles
  to buy miniature plastic horses and Black Stallion books at the Poplar Plaza Shopping
  Center. At times I morphed into equine behavior myself, cantering around the house with
  a jump rope in my mouth and a bath mat belted on as a saddle. I would make a
  steeplechase out of the hedges separating the yards on our street and neigh in response to
  questions. But owning a horse was an extravagance far beyond the middle-class means
  of my parents, for whom canned asparagus constituted a luxury. The necessary deep
  pockets were worn by my grandfather.
  We called him Da-Dee (accent on the second syllable), and my grandmother was
  always Moma, resistant to the notion of being "Grandma" and relegating her own
  daughter to the more formal "Mother." Outside of the family, they were Cy and Tommy,
  both nicknamed for their fathers. Norville Shapleigh "Cy" Shobe, the son of Missouri
  poultry farmers, was an electronics wizard, just a boy when he made front-page news in
  Kansas City by assembling the first homemade radio in the state-strangers from half a
  dozen counties drove right up to the porch in four-wheeled surreys to hear the raspy
  wonder of it. When the family moved to Arkansas, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old
  Gladys "Tommy" Toler, whose father owned a dry goods store, and married her within
  the year. (At the time, the term child bride was more custom than pejorative.) To the
  newlyweds, Memphis was The City, where the delta was said to begin in the gilded lobby
  of the Peabody Hotel, and it was the only place for a young man with prospects.
  My grandfather was named for the hardware store where his father earned the
  money for the chicken farm, and it was with a letter of introduction from Mr. Shapleigh
  that he got a job interview in Memphis at Orgil Brothers Hardware, agreeing to be a
  salesman only if they would agree to sell radios. From there he started his own business
  distributing wholesale appliances, and it provided well: in 1950, the year I was born,
  Shobe, Inc., grossed $5 million, a fortune half a century ago. (The company logo, a
  rooster boasting "We"re crowin" because we"re growin"," was immortalized in various
  shades of red stained glass on the porch door of my grandparents" house.) It was this
  honeypot that could yield the horse and riding lessons I wanted. "You go on into the
  sitting room," Moma told me in a conspiratorial whisper, "and love up on Da-Dee"s neck.
  He"ll give you anything you want."
  My grandfather was a lank and looming man, the angular contours of his body
  seeking out the familiar dents and curves of the red easy chair that served as his sanctum
  sanctorum in the second-floor study. His cherished pastimes were shooting and flying,
  and he sat beneath a gun rack and a pilots" flight map of the United States. There were
  hints of tobacco and chicoried coffee in his clothes as I climbed onto his lap, ludicrously
  big for such an assignment, and nuzzled against his neck with my request. At first he
  responded with a low growl, more theatrical than alarming, to my "pretty please with
  sugar on top," and his right had tapped ashes off the Camel in its crystalline holder. Then
  the tiny pings stopped, and his muscular hands tightened around my skinny arms. He
  wouldn"t answer, and he wouldn"t let go. He held me down on this lap, his body
  stiffening. In some inchoate way, I knew to run from such an encounter, although I didn"t
  recognize that it represented an exchange of money for feminine charms and wouldn"t
  know until much later what such a transaction was called. All thoughts of a horse
  vaporized as I managed to wriggle out of his grasp. I ran from the room, his muffled
  laughter mocking my retreat.
  Love up on Da-Dee"s neck. More than any other fillip of memory, those words
  summon up the paramount message and mandate of my childhood: I was pretty, and my
  looks were a kind of currency. Nobody would care what I did, what I said, what I read,
  but beauty had magical powers, a kind of legerdemain especially effective with men. It
  was like being taught double-entry bookkeeping. At that moment I was to hug my
  grandfather not because it was good to express affection but because I had blonde and
  blue-eyed assets that might get me a horse.
  Rather ironic, considering that I was not even supposed to be a girl. My mother
  had miscarried twice in the four years since my sister was born (christened Gladys, for
  Moma, but called Terry). Her unexpected pregnancy was ascribed with a sacred duty to
  provide my father with a son, but it was deemed a washout the moment the doctor peered
  at me and said, "It"s a girl." (When Mother did produce a male heir four years later, she
  triumphed in a rare practical joke on my father, bringing my brother, Bill, home from the
  hospital with a pink ribbon Scotch-taped to his bald head-small "up yours" to the
  intimation that boys were better than girls.)
  Perhaps I sensed in vitro that my gender would come as a major disappointment
  to my family. I was in no hurry to enter the world and literally backed in, rear first (never
  the smallest part of my anatomy). "You were easy to deal with," Mother told me, "until
  you were born." She had gone to the Methodist Hospital when her water broke, naturally
  expecting contractions to start. When nothing much happened, she summoned my father
  from the clouds of cigar smoke in the waiting room and, in true iron butterfly spirit, went
  to have her hair washed and set at Gould"s Beauty Parlor. She had just ordered mint tea
  and selected a pleasing tangerine frost for her nails when my position in the womb, called
  a frank breech, became apparent and progressed to a harrowing labor, for which Mother
  has yet to forgive me. I was born with a birth defect, a nerve tumor on the back of my
  neck that had to be removed. (Ironic that someone who would earn a living projecting an
  image of female flawlessness would get the first of a lifetime of scars before even leaving
  the hospital.) I remained "Girl Shepherd" for several days while my family debated what
  to call this female child, finally justifying my presence by combining the names of my
  grandfather (Cy) and father (Bill).
  Well before I could have articulated it, I was instinctively aware of my assignment
  in the family: to be perfect. If I couldn"t be a boy, at least I could be the uber-female:
  pert, polite, charming, compliant, and above all, lovely to look at. (It was implicit that
  my sister was excused from this commission, being bigger, brawnier, and brunette.)
  Certainly I was not to say or do anything controversial or unladylike. "Siboney," my
  grandmother would intone, making a pet name out of the unofficial national anthem of
  Cuba where my grandparents often vacationed. "Don"t go too far to the left or too far to
  the right. Stay in the middle of the road. Stay puuuuure vanilla." I wore white cotton
  gloves with smocked floral dresses. Against my vehement protests, my hair was tortured
  into a frightening mass of deep-fried curls, which was considered more feminine than my
  straight hair with the recalcitrant wave in back. My godmother, Marie Hay, asked me to
  select my silver pattern ("Chantilly") when I was ten, and I learned to dance by standing
  on my father"s black and white wing tips, swaying to "Just the Way You Look Tonight"
  while my mother primped for an evening out. There was a limited choice of destinies for
  a girl like me, with the distinct suggestion that life"s ultimate achievement was to be
  anointed the Maid of Cotton, fetching symbol of Memphis"s most important industry, or
  (spoken in reverential hushed tones) Miss America, a possibility that might have justified
  being born female.
  All of which conflicted with my natural inclinations. I jumped from the highest
  branch of trees, hiked the old Shiloh military trail, and used a key worn on a lanyard
  around the neck to tighten metal skates, which left me with perennially bleeding elbows
  and knees. I declined to brush my hair until compelled to do so, and wore the same pair
  of tattered overalls until they disappeared from my closet (my mother quietly consigned
  them to incineration). To avoid getting dressed, I streaked naked next door and sat on the
  neighbors" porch swing until my mother by assembling what I thought to be a decorous
  outfit: a pink dress with puffed sleeves and my favorite red sneakers. "Look Shep," she
  called to my father, as if I had placed a lampshade on my head, "she picked this out
  herself." My grandfather would grasp my hands with unedited distaste for my gnawed
  cuticles, saying, "You can always tell a lady by her nails." I rejected all dolls, especially
  the busty new Barbies coveted by my prepubescent crowd, all of us still wearing Fruit Of
  The Loom T-shirts over flat chests, and when my brother got electric trains (derisively
  telling me, "That"s for boys"). I sulked for weeks and contemplated various means of
  derailment. (He also got a cross-country turnpike set, a Rin Tin Tin badge, and a Fort
  Apache. I got talcum powder and a bath mitt).
  The tomboy temperament that vexed my mother helped forge a bond with my
  father, even after my brother came along. He endorsed my interest in sports, didn"t think
  it was weird to toss a football with me on the front lawn, gave me a baseball glove, and
  shared the sacrament of rubbing the leather with oil and shaping it by letting it spend the
  night cupping a ball. He even exulted when I beat the crap out of a bully named Chris
  Crump (as much crap as a whiffle bat could extract), for holding my little brother"s hand
  in an anthill. In those years when I was a surrogate son, my father let me accompany him
  on Saturdays to the warehouse he ran for Da-Dee, when it was quiet enough to roll a
  secretary"s swivel chair up and down the aisles. He taught me to swim by buckling on an
  orange Mae West and dropping me off the end of the pier at my grandparents" summer
  home.
  For the great French writer Marcel Proust, the door of memory was opened by the
  taste of a madeleine cookie. For me, it"s Dr Pepper: one sip, and I am returned to that
  summer house on a slender tributary of the Tennessee River in Alabama called Shoals
  Creek. It was built in the 1930s as a hunting lodge on a remote promontory near a forest
  of cedar, pine, and burr oak, but the original owner felt too isolated and sold the five-acre
  property to my grandfather for the 1950 bargain price of $35,000. As a toddler who
  couldn"t pronounce the letter l, I called it the "yake house," and the moniker stuck with
  the whole family. On the four-hour drive from Memphis, we stopped at filling stations
  with green jars of sour pickles for sale by the cash register. (I could make a pickle last all
  day. The goal was to suck out the insides but maintain the outer shell so you could blow
  it up like a balloon, make it breathe. I"d find the jettisoned ends of pickles under my
  sister"s bed). Da-Dee arrived in a style more befitting the lord of the manor, landing his
  own twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza on an airstrip across the creek and announcing his
  presence by buzzing the house from the air so that Moma would be waiting on the tarmac
  when he touched down.
  In the early summer mornings, before the humidity would slap down like a
  biblical plague, Da-Dee and I got up before the others to sit in penumbral shadow on the
  long screened porch and watch the choppy surface of the water become streaked with
  first light, which looked like thousands of glittering broken mirrors, so bright that we had
  to squint. We"d wad up some day-old bread, stick the gummy ball on a hook and line at
  the end of a cane fishing pole, then plop into the reclining chairs on the pier and wait for
  the bite of catfish and bream and crappie (a delicacy not yet appreciated by chic chefs). I
  was the only one in the family with enough guts to eat calves brains and eggs with Da-
  Dee. There was a huge black cauldron in a tarp-covered clearing near the house for deep-
  frying fish and hush puppies, the crisp puffs of cornmeal meant to placate dogs driven
  mad by cooking smells but appropriated by smart humans. Moma kept baby goats, which
  ate up the shrubbery, and peacocks whose shrill reveille I learned to imitate with ear-
  splitting accuracy, and hens that roosted in the trees at night, but these were more pets
  than livestock. Dinner was often an anonymous quail or duck shot by Da-Dee (there
  were usually a few vanquished carcasses hanging in the kitchen), and we never sat down
  to a summer meal that didn"t include tomatoes, often fried green tomatoes, even at
  breakfast. I took the red paisley bandannas that served as napkins and made streamers for
  my bike or slings for a fake broken arm.
  It was there at Shoals Creek that my grandfather seemed most content, only
  vaguely morose. He would lapse into a private reverie, occasionally broken with an
  enigmatic aphorism ("Everything"s gonna be all right") said as much to himself as to
  anyone else. I never considered his taciturn manner an indication of a dissatisfied soul-
  he had every conceivable creature comfort and was coddled by the sort of wife who put
  the cuff links in his shirt every day. Years later my father told me that he imagined the
  wistful cast in Da-Dee"s eye was a woman named Daisy, ensconced in a downtown
  Memphis apartment with my grandfather"s name on the lease. When Moma found prima
  facie evidence of the affair, she sent his suitcase to the Peabody Hotel, then thought better
  of it. I heard that she threatened to study taxidermy and mount the stuffed and
  formaldehyded bodies of Da-Dee and his mistress alongside the deer head over the
  massive stone fireplace at the yake house. Daisy disappeared, as did a certain kick-ass
  vigor in my grandfather"s spirit. He mentioned her name in the narcotic musings of his
  deathbed, when I guess he felt he had nothing left to lose or hide.
  Moma was not about to abdicate from the perquisites of an indulgent marriage,
  exemplified by more than a hundred pairs of shoes filling three closets-a tottering
  chronicle of fashion victimization that ranged from Duchess-of-Windsor bejeweled to
  Chiquita-banana tacky. Years later I learned about one source of her shoe fetish: back
  home for a visit, I was exploring the Memphis Yacht Club, the hyperbolic term for what
  was then a series of wooden boathouses strung together with steel cable and wired with
  yellow lights to keep the bugs away. I was shocked to see a sailboat tacking back and
  forth across the Mississippi River. Sailing on the Mississippi? What kind of nutcase
  would try that? There"s a constant traffic of enormous barges, several cit blocks long,
  that move huge amounts of water out of their way, and it takes these behemoths thirty
  minutes to stop, often sucking smaller vessels into their wake like helpless anchovies.
  The current runs strong only one way over treacherous whirlpools, and the depths of the
  muddy water can be deceptive. So it was axiomatic that nobody would try to navigate
  the river without a least one engine. The mad sailor turned out to be a devilishly
  handsome silver fox named Smith. When I reported our meeting to Moma, she got a
  dreamy look in her eyes and said, "Oh, that"s Smitty from the Julius Lewis Department
  Store. I must have bought fifty pairs of shoes from that man."
  Most of her wardrobe came, apparently without erotic subtext, from The Helen
  Shop: sherbet-colored chiffon sheaths for charity balls, pearl-buttoned cashmere
  cardigans, scarves to match every outfit, a prized chinchilla stole-all supported by a
  long-line girdle that redistributed a thickish waist from bust line to just above the knees.
  There was one set of noises when she was putting it on and another when she was
  desperately pulling it off, the indicia of zippers and garters pressed into flesh like
  thumbprints in yeast dough. In one of her closets were two tan leather suitcases with
  yellow knit bows on the handles, kept packed at all times in case Da-Dee had an urge to
  fly off for a "rendezvous," one of the parties held by the Sportsmen Pilots Association all
  over the country, with buffet tables set up right in the hangar. I got taken along once as a
  teenager, and the gin and tonics started before the propellers stopped spinning.
  Like me, Moma had been something of a jock, a predilection uncommon to her
  generation, until a heart attack in her forties curtailed all sports but golf. I liked to play
  with her trophies from country club tournaments, topped with tiny gold-plated figurines
  of sturdy women swinging drivers over their heads. Ladies" Day at the clubhouse was the
  only time I saw my grandmother in pants, the kind of clothes I appreciated. She hated the
  female liturgy of the beauty parlor, preferring her own Aqua Net, and claimed she owed
  her baby pink complexion to a nightly smear of Lady Esther cold cream-once a week
  she left it on all day long, walking around the house with a greasy mask. Years before,
  according to the fashion of the times, she had plucked out her eyebrows and had to draw
  them back on. I would watch her apply the Max Factor brownish-black eyebrow pencil
  as we sang a duet of "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know," with me doing the harmony part.
  Moma loved music more than anything, and growing up she taught herself to play the
  church organ. I never visited her house that she didn"t sit down either at her organ or her
  piano to accompany us kids singing the gospel hymns of her childhood. A few years after
  my grandmother"s death, my mother came across a note scrawled on a yellow legal pad
  concerning Moma"s only regret: that she hadn"t "followed up and done something with
  her music." She was always urging me to do what she called those "sweet songs" like
  "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," and at her insistence I sang it as my talent portion of the
  Miss Teenage Memphis Pageant.
  Moma grew up in the small rural town of Carlyle, Arkansas. The churchyard was
  kept at full occupancy by the influenza epidemic of 1918, which claimed her mother
  when Moma was only seven. Startled by an unusual thump coming from the parlor
  where the body was laid out, she refused to accept that the window had slammed shut,
  believing that the coffin had been tumbled off a table by ghosts, and engendering a fear of
  spectral spirits that was not completely dissipated in adulthood. The care of three
  younger siblings fell to this child, with devastating consequences: baby sister Edith
  crawled too near a fireplace, and her leg was so severely burned that it was amputated
  above the knee. As a child I was fascinated by her prosthesis and was always trying to
  get a peek of it or her without it. But Great-Aunt Edith never let her false leg keep her
  down. She became a graceful dancer, married Saul Byarly, who printed the Arkansas
  Gazette, and had four impressively achieving children: an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer,
  and a chief nurse in cardiovascular surgery.
  As adolescent lady of the house, Moma enjoyed certain benefits along with the
  burdens, partnering her widowed father at every rural shindig. When her position was
  subsumed by a stepmother, she began a rebellion of such ornery defiance that she once
  ate an entire shipment of green bananas meant for the store and was sent to live in a Little
  Rock boardinghouse owned by a family friend. With only one line left on her dance card
  at the DeMoolay Young Men"s Organization, she caught the eye of a hulking blond boy
  with elephantine ears and a killer smile, two years older and ready for a wife. Perhaps
  she saw marriage to a clever and ambitious fly-boy as her ticket to ride. Moma and Da-
  Dee crisscrossed every square mile of the delta in his plane, which was red canvas
  covered with two open-air cockpits. Having baby Patricia Cornelia Shobe didn"t much
  crimp their style, my mother was often left on the farm with grandparents who doted on
  her, waiting for her parents to swoop down in a cleared field and pick her up. I have a
  photograph of Patty, Tommy, and Cy when my mother was a toddler; they look like the
  American dream, an enviable portrait worthy of a cereal box or a postage stamp.
  The custodial grandmother, Clara Shobe, was known as Ma-Maw. Every Sunday
  morning she chose the plumpest chicken in the yard, casually wringing its neck for
  dinner, and the storm cellar was lined with Mason jars of her bread-and-butter pickles and
  Prohibition "home brew." My grandfather, the electronics wizard, made sure they had the
  first telephone in those parts and installed a gas range, but Ma-Maw preferred the old
  woodstove and wouldn"t let him remove it. With their only son gone, the older couple
  adopted a series of orphans who helped satisfy my mother"s endless yearning for siblings.
  On summer nights, she caught lightning bugs in a canning jar and put their illuminated
  tails on the boys" model planes.
  Patty Shobe was not destined for animal husbandry but for husbandry of another
  kind. In 1943, she was engaged to an air force bombardier who was the scion of a
  prominent Memphis banking family. Like all the young ladies in the area, she dug a
  pretty dress out of the cedar closet and went to help entertain the servicemen at the
  Millington Naval Air Station, where her father was serving as head flight instructor. A
  handsome young cadet saw her swaying to Glenn Miller and asked her to dance. He was
  William Jennings Shepherd from Buckingham Courthouse, Virginia. (The town took the
  name of its most prestigious edifice, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson, but was
  so small that it reported only two surnames to the census: Spencer and Shepherd.)
  "Do you know Cy Shobe?" Patty asked her dance partner. "He"s my father."
  "Oh, c"mon," Shep answered. "I"ve had five girls tell me that tonight." Apparently
  my grandfather"s name was invoked to ensure proper behavior from any man dancing
  with his "daughter."
  Bill Shepherd"s mother and grandmother had died on the same day, both from
  cervical cancer, surely evoking disturbing feelings about female fragility and creating a
  powerful urge for someone to ply the womanly arts in his life, to do the caretaking. He
  proposed to Patty on their third date, saying he urgently needed an answer before being
  assigned overseas. When she accepted, the two of them made an appointment to see her
  former fiancée"s father at the bank, carrying a Dear John letter to be forwarded. Her guilt
  at writing "I"m sorry I"ve fallen in love with someone else" was compounded when she
  was told the bombardier had just been shot down over Germany and was a prisoner of
  war. My father never did get shipped out; the POW returned a war hero and married a
  childhood friend of Mother"s. More than fifty years later, this woman sometimes
  encounters my mother in Memphis and sighs, "You know, Patty, he"s still in love with
  you."
  It was simply taken for granted that my father would go to work at Shobe, Inc.
  (his only experience had been on a high school football field and in the cockpit of a pilot
  trainer), but that opportunity dissolved into a classic scenario of the son-in-law who feels
  gotten for cheap. Dinnertime at my house was often punctuated by his tirades about
  Shobe stinginess, despite his ascension from warehouse stock boy to executive vice
  president. "Nobody"s told the son of a bitch that the slaves were freed a hundred years
  ago," he railed. "How"s it fair that he lives so high on the hog while we eat chitlins?"
  My parents must have been salivating when they went to Little Rock to help settle
  the estate of Da-Dee"s Aunt Diloma, one of the first women in Arkansas to work for the
  phone company. Jilted by her fiancée, she lived with Dickensian eccentricity: she
  continued in her job for half a century, a stylish woman in cinch waisted suits and a
  Gibson-girl pompadour (her fifty year employee pin is still hanging from my mother"s
  charm bracelet), but she talked to cows and secreted money in mattresses and walls. Da-
  Dee got most of the cash, plus a fortune in AT&T stock, hidden in burlap tobacco sacks,
  and my parents hoped some of the windfall might trickle down to them. The Shobes
  denied themselves little but acted as if gifts to their only child and grandchildren were
  debts to be grudgingly paid. Maybe they couldn"t forget that in Memphis, unless your
  money came from King Cotton, you weren"t rich, just nouveau. Maybe the Depression
  mentality endemic to their generation had ripened into a canon about the perversity of the
  universe, which holds that good luck is transient and bad times last forever. Maybe it was
  just a pissing contest between my father and grandfather. But the Shobes had little talent
  for sharing.
  Most of my childhood was spent in a one-story brick house on Highland Park
  Place (you could stand at the front door and see straight through to the backyard) with a
  fake fireplace mantel, plastic violets in a vase, and a mechanical bird that sang in a cage
  (a gift from my grandmother). One of the few genuine furnishings was a leather top table
  that became a disaster of watermarks from cocktail glasses. My mother pasted S&H
  green stamps into books and redeemed them at the catalog store on Union Street for a
  prized lamp with a silk shade. I took a cold bath on nights when my sister"s rank as
  firstborn gave her priority and there wasn"t enough hot water to fill the tub a second time.
  Neither was there money for the piano lessons I wanted, much less the instrument itself.
  So I borrowed my grandmother"s old ukulele and songbook I found in her attic and
  taught myself everything from "In the Evening by the Moonlight" to "Ja Da." Whenever
  my parents had guests, they insisted I entertain. When I finished my songs everyone
  always seemed slightly underwhelmed. This definitely eroded my confidence, but
  nothing, it seemed, would ever stop me from singing: It was something I just had to do,
  like walking or breathing.
  My grandparents, by sharp contrast, had a piano and organ in each of their three
  homes (Memphis, Shoals Creek, and Fort Lauderdale, including one painted Moma"s
  favorite cherry red. (My mother detested the color, and after my grandmother"s death, I
  was given the red organ on the condition that I have it refinished. When I was ten, we got
  a tabletop keyboard with a fake wood veneer and a songbook showing how to push preset
  "chord buttons. The spine of the book was permanently opened to the two melodies that
  got played ten times a day: "On Top of Old Smokey" for Terry, "Liebenstraum" for me.
  (When I first saw the title of the song, I thought it was an ode to Liederkranz, the stinky
  cheese my mother loved but my father banned from the house.)
  Less than a mile but light years away was my grandparents" elegant three-story
  Tudor house on East Drive, with an S for Shobe on the awnings, harlequin print drapes at
  the windows, jewel-toned Oriental carpets, and crystal chandeliers. The silverware was
  gold-plated, and the furniture was made of rich woods, rather too grandly ornate and
  ostentatious for my tastes (then or now) but substantial in a way that represented money.
  Visiting was entry to Valhalla, seductive but tenuous. They financed what they considered
  good for business or social standing, like membership for my family at the Chickasaw
  Country Club, even though the monthly dues took food off our table. As a child, I gorged
  on several grilled cheese sandwiches a day at the poolside cafe and an astonishing tomato
  ice cream in the dining room, and I stood under the shower in the ladies" locker room for
  an hour at a time, never running out of hot water as I did at home. аá
  The family business being appliances, my grandparents bragged that they had a
  television in every room, even the bathroom (competing in entertainment value with a
  book called Jokes for the John that lived on top of the wicker hamper). My parents did
  achieve some permanent prestige on Highland Park Place with the first TV on our block
  (perpetually tuned to wrestling or Dragnet) and the first air conditioner (installed in my
  parents" bedroom, where all of us gathered when the August heat sucked the breath out of
  our own rooms). We participated in the careless abundance of my grandparents" lives,
  like the wondrous fruit ambrosia with marshmallows, coconut, and pecans, or the three
  kinds of turkey dressing and cavalcade of pies at Thanksgiving.
  Perhaps it was only the disparity with my grandparents" groaning table, but I
  never felt that there was enough to eat at home, with only rare trips to those exotic
  pleasure palaces: the Joy Young Chop Suey restaurant and Pappy"s Lobster Shack. What
  we never ran out of was pickles, pork rinds, and canned Vienna sausages, and we ate a lot
  of "falling off the stool" eggs (soft-boiled and mashed with butter), so named because my
  brother fell backward off the stool the first time Mother made them. About once a month
  my grandmother would take me to the "curb market," where local farmers brought their
  produce to town. She"d buy a big bag of wild greens called "polk salad," which she
  described as a spring tonic (the digestive equivalent of spring cleaning), and we got thinly
  sliced ham sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise from a large man with the improbable
  name of Mr. Ham.
  My mother had a taste for sophisticated foods like artichokes that weren"t popular
  in the South, but these were so expensive that she examined our plates for microscopic
  edible morsels possibly overlooked. ("You haven"t cleaned that leaf," she"d say. "Do you
  know how much it cost?") I scrounged food with the thrift and cunning of the Artful
  Dodger, stealing from my brother"s dish when he looked the other way and licking the
  pots and pans before washing them.
  Half a mile away, in the home of my best friend Jane Howard, there was a
  ubiquitous earthenware crock of homemade pimento cheese, and okra stewed with
  tomatoes, and endless rashers of bacon for breakfast-only part of the salvation she
  provided in my life. Jane and I bonded in the fifth grade when, as teacher"s pet, she was
  given the honored responsibility of collecting the girls" purses after lunch, to be stowed in
  a closet during recess-a pile of child-size pastel plastics and black patent leather. She
  needed an assistant and chose me. Very soon we discovered our mutual passion for
  reading everything from the Nancy Drew mysteries to Emily Bronte"s Wuthering
  Heights.
  Jane and I defied the carefully delineated description for southern female
  adolescence. "Those girls have too much fun," a neighbor observed to my mother. (Jane
  continued this pattern with my children, whom she taught to burp on cue, her theory
  being that there are some things in life you just need to know.) I was awed by her ability
  to shoplift licorice by stuffing a huge wad of it in her mouth, and when she failed to grasp
  the concept of grapefruit segmenting in home ec., she glued her botched slices back
  together, to the outrage of Mrs. Kernodel. We played soldiers in the musty third-floor
  attic of my grandparents" house with German military memorabilia-some of the men
  who trained under Da-Dee have brought the souvenirs back at the end of the war. We
  joined the Brownies, thinking that we were going to whittle and tie knots and light
  campfires, but the troop leader thought it more valuable to learn proper place settings,
  and her idea of an interesting craft project was waterproofing paper bags from the Piggly-
  Wiggly grocery with shellac so we could sit on the ground without sullying our uniforms.
  I got admonished and ousted by parents and teachers for a lot of Jane-inspired
  misconduct (the only time I got sent to the principal"s office was after Jane double-dog-
  dared me to slide down the school banister), but she often got away clean and had an
  enviable ability to defy grown-up rules and without seeming insolent. My mother once
  tried to enlist her in clearing the detritus of an evening at home-the empty bottles of
  Wild "Turkey left like deflowered vases on the windowsill, the stale stubs of cigarettes
  heaped so high in ceramic ashtrays that they"d spill on the way to the trash can. "I"m
  sorry, Mrs. Shepherd," Jane said, "but I didn"t make this mess and I"m not cleaning it
  up."
  At eleven o"clock every day, my mother had a Coca-Cola, which I sometimes
  prepared to her specifications: the ice-cold soda had to be poured like beer down the side
  of a tall glass to preserve every bit of carbonation. There were slightly different
  regulations for cocktails: I was taught to select the highball glass (squat but not too
  squat), measure out a jigger of Scotch and fill the glass with ice, leaving just a little room
  for water. I never saw Mother drink a beer, but once when I knocked someone else"s beer
  off a tray, my mother said, "That"s the best thing you can spill because the smell doesn"t
  stay in the carpet." (I still say that but have no idea if it"s true.)
  In my family, the happy hour began before noon on weekends with Bloody
  Marys, by sundown on the average weekday. Drinking was a subject of unabashed levity,
  without menacing undercurrents. There was a gag clock at the lake house bearing the
  epigram NO DRINKS BEFORE 5, the punch line being fives at every point on the dial,
  and cocktail napkins imprinted with whimsical instructions on "How to Recover from a
  Hangover." Da-Dee had a full bar in the room back behind his office, a dimly lit
  tabernacle to the manly creeds of liquor and cocksmanship, with a plaque praising "men
  who come together and find contentment before capacity." I liked to sneak up onto the
  tall bar stools and touch the beer mugs that had naked ladies as handles.
  Da-Dee"s drinking followed a predictable and not very alarming pattern, winding
  down to sullen solitude. Moma just tried to keep up with him. One night at the lake house
  when I awakened to hear virulent cursing, my sister informed me it was a bogeyman from
  the bottom of the lake (she had recently been impressed by readings about the Loch Ness
  monster). But the disturbance was just Moma, roaring drunk and attempting to move a
  sofa upstairs by herself. She gave up drinking for twenty years, then started taking "just a
  sip" of wine, ending up with a twelve-ounce tumbler and turning the basement into a
  wine cellar, the ceiling covered with clusters of plastic grapes and stocked solely with her
  favorite Blue Nun.
  It was said, in a jocular tone, that my father could find his way driving home by
  feeling for the curb with his foot. One Thanksgiving he passed out in the front vestibule,
  the door wedged open by his inert body until a chilly draft alerted the household. My
  brother grabbed his arms, my sister and I his ankles, dragging him far enough inside to
  close the door, then we turned out the lights and ignored the phone, pretending that no
  one was home. During their parties I huddled in bed under an inadequate bunting of
  protection provided by my nubby white chenille spread. With cotton balls stuffed in my
  ears, I sang to drown out the raucous laughter from downstairs.
  One morning I awoke to find a huge oval crater in the wall outside my parents"
  bedroom. My mother had locked my father out, and in his attempt to force the door open,
  he ricocheted backward, pushing his body through the opposite wall. The hole was
  plastered and painted over the next day, but we all knew it was there, like pentimento on
  an artists" reused canvas. My legacy from this incident is a recurring nightmare: I run
  from door to never-ending door of the house where I grew up, frantically making sure
  they"re all locked, but there"s always one I don"t get to before someone or something gets
  in, and I wake up screaming.
  Men of my father"s generation never heard the expression "What part of "no"
  didn"t you understand?" As an adult, I have come to know that there is a place between
  consenting partners where "no" can be erotic, and that sexual fantasies don"t have to be
  politically correct. The sounds of sex are confusing to a child, who can"t distinguish
  between pleasure and pain. Once when I tried to come between my parents, my father
  flung me out of his way and then roared "The hell with both of you" as he lurched from
  the room. And I still can"t explain or forget the time I walked into my parents" bedroom
  and found my mother weeping while my father and grandfather stood near the end of her
  bed, laughing.
  Without warning, the loving man who coached my softball team and taught me to
  dance and painted my rusty bicycle bright red like new would disappear, and I knew
  instinctively to stay away from the drunken impostor who took his place. Logically, I
  thought, if the poison that made him act crazy wasn"t in the house, my real father would
  prevail, so one night I took all the bottles from the bar and stashed them creatively-
  beneath sofa cushions and inside the zippered stuffed animal that was the "pajama
  buddy" on my bed. He found the bottle I"d stowed under the sink and mumbled
  something about being lucky that he hadn"t drunk the drain cleaner in the "new" liquor
  cabinet.
  The morning after one of these episodes, my father would come down to the
  kitchen with amnesia, smooth-shaven over a gray pallor. He"d skulk up behind my
  mother, encircling her waist with his arm, and give her neck a quick kiss. She"d elbow
  him away, her voice taking on a noticeably defeated tone as she got breakfast ready,
  making the choice between Kellogg"s Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies sound like a
  matter of critical attention. My father poured his own coffee and settled behind the
  newspaper, pretending not to notice the punitive silent treatment.
  As if by consensus, my siblings and I ignored the friction between my parents and
  never discussed the family drinking patterns, except that we referred to Moma and Da-
  Dee"s Florida condominium as Fort Liquordale. Sometimes my grandparents, for the
  moment lucid and sober themselves, herded us into their white Cadillac, its leather seats
  the color of coffee ice cream, and gave safe harbor. Moma would put us in a guest
  bedroom and bring us thin-sliced raw potatoes and radishes in ice water while we
  watched What"s My Line. Our tacit contract matched the adults" denial: if we didn"t name
  the problem, maybe it wasn"t true, or would just go away, and it wasn"t really polite to
  mention it anyway. Southern etiquette requires no validation of unpleasantness, the kind
  of social myopia related in a quirky story called "My Mother"s Dead Squirrel" (everyone
  ignores the stiffened creature on the sofa out of a sense of good manners).
  Our family turmoil seemed to go unobserved in the other houses on Highland
  Park Place. The chief of police, who lived across the street, just called his customary
  "Morning, Shep" to my father as they both left for work. I was a little blonde ornament
  high in many trees on our block; sometimes climbing a neighbor"s elm was the safest
  harbor from my parents" warfare.
  I did not ascribe any special significance to the delivery of new beds for my
  parents, just like the ones Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had. It was unthinkable that a
  marriage (theirs or anybody"s except Elizabeth Taylor"s) could be vulnerable. Parents
  weren"t supposed to be happy or unhappy, satisfied or not, and the word dysfunctional
  was not part of the common parlance. Their old double bed was moved into the room that
  my sister and I shared, and it was thrilling, at the age of four, to leave my baby bed, to
  finger the fat puffs of faded blue quilting on the big new headboard. I was already under
  the covers when Terry turned in for the night, and I reached out to cuddle against her, but
  she kicked me away and pummeled me with her fists, yelling, "Leave me alone."
  Hugging a few inches of mattress edge, I whimpered all night.
  When my father saw my bruised shins and red-rimmed eyes, he made Terry bend
  over, hands to ankles, and walloped her with his belt. She incurred a similar punishment
  every time she chased me around the house and attacked me, which was often because I
  regularly provoked her (awfully dumb, since she was older, bigger, stronger, and faster). I
  hid over a floor furnace in the hallway outside the den every time she was punished,
  talking to my plastic horses while my sister yelped, determined to avoid such punishment
  myself. I, Miss Perfect, rarely got whipped: my most egregious sins were repeatedly
  scribbling in crayon on the living room wall and taunting my brother to bite me, then
  telling on him when he did. The spankings came to an end when I stopped crying.
  My sister had every right to be jealous over my designation as "the pretty one" in
  the family, but I was hardly her only target-she once took a hammer to the TV because
  the picture kept rolling across the screen. I wonder if her aggression wasn"t the inevitable
  result when kids are asked to be the container for family turbulence. My brother and I
  were close playmates until he reached puberty and made an early emotional defection
  from the family. All our attempts at building bridges seemed to fail. For a while we went
  for counseling together, and at one session the therapist suggested, "Draw an imaginary
  line around yourself showing how close you want people to get." When I made a circle
  about fifteen inches away from my body, my brother looked stricken. "I don"t know why
  you"d shut me out like that," he said.
  I"ve never stopped mourning how my sister and brother were lost to me at an
  early age, in ways that have been difficult to recoup even with adult understanding-a
  wound that wouldn"t be cauterized. I knew I was loved by our parents, perhaps loved
  better than Terry or Bill because I tried so hard to be perfect. But our sibling relationships
  were defined and limited by our mutual needs to survive and to contain the secrets of our
  fragmented lives. When there"s so much anarchy, so much hidden in a family, the natural
  ability to bond and establish meaningful connections is broken because it"s every man for
  himself.
  And yet each Sunday we answered the carillon bells of a city that was reputed to
  have more churches than gas stations. We washed our tearstained faces and put on clothes
  that smelled of Niagara starch, to sit in sanctified silence at Holy Communion Episcopal
  Church. I sang in the choir, a perfect perch for looking at my family in a front pew,
  miserable but spit-shined behind a Donna Reed facade. Whatever tempest had been
  weathered at home, I would feel renewed and forgiven after church, caught up in the
  exotic, quasi-erotic imagery of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ.
  The Holy Communion itself, that most blessed of sacraments, seemed to speak directly to
  me: "Almighty God from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts." I
  made Faustian bargains in silent prayers: I"ll be good, just please make Terry stop hitting
  me, please make Mother and Dad stop fighting, please make everybody stop drinking. I"ll
  be good, I"ll be so, so good.
  Of course, I was almost a teenager, and good was out of the question.
  
  Chapter Three
  "GOING ALL THE WAY"
  
  IF THERE"S A LIE TO BE TOLD ABOUT SEX, I"VE TOLD IT, although
  never to get a job or to get even, mostly to have more sex. I suspect I"ve spent a lifetime
  trying to rewrite my mother"s chary lessons on the subject. When I was ten, I interrupted
  her in the bathroom as she lathered her legs for shaving, one foot poised on the edge of
  the tub, and seized the occasion to ask where babies came from. Screwing up her face
  with displeasure, she said, "The man takes his thing and puts it in there," pointing
  somewhere in the vicinity of the shaving cream, making it clear that she found the whole
  matter repugnant and had no intention of elaborating.
  In the night table next to my mother"s bed, I found a copy of Lady Chatterley"s
  Lover and thrilled to see words never uttered in polite southern society (although "John
  Thomas" was lost on me). Jane helped to supplement our carnal knowledge by filching
  her family"s pictorial edition of Gone With the Wind, which contained many heaving
  bosoms and taught us that sex was about a thrashing Scarlett O"Hara being carried to a
  scene of conjugal rape. Only slightly more descriptive was the compulsory sex education
  given in the same school basement where I"d gone to kindergarten. Tedious anatomical
  drawings were shown on an 8-millimeter projector: a triangular patch of womb, spots
  with kite tails swimming along tubes. Sperm and eggs were anthropomorphized with the
  same male and female traits assigned to southern men and women: the sperm described
  as aggressive, the eggs as almost demure. There was no discussion of pleasure, certainly
  no mention of female orgasm or of a moral compass offered beyond the oxymoronic:
  don"t do it before you get married, and don"t be a cock teaser.
  I hadn"t a clue why there was blood on my underpants at camp the summer I was
  eleven-Mother had skipped that subject altogether. I imagined it as a stigmata, a
  penance for willful tomboyishness, or perhaps evidence of a rare and incurable
  gastrointestinal disorder. I padded myself with toilet paper until a teenaged counselor
  discovered I was the source of the cabin"s TP shortage and provided a long overdue
  biology lesson. When I summoned up the courage to report my new status as a woman to
  my mother, she shook her head in commiseration, muttering something about "the curse."
  In the school bathroom, I would stand frozen in the stall, working up the courage to walk
  nonchalantly to the wastebasket with my wrapped-up sanitary napkin. I cannot
  overestimate the significance of the invention of flushable tampons.
  Before menstruation, I was physical and athletic and strong. I could run, jump,
  climb higher than any boy. I earned Shark Club membership at camp (for swimming the
  most laps) and wrestled with the lifeguards at the pool in unbridled horseplay. Suddenly I
  had no choice but to act like a lady, which seemed like a dangerous narrowing of
  perspectives. Whatever lessons in personal deportment were not covered at home I
  learned in charm school at the country club, a virtual petri dish of southern womanhood. I
  sat with the other daughters of members in collapsible bridge chairs, practicing how to
  cross my legs at the ankles, balancing books on my head to achieve the proper floating,
  ladylike gait: shoulders back, chest out, chin up. Occasionally we"d test-drive our newly
  honed skills at coed dance classes: giggly girls with bad home perms and pimply boys
  with castrati voices, slouching awkwardly and improbably through the bossa nova, the
  Lili Marlene, the bunny hop, balling the jack.
  My body seemed to change before my eyes. One year my breasts were
  embarrassingly too big and the next year they weren"t big enough. Advertisements were
  touting the wonders of Cross-Your-Heart bras and 18 Hour panty girdles. It was definitely
  not considered ladylike to have a butt that jiggled under my clothes, and it was
  particularly mortifying to be observed by Da-Dee, who leered at my new shape and said,
  "Cybill, you"re getting yourself a T-heinie." When he announced his intention to give me
  a twenty-gauge shotgun for my twelfth birthday and take me to the Memphis Gun Club to
  shoot trap and skeet, my mother considered it a royal edict and high honor. I was thrilled
  at the prospect of having my own gun, but it was impossible to explain the uneasiness I
  felt in my grandfather"s presence, and I pressed myself against the passenger door when I
  rode with him to target practice.
  Mother may have taken a pass on sex education, but her imparted wisdom about
  beauty was exacting. "Honey, you"ve got to suffer to be beautiful," she"d say as she drove
  me to Lowenstein"s department store for underwire bras, depositing me in a draped
  dressing room and smoking a cigarette with the bored saleswoman while I stuffed
  reluctant breasts into unforgiving elastic. My mother wrapped her freshly coiffed hair in
  toilet paper at bedtime, but I slept with fat brush rollers digging into my scalp. On several
  occasions, I found my sister sound asleep, wearing the pale pink plastic hood of a bonnet-
  style hair dryer, attached to a heat-conducting hose. I once awoke to the smell of
  something burning and shook Terry to tell her that her bonnet was melting.
  Even as I understood that beauty was armored protection in my family, a cosseted
  thing that guaranteed my status as the perfect child, I seemed determined to imperil it
  with some regularity. I never saw the rusty filament of barbed wire sticking out of the
  vine-covered fence I was trying to scale on my aunt Gwen"s farm and didn"t notice the
  blood pouring down the front of my new white vinyl snap-up jacket, only the pale look of
  horror on my mother"s face when she saw the triangle of flesh dangling from my upper
  lip. It was my great good fortune that the doctor on call in the emergency room of the
  local county hospital refused to sew me up, recognizing that a plastic surgeon"s hands
  were called for. I lay on the backseat of our station wagon with an ice pack until we got to
  Memphis and Dr. Lee Haines, who put over two hundred stitches into an area half the
  size of a dime. I went home with a huge dark lump crisscrossed with black thread, and
  when I cried as I looked in the mirror, the tears washed over the shiny, gooey salve,
  carrying a foul medicinal taste into my mouth. But my own horrified reflection was no
  worse than the revulsion I saw on the faces of my parents and grandparents. I hid when
  the doorbell rang, sure that the neighbors were asking, "Whatever happened to that pretty
  girl?" It took three years for the scar to heal, leaving a faint triangular line below my
  nostrils, but I learned an important lesson about the transience of beauty: in the blink of
  an eye, my unique family position was jeopardized. Disfigurement was not lovable. And I
  would never be perfect again.
  I singed off my eyelashes and eyebrows when I tried to light the gas grill of our
  backyard barbecue, but I dutifully rubbed them with petroleum jelly, a therapy I"d used
  on horses to help their hair grow in over scars. When my lashes came back longer and
  thicker, Mother stopped just short of recommending conflagration as a beauty treatment
  to her friends. In her continuing obsession with my hair color, she marveled at a new
  product called Summer Blonde.
  "This is great," she said in a hushed tone as she hurried me into the bathroom with
  the box of magical elixir. "All you do is spray it on, and we don"t have to worry about
  your hair getting darker ever again."
  My whole life I had encountered disbelief when I insisted that my hair color was
  natural. Now I would have to lie. "What am I going to say when people ask if I dye my
  hair?" I fretted.
  "This is not dye," she insisted. "It"s a lightener, just like sitting in the sun." With
  maternal endorsement for the white lie, I dutifully sprayed on what I discovered, only
  years later when the FDA became more rigorous about labeling, to be peroxide.
  Shopping with my mother usually involved the Casual Corner on Union Avenue,
  then lunch at the Pig "n Whistle Bar-B-Q, where she"d gone as a girl. The implicit
  uniform of junior high consisted of a white oxford cloth blouse, circle pin at the rounded
  collar, cabled cardigan sweater with matching kneesocks, and plaid wraparound skirt. The
  outfit had to include black and white saddle shoes or Bass Weejuns (I favored tassels over
  penny loafers, since I could never squeeze the coins in the slots). We were fashion
  lemmings so early in the game, but occasionally I was downright rebellious. Once I got
  sent home from school for wearing culottes, which were deemed too closely related to
  pants. The assistant principal called my mother to say, "Please come pick up your
  daughter and have her return in a skirt." Mother thought it was ridiculous and took me
  out for barbecue.
  She didn"t know she was quoting Dorothy Parker when she said, "Men seldom
  make passes at girls who wear glasses," but I knew there were no Barbie dolls with
  spectacles. I was fifteen when I failed the eye exam for my driver"s permit, and my
  mother, refusing to believe the results, got a family friend who was an eye doctor to write
  a note certifying that I did not need glasses to drive. This explanation did not impress the
  civil servant at the Tennessee Highway Patrol, nor did my failing the eye exam a second
  time. I was finally permitted to consult an optometrist for the glasses I so obviously
  required-I"d been squinting at blackboards, movie screens, and my competition on the
  basketball court for years. Mother sat next to me while I was fitted with owlish round
  black frames, a stoic look of loss and resignation on her face, the reflection of the perfect
  daughter created in her image once again marred. When I reported passing the eye exam
  on my third try, she said "Fine" in a dull tone that implied nothing fine at all.
  The commandments of beauty seemed even more stringent than those of the
  church, but I didn"t have to wait for the hereafter to reap the rewards. Despite my glasses,
  the boys did make passes. And I was a born receiver.
  
  I CAN TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE JUST BY walking past the
  men"s cologne counter of any department store. English Leather-that"s Mike. Canoe-
  that"s Sam. Jade East-that"s Lawrence. British Sterling...
  I did not vomit from my first kiss, but I spit into the sink for a good five minutes
  and then used half a tube of Crest. I was fourteen and it was at night on my front porch,
  after a Memphis Chicks minor league baseball game. I had gotten tired of watching the
  make-out scene from the sidelines and vowed to get it over with.
  You might think I"d been vaccinated against drinking from the examples at home,
  but when I was fifteen I went along with the group that trawled Joe"s Liquors looking for
  someone who could be bribed into buying us quarts of Miller Black Label. An old man
  leaning against the store"s gyrating Sputnik-shaped neon sign was easily persuaded, and
  my few ounces of the purloined stuff, guzzled out of the bottle in a brown paper bag,
  created a quick buzz. I found myself dancing to "When a Man Loves a Woman" and
  nuzzling against the sweet-smelling neck of a nineteen-year-old boy with a doughy little
  cleft where his chin should be, Mick Jagger lips, and bleached blond hair cut in a long
  mop. When Mike picked me up for a movie date a few days later, he displayed excellent
  credentials for a first boyfriend: my parents hated him on sight.
  My tradition of sex and lies began when I started sneaking out to see Mike using
  Jane as an alibi. Jane owed me big time since I had saved her from drowning at Shoals
  Creek-she had jumped off the pier to chase a toy football that my brother threw
  downriver, got tired fighting the current, and was about to go under when I got to her
  with a life preserver. But she did not appreciate her role as a beard, nor the fact that I
  bailed on her if there was a chance of seeing Mike. We had to find other venues when he
  left a racy, unsealed note for me on Jane"s front porch, and her father got to it first. We
  steamed up the windows of his MGB all around town, arms and legs splayed in ungainly
  positions when a policeman interrupted our foreplay with a flashlight"s beam. But our
  preferred sanctuary was behind my grandparents" house when they were out of town:
  once past the porte cochere, we were hidden from the street, safe from discovery.
  I was absolutely stunned by the intense pleasure of kissing and caressing, a
  visceral experience I had no right to expect, given my mother"s counsel. After six months
  of exquisite teasing, we"d done everything but "go all the way." On a clear cold night I
  walked out on our front lawn, across the grass that was crunchy with frost, gazed at the
  starry night sky, and negotiated with God in what has come to be known as Clintonian
  logic. "It"s not intercourse," I offered, "it"s just outercourse. And I won"t do it anymore."
  Then I went inside, looked at the photograph of Mike I kept hidden under the library card
  in my wallet, and thought: Who am I kidding? I stuffed rollers into a hairnet, placed it on
  my pillow, and arranged a lump of clothes under the blanket in a vaguely human shape. I
  climbed out the window and found Mike"s car around the corner.
  I felt oddly detached from my first time, as if it were more a rite of initiation to be
  crossed off a list than a sexual epiphany, but Mike had warned me that it would get so
  much better. As I climbed back through the window of my bedroom, the ceiling light
  suddenly switched on, illuminating my father"s face. Wordlessly, he walked down the hall
  to the room where he kept his toolbox, his silence more frightening than the usual bluster
  of his anger. My throat seemed closed tight, but I managed to mumble, "What are you
  doing?"
  "Nailing the windows shut," he said.
  "But what if there"s a fire?" I asked, watching helplessly. "I won"t be able to get
  out."
  He never looked back at me as he took out a ball peen hammer and answered,
  "That"s not the fire I"m worried about."
  It was too late to safeguard my virtue. Mike and I were already scouting locations
  for the next time, and the next, and the next, exploring the various versions of lovers" lane
  in town. I walked out the front door to meet him now, sanguine behind a careful lattice-
  work of lies. A subtle change occurred at home: once I became a sexual creature, nobody
  in my family seemed to like me anymore. My father sensibly realized he could not act as
  full-time sentry, but he glowered across the dinner table and spoke to me in staccato
  bursts, as if conversation was expensive. I knew from the rearrangements in my bureau
  drawers that my mother was looking through my papers, finding letters from Mike, but
  she referred to my behavior only obliquely, with thinly veiled references to men who
  don"t buy cows when the milk is free. I kept up my own part in the pretense, wearing
  Mike"s school ring on a chain hidden under my blouse when I was home and putting it on
  my finger at school, the fraying bits of white surgical tape wrapped around the band to
  make it fit.
  The most safety and seclusion was in a new development off Walnut Grove Road,
  where the streets were paved but the houses not yet built. When the weather turned warm,
  we spent every weekend at the drive-in movie, facilitated by Mike"s new Nash Rambler
  with collapsible seats. We were hardly the only teenagers grabbing illicit Saturday night
  sex-by daylight, the grounds of the drive-in were littered with more discarded condoms
  than popcorn kernels. Emboldened by lust, we planned on adding a Wednesday night and
  a real bed to our repertoire, since that was when Mike"s parents and younger brother went
  to Bible meetings. Watching from a safe distance as the family car pulled out of the
  driveway, we left the Rambler down the block and crept into the house like burglars.
  We"d barely undressed when there was the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door
  and a young boy"s voice saying that he did so have a stomachache. Grabbing our clothes,
  we whispered a frantic escape plan, which entailed my climbing out a chest-high window,
  running half-naked across the vacant lot behind the house, and waiting behind a magnolia
  tree until Mike retrieved me.
  Longing for a place where we couldn"t get caught and wouldn"t be arrested, we
  saved up for a room at the Rebel Motel on Lamar Avenue, the highway south toward
  Mississippi. There was a flashing confederate soldier"s cap over the VACANCY sign as
  we pulled into the parking lot. Although we were unlikely to see or be seen by anyone
  familiar, I was technically jailbait and ducked beneath the dashboard while Mike paid
  nineteen dollars for a room with cinder block walls painted the color of iceberg lettuce. I
  refused to touch the frayed graying towels. Only the magnitude of pent-up teenaged
  hormones could overcome the bed, made with matching gray sheets over a mattress that
  smelled of mildew and collapsed in the middle like a taco. But the privacy and lack of
  interruption overcame the lack of aesthetics. This was the real first time. It was daylight
  when we arrived, and I was shocked to see that it was dark when we left.
  Mike was slightly schizophrenic about birth control: he was always prepared with
  condoms but delayed using one until the last possible moment, relying on the notoriously
  imprecise method of withdrawal, which I naively accepted. I went through craven
  watchful waiting for my period every month. One day late, and I couldn"t eat or sleep.
  Three days late, and I was stumbling in a trance through the green-tiled halls of the
  school, chastising God for combining the pleasures of the flesh with the only occasional
  need to reproduce. Five days late, and I was swearing off sex forever, convinced that my
  life was over. At the first twinge of cramps I"d start to breathe easier, and with the first
  sign of blood, I dropped to my knees in prayer. Hallelujah! Pregnancy anxiety forever
  changed my attitude about menstruation-never again "the curse" that my mother
  described but reason to rejoice.
  When I told Mother that my periods were irregular, she made an appointment for
  me with her doctor, a family friend who used to hunt squirrel and invite us over for stew.
  Nate Atherton was as wide as he was tall, with a narrow circumference of hair that made
  him look like a tonsured monk, but he was kind and avuncular as he questioned me,
  obviously aware that I was sexually active.
  "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asked. Unable to meet his eyes, I mumbled yes.
  "Are you in love?" he asked. Again I said yes, and assured him that we planned to get
  married one day. He wrote something illegible on a prescription pad, and I blithely
  handed it to the same pharmacist who"d given me penicillin when I was five, cough
  medicine for innumerable childhood viruses, Jean Nate for many Mother"s Days. I almost
  choked when I looked in the bag and saw a pink plastic container with thirty tiny pills on
  a round dial. Speaking in a hoarse whisper of excitement, I called Mike and said, "I think
  this is birth control!" We drove to the other side of town, and I cowered in the car while
  he confirmed that I had been given the miraculous Pill from a druggist I felt certain
  wouldn"t be bumping into my father at the hardware store.
  I still marvel at the doctor"s act of compassion: he knew I would discover that I"d
  been given a way to escape unwanted pregnancy but avoided any direct conversation
  about it, saving me from a confrontation with my mother and allowing her to continue
  being an ostrich. Twenty-five years later I asked my mother, "Did you know that Dr.
  Atherton gave me birth control pills when I was sixteen?"
  "No!" she said, but allowed as to how it was probably a good idea.
  
  THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WERE going to
  an appliance convention (the Philco Hawaiian Holiday), and their invitation for me to
  come along was camouflage for a plot to drive a wedge between Mike and me. Even
  though the plan was pathetically transparent, I figured true love could survive a vacation,
  and I could hardly pass up a trip to Honolulu-I"d never been north of the Mason-Dixon
  line. As we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by glorious women with burnished
  skin who placed leis of fragrant white plumeria around our necks, and by an attractive
  young mainlander introduced as Joseph Graham Davis, a Columbia Law student who"d
  taken a summer job with the travel agency that arranged our trip. He called himself Gray,
  a patrician name to match his preppy clothes (cotton T-shirt tucked into khakis) and
  prodigal swath of Kennedy hair. He offered to show me around the island, and with the
  sense of urgency and speeded-up time of a vacation, it didn"t take long to progress from
  whiskey sours on the deck of an oceanfront bar to passionate necking on Waikiki Beach.
  That evening when we returned to the hotel, my father was pacing the lobby with a
  security guard, a walkie-talkie belching static as he conferred with colleagues around the
  property. My parents took one look at my disheveled clothes, my shoes and pockets filled
  with sand, and decreed that I was to remain within spitting distance for the rest of the trip.
  I managed to slip Gray my address as I was boarding the plane home, and we
  exchanged long, philosophical letters about our ambitions and goals (his were written on
  a yellow legal pad so the lawyers at the New York firm where he was clerking would
  think he was hard at work). Our relationship probably should have remained epistolary:
  when I went to New York almost two years later, I was thrilled at seeing him again-a
  built-in boyfriend. We drove to his parents" empty house in Westchester County and
  climbed into their bed, in an old-fashioned frame high off the floor, but our fondling was
  interrupted by his parents" unexpected return-a classic scenario in my sex life. I dived
  under the bed just before his mother came into the room and could see her pink pumps
  from my hiding place, barely breathing until her bathroom needs gave me a window of
  escape. A few days later we tried again at the family beach house on the Jersey shore,
  deserted for the winter, but we both sensed that we were trying too hard and ended up in
  bunk beds. Driving back to New York in silence was a glaring contrast to our lively
  conversations before attempting to be sexual. Gray Davis always drove twenty miles
  faster than the speed limit and was still always two hours late. I would guess that he"s
  stopped speeding and is more punctual now that he is the governor of California.
  The trip to Hawaii did derail my romance with Mike, to the delight of my parents.
  It"s a bittersweet moment, the recognition that a first love is just that. The person who
  evoked such hunger and longing and indiscretion isn"t going to walk into the future with
  you. There will be others with voices like tupelo honey, whose touch will make your
  palms damp. I broke up with Mike (on the telephone-remarkably easy) and moved on.
  Sam wore Canoe. He dressed in preppy blazers from Brooks Brothers and was a
  founding member of a young men"s social club called the Midnight Revelers, famous for
  their parties. He was one of the lifeguards I had periodically dunked at Chickasaw
  Country Club and was considered so socially acceptable by my parents that I was granted
  permission to visit him that fall for homecoming weekend at the University of Tennessee
  in Knoxville, on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. The campus seemed to glow with an
  unearthly light from the preponderance of clothing in the school colors: Day-Glo orange
  and white. Just before the football game, Sam gave me a corsage, a huge white mum
  trailing orange and white ribbons, and as I sat in the stadium, baking in the noonday sun,
  I kept sticking my face in the flower, inhaling the mushy coolness. We were so highly
  chaperoned that the only time we got to touch was when we were dancing. The proctor in
  Sam"s dorm wrote to my mother expressing her delight in such a well-mannered guest.
  When Sam came home to Memphis for weekends and holidays, there were no
  chaperones, and we borrowed his grandmother"s basement-the ultimate den of iniquity,
  with a fireplace, pool table, TV, wet bar, and a plush velveteen sofa. Grandma rarely left
  the second floor of her weathered white-brick house, sometimes yelling downstairs,
  "Y"all okay down there?" Sam would holler, "Doin" Jim Dandy," with a surfeit of
  enthusiasm and peel off my clothing to the accompaniment of Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra
  LPs. Unlike my girl friends, who were fooling around to the Four Tops and the
  Temptations, I was wooed with the music of my parents.
  Sam recognized that the way to my heart was through my stomach. I can still taste
  the pompano almondine and three kinds of oysters (bienville, casino, and Rockefeller) at
  Justine"s, the most exclusive restaurant in Memphis, in an antebellum mansion with a
  rose garden (even my grandparents had only been there a few times). I worshiped at the
  altar of the killer pecan pie Sam"s mother made from a recipe on the bottle of dark Karo
  syrup. On Valentine"s Day he left the industrial-size Whitman"s sampler at my door, along
  with a giant wooden heart inscribed "I love you" on the front lawn, pounded into the
  frozen earth on a garden spike. But I was restless and bored with college-boy sex. I"d be
  graduating from high school in a few months, and despite the number of ways I found to
  write "Mrs." in front of Sam"s name on my loose-leaf notebook, I was pretty sure that his
  circumscribed image of our life together would grate. Fat tears slid down his cheeks and
  his face fissured as we sat in his Mustang on a chilly autumn day, but he wasn"t fooled for
  an instant as I lied that I"d been chatting with God about the sin of sex before marriage. A
  month or so after our breakup, I was kissing a new beau good night at my front door.
  Turning to go inside the house, I looked through to the backyard to see Sam watching,
  wearing his Revelers tuxedo and scowling like Heathcliff.
  Lawrence wore Jade East. He went to Florida State, played golf like a pro, and
  drove a pale blue Thunderbird, which we would park on the far side of Galloway Golf
  Course. He was more... esoteric in his amorous tastes. "I"ll show you what I like," he
  said during what I assumed to be a moment of high arousal. He undid the button at the
  wrist of his shirt and rolled his sleeve back slowly, all the way above the elbow. Then he
  said, "Just stroke my arm." I was thinking: This guy is really weird. He doesn"t want to
  do anything. And I did it wrong, first too hard, then too soft, so he said, "Let me show
  you how." From the vantage point of several experienced decades, the arm-stroking
  thing now seems fabulously sophisticated, not to mention the ultimate safe sex. And I
  came to think that a golf course is a rather erotic place, as long as you don"t get arrested.
  
  SEX WAS TOO EARLY AND TOO URGENT IN MY LIFE, AND I wonder
  how my sexual energy might have been deferred or given another outlet. When I was
  growing up, there was no Joycelyn Elders to encourage masturbation rather than motel
  rooms. Academia might have sufficed as distraction, but it was given scant regard for
  girls in my family. The $150 scholarship I was offered to attend a private high school
  didn"t cover the cost of tuition, and my grandparents wouldn"t put up the additional
  money. Our household was big on Collier Junior Classics and Reader"s Digest Condensed
  Books. I read everything in the bookcase ("That girl always has her head in a book," my
  mother said, and she didn"t mean it as a compliment). I even trained myself to read in the
  car without getting sick. The first time I went to the Highland Avenue branch of the
  Memphis Public Library, I was overwhelmed. "You mean I can take out as many books
  as I want?" I asked. I couldn"t understand why I got punished for bad behavior by having
  to bend over and get walloped with a belt, while my friend Martha got punished by
  having to memorize "The Raven."
  As adolescent virgins, my friends and I had gabbed without much information
  about "going all the way," but I stopped talking about sex when I started doing it, and
  lying about it extended to my best friends. I knew with an unshakable certainty that none
  of my crowd-all good southern girls-were experiencing what I was, and it was
  inconceivable to share the intimacies. Even within my troika of Jane, Patty, and Martha,
  our gossip about social pairings had tacit boundaries beyond which we didn"t venture,
  resorting to a discreet policy of "don"t ask, don"t tell." Later I would find out that I was
  indeed way ahead of the pack.
  Certainly Delta Alpha Delta was virginal. High school sororities constituted a
  cherished Memphis heritage with a fixed protocol that brooked no deviation. During rush
  week, prospective pledges wearing themed name tags (in the shape of bongo drums,
  perhaps, or Nefertiti"s head) were invited to partake of cucumber sandwiches and Rotel
  dip (made with a can of Rotel brand spicy chiles and tomatoes melted with Velveeta
  cheese) at the homes of older "sisters." On the weekend that votes were tallied, each girl
  would wait, hoping for an invitation to join, which was announced by a caravan of cars
  pulling up to her house, with crepe paper streamers and blaring horns. (Each sorority had
  a distinctive honk, recognizable from blocks away.) I didn"t just join D.A.D.; I became
  the class president in my senior year and immersed myself in its genteel traditions of
  charity work and partying. We formed a white girls" version of a Motown group,
  performing at hospitals and nursing homes. To raise money for the parties, we sponsored
  pancake suppers and car washes, and once a month I"d rise at 5 A.M., drive to the Krispy
  Kreme, and pick up sixty dozen (or perhaps sixty thousand) doughnuts that we"d sell.
  Despite these mannerly rituals, my waterloo in high school was the "charm
  notebook" required for Phys. Ed. I can only imagine what hyperkinetic gym teacher of an
  earlier era, perhaps damaged by overexposure to Gone With the Wind, conceived of such
  a curiosity, quaint even by 1960s standards. We were supposed to put together
  information about clothes, hair, makeup, and other womanly wiles. Surely this was an
  assignment for which I"d been in training since the crib, but I thought it was asinine and
  made an obviously slapdash effort, sloppily gluing pages from Glamour, Mademoiselle,
  and Seventeen on construction paper. I earned an F. (No small irony that in less than
  three years I would be on the covers of these magazines.) I"d played on the church
  softball and basketball teams and set a district record in the long jump (formerly called
  the broad jump, until the term was deemed politically incorrect). A contender for best
  female athlete, I failed gym.
  My father was outraged and showed up at school to defend me, certain that he"d
  just "fix" things with the bottomless tool kit of parenthood. I was filled with a smug pride
  as he strode into the gymnasium to see the evil Mrs. Hotchkiss, keeping close to the wall
  as his wing tips clacked against the wood floor. They vanished into offices behind the
  girls" locker room, too far for me to hear, As my father stormed away from his failed
  mission, he caught my eye and said, "Sorry, Cy, I couldn"t get her to change her mind."
  With a failing grade, I was kicked off the cheerleading squad-the ultimate disgrace-
  and the next semester, when all of my friends were learning to type, I had to repeat gym. I
  was still half a credit short at graduation, a deficit magnanimously overlooked by the
  authorities. In another recurrent dream of my adulthood, I am capped and gowned,
  marching into the auditorium to the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance," only to be
  yanked back to sit with the kindergarten class while a toothless Mrs. Hotchkiss, looking
  remarkably like the Wicked Witch of the West, chants, "I"ll get you, my pretty."
  
  Chapter Four
  "AND THE WINNER IS..."
  
  MOMA CALLED SOMEONE WITH A BIG EGO "SUCH A much." I was
  certainly supposed to spend time and energy on my appearance, heeding my mother"s
  remonstrance that women must suffer to be beautiful, but I wasn"t supposed to act
  prideful about the results. This confusing message left me with only disdain or
  indifference about the beauty pageants that were endemic to the culture in 1966 (it
  seemed as if there was a Miss Magnolia Blossom or Miss Local Carburetor Shop being
  lauded in the papers every other week). I considered beauty pageants dorky and myself
  anti-establishment: failing gym, cheating in Latin, smoking Prince Edward cigars with
  Jane, and sneaking out for sex. Ignoring my disinclination to enter such a contest, my
  cousin Tom Byarly (son of Great Aunt Edith, who crawled into the fireplace) decided that
  I was the perfect candidate for Miss Teenage Memphis and kept sticking that application
  under my nose, saying, "Just sign it." With no real enthusiasm, I signed.
  Every aspect of the contest was scrupulously regulated. Instructions for a written
  test, to be administered at the local Sears Garden Center, were a source of unwitting
  humor: "there is no way to prepare for this test...Dress is optional, but try to look your
  best... You are encouraged to socialize with other girls while enjoying free Dr. Pepper." I
  answered questions such as "How would you achieve world peace?" without a trace of
  irony.
  Each girl was allotted two minutes for a talent routine that was taped early in the
  week-I sang "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" while playing the bass ukulele. ("Get
  into costume immediately, then relax") The finals were to be broadcast live on WHBQ,
  the local ABC-TV station. ("Be yourself" and "Use all available knowledge about good
  grooming.") I was a nervous wreck that day but declined Mother"s offer of a mild
  sedative (she said everybody took them). I dressed in the gold and white formal we had
  selected and then I submitted to the hairdresser, who managed to achieve the perfect flip
  that had always eluded me.
  I head George Klein, the master of ceremonies, announce, "And the winner is...,"
  but when he said my name, I looked around for a moment to make certain there wasn"t
  anyone else named Cybill Shepherd in the group. My parents bolted out of their metal
  folding chairs in the TV studio, beaming broad smiles and clapping wildly while the other
  families politely applauded. The next day, the Western Union man because a familiar
  figure at our house, delivering dozens of telegrams from local politicians, beauty parlors,
  the church rector, even Chris Crump, whom I had beaten with the whiffle bat years ago.
  The note from one family friend summed up the prevailing sentiment: "As far as your
  parents and grandparents are concerned, you are already Miss Teenage America, as you
  are such a sweet, thoughtful all-American girl. If you stay this way, and I"m sure you
  will, you can never really become a loser!"
  My prizes were a Sears wardrobe and a year"s supply of Dr Pepper, which was
  stacked on our porch almost to the top of the pale green riveted plastic roof. But I also got
  to represent Memphis in the Miss Teenage America pageant, where the stakes were
  considerably higher: $10,000 in scholarships, a stock portfolio, and a car. All of the
  "young ladies" were to be accompanied to the contest in Dallas by their mothers. On one
  side of us was Miss Indianapolis, on the other Miss Spokane. Every time we left the hotel
  we were chauffeured in a cavalcade of turquoise blue Comets, escorted by cadets from
  Texas A&M to entertainments such as a Turtle Derby. (Each contestant got to keep her
  turtle and a supply of Gourmet Turtle Food.) My scrapbook from that week includes a
  recipe card for avocado dip and a coupon for dinner, noting in my scratchy penmanship:
  Had to have meal ticket or couldn"t eat-always an important concern to me. The judges
  were introduced peremptorily at a cocktail party that featured a tomato aspic in the shape
  of an armadillo. I was thrilled to meet Dick Clark, but on a more practical level I was
  interested in the director of the American Airlines Stewardess College, something I"d
  always considered a viable career option, a last resort to get out of Memphis.
  When the finalists were announced, I was not one of them. Instead I was named
  Miss Congeniality, one of the honorary but dubious consolation prizes that included Miss
  Personality and Miss Sportsmanship. Lying to a reporter from the Memphis Press-
  Scimitar who called for an interview, I gushed, "This is the greatest thing that ever
  happened to me. All the contestants are best friends already. Last night we had a slumber
  party, and tonight we"re dancing at a go-go place, but no boys are allowed. It"s a good
  thing the frug came along since the girls have to dance by themselves." Failing to make
  the cut as a finalist was devastating, reinforcing my lifelong anxiety about falling short of
  perfection. Sad and miserable, I had to swallow my disappointment and participate in the
  remaining festivities, rehearsing a group song about the spectrum of national contestants
  ("They"re beautifying Baltimore and out in Santa Rosa, in Louisville and Buffalo and on
  the Ponderosa"). The winner was an "at-large" candidate from Milpitas, California,
  whose talent was an "authentic" hula dance performed to a Don Ho record.
  Even though I returned to Memphis in defeat, something was changed and would
  never again be the same: I was famous, publicly acknowledged as beautiful and rewarded
  for it, different and set apart. I"d imagine a friend"s voice getting a little crispy and
  impatient, disallowing me any complaint about fatigue or boredom or a bad hair day. The
  president of the pageant did offer me a summer job at the shows he produced for Six
  Flags over Texas-my first professional offer-but my parents wouldn"t let me live away
  from home by myself. I was still somewhat useful to pageant officials, who asked me to
  appear at a party for the next year"s Miss Teenage hopefuls. "Actually," said the letter
  from the director of public relations, "all we want you to do is smile prettily when you are
  introduced and mingle with the girls, convincing them to enter the contest." Smiling
  prettily seemed to be my talent.
  
  EVERY CHILD IN MEMPHIS GREW UP UNDERSTANDING that it was
  the cotton capital of the world, that the crop had dominated the economy, even the
  society of the city since before the Civil War, when a major slave market provided the
  necessary labor of industry, and cotton brokers dotted the waterfront, transacting
  business at a cotton exchange that rivaled Wall Street. King Cotton still occasioned the
  biggest social event of the year, the Cotton Carnival. From the time I was a little girl, I
  stood with the crowd awaiting the Carnival king and queen, who were chosen from the
  wealthiest and most prominent families in town. They arrived on a flower-bedecked
  barge, blindingly lit and dressed in shiny rhinestoned costumes, at the historic downtown
  steamboat landing, lined with cobblestones that were said to have been brought to North
  America as ballast on Spanish galleons and towed upriver by mules. The local country
  clubs named royal princesses to the king and queen"s court, and Chickasaw"s board of
  directors appointed me their representative in 1968, a commission that could not be
  refused, whatever my disdain for pageantry. I had to make an appointment with the
  "modiste" who was making the princess costumes, after receiving a mimeographed sheet
  of instructions: "You are to bring sixteen (16) button white fabric gloves for evening and
  "shortie" white gloves for day costume. You are to bring small button pearl earrings (no
  loops or "dangles" please)... A rhinestone tiara is to be worn with your nighttime
  costume. A deposit of $5 will be required... You will be responsible for furnishing two
  pairs of shoes-plain, closed heel (opera), closed toe pumps. NO FLATS OR
  BALLETS, PLEASE. Hose for your daytime costume will be furnished... MOST
  IMPORTANT: Wear the foundation garment you plan to wear with your costumes when
  taking your measurements and for fittings."
  There were no blacks represented in the Carnival-they had their own separate
  Cotton Makers Jubilee-and the only black people I knew were domestics or warehouse
  workers at Shobe, Inc. Memphis was still cleft along rigid color lines, with segregated
  barbershops and libraries, and there were COLORED ONLY signs with figurative hands
  painted in dark colors pointing to different drinking fountains and rest rooms. The local
  movie house had a colored box office and seating up in the nosebleed section of the
  balcony, a brutal sauna on humid summer nights. In 1965, when a maverick theater
  operator at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center screened A Patch of Blue and Sidney Poitier
  actually kissed a white woman, the audience reacted with an audible "Whoooa." Blacks
  were admitted on a different day at the Mid-South Fairgrounds every fall and attended the
  Negro school a mile away from my own. There is still, in a public park across from the
  University of Tennessee Medical School, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first
  grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in rural Tennessee. Despite an ongoing
  controversy, it"s allowed to stand because he was a famous Civil War general. Once,
  when I was very young, my grandfather and I saw the hurried scattering of spectral white
  gowns and pointed hoods, illuminated by the glow from a burning cross, as we drove
  through the "other" part of town. The sight of the Klan in full regalia strikes fear in the
  heart of even a little white girl and an old white man.
  "Da-Dee, who are the ghosts?" I asked. "Don"t bother your pretty head," he
  answered, but he put his foot to the gas pedal.
  Like most of the people in that time and place, my family had a tacit code of
  "benevolent" racism: my grandparents treated their black housekeepers with familial
  fondness and support, dispensing hand-me-down clothes and leftover food with the
  fraudulent magnanimity of the times. Waiters and bellhops were addressed by their first
  names, whatever their age, and I shelled peas on the back porch of the lake house with a
  kind and dignified elderly lady named Annie who had to call me Miss Cybill. It would
  have been unthinkable for me to challenge the views and vernacular of the older
  generations. Even though I was enlightened by the climate of civil rights activity, I did
  nothing. There were black kids in my high school class, unknown to me and my circle of
  friends. Our connection to black culture was through the music of the times, Jr. Walker
  and the All-stars spoke to us in a different way from how our parents had related to the
  Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers, although I hardly examined the societal ramifications of
  the soulful sounds.
  In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Poor People"s Campaign
  to Memphis in support of the mostly black striking sanitation workers. Hundreds of men
  who hauled garbage and dug sewers gathered at a rally to hear him say "It is a crime for
  people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages," and strikers wearing
  sandwich boards that read I AM A MAN were maced and tear-gassed on Main Street.
  Local news reports portrayed King as an irresponsible agitator who had goaded the rabble
  to violence. Shops were vandalized, and we heard that the train from Chicago to New
  Orleans passed through Memphis without stopping. The National Guard was called out in
  armored tanks that moved through the streets on rubber tracks-my friend Jane and I
  went driving around to see them rerouting traffic, sending people home. Some of the
  locals acted as if the turmoil was a huge personal inconvenience, but others treated the
  presence of armed guards in our midst with a comically misplaced sense of southern
  hospitality, pressing sandwiches and doughnuts on them. Rubbish in sacks and cartons
  was piled everywhere, and delicate ladies swooned at the mention of rats. The Mississippi
  River and the network of open drainage ditches in the city combined to host a sizable
  rodent population-it was said that a rat could traverse the city more quickly by ditch
  than a person could by car. And they were big enough to mount and ride. I once went to a
  "Sunset Symphony" picnic near the river and remarked on a cute little cat wandering near
  the water. "Not a cat," I was told.
  I was standing with friends on the colonnaded veranda of my high school in the
  late afternoon of April 4, just weeks before our graduation, when we heard that Dr. King
  had been shot, and within a few hours, the world way beyond Memphis knew that he was
  dead. The Lorraine Motel was a few miles away, too far to hear the firecracker blast of
  the assassin"s bullet or to see Dr. King"s friends trying to scrape his blood from the
  balcony, but too close for comfort to my family and a large part of the city"s white
  population. My father made sure his luger was loaded, and Moma called to say that Da-
  Dee had moved a shotgun down to the front hall.
  There was a pall over the city for weeks, a sense of fear and chaos, with stringent
  early curfews and the intensified presence of militia. High school proms were canceled
  by municipal decree, as was Cotton Carnival, and I was not displeased to be a princess in
  absentia. When I passed a black person on the street, I averted my eyes with a searing
  flash of shame. I felt absolutely responsible for the murder. I knew the expression "If
  you"re not part of the solution, you"re part of the problem," although I was not to assuage
  my guilt with action for another twenty years. But after the initial shock, nobody in my
  little microcosm talked about the shooting. It became unmentionable. Palm Sunday fell
  three days after Dr. King died, and there were green fronds decorating the white pillars of
  our church but no sermon from the pastor about healing the wounds of race relations in
  our community. Commencement exercises proceeded on schedule but I recalled no
  mention of the assassination.
  As a graduation present, my grandparents gave me a trip to Europe: the beginner"s
  three-week tour with a group of students from the local high schools, through London,
  Geneva, Madrid, Lisbon. We had to skip Paris because of the student riots against U.S.
  involvement in Vietnam, but that meant extra time in Italy and my first exposure to its
  masterly painting, sculpture, and architecture. I had inexhaustible energy for museums
  and basilicas, panoramas and piazzas, never-drying underwear hung on Juliet balconies
  and dark-haired boys who flirted in charmingly accented English limited to "Hello,
  beautiful." And the trip occasioned an epiphany. Looking up into the vaulted ceiling of
  the Sistine Chapel, I was overwhelmed by the power of those frescoes-the creation of
  Adam with God"s outstretched hand and the last judgment of Christ-but my eyes drifted
  to the image of a half-clothed female.
  "Excuse me," I asked the guide, "who"s that big ol" muscular woman reading a
  scroll?"
  "That is the Delphic Sibyl," he answered. My name, a name I"d hated and heard
  mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the spelling
  tweaked). And why was a pagan symbol on the ceiling of a Christian chapel? Because it
  was a Sibyl who prophesied the coming of Christ. And there were lots of us. In Roman
  mythology, the guide informed me, Cybele was a supreme being called the Great Mother
  of the Gods, and a temple in her honor was erected on the site now occupied by the
  Vatican. The high priestesses known as Sibyls were named for her, and their oracles were
  so respected that they guided imperial policy for Roman emperors.
  I know how pretentious and melodramatic this sounds, but something in me
  clicked at that moment in that place of such beauty and grandeur. I"d never been exposed
  to fine art-hell, the closest I"d gotten to classical music was 101 Strings of Mantovani. It
  was as if the world had been in black and white, and suddenly there was a new palette.
  There seemed to be a personal message in the chapel for me: the existence of a female
  deity before the time of Christ symbolized the limitless power and potential achievement
  of women. If God is a man, then woman is not created in his image, limited by a celestial
  glass ceiling. But if the holiest of holies is female, then women can do anything. I have a
  droll friend who says she doesn"t believe in God, only in signs from God. I believe in
  both, and the Sibyls were a little calling card from the divine. The visual stimulus of great
  art was sensuous and powerful, and it made me long to do something creative. Modeling
  was not what I had in mind.
  
  MODELING GOES BACK A LONG WAY IN OUR FAMILY: when my
  grandfather was a toddler, he wore a wide-brimmed hat and pulled a red toy wagon in a
  turn-of-the-century advertisement for Shapleigh"s Hardware. My first paying job, in my
  junior year of high school, was for Coppertone, made by the Memphis-based Plough
  Corporation. (A dump truck backed up to a photography studio fitted with fake palm trees
  and poured in a load of white sand.) It must have been a slow news day when Ken Ross,
  a staff photographer for the local paper, asked me to pose, without pay, for a few seasonal
  photos in which I scared some Halloween goblins. He was a scout for the Model of the
  Year pageant, the brainstorm of a man named Stewart Cowley who owned a modeling
  agency in New York City, and Ken put my name on a list of suggested entries. When
  Stewart called, my parents thought I was too young to consider leaving home but decided
  it was only polite to meet Cowley at the Peabody Hotel when he came to look over the
  local pulchritude. Our appointment coincided with the ritual marching of the ducks
  through the Peabody lobby: In the 1930s the hotel manager returned from a weekend
  hunting trip having partaken of a little too much Tennessee sippin" whiskey and thought it
  would be fun to put some of his live duck decoys in the lobby"s ornate marble fountain.
  The enthusiastic response from guests begat a tradition: every morning at eleven, under
  the care of an exalted bellboy called the duckmaster, a gaggle of English call ducks
  descend in the elevator from their home on the roof to spend the day splashing in the
  fountain, and every evening at five they return. It"s one of Memphis"s prime photo ops.
  Stewart Cowley had been a theatrical agent before World War II and had a certain
  flamboyant flair-there were framed photos of two large standard poodles in his suite. I
  didn"t know that his contest idea was contemptuously referred to as Stewart"s Folly by his
  New York competitors-my parents simply told him, "Maybe next year." The first Model
  of the Year contest drew a huge audience when it was telecast on CBS-so much for
  Stewart"s Folly, although another man claimed Cowley had stolen the idea, and he spent
  so much time in litigation that he was known as Suin" Stew. When he returned to
  Memphis the following year, I was planning to study art history at Louisiana State and
  was still disdainful of anything that smacked of a beauty pageant. My mother insisted that
  I show him the courtesy of turning him down in person, and I went to the hotel in defiant
  disregard for my appearance, wearing cutoff jeans, with skin tanned mahogany and
  unwashed hair too blond from the sun. We sipped sweet iced tea, a southern tradition with
  its overkill of sugar, while Cowley chatted about the rewards awaiting the contest winner:
  a contract with his agency and $25,000 guaranteed in modeling fees the first year.
  I"d rehearsed a smug little speech about having a higher calling to study Italian
  art. "I"m really not interested in being a model," I said.
  "I"m sorry to hear that," Cowley replied. "You have a good chance of winning
  here in Memphis and going on to New York." There was a twinkle in his eye as he dealt
  his trump card. "And you"re a helluva lot closer to Italy in New York than in Baton
  Rouge, Louisiana."
  My father was cutting the grass and my mother was sitting on the front porch in a
  wrought-iron chair when I returned from the local Model of the Year pageant. There was
  a huge pile of yellow roses poking out the window on the passenger side of the 1960 Ford
  Fairlane I"d inherited from my great-grandmother, which required putting your foot flat
  to the floor every time you accelerated.
  "What in the world is all that yellow?" Mother called as I pulled in the driveway.
  "I won," I said.
  Stewart Cowley tempered my victory with a dose of reality. "You"ll have to lose at
  least thirty pounds," he announced and handed me a mimeographed copy of the
  grapefruit diet. I consumed two strips of bacon a day, plus meager portions of canned
  tuna and cucumbers, washed down with black coffee and Tab, each meal followed
  religiously by half a grapefruit (occasionally, for a hit of exotica, broiled). Perversely,
  during this starvation routine, I lay around the house reading cookbooks and a twenty-
  five cent booklet called "Count Your Calories" that detailed the difference between boiled
  pigs feet (185 calories) and pickled pigs feet (the way I liked them, at 230 calories). All I
  thought about was food. Once I sneaked into the kitchen at 3 A.M. to polish off some
  leftover lamb chops that hadn"t been ravaged to my mother"s satisfaction.
  I lost twelve pounds but claimed twenty-eight on the Model of the Year
  application, and that September, instead of registering for Art History 101 at Louisiana
  State University, I went to New York for the finals. I was familiar with the skyline from
  the movie King Kong, one of my childhood favorites, but nothing could have prepared
  me for my first view of the city as the plane circled La Guardia Airport: Manhattan on a
  platter, rising from its slim, precarious perch between two rivers, with the crush of people
  and their island mentality, all wanting access and egress at exactly the same time. The
  other contestants were registering at the Waldorf-Astoria with their mothers, despite the
  fact that they all seemed stunningly grown-up. I called home in a panic, and my mother
  was on the next flight. As she walked through the hotel lobby, she passed one willowy
  Miss Somewhere after another. "I swear," she declared when she called my father to
  report her safe arrival, "I don"t know what Cybill is doing up here with all these beautiful
  women."
  The walls of the Stewart Modeling Agency were covered with intimidating
  pictures of Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, and Marisa Berenson, behind the
  "bookers" with telephones attached to their shoulders and big volumes of rate cards for
  all the girls, who were never called anything but girls. (The stars didn"t have a rate. Their
  fees were unquestionable and unmentionable.) My outlook improved when I went to the
  CBS studio and started trying on various outfits. Looking in the mirror at my gold
  sequined bikini and long hot-pink cape with a hood trimmed in matching sequins by Oleg
  Cassini, I thought: Maybe I have a chance. I also thought: Losing is really a drag-let"s
  try winning for a change.
  I watched a tape of the pageant recently, and it feels like going on an
  archaeological dig, pulling up unfathomable shards of the past. The broadcast, which
  preempted Mannix, opened with a song: "Who"s that walking along the street, so cool,
  keeping a groovy beat... She doesn"t mind you will have to stare, great in everything she
  wears." A silver pleated curtain rose to reveal a group of go-go dancers writhing in front
  of the contestants, who stood, frozen, on a stepped platform. The helmet-haired hostess,
  Arlene Dahl, sat at a table behind a pitiful arrangement of carnations that seemed to be
  strategically placed to conceal her bosom. The dimpled and equally helmet-haired cohost,
  John Davidson, commented, "This is a girl watcher"s dream come true."
  There was some speculation about the career ambitions of the contestants. "Do
  you think these girls always wanted to be models?" Davidson asked with some gravity.
  "Not necessarily, John," answered Dahl. "Some wanted to be nurses, airline
  hostesses, and more often than not, movie stars."
  The emcee, Jack Linkletter, summoned each girl to center stage for an interview,
  each of us having been instructed to do a little pirouette as we reached him.
  "Do you want to have a large family?" he asked one.
  "No," she said without a touch of irony. "I think maybe six or seven."
  He asked a girl from Iowa to make the noise of an egg-laying chicken and
  commented about another, "This is a very ambitious girl in the sense that she has a lot of
  ambitions."
  Everyone was wearing so much eyeliner and shadow, such heavy false lashes, that
  we looked like sleepwalkers. Davidson and Dahl did the fashion commentary.
  "The accent this year is on chains," said Dahl, "to circle the waist or wrist or just
  to call attention to a pretty face." "Or maybe to keep a girl at home with the
  chains," chimed in Davidson.
  When my turn came, I approached Linkletter, wearing a crushed red velvet coat
  with black gloves and boots and a cossack hat-actually a rather elegant look,
  considering the possibilities, which ran to tartan tam-o"-shanters and orange leather
  boots. I was terrified, exhausted, overwhelmed, and no doubt starving, and I looked it.
  "In last year"s Miss Teenage contest," Linkletter said to me, "you were Miss
  Congeniality. And you got to travel to Europe."
  "Oh, yes," I gushed, "it was wonderful."
  "Which do you like better: European men or American men?" "Oh, I like them
  booooooth," I said in a breathy drawl.
  "Are they different?"
  "Oh, there"s all different varieties, American men and European men."
  "See how congenial she is?" said Linkletter.
  Instructions were to walk as if I were floating, like a geisha, my heels never
  touching the ground, when I paraded down the runway in the "Fun" segment of the
  program. Other contestants were consigned to pseudo cowboy chaps and space suits. The
  girl who followed me was wearing a hat so hideous, all she needed was a dangling price
  tag to look like Minnie Pearl. I had practiced flinging open my sequined cape in front of
  every available shiny surface until I had the move nailed, and I sold that bikini. I thrust
  my hips into the turn at the end of the runway, exposing a slice of midriff that hadn"t been
  so flat since I was ten and never would be again. Winning was nothing short of a
  calculated decision, but it was emotional beyond my initial contemptuous expectations.
  All that sentiment had been held in check until the moment of triumph while I smiled and
  made the right turns. There"s something devastating about winning, almost like walking
  across the bodies of the others, feeling the responsibility of the torchbearer for the beauty
  olympics. It"s almost too much to bear. When you see a pageant winner crying, those are
  not crocodile tears. You don"t cry that way when you lose.
  It was the lore about a young Grace Kelly, safely ensconced in the Barbizon Hotel
  upon her arrival in New York, that pacified my parents when Stewart Cowley suggested it
  as a place for me to stay. Perhaps Grace liked pink. My room looked like the inside of a
  Pepto-Bismol bottle, with a narrow single bed and a gigantic bathtub down the hall. The
  decision was made in haste: I won the contest on a Saturday night, and that Tuesday
  morning I was shooting on the sand dunes at Jones Beach for Ship "n" Shore blouses. My
  starting rate was $20 an hour, and during my first month of work I made $6,000, but I
  spent a small personal fortune on the arsenal of beauty props I was expected to carry:
  self-adhesive nails, hot rollers, braids, falls, ponytails, hair spray, a ratting comb, and
  enough makeup to spackle a driveway. To haul it around, I bought a khaki fishing bag at
  Abercrombie & Fitch-a store on Fifty-seventh Street that celebrated patrician leisure
  activities-and took out the plastic lining meant for the fish. One of the women at the
  model agency informed me that I needed fur to look glamorous in New York and set up
  an appointment at Mr. Fred"s Fur and Sport, where I bought three, count "em, three coats:
  rabbit, possum, and curly white lamb. My shopping expedition was given six column
  inches in my hometown newspaper, but the midi length of the possum I"d chosen was
  deemed "overpowering for her delicate blond beauty." (I wore it to wave from a float in a
  Thanksgiving Day parade in Charlottesville, North Carolina, much to the consternation of
  the officials, who were upset about not being able to see tit. and ass. They gestured
  frantically for me to remove the coat and reveal the skimpy gown underneath, but this
  particular set of tits and ass was freezing.)
  I quickly learned the art of the go-see: I was told to buy a little notebook for my
  appointments, and every day I"d call the agency for a list of perhaps a dozen magazine
  editors and account executives who wanted to look me over. Getting the lay of the land
  required reciting a mantra: the Hudson River is to the west, Greenwich Village is to the
  south, Fifth Avenue"s in the middle... Often I"d realize that I was on West Fifty-fourth
  Street when I was supposed to be meeting a client on East Fifty-fourth Street. I felt a
  discomfort akin to the theme of my childhood, when I knew that physical attributes were
  all that counted, but my early foray into modeling was a wonderful opportunity to
  become accustomed to rejection. Sometimes I knew the reason, sometimes not. I never
  got the Dentyne chewing gum commercial that I went up for three different times. The ad
  agency executives ordered "Smile harder," then "Wider," then "Less." Apparently I chew
  funny.
  One day I was summoned to the office of Diana Vreeland, the flamboyant editor
  of Vogue. She handed me a bikini that looked like three slices of bread strung together
  and told me to change in a closet. My ass hung out the back, which did not go unobserved
  -rather rude, I thought, since she had such an odd-looking body herself: all limbs with
  no waist and a face that seemed to have been ironed.
  What many people don"t know about modeling is that the editorial shots in
  fashion magazines are the worst paying jobs. Catalogs are the bread and butter of the
  industry, photographed in formulaic ways that were thought to show the cheap clothes at
  their best advantage. Usually we worked in a studio against a huge roll of paper called
  no-seam hung from the ceiling. If I tried to make an impulsive, spontaneous gesture, the
  clothes tended to wrinkle, and the photographer would bring me back to the standard
  pose-"One hand on your hip, please, one hand on your throat."
  Location shoots were more interesting, although there was seldom time to explore
  and enjoy the locations. I was required to make a personal appearance as Model of the
  Year in Caracas. (I mostly remember the sweet, thick coffee, which jolted me out of jet
  lag.) I made an Ultra Brite toothpaste commercial in Los Angeles, staying at the
  Continental Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard, which got a reputation as the Riot House after it
  was trashed by rock groups in residence. (I mostly remember worrying about my eyes,
  puffy from crying out of sheer loneliness, plus I had a zit on my face that looked like a
  third eye.) I made a Cover Girl commercial in Bavaria, where the big brewing companies
  made extra-strength beer for Oktoberfest and waitresses carried three steins on each arm
  as people danced on tables in steamy beer halls. (I mostly remember wrapping myself in
  a feather bed in my freezing room at the inn.)
  I didn"t make many friends while I was modeling. Competition turned the other
  girls into enemies-even on a location shoot where we were all working, there was a
  sense of rivalry about who"d end up with more pictures in the magazine. On-camera
  "talent" must be protected, which made people suck up, but only until they"d gotten what
  they wanted. I didn"t trust the editors and account executives, who acted as if I was going
  to be their best friend for life while we were working together, and then vaporized when
  the day ended. In the beginning I was afraid to look at the camera for fear that the
  photographer would think I was looking at him and giving him sexual license. It took me
  a while to acknowledge that photographers didn"t necessarily want to sleep with me. I felt
  utterly intimidated about talking to northerners; many people took my thick Memphis
  accent as evidence of mild retardation.
  One who didn"t make those assumptions was a young executive at CBS named
  James Cass Rogers, newly graduated from Yale Drama School and assigned to the Model
  of the Year telecast. During a rehearsal break one day, I was sitting in a corner with my
  nose in a book when he approached. "You don"t look like the sort of girl who"d be
  reading The Confessions of Nat Turner," he said.
  "Oh, really," I said, "what does that sort of girl look like?" Our friendship is now
  in its third decade. Jim always gave me loving criticism-there"s probably nothing more
  valuable. And he understood that I felt diminished by modeling. It made me financially
  independent and was occasionally creative, but most of the time I was treated like a prize
  steer being groomed and readied for a county fair (except I wasn"t supposed to bulk up).
  He encouraged me to find out what delighted and excited me by taking some college
  courses, a proposal that was greeted with derision by everyone at my agency. "Models
  always say they want to go back to school," said the same person who told me to buy fur,
  "but they never do. Modeling money is too good, and the life"s too cushy." Removed
  enough from childhood tutelage about being a good girl, my new reaction to the words
  "You can"t..." became "Watch me."
  Stewart Models demanded three days of work a week to fulfill my contract, so
  Jim suggested that I start with a single English literature course at Hunter College night
  school. Books had been my best friends in a chaotic household where people said they
  were happy but didn"t act like it. Books never talked down to me, didn"t care what color
  my hair was and, to this day, are my most treasured possessions. College was an
  opportunity to devour the classics, to live inside them: in Oscar Wilde"s The Picture of
  Dorian Gray, I learned the tragic bargains people make for eternal youth and beauty.
  In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad exposed the sinister unexplored and
  unowned areas of my psyche. In What Maisie Knew, Henry James let me into the
  turbulent world of a girl whose parents, just divorced, compete for her affection and
  approval, a parallel universe to my own. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton seemed to
  speak directly to me about a beautiful outsider trying to fit into fashionable New York,
  recognizing "a new vista of peril." (One book I couldn"t relate to was Beowulf, written in
  Old English, which might as well be Old Swahili.)
  The next semester I enrolled in the College of New Rochelle, a small progressive
  Catholic school for women in Westchester County, an hour north of Manhattan, which
  was more willing to accommodate my full-time work schedule. I spent only one night in
  the dorm, which seemed to vibrate with stereophonic noise. I tried blasting the opera
  Carmen to counteract Grace Slick down the hall and experimented with waxy earplugs
  that got stuck in my hair, but I had been out in the world too long to put up with the
  indignities of shared showers and toilets. I had moved out of the Barbizon (I wouldn"t last
  long anywhere that men weren"t allowed) to share an apartment with other models, so I
  made a reverse commute for my classes, taking the train up from Grand Central Station.
  Blessedly, I was excused from taking statistics and was allowed to bypass the generalized
  Introduction to Art, proceeding right to History of the Italian Renaissance. It was a highly
  charged time on campuses across the country, and I voted along with my classmates for a
  student strike against the Vietnam War-my first political protest. I was an anomaly: a
  passionate student who didn"t care about grades or earning a degree, and I wanted to
  learn. I was required to think, and it was one of the happiest times in my life.
  Feeling like a frog that needed a bigger pond, I enrolled at Washington Square
  College of New York University and switched my major to English literature. Studying
  art history means reading art criticism, much of which is dry as a bone. At least literary
  criticism uses the same medium it is commenting on. I wouldn"t be studying what other
  people said about the creative people, but the words of the creative people themselves.
  Sitting through a Shakespearean play had never been my favorite pastime, but my class
  on his works was a chance to read and discuss the universal Sturm und Drang still
  pertinent today-hardly a week goes by that I don"t refer to the lies and betrayal in the
  unholy trinity of Othello, Desdemona, and Iago.
  An anthropology course imparted a daring bit of knowledge: somewhere in the
  world there were women uncovering their breasts with impunity and covering up their
  ankles. I knew the stereotype that you could identify a woman"s nationality by noticing
  which part of her body she tried to hide if naked: an American would cover her breasts, a
  European would cover her genitals, an Arab would cover her face. Whatever part a
  woman believed she"d be struck down dead for exposing depended on country, culture,
  god, or tribe. The idea that there was nothing inherently right or wrong about nudity
  would justify one of the most important decisions in my future.
  Stewart Cowley"s attorney"s best friend had a best friend whose best friend was
  John Bruno, a wealthy restaurateur who raced Ferraris and ran a family-owned
  steakhouse called the Pen and Pencil. He seemed both suave and down-to-earth to me:
  ten years older, Italian, born and raised in Manhattan. On one of our first dates he put on
  a white lab coat and took me into his meat locker, showing how he had inspected the beef
  himself, stamping it in purple ink with the restaurant"s insignia. One night we parked half
  a block from the restaurant after it closed to spy on employees who were stealing meat.
  (John said that all employees steal, that part of running the business was figuring out how
  much he could afford to have stolen and still make a profit.) He loved New York, and I
  got my feet permanently planted in the granite, in the subway and the theater, in Central
  Park and in the fountain on the plaza of the Seagram Building, where we went wading on
  a deserted Fourth of July when it felt like we had the city to ourselves.
  I was sharing an apartment on Sutton Place with three other models (two
  bedrooms, two bathrooms, two locks on the door). When I got a bad strep throat, John
  brought me an Italian chicken soup called stracciatella and held me until I fell asleep.
  I"ve always felt that foreplay should be like a good meal, going from soup to... nuts, and
  we consummated the relationship when I recovered. Leaving the apartment, a chorus of
  "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman" ringing in our ears, we danced our way
  toward the East River, not caring that the sky was gloomy and certainly not noticing the
  piles of steaming dog shit before we stepped in it. (Pooper-scooper laws were not yet in
  effect, but I later learned the traditional theatrical superstition that stepping in dog doo on
  the way to a performance will bring luck.) Eventually I asked John to help me find a
  small apartment of my own and moved into a studio in the East Sixties, with a sleeping
  loft and a pullman kitchen that cost $500 a month (my day rate was up to $60). I indulged
  my innate disordered slobbiness, with nothing in the refrigerator but unrecognizable
  leftovers. (Could it be that the green fuzz ball was once a piece of cheese?)
  I"d never even heard of brownstones, the nineteenth-century town houses built
  from the stones of river quarries up the Hudson, until I saw where John lived on the
  Upper East Side. When he led me up the spiral staircase for the grand tour, I gasped at a
  room with grand gilded mirrors, plush curved couches, and Victorian bibelots. "That"s
  where my mother lives," he explained. "I"m upstairs."
  He lives with his mother...? I was reassured when I saw his own bachelor
  quarters, complete with bearskin rugs and leopard upholstery, even as a cover for the
  bathtub. And John"s mother turned out to be one of his best assets. Frances Bruno was a
  good head shorter than I and shaped like a Sumo wrestler-she looked as if she could roll
  right over anyone who got in her way. She had a big nose, short brown hair, and the
  gravelly voice of an ex-smoker, with an earthy, unedited laugh. She was involved in
  almost every aspect of the restaurant business, and no task was too insignificant: she had
  even reupholstered the chairs in the powder room herself. She suffered from bad arthritis
  and sometimes joined me in the basement swimming pool at the Barbizon, even after I
  was no longer living there, wearing a thick white rubber cap (although she didn"t put her
  face in the water) and a bathing suit with a "modesty panel." Her street wear was more
  fashionable. Years before, she"d been the head fitter at Saks Fifth Avenue and took me to
  see how, in the days before computerized everything, the salespeople would send a
  customer"s money up to the cashier through a system of polished brash pneumatic tubes.
  She loved to shop, sometimes handing me a suede jacket or a pearl necklace with an
  apology: "Forgive me, I just had to buy this for you."
  Everything Frances did seemed sophisticated too, not just going to the
  Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center but eating afterward. (Dinner was at six
  o"clock when I was growing up.) She ordered steak tartare and so did I. I didn"t know
  from tartare; I figured it was steak, and how wrong could you go? When the plate of
  ground raw meat arrived at the table, I didn"t want to admit that I had no idea what I"d
  ordered. I took a bite, managed to swallow, and asked, "Isn"t this too rare for you?"
  Frances always poured water into her wine, saying, "...or else I"ll be tipsy." And she was
  so easily, physically demonstrative. I felt that her hugs were untainted by any envy or
  reservation. That time had passed with my own parents, who conveyed a subtle
  discomfort about physical affection. Puberty and lies had distanced us.
  Christmas 1968 should have been a triumphant homecoming for me. When the
  Commercial Appeal was delivered to our house, I was on the cover of the magazine
  supplement. After dinner, my father and I took one of our traditional walks around the
  neighborhood, where a suburban building boom had created lots of new construction. We
  hadn"t gotten out of our yard before he said, "Your mother doesn"t turn me on anymore."
  Long pause. My first thought was: I don"t want to hear this. I felt as if I was
  outside the scene, which looked small and distant, as if viewed through the wrong end of
  a telescope. But I said, "So who does?"
  And he answered. "Her name is Ellen. She"s my secretary. She"s quite a bit
  younger than I am."
  My father was never supposed to leave, no matter what his behavior to my
  mother, no matter how she might have failed him. They were, after all, the best
  jitterbuggers in Memphis. For years I asked my mother, "Why did you and Dad stay
  together if you were incompatible?" and she always answered, "It was a perfect
  relationship. We were so in love." I remember reading somewhere that the urge to defend
  your failures can be so strong that you invent another world to inhabit, a cocoon of denial
  in your own head and in the public eye. My mother had invested in a kind of fantasy
  goodness about my father, and it wasn"t until years later, when I"d confided the worst
  heartache of my life, that she acknowledged her futile convictions about her husband and
  the societal pressure to stay married. You get to know the bad mask of a person, she
  would say, and you stay, hoping there is a good person underneath who really loves you
  and will never leave.
  My father always said he left Memphis with nothing but the shirt on his back. In
  truth, he drove away in a white Ford LTD, with a nice severance package, having failed
  to usurp control of Shobe, Inc., from Da-Dee. He married Ellen, then divorced her, then
  remarried her, and along the way they had a daughter, Mary Catherine. They were living
  in St. Louis and he had stopped paying my mother alimony. I begged her not to have his
  wages garnisheed, which got him fired because of the corporate policy at the company
  where he worked. A lifetime of heavy drinking caught up with his liver, and the doctor
  said he"d be dead within the year, a censure that seemed to impress him. He stopped
  drinking, and when he rented a vacation cabin in Ponca, Arkansas, deep in the Ozarks, I
  went to see him. The opposite of in vino veritas is that liquor can camouflage the true
  person, and in sobriety my father turned out to be lively, kind, intelligent, unpretentious,
  fun. But mostly he was alive.
  
  JOHN BRUNO LIKED SKINNY MODELS, BUT HE FED ME A little too
  well. He belonged to the oldest gourmet society in the world, called La Chaine de
  Rotisseurs, and wanted to eat in a different restaurant every night. The meals were
  glorious-silken smoked salmon with fat capers at The Colony, foie gras and duck a
  l"orange at Quo Vadis-but disastrous for my figure. The paradox of modeling was that I
  represented the cynosure of female beauty, selling an illusion of perfection, and the tacit
  promise of an ad or commercial with my likeness was that those products and services
  would make other women look like me, but in my private life, even I couldn"t look like
  that me. The moment the Model of the Year contest was over, I started gaining weight,
  back up to my prestarvation pounds. On weekends I went running around the Central
  Park reservoir with John, but he couldn"t join me on the days he worked, and I felt unsafe
  going alone.
  Every week I"d pass thinner, younger, prettier girls on go-sees, and John made
  disparaging comments about my ample hips and thighs, even as he was ordering a Grand
  Marnier souffle from one of his gourmand buddies. Twice I stuck my finger down my
  throat after a meal but fortunately found the experience too repulsive to make it a habit.
  The average model of my height weighed no more than 108 pounds (110 was considered
  fat), and I weighed 150. Nothing ever fit. I didn"t fit. On a photo shoot for Vogue, the
  editor had to cut the dresses up the back and affix the butterflied pieces to my skin with
  Scotch tape.
  Sometimes when we were shooting on the streets of New York, the magazine
  would rent a big black limousine, the driver would look the other way, and that would be
  the changing room. I"d jump out, do the picture, and jump back in again. Once when I
  was doing a Glamour shoot, the editor handed me a long-sleeved shirt that would not go
  past my elbows and pants that would not go past my knees.
  "What size are these?" I asked, poking around for a label.
  "These clothes are French," she said with a sniff.
  "Well, these are not French shoulders," I said. "My elbow must be the size of a
  French woman"s thigh."
  "You can go home," said the editor with a sigh. Getting paid to go home was one
  of my favorite days of modeling.
  On a shoot in Saint Martin, the other model had spent much of the past year in
  Mexico, obviously sitting in the sun with iodine and baby oil, and it was the middle of
  winter in New York. When we lay on the beach together, we looked like the black and
  white keys on a piano, and I was told to stay out in the sun so we would "match." I had
  baked myself for years, but this time I had an allergic reaction, and the next morning, my
  eyes were swollen shut. I stayed indoors for twenty-four hours with compresses of wet
  tea bags, but it didn"t do any good. I got paid for not working that time too.
  Most models casually took appetite suppressants that were pure speed, professing
  satiety after nibbling what I considered hamster food. Practically everyone smoked, a
  habit I"d avoided because of childhood pneumonia, with the added incentive of my
  mother"s hacking cough as morning reveille and evening taps from her three packs a day.
  On location for Glamour in Key West, my roommate was a former Miss Universe who
  convinced me to try her prescribed amphetamines.
  "Are you sure they won"t make me feel weird?" I asked. "And aren"t they
  addictive?"
  "Not at all," she answered. "I take them every day."
  She assured me there"d be no unpleasant side effects, and I"d watched her sleep
  sound as a baby, so I swallowed a few pills. I lay a wake all night, sweating and staring at
  the ceiling, my heart pounding as if it was going to pop out of my chest and my teeth
  gnashing like a hungry beaver. When she woke up and asked, "Would you like-" I
  quickly said, "No, thanks."
  The photographer on that shoot was a man named Frank Horvath-scruffy and
  obese, partly shaven before it was chic, wearing supersize dark army fatigues, utterly
  unappealing and initially interested in me. At our first meeting, in a dark room at the
  magazine offices, he"d looked me up and down for about two seconds, shrugged, and
  muttered, "Okay, she"ll do," and left the room. We were working at Hemmingway"s
  house in Key West, with a resident collection of six-toed cats living in the garden, and
  Horvath didn"t bother to knock when he came into the room where I was being dressed
  by the editors, demanding of no one in particular, "Is she ready yet?" We were working
  on a second-story veranda, and he hadn"t even shot a whole roll of film before he said,
  "You"re not very good at this." I stared at him, struck dumb by his blunt candor. "Stop
  posing," he said. "You"re trying too hard, and you"ve developed some bad habits. Just
  think, be in the moment, actually see what you"re looking at." I didn"t know it at the
  time, but he was giving me my first acting lesson. The camera captures what you"re
  thinking, so it had better be something besides: if I hold my hands like this, I"ll look
  thinner. Jimmy Cagney said that acting was stand up tall, look the other guy in the eye,
  and tell the truth. What Frank Horvath led me to that day was a kind of photographie
  veriti.
  Glamour put me on the cover and used 101 photographs of me inside that issue
  (my grandmother counted) followed by seven Glamour covers that year. The era of
  Twiggy and Jean ("the Shrimp") Shrirmpton was over, and there seemed to be a little
  window of opportunity for a healthier look, personified by Tiegs and me. Everybody is
  supposed to have a better side, and I was always photographed from the left for covers,
  but Richard took this as a challenge. "Let"s try the right side," he"d say each of the half
  dozen times we worked together, but his "cover tries" were never used because editors
  were unaccustomed to seeing me that way.
  Sometimes the photographs looked like another person altogether. By the time
  they"d been retouched, there were no flaws, asymmetry of any kind. Things you didn"t
  know you had were eliminated from your face. I"m still shocked at what Kodak did on
  the full-length cutout of me that stood in drugstores to introduce the first Instamatic
  camera-there wasn"t a dimple or ripple of flesh. The countertop version had a
  mechanical arm that swung the camera up and down, rubbing an unfortunate line across
  my face. I inherited the cutout that my grandmother kept in her garage (she said "Hi" to it
  every time she pulled in), and one year my caretaker stuck a Santa hat on its head and a
  sign that said MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL. I still have my original "Breck girl"
  portrait too, an idealized vision of a woman, all misty and dew-eyed like a Stepford wife.
  These relics seem to migrate to my home in Memphis. Maybe they talk to one another
  when I"m not around, like the toys in Santa"s workshop that come alive at night.
  I was clueless about the future beyond modeling, but not out of contentment with
  the status quo-I was frantically trying to figure out what was my Job in the universe.
  Stewart Cowley was opening a talent division to maneuver models into lucrative
  television and film work. He suggested that I meet a man who"d made a violent, low-
  budget, successful movie and was preparing to direct the sequel. The gold-leafed hotel
  suite was far more sumptuous than I expected for a B-list mogul. Stewart brought me
  upstairs but left quite abruptly, whispering "I"ll be right back" while I arranged myself on
  the sofa. As we were talking, Mr. B-list took my elbow and steered me to one of the tall
  windows overlooking Central Park. Then his hand moved from my elbow to my shoulder,
  he leaned in close and thrust his tongue down my throat. Naively, I asked what was going
  on.
  ""This is a scene in the new film," he said. "I thought we"d rehearse."
  I pushed him away saying, "I don"t think this is working for me," just as I heard a
  knock at the door signaling Stewart"s return. I made an excuse about needing to be
  somewhere else, and the moment we were in the hallway, I hissed, "Don"t ever leave me
  alone with one of those creeps again!" I never knew whether his sudden departure was
  prearranged or an innocent mistake.
  With the memory of that lechery still fresh, I learned with some trepidation that
  Roger Vadim had offered me a screen test for a film called Peryl, and I insisted that a
  chaperone accompany me to Los Angeles: my booker at the agency, Donna DeCita,
  whose sister is Bernadette Peters. We stayed in the grizzled old Chateau Marmont on
  Sunset Boulevard, where some of the regulars were wandering around the lobby in their
  bathrobes. Because there was no script yet, I was instructed to rehearse a scene from Cat
  on a Hot Tin Roof. I sat on the lawn reading lines with Vadim"s assistant, who then drove
  me to Malibu for the screen test. Vadim was tall and slender with thinning hair, a creamy
  shirt that he said was made of Egyptian cotton. Three years of Memphis high school
  French didn"t help me understand a word as he conversed with a French actor named
  Christian Marquand (also tall and slender with thinning hair), whose home we were using
  for the audition. I definitely knew what the term ménage a trois meant and was glad for
  the chaperone.
  Most of the test consisted of filming me, with no sound, dancing to the Rolling
  Stones singing "(I Can"t Get No) Satisfaction." (The old-time Hollywood producers,
  many of them German, would refer to this as "M.0.S."-mit out sound.) The film never
  got produced; I was told that the financing fell through. But I had started something
  interesting with the assistant (younger, hairier, and shorter than either of the Frenchmen),
  and as my friend Wanda used to say, "How do you know if a shoe fits unless you try it
  on?" A few weeks later, I lied to John Bruno and flew to San Francisco for the weekend.
  The assistant picked me up on a motorcycle and strapped my suitcase to the back. I kept
  looking over my shoulder as we rode, expecting to see the highway littered with my bras
  and underpants. Vadim later offered me a role in Pretty Maids All in a Row, but the
  character was set to die, early and gruesomely, in the girls" rest room of a high school. I
  declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat, and my acting
  career was stalled at the gate.
  
  Chapter Five
  "MAKE SURE THERE"S A LOT OF
  NUDITY"
  
  IT"S A NOD TO THE HYPERREALITY OF THE FILM BUSINESS that
  everybody in Hollywood knows the maxim: no names on location. Cast and crew
  conspire in an implicit acceptance and discretion about the phenomenon of musical beds,
  about who is seen emerging from which star"s trailer or which grip"s room at the Motel 6.
  The set is like an office Christmas party, where indiscretions are absolved when the
  party"s over, or like the miniature village around the model trains that I coveted as a
  child, a bantam community assembled for fun. Everyone has a common purpose,
  everyone is paid to be creative, and everyone can pretend to be someone else. It"s a
  dreamscape of sorts, basically free of familial and adult responsibilities. I was twenty
  years old when I entered that world, mischievous and recklessly self-absorbed.
  In the spring of 1970, there was a mounting pile of scripts in one corner of my
  apartment, so daunting that I virtually ignored them. I was content to give the movie
  business a wide berth anyway. The Hollywood people I"d met so far were creeps, and
  every model I knew was taking acting lessons. I was determined to be different. My
  friend Jim Rogers offered to help sift through the scripts and found one he thought I
  should consider. It was called The Last Picture Show, from a coming-of-age novel by
  Larry McMurtry about the lives of small-town Texas teenagers in 1951. I would be
  considered for the part of Jacy Farrow, the character whose imprudent promiscuity
  wreaks havoc with her friends and neighbors.
  I went to meet the director, Peter Bogdanovich, in his suite at the Essex House
  facing Central Park, and my deportment conveyed an intentional lack of interest: jeans
  and denim jacket streaked and softened in the washing machine with rocks and bleach,
  Dr. Scholl"s wooden sandals, and a paperback book. Zen philosophers talk about hitting
  the target without aiming at it, is surely what I did. I hated the idea of playing Jacy, a self-
  absorbed ice princess whose persona had often been assigned (erroneously, I thought) to
  me. She stings men and moves on, making them sexual objects as men traditionally do to
  women, but she never finds anything satisfying. Plus the script called for two nude
  scenes, which seemed anathema. Nudity as an inherently moral concept is one thing;
  actually dropping my skivvies was another.
  Peter opened the door to his suite. He looked to be thirtyish, six feet tall with a
  high forehead, dark eyes, a shock of thick near-black hair, and a goofy. smile. The
  immediate attraction was so strong, I was flummoxed.
  "What are you reading?" he asked.
  "Dostoyevsky," I said.
  "Which one?" he asked.
  "War and Peace." I was so unnerved, I might have fumbled my own name, let
  alone Tolstoy"s. But we both laughed out loud, and he invited me to sit down. As he
  headed for the couch, I curled up on the floor next to a coffee table with a tray that held
  the remains of a room-service breakfast and a small crystal vase with a single red rose.
  During the course of our conversation about the film, I picked up the flower and slowly
  plucked the petals off one by one, making a little pile of vanquished foliage. Peter later
  told me that he imagined Jacy could do to any man what I had done to that rose.
  Pages of a new script shuttled between Peter in California and Larry McMurtry in
  Texas, a virgin screenwriter who typed scenes on cheap yellow paper. They established a
  basic construction for the story that was not in the book (a year that spanned from one
  football season to the next), added some important material (like a graduation scene), and
  began casting pivotal roles. Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn were to play two middle-
  aged women assuaging loveless marriages with infidelity. Ben Johnson, who"d played
  opposite John Wayne in several of John Ford"s seminal westerns, turned down the part of
  Sam the Lion, the ethical heart of Anarene, Texas. He didn"t like the four-letter words in
  the script, said he didn"t talk that way in front of women and children. So Peter had Ford
  call him.
  "Are you gonna be the Duke"s sidekick for the rest of your life?" Ford demanded.
  "Well, they"ve got to rewrite the dialogue," said Johnson.
  Peter complied and called to tell Johnson that some of the objectionable language
  had been removed. "I hope you understand," Peter said assuredly, "you"re going to get an
  Academy Award for this picture."
  "Goddammit," Johnson said, "I"ll do the goddamned thing."
  Peter chewed on toothpicks in those days, part of his program to quit smoking,
  and had stopped to pick some up at a Food Giant in the San Fernando Valley. While
  standing in the checkout line, he saw my face on the cover of Glamour, my hair in
  tendrils over the collar of a pink and white shirt imprinted with the words "I love you"
  over and over. There was a fresh sexual threat in the photograph that made him think of
  Jacy Farrow. He"d considered two Texas girls for the part: one was Sissy Spacek, and the
  other was named Patsy McClenny until she started working in soap operas and reinvented
  herself as Morgan Fairchild. But I learned much later that his immediate reaction to that
  magazine cover was the kind of disorientation that Jacy engendered in men. If anybody
  ever projected an image of completeness when at the core was emptiness, it was Jacy
  Farrow. Peter couldn"t know it was also me.
  He was convinced that not only would my lack of acting experience not prevent
  me from playing the role successfully, it might even enhance my work because I wasn"t
  coming into the process with preconceived notions about the character. I was a blank
  slate, fresh clay. He didn"t want me to do a screen test, but the producer, Bert Schneider,
  was less assured. He even dug up the test I"d made for Roger Vadim in an effort to
  convince Peter that I didn"t have enough innate talent to compensate for my amateur
  status. It was the only time Peter would ever doubt me. I was asked to do a reading in
  California with Jeff Bridges, who"d already been cast as Duane Jackson, the callous boy
  on his way to war, and two young actors who were up for the part of the more sensitive
  and vulnerable Sonny Crawford: John Ritter, son of the country music star Tex Ritter, and
  Chris Mitchum, son of Robert Mitchum. Eventually the part went to Timothy Bottoms,
  who had just played the lead as a quadruple amputee in Dalton Trumbo"s World War I
  film Johnny Got His Gun.
  My modeling agent Stewart Cowley arranged for his Los Angeles representative
  to pick me up at the airport, where he announced, "For your first lunch in town, I"m
  taking you to Pinks," a local landmark for chilidogs. I"d been to L.A. before on modeling
  assignments, but this was Hollywood. Tinseltown. Take the sunshine, mix in a little smog,
  and the city actually looks tan. I was anxious, excited, and hungry, wolfing down several
  chili cheese dogs with sauerkraut and mustard. I was fumbling in my purse for breath
  mints when we got to the BBS office. A young man with a lean face, receding hairline,
  and dazzling smile was reclining in a swivel chair with his feet on the desk, smoking a
  joint. I"d seen Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces so I recognized Jack Nicholson, who
  lurched to his feet and made an elaborate attempt to bow in greeting, making jokes I
  didn"t get but laughed at anyway.
  I got the job but not without Schneider"s growling insistence to Peter, "Make sure
  there"s a lot of nudity." My entire salary was $5,000 for twelve weeks of work, an amount
  I could have earned in a week of modeling, but by this time I began to believe that the
  compelling story of these teenagers whose options seem so limited by their dusty small
  town would be painful but important to tell. By thinking back to the paintings of the bare-
  breasted women I"d seen in the great museums of Europe, I"d determined that the nude
  scenes had nothing to do with morality. But my boyfriend, John Bruno, had other ideas.
  "You do a nude scene and I will never marry you," he declared. "If everybody in the
  world sees my future wife naked, you won"t turn me on anymore." This from a man
  supposed to be so sophisticated? I was never really interested in marriage to John or
  anybody else: it represented a kind of indentured servitude, and I was hardly alone in
  rethinking the institution. The atmosphere of the late 1960s was one of sexual libertinism,
  from the bumper stickers that said MAKE LOVE NOT WAR to the newly endorsed
  forms of socializing (mate swapping, orgies, and "key parties-couples played grab bag
  with their car keys, throwing them in a bowl from which the wives fished out a set and
  went home with the owner).
  I don"t need to hear Billie Holidays "God bless the child who"s got his own" to
  know that I had to make sure I could take care of myself in the world so I wouldn"t be
  beholden to men. I was disturbed by John"s possessiveness and his insistence, from the
  beginning of our affair, that if either one of us was in the mood for sex, the other had to
  comply-not a great basis for passionate lovemaking. But it was Frances Bruno who
  provided the final impetus for me to leave. "If you wanna do this movie, you gotta do this
  movie," she said. "You know I love ya, but don"t let Johnnie hold you back." I knew
  enough not to do Pretty Maids All in a Row and enough to do The Last Picture Show.
  Production began that October in north central Texas, a time of golden Indian
  summer sunlight combined with fierce freezing winds. To a large extent, we were persona
  non grata in the community. The locals resented Larry McMurtry"s portrayal of their
  foibles-when Peter met Larry"s father, the elder McMurtry said, "If you"ll pour
  kerosene on him, I"ll light the match"-and the real town, called Archer City, was given
  the pseudonym of "Anarene" for the film. Our provisional home was the Ramada Inn in
  Wichita Falls, a two-story construction of red brick built around an unheated pool. Every
  day for two weeks I worked with an accent coach in my cheerless room right next to the
  soft-drink machine and rehearsed in the optimistically named Presidential Suite, an
  orange nightmare that Peter shared with his wife, Polly, the film"s production designer.
  Peter was twenty-three when they married, and just three weeks before filming began,
  she had given birth to a second daughter, Alexandra, who was left in the care of Peter"s
  parents in Arizona along with three-year-old Antonia.
  I sometimes ask guests in my home to take their clean hands and touch the patina
  on my treasured canvases from Borislav Bogdanovich, Peter"s talented and eccentric
  Serbian father, a painter who worked in his pajamas and allowed no one to touch his hair.
  His wife came from a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, and though many of her
  relatives perished in the Holocaust, she managed to escape to America in 1939, already
  pregnant with Peter. Her first child had died after a horrifying accident, scalded by the
  hot soup she was making and succumbing to anaphylactic shock. Peter knew that an elder
  brother had died, but Herma Bogdanovich mentioned it to him only once toward the end
  of her life, barely able to get the words out, and I can"t help but think that Peter suffers
  from survivor"s guilt.
  Peter once had a perforated ulcer and has had to be very careful about what he
  eats ever since, so he didn"t accompany the cast and crew each morning as we ate eggs
  and grits at the motel diner, opened especially early for us. We rode to Archer City in a
  circa 1950 bus-the chug of its diesel engine in the predawn stillness was my wake-up
  call. I spent twenty-five dollars on a used bicycle with fat tires and no gears so I could
  explore the area, but there wasn"t much to see except trailer parks and junkyards. We had
  so much time on our hands that I read voraciously Kate Millett"s Sexual Politics,
  Germaine Greer"s The Female Eunuch, and Betty Friedan"s The Feminine Mystique.
  These three feminist books revolutionized my thinking and put his-story into perspective.
  I was born again as a radical feminist, and began a search for her-story.
  My dressing room was on the second floor of a seedy old hotel whose street-level
  space was a hamburger joint-the burgers were put in paper bags that would be dripping
  with grease within moments. My wardrobe consisted of thin cotton dresses from a
  vintage clothing store and a pair of jeans from the Columbia wardrobe graveyard
  erroneously labeled "Debbie Reynolds"-many inches shorter and pounds lighter than I.
  For my first scene as an actress, I was in a convertible parked in an open field,
  making out with Timothy Bottoms, who was to reach under my halter-top and grab a
  handful of breast. There was a rumor that Tim refused to bathe in protest before his love
  scenes with Cloris Leachman, but he smelled fine to me and seemed almost as nervous as
  I was, furiously chewing gum all during rehearsal. The mid-autumn sun of the Texas
  plains was so blinding that I couldn"t keep my eyes open, and it seemed like half the town
  was recruited to hold blackout flags made of a heavy opaque material called dubatine to
  block the glare. Right before he said "Action" Peter leaned in close to me and instructed,
  "No tongue." I disobeyed.
  But for the most part I listened attentively to everything Peter said: how to do a
  double take or overlap dialogue with another actor, how to brush my hair lightly between
  takes so it would match in the next scene, how a task (called a piece of business) or an
  article of clothing or the town itself could help to capture and reflect the character.
  Casually taking Sonny"s milkshake away from him, loudly slurping the last drops out of
  his cup, all the while professing my devotion, showed in a humorous way that Jacy
  always gets what she wants-like a spider sucking the innards out of her victims. Peter
  often repeated Orson Welles" dictum that a good director presides over accidents. During
  the scene with Sonny and Sam the Lion at the water tank, the sun was doing gymnastics,
  in and out of the clouds several times. Instead of saying "Cut!" Peter motioned for
  everyone to keep going. He loved the moody chiaroscuro created by the contrasting light.
  It became his homage to the great American director John Ford. More than twenty years
  earlier, when Ford was filming She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (with a much younger Ben
  Johnson), a terrible rainstorm approached. Ford liked the threatening look of the dark sky
  and decided to shoot anyway. Fearing for his reputation the director of photography wrote
  directly on the celluloid, "Shot under protest." He won the Academy Award.
  I witnessed the quintessential oblivious wielding of power of a passionate
  director: in one outdoor scene, two children were playing behind a house that was in the
  camera"s frame, and Peter called to them, "Hey, you kids, get out of your yard." With
  each passing day I began to feel more and more invested in every scene, worrying: Oh,
  God, is he going to get this take? or Has it stopped raining so we can finish this scene?
  Every chance I got I stayed up all night to watch the shooting, drinking Dixie cups of
  coffee and brandy to stay awake. I loved to see the cables snaking across the wet streets
  (always hosed down for night filming because the reflection makes them more visually
  exciting), the huge wind machines that had to be moved by three brawny grips, the smoke
  wafting out of chimneys above the bulbs of the arc lights in the cold night air. Peter had
  decided to shoot the film in black and white because it would portray the 1950s more
  convincingly and because color can distract the audience. Gradations of gray allow
  people to concentrate on dramatic content and performance, rather than the tone of red in
  an actress"s lipstick or dress. The sharpness and depth of field in black and white have
  never been surpassed in color photography.
  Several weeks into the shooting, Peter got a request from Bert Schneider: Could
  Stephen Friedman visit the set? He was a producer only because he owned the movie
  rights to the book and Peter reluctantly agreed to let him observe for a few days.
  Friedman asked me to take a walk with him one afternoon and gave me notes on my
  performance. Returning to the hotel, I saw Peter.
  "Do you think my acting is enthusiastic enough?" I asked.
  "Who"s been talking to you?" said Peter. When he learned that it was Friedman, I
  thought smoke would come out of his nostrils. Then, crossing the lobby, he ran into Ellen
  Burstyn.
  "Who"s this Friedman character?" she asked. "Is he a producer or what?"
  "Well, he"s a nominal producer," Peter said.
  "He"s giving me line readings," said Ellen. "He told me about one of his favorite
  lines in the book, how he always imagined it being said like-"
  Peter exploded and ran for a phone to call Bert Schneider. "If that cocksucker isn"t
  out of Texas by tonight," he screamed, "I"m going to borrow a hunting knife from one of
  these good ol" boys and kill him.""
  Friedman was gone the next morning, and we didn"t see him again until the
  Academy Awards, where he was dressed in a green tuxedo. When a still photographer on
  the set talked to me about my scenes, Peter sent him packing too. The joke was: if you
  want to get fired from this picture, talk to Cybill Shepherd.
  Jacy makes her initial appearance in the movie theater where Father of the Bride
  is playing. Sonny is necking with his girlfriend in the back row, keeping one eye on
  Elizabeth Taylor, whom he really wants to be kissing, and Jacy walks up the aisle with
  Duane to ask teasingly, "Whatcha"all doin" back here in the dark?" I was sitting in a row
  just ahead of Peter as we waited until the shot was lit to the satisfaction of the Oscar-
  winning director of photography Robert Surtees. Peter leaned over the worn velvet seat
  and spoke in a low voice right next to my ear.
  "How are you doing?" he said.
  "I"m a little nervous, but I"m okay "I answered. "How are you?"
  He bent an elbow on the seat and rested one cheek in his hand. "I don"t know who
  I"d rather sleep with," he said, "you or the character you"re playing."
  The moment was so intense that I covered my face with my hands to hide the
  rising color. Just then I heard from the back of the theater, "We"re ready for you, Cybill."
  Even if he hadn"t meant it, Peter"s words would have been terrific motivation for
  the scene. I felt sexy, playful, inspired. And I couldn"t stop thinking about him, about the
  corners of his mouth as he spoke before I covered my eyes.
  Not long after, Polly was away scouting locations, and Jeff Bridges had left for a
  week of army reserve duty. As we wrapped for the day, Peter said, "I guess you"re going
  to be alone tonight." It was his first reference to the open secret that Jeff and I had been
  keeping company after hours.
  Jeff was adorable, but nobody could compare to Peter. What he had to offer was
  authority, maturity, guidance, and a palpable attraction. The force field that had started in
  the Essex House, when I didn"t know what book I was reading, would grow to the point
  that even Polly remarked on it-she said facetiously that Peter was always drawn to
  women with big breasts and small feet (neither of which she had).
  There was a moment of silence and expectation before I responded to Peter"s
  comment.
  "I"m alone every night," I said. It was as if the lighting in the room changed,
  everything fading to black until there was just one spotlight on the couple.
  We made plans for dinner that night at a cowboy steakhouse outside of town that
  we hoped would not be frequented by any of the cast or crew. I nervously tried on every
  outfit in my suitcase, finally settling on blue jeans. It was the time of night when the
  ambient temperature in Texas seemed to drop like a stone, but the shiver I felt down the
  back of my neck as I saw Peter at his car wasn"t meteorological. In that flat country, the
  sky gets bigger and the sunset surrounds you like a dome. We stopped and stood by the
  bridge that crosses the Red River, watching the ball of fire drop behind the horizon. He
  sang a cappella to me in the car on the way home-"I"m a Fool to Love You" and "Glad
  to Be Unhappy." No suitor had ever serenaded me like that, and it felt like the most
  romantic kind of wooing. When we got back to the motel, we both went to my room.
  An emotional archaeologist might speculate about how much bought into the
  mythology of The Last Picture Show and a character who represents the height of
  narcissism: damaging other people but focusing on how bad it makes her feel. Jacy was
  doing that in the film, and I was doing it in real life, aware of the pain we would cause
  but unable to resist causing it. The inability to tolerate the truths about oneself is an
  essential element of narcissism, and I had a blithely unexamined life. The participants in
  a love triangle are often neatly categorized as innocent victim, faithless destroyer, and
  erotic enabler. But the roles are mutable, and I don"t think you can play one without
  ending up playing them all.
  When Polly returned from her scouting expedition the truth became impossible
  for her to ignore. We weren"t doing anything obvious-on the contrary, we were even
  more guarded, trying to stay away from each other-but the energy changes when an
  illicit affair is consummated. Polly would later tell Peter that she knew for sure when she
  saw a box of pralines in their room that were not meant for her, even though they were
  her favorites. One night she was eating dinner in the restaurant at the Tradewinds Motel
  when she saw us come in. Knowing it was best not to have a confrontation until the work
  was done, she crawled out of the restaurant on her knees. She moved to another room at
  the Ramada Inn, hoping that she could resurrect her marriage after a location affair had
  lost its heat.
  On those charts that measure stress in life, where the death of a spouse rates 100
  and a bad haircut is a 3, Peter was hovering near the top, and he went off the chart
  entirely when he got the news that his father lay in a coma after a catastrophic stroke. He
  went to Arizona for the weekend, but three days after he returned to work, Borislav
  Bogdanovich died.
  Peter"s father"s death drew us closer together as I made myself available to hold
  and comfort him. But it would have been completely inappropriate for me to accompany
  him to the funeral-I was the chippie who had broken up his marriage-and Polly
  declined to go, so he had no support for the trip. When he returned, he had to shoot the
  funeral scene for Sam the Lion, a brutal piece of bad timing. It would become one of the
  most powerful sequences of the film, informed by Peter"s personal loss and infused with
  an extra dimension of raw emotion that affected all of us.
  All my life I"d been told I could use my beauty, but it had been slippery footing: I
  was never thin enough, my breasts were not the right shape, and the area under my eyes
  was too puffy. But in 1970 I had the right look for the right time-a genetic roll of the
  dice in my favor. If I had resembled one of Modigliani"s fragile waifs rather than
  Botticelli"s ample voluptuaries, maybe nobody would know who I am today. Peter told
  me, "Don"t you dare lose weight," and for the first time in my life, I felt confident about
  my looks. But I was still petrified by the thought of the striptease on a diving board at a
  midnight pool party and the deflowering at the Cactus Motel that has all the romance of
  root canal.
  An assistant director was given what he considered the plum assignment of going
  to talent agencies in Dallas and finding a body double for me, in case I refused to do the
  nude scene. But I wouldn"t let him see me naked or pose for photographs, so I was put in
  the bizarre position of describing my breasts to him. (Wildly embarrassed, I said "eggs
  over easy.") Peter kept reassuring me that there would be only a skeletal crew, that none
  of the other actors would be present when we filmed, and that it wouldn"t mean the end
  of my career before it even started. A friend had pointed out to me that once an actress
  appears nude on film, the stills often fall into the wrong hands, and I wanted a signed
  affidavit from Peter and the producer Bert Schneider that no still photographs would be
  printed. I continued to nag Peter about this until one day he snapped, "If you ever
  mention this again, I will never give you another piece of direction." I never did speak of
  it again. The day we shot the diving board scene, I wore two pairs of underpants so I
  could remove one and still be covered. My anxiety was impeccable motivation, since
  Jacy"s bravado covers up sheer terror.
  I had another naked moment of truth in the scene at the motel. As an impotent
  Duane keeps mumbling, "I dunno what happened," Jacy finally explodes, "Oh, if you say
  that one more time, I"ll bite you," throwing her panties at his head. Since Peter was
  framing the shot for a close-up, I was thrilled to get to put my bra back on. There"s a
  comic juxtaposition of music and action in the scene, a florid arrangement of "Wish You
  Were Here" mocking Duane"s inability to get it up. Nudity and comedy in the same scene
  is a rare combination in film.
  (Years later, when Peter reedited the movie for a new release, he reinstated a
  scene where Jacy has sex on a pool table with "Abilene," a callous older man who works
  for her father and has an affair with her mother. The sex is not violent or coerced but so
  cold and bloodless that it seems tantamount to an act of aggression against Jacy, stopping
  just short of rape. Including this scene makes my character more sympathetic, gives her
  more dimension. The original sound had been lost, so I had to go into a studio and
  rerecord the audible implications of lovemaking, looking at footage of myself from
  twenty-five years earlier while Peter stood next to me giggling.)
  At the time I thought that God was going to strike me dead for appearing nude in
  a movie. But the morning after, I got up and ate oatmeal and realized that I was going to
  live. I thought surely I"d be struck down after I had sex with a married man. But the
  morning after, I woke up quite healthy. I knew the affair was wrong, but I rationalized it
  by thinking that I hadn"t exchanged any vows with Polly, and that I was only doing what
  men have been doing for eons, taking their pleasure wherever they find it. John Bruno,
  who had come for one visit, sent me a pithy present: a shiny steel heart-shaped dog tag on
  a chain that said: MY NAME IS CYBILL, I BELONG TO NO ONE. Now it seems like
  an estimable motto, but at the time it saddened me.
  When a film wraps, the actors often like to keep some of their props or wardrobe
  as mementos. I wanted the heart-shaped locket and the brown and white saddle shoes that
  Jacy wore, but Polly was in charge of costumes and wouldn"t give them to me. I guess
  she figured I had enough of a souvenir: her husband.
  Peter and I had made no promises to one another beyond the boundaries of Texas.
  I"d never experienced anything so powerful before and didn"t know where it would lead.
  I still thought of marriage as an outdated institution left over from the era of chastity
  belts, but Peter said he had to give his own marriage a chance. I went back to Memphis
  before returning to New York City and Peter and Polly returned to their home in Los
  Angeles. Right away he began sneaking out to phone me, and Polly finally said, "If you
  can"t stay away from her, why don"t you just go with her?" He called me from his room
  at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
  "Do you want to come out here and live with me?" he asked wearily.
  "Okay," I said, the calmness of my voice belying the joy and trepidation in my
  heart. "When do you want me to come?"
  "On the next plane," he said.
  We rented a furnished apartment on the seventh floor of a landmark Art Deco
  building on the Sunset Strip. But many nights I camped out on the couch at the
  production company, living on those chili dogs from Pinks and watching Peter edit The
  Last Picture Show on an old Moviola. Since he had no assistant, he assembled the raw
  footage himself-twenty-four frames per second, like twenty-four still photographs. He
  marked with a white wax pencil between the frames where he wanted to cut. Then he
  rolled his chair over to a splicer table, reassembling the film with a special Scotch tape
  that had sprocket perforations. He would then run the scene for me, demonstrating the
  powerful effect of adding or removing even a single frame to the "head" or the "tail" of
  the shot. Watching Peter work was an education in film, and it served me well when I got
  involved in the editing of the Cybill show. I like it when I hear this process called
  "montage." It seems to convey the hope that the whole will add up to even more than the
  sum of its parts. Film is visual music. It"s put together with more than logic and
  announces when it"s right. Many a performance can be made or destroyed by what is left
  in or cut out.
  Columbia fought hard to rename The Last Picture Show, afraid it would be
  confused with The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper"s follow-up to Easy Rider that was to be
  released just a few weeks earlier. Studio executives submitted about five hundred
  alternative titles, all of which were resoundingly rejected-it was, after all, the title that
  had originally attracted Peter to the project. Bert Schneider called with the disheartening
  news that the picture had been given an X rating because of the nudity, but Peter said, "I
  don"t see how we can cut any of it. Tell them to look at it again." Bert appealed to his
  brother, Columbia"s head of production, who had been an earlier advocate, arguing
  against the corporate executives who questioned why anybody would want to see a black
  and white film, much less make one. The rating was changed to R. We never knew why
  this happened.
  My mother"s response to the news about Peter and me was "If you"re going to be
  with a married man, you might as well be a whore." But her moral stance didn"t prevent
  her from accepting my invitation to the premiere at the New York Film Festival or from
  sharing the suite reserved for Peter and me at the Essex House. (In a romantic gesture, he
  had tried but failed to get the same suite where we first met.) There was only time for
  brief introductions because we had to leave early for the requisite media interviews and
  Mother was not happy that she didn"t get to ride to Lincoln Center in the same limousine
  with us and share the glory. I was ambivalent about her presence: I wanted her to
  participate, but she"d already declared me a harlot, and I knew she"d have a hard time
  watching a movie featuring my bare breasts.
  The Last Picture Show starts in silence that continues for a long time-no music,
  stark black lettering for the credits, and a slow pan during which the only sound is a
  blowing wind. The first voice you hear is Peter"s, as an off-camera disc jockey with a
  thick Texas drawl introducing Hank Williams"s recording of "Cold Cold Heart." Peter
  and I held hands as the lights dimmed. I didn"t relax until Jacy"s first line-"Whatcha"all
  doin" back here in the dark?"-for the first time, I felt the magic of an audience laughing
  at something I said.
  There was a postpremiere party at Elaine"s, a popular place with the New York
  media crowd. When I walked into the room on Peter"s arm, people stopped talking and
  snapped to attention. But I was also aware that they weren"t much interested in what I had
  to say. I felt like a paper doll: I looked good on a flat surface, but if I turned to the side, I
  wasn"t there, like the cardboard cutout of me used to sell Instamatic cameras. I listened
  rather than talked for most of the evening, burying myself in my lamb chops. When we
  got back to the hotel, my mother was standing slightly out of the doorway to her
  darkened room, wearing a bright floral robe.
  "What did you think?" Peter asked.
  She directed her answer to me, as if I had asked the question. "Maybe you"ll do
  better next time," she said, then turned her back and shut the door. I giggled a little
  uncomfortably (after all, we"d gotten a standing ovation), but Peter winced, as if he"d
  been slapped in the face and muttered "shit" under his breath. They never spoke again.
  Newsweek called The Last Picture Show "a masterpiece...the most impressive
  work by a young American director since Citizen Kane." It was nominated for eight
  Academy Awards and won two, for Best Supporting Actress and Actor (Cloris Leachman
  and Ben Johnson). It won seven New York Film Critics awards, three British Academy
  awards, one Golden Globe, one National Society of Film Critics award, and was selected
  by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry. Although the Oscars for Best
  Director and Best Picture went to William Friedkin and The French Connection, I had
  become an actress under the tutelage of a great teacher. Like the song about dancing with
  the man who danced with the woman who danced with the Prince of Wales, I was taught
  by the man who was taught by Stella Adler who was taught by Stanislavsky. He
  surrounded me with people who were the best in the business, helping me avert the kind
  of early career embarrassment that comes back and bites you in the ass. My ass didn"t
  show teeth marks until later. As Orson Welles said about his career, I started at the top
  and worked my way down.
  
  Chapter Six
  "WHITE BOYS DON"T EAT..."
  
  MUTUALLY AND ENTHUSIASTICALLY, PETER AND I rejected marriage
  vows-but both of us will always regret not having had a child together. When we moved
  into Sunset Towers, there was a period of time when he went "home" each night to put
  his two young daughters to bed. He usually returned beaten down by Polly"s
  recriminations. Later his girls would visit us on weekends, and for the first twenty-four
  hours, I was the enemy, but I never tried to woo them or be their mother, just included
  them in games of Parcheesi and croquet and took them swimming. Eventually, we would
  all relax-just in time for them to go back "home."
  I had no more than the occasional bloodless telephone conversation with their
  mother. Polly was a great help to Peter in his work, but when the marriage was over, their
  behavior toward each other reinforced a sense of the singular creative hostility between
  them, still fresh in recent interviews. According to Polly, she not only discovered the
  novel of The Last Picture Show but also me. When Peter began work on What"s Up,
  Doc?, a screwball comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O"Neal intended as an
  homage to Bringing Up Baby, he decided to hire Polly, who accepted the job of set
  designer on the condition that I be banned from the set, bravely joking that she refused to
  be "Cybillized." I visited in San Francisco anyway but was relegated to swimming laps
  at the Nob Hill YWCA and hearing stories about la Streisand secondhand. (Peter asked
  her to cut her famously talon like fingernails, but she would only comply on her right
  hand, so in most of the movie, she"s holding a raincoat or some other prop in the left.)
  The closest I got to the set was watching the "gag reel," Peter playing Barbra"s part to
  show her what to do in the scene where she sings "As Time Goes By." He hides under a
  drop cloth and slithers off the piano, stopping just short of kissing Ryan on the mouth.
  My relationship with Peter felt as if it was built on shifting tectonic plates. Our
  only rule was "Don"t ask me what you don"t want to know," and the corollary was
  "Never cheat on me in the same city." I"m sure part of my appeal for Peter was that I was
  attractive to other men. He"d watch from down a drugstore aisle or across a theater lobby
  as some guy would circle in preflirting formation, then he"d appear beside me with a
  smug kiss or gesture of intimacy that announced squatter"s rights. I wonder now if he
  didn"t unconsciously condone me having relationships with other men.
  The summer of 1972, while back in Memphis, I got a call from George Klein, the
  local television host who"d emceed the Miss Teenage Memphis pageant. A friend of his
  had admired me in The Last Picture Show. He was an actor too. And he lived at
  Graceland.
  I"d been crazy jealous when my sister got a record player and a small collection of
  Elvis Presley 45s back in the mid-1950s, playing "Hound Dog" and "Don"t Be Cruel"
  nonstop and singing along in a tinny voice that I tried to overshout. Everybody in
  Memphis felt jingoistic pride in the native son who hung out with the black musicians
  like Big Joe and Ivory Joe Hunter in the juke joints of Beale Street, adapting their moves
  and their music. (It was Willie Mae "Big Mama" "Thornton who recorded "Hound Dog"
  first, and she was talking about men-"You ain"t lookin" for a woman, all you lookin" for
  is a home.") Sam Phillips, who engineered the radio broadcasts on the Peabody roof, had
  started Sun Records, signing up Jr. Walker and Little Milton and B. B. King, and he was
  looking for a white boy who could sing like a black one. A local disc jockey at WHBQ
  named Dewey Phillips was playing black and white artists on the same station for the
  first time. He"d spin anything from Hank Williams to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and he put
  Elvis on the map. But when Elvis went from radio to television and live performances,
  his music wasn"t considered polite (you never saw Sinatra bump and grind like a
  stripper), and I could recall with clarity the furor when Ed Sullivan consented to show
  him only from the waist up, fearful for the overwrought libidos of the nation"s youth. In
  1972 I was not too interested in Elvis Presley or his moves. He"d become a little passé,
  supplanted by Motown and the British invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
  But he was, after all, the King.
  "He"s got to call me," I told Klein, "and he"s got to pick me up himself."
  "Fair enough," he said.
  One of his people tracked me down at Jane"s house. "It"s for you," she said,
  handing me the receiver with demonstrative boredom. "Some weirdo pretending to be
  Elvis Presley." When she grasped from my stunned mien that this was no impersonator,
  she pressed her own ear to the receiver next to mine, the two of us listening to a voice
  that sounded like melted Kraft caramels.
  "I"ve wanted to meet you for a long time," he said, "ever since I saw you in that
  movie."
  "That was two years ago," I said. "What took you so long?"
  He gave an appreciative little laugh. I"d like to see you sometime," he said.
  "Are you sure you"re not still married?" I asked. Like the rest of the world, I knew
  about Priscilla and their daughter, Lisa Marie, and I"d already taken hits for breaking up
  one marriage, but he assured me he was separated and in the throes of a divorce. He
  asked me to join him for a movie that evening-Elvis regularly rented local theaters at
  midnight for his entourage, unflatteringly known as the Memphis Mafia. Jane was flailing
  her arms in a silent entreaty, "Take me! Take me!" I asked if I could bring my best
  girlfriend. Sure, he said. Elvis never did have a problem with two girls.
  I dropped my demand about being picked up, since Jane and I were driving
  together. When we entered the Crosstown Theater, the phalanx of good ol" boys wouldn"t
  let us past the lobby. So Jane and I started tangoing together in front of the popcorn
  machine, ignoring the people who were trying desperately to ignore us. Word that Elvis
  had entered the building through a side door filtered into the lobby like a game of
  whispering down the lane, and we were granted admission, sitting in a row with the
  bubbas. As if on cue, everybody in the row to my right got up and moved one seat over.
  I smelled him before I saw him, but I couldn"t for the life of me identify his
  cologne. Let"s just call it Eau de Elvis. His luminous olive skin glowed with what I later
  learned was bronzing makeup. He was chewing Fruit Stripe gum and offered me a piece,
  graciously sending another down the row to Jane. As others arrived for the screening, he
  pointed out a distinguished-looking man. That"s an eye surgeon," he said. "He treated me
  for an infection by driving a needle straight through my eyeball, and I was awake every
  minute." Then he opened his jacket and revealed a pearl-handled revolver stuck in his
  belt. "I carry this little girl everywhere I go," he said. When these preambles were over,
  we watched Goodbye Columbus in silence, while I tried to sneak peripheral glances at
  him in the dark. There was a second feature scheduled, but partway through Sunday,
  Bloody Sunday, there was a kiss between two men. Revolted members of the Mafia
  yelled, "That"s gross, man," and Elvis ordered, "Stop the movie." And then he was gone,
  uttering a barely audible "See y"all later."
  Jane and I had just reached the sidewalk in front of the theater when a white
  Lincoln made a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. Elvis strode toward us and asked, "Y"all
  want to come back to the house?" Jane and I exchanged glances, read each other"s
  thoughts, and declined. With the barest trace of good night, Elvis pulled away and
  proceeded right through a stop sign, within spitting distance of a motorcycle cop. We
  watched as the officer signaled the car to pull over and Elvis flashed his Special Deputy
  badge from the Memphis Sheriff"s Department. (Later I got a badge too. It lived in the
  bathroom drawer until somebody in the sheriff"s office was indicted on sixty counts of
  fraud and bribery, and all special badges were revoked. Fortunately I tend to get in the
  kind of trouble that doesn"t involve law enforcement.)
  A few days later I was invited to Graceland for lunch. One of the bubbas rang the
  bell of my childhood home while Elvis waited out front. Mother was oblivious to my
  caller, and my brother was in his "Everything-in-my-life-is-terrible-because-you-are-my-
  sister" stage. I"d been in swanky homes of famous people (in fact, I now lived in one
  with Peter), but Graceland had a special glow behind its wrought-iron gates, with a tree-
  lined driveway winding up to a portico fronted by tall white columns and two white stone
  lions as palace guards. There was a rather formal dining room, but we ate in the kitchen
  with Elvis"s father, and with little conversation. (Southern folk are brought up not to talk
  with their mouths full.) The meal included the first three of the four southern food
  groups: salt, fat, sugar, and alcohol. Chicken-fried steak was cooked well done by a
  housekeeper who called me Missy and sent plates out to the bodyguards waiting by the
  cars. One of them drove me home shortly after dessert: slices of devil"s food cake colored
  an unnatural red.
  I was back for dinner the next day (deep-fried sandwiches made of peanut butter,
  bananas, and mayonnaise), and it was just the two of us. Elvis led me on a tour ending in
  his bedroom, all red and black with a fake leopard cover on a king-size bed, four TVs,
  and smoky mirrors on the walls and ceilings. I had no doubt about how the evening
  would end-there was soft kissing on my neck and arms, pulling off layers of clothing to
  reveal new naked places-while I kept thinking: Do I want to do this? I"d been treated
  like a hot piece of ass in New York, and I resisted the idea of being a notch on the belt of
  a renowned lover boy. But his kisses were so slow and deliberate, his skin so smooth-a
  little soft around the middle but hard in the right places. He nibbled down my body, virile
  and playful, then stopped abruptly at my belly button.
  "Is something wrong?" I asked.
  "Uhh, well, you see, me and the guys talk, and, well, white boys don"t eat pussy,"
  he said.
  This was an interesting concept: that the frequency and popularity of oral sex
  broke down along racial lines.
  "You don"t know what you"re missing," I said playfully, emboldened by the
  prospect of shaming him into action with my sheer disbelief. "I"m used to men diving for
  it. Would you like me to show you how?"
  He warmed to the subject, as did I. But I had the feeling of being outside myself,
  watching. Sex with another man didn"t feel like I was cuckolding Peter-I figured I
  couldn"t cheat on someone I didn"t have, and Peter wasn"t mine in any real, permanent
  sense. I kept earnest, copiously annotated diaries in those days written in code in case
  Peter happened upon them. The musings of youthful self-absorbed angst are fairly
  insufferable to read now, but there"s one passage that still resonates: "Elvis"s stupidity is
  rejuvenating against Peter"s superiority. I don"t think Peter takes me seriously, but going
  with him has a lot of prestige."
  I had fun in Elvis"s bed, but I couldn"t sleep in it. Shortly past midnight, he drove
  me home, my face rubbed raw from kissing.
  Although I"d made TV appearances as Model of the Year, The Last Picture Show
  really inaugurated what becomes almost a tangential career for any actor: working the
  talk-show circuit. At first I was stiff, calcified, afraid to open my mouth. Then I became
  awkwardly flirtatious, trying to amuse, drinking too much coffee and talking too fast.
  Then I would adopt Peter"s hauteur, minus his raconteur skills. One of my appearances
  almost derailed my career. In 1971 Neil Simon, the most popular American playwright of
  his time, had written his first screenplay called The Heartbreak Kid, from a short story by
  Bruce Jay Friedman. Charles Grodin was to play the nice Jewish guy who falls in love
  with the classic icy shiksa of his sexual fantasies on his Miami Beach honeymoon and
  ditches his bride, played by Jeannie Berlin. (Director Elaine May had cast her real-life
  daughter as the jilted bride, although nobody knew they were related until filming had
  begun.) The shiksa role went to the dark-haired girlfriend of Freddie Fields, a powerful
  Hollywood agent who looked like an early Austin Powers. ("Let me give you some
  information, kiddo," Fields once said to me, leaning uncomfortably close and breathing
  hot agency breath on me at a screening in his house. "It"s not the directors or the
  producers who are the real powers in this business. It"s the agents.") The brunette had to
  become a blonde, and rehearsals had already started when her stripped and bleached hair
  began falling out in clumps. I got a call: could I go for a reading tomorrow?
  Although I didn"t learn about it until later, Elaine May had seen me chattering
  mindlessly on Dick Cavett"s show and decided I couldn"t play this or any part. (In partial
  defense, Cavett had started the interview by saying, "I haven"t seen your film, but it"s
  supposed to be very good.") The reading for May and Simon took place in a small
  generic office building in New York. Most of the time when I enter a room for an
  audition, I know if I"ve got the job, and I didn"t feel like I had this one. But I started to
  read, and they started to laugh. As we said good-bye, Simon clasped my hand in both of
  his and said, "I always knew you"d be perfect."
  Simon had a contractual guarantee that the dialogue would be used exactly as
  he"d written it, and we knew that not a word could be altered. (There"s nothing wrong
  with cleaving to good writing: Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy always said they
  were "script technicians" hired to make the lines on the page work.) But May liked to use
  improvisation as an acting exercise during rehearsals, although she didn"t call it that. She
  spoke about the exploration of subtext, the meaning beneath the lines. And she gave me a
  wonderful piece of advice that sounds dumb but works. "When you deliver a line," she
  said, "say it as if you expect the other character to be hearing you, getting it."
  May seemed to think that Grodin was hysterically funny and laughed at
  everything he did. He had lost a lot of weight to do this role, so his skin was kind of
  hanging off his bones. In a scene where we were lying in bed together, the script called
  for me to play with his hair, but when I reached up to push a strand off his forehead, he
  blocked my hand and hissed, "Fake it. This is a rug."
  "You"re kidding," I said, assuming that he was making a joke to catch me off
  guard and provoke an interesting facial expression. (I"d never come within calling
  distance of a toupee before.)
  "No, really," he said.
  "You can"t be serious," I persisted.
  "I"m serious," he said. The exchange did not endear me to him, or him to me.
  The Heartbreak Kid was a continuation of The Great Breast Hunt: I didn"t want to
  do the nude scene clearly indicated in the script, but if I"d said so up front, I wouldn"t
  have gotten the part. I still didn"t quite trust that stills from The Last Picture Show
  wouldn"t fall into the wrong hands and had no wish to enrich any celluloid archives that
  could haunt me in the future. I was bothered by the objectified use of naked women, an
  issue of power, not morality. If Harrison Ford had to expose his balls on-screen, I don"t
  think he would make as much money. In the past, when nudity was verboten, directors
  had to be more clever. Alfred Hitchcock hired a double for Janet Leigh"s shower scene in
  Psycho, then used seventy-two different shots in forty-two seconds without ever exposing
  an erogenous zone.
  One of the producers of The Heartbreak Kid was Eric Preminger, the love child of
  the director Otto Preminger and the burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, who said of her
  career, "I wasn"t naked. I was covered with a blue spotlight." Perhaps Preminger deemed
  to have a special affinity for female strippers because he was recruited to visit the
  Playboy mansion in Chicago to audition the bunnies, inspecting their breasts and
  selecting a body double for me. When he found the pair he"d dreamt of, he came to my
  dressing room with a contract and said, "Sign this right away."
  I didn"t know it at the time, but an actor has the right to give written approval of a
  body double, guaranteed by the Screen Actors Guild. I just knew not to sign anything
  without a lawyer looking at it (a precaution I have drummed into my children since they
  were old enough to hold a pen). When I finally saw the scene cut together, Grodin was
  shown looking at my chest, followed by a shot of the proxy"s breasts (nice ones, by the
  way) without my head attached. I found the nudity disruptive, but there was a lot of
  pressure on me to approve the use of the body double, since Preminger had spent
  considerable production money on the Chicago trip and had paid the bunny. But I held
  my ground, and Elaine, the director, agreed with me.
  Elaine May chewed No-Doz by the fistful to stay awake. Shooting in a frigid
  Minneapolis winter, her feet got frostbitten, and we got to keep warm inside, while her
  toes thawed out. The weather was more accommodating in Miami. I was staying with the
  rest of the cast at a low-rent Holiday Inn nowhere near the fancy beach hotels and got
  stuck in the decrepit elevator. I was more bored than scared-which is why, to this day, I
  never approach an elevator without thinking I should have a book with me, just in case.
  So it wasn"t just languishing for Peter that made me anticipate his visit so eagerly: for a
  few days I would get to stay in the Fountainbleu. Big breakfast buffet. Big swimming
  pool. Big Atlantic Ocean. Peter was not one for slumming.
  Larry McMurtry came to visit too. Peter had suggested that they collaborate on a
  new script, called at various times West of the Brazos (which is a river), then Palo Duro
  (which is a canyon), then Streets of Laredo (which, it turned out, had been the title of a
  mediocre movie starring William Holden and Glenn Ford). "What kind of western do you
  want to make?" Larry had asked Peter.
  "Some kind of a trek," Peter said. "As long as it"s not about cows because
  Howard Hawkes did the quintessential cattle drive in Red River."
  From the beginning, the film was conceived as a vehicle for Jimmy Stewart,
  Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. Peter acted out all the parts while he and Larry wrote the
  script, and nobody does a better Stewart, Fonda, or Wayne except Stewart, Fonda, and
  Wayne. But Wayne apparently asked John Ford"s opinion, and although Ford had been
  instrumental in getting Ben Johnson to do The Last Picture Show, this time he told Wayne
  not to do the film knowing full well that if he backed out, the others would follow "The
  old man doesn"t like it," Wayne said to Peter.
  "That"s not what he told me," Peter said, but for some reason he never confronted
  Ford. Maybe he didn"t want to ask another favor. But Peter would often repeat what
  James Cagney said about Ford after the director had knowingly let him crash in the
  sidecar of a motorcycle driven by the character actor William Demarest, who had never
  been behind the wheel, "There"s one word to describe John Ford and the Irish: malice."
  The ideas that germinated in the Fountainbleu were eventually reworked into
  Larry"s Pulitzer-winning novel Lonesome Dove. Despite the warning that cows had been
  done, the book centered on the last daring cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the late
  nineteenth century. But Peter was never given credit for many of the ideas generated at
  the hotel, which saddened and angered him. "Larry used every part of the pig," he would
  say.
  I hadn"t heard from Elvis since Graceland. But when I was back in Los Angeles,
  he called, offering to send his plane for me for a weekend at the house he"d rented in
  Palm Springs. One of his henchmen picked me up at the airport, looked at my jeans and
  tie-dyed mirrored vest and said, "Next time we"re in L.A. we"re gonna arrange a
  shopping trip so you can get some nice new clothes because Elvis likes his ladies to look
  a certain way." Only if I can help pick out his clothes, I thought. The house was luxurious
  in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic
  glow. All the King"s men were in residence, wearing pins that said TCB, code for Elvis"s
  catch phrase "Taking Care of Business." They spent the afternoon competing to see who
  could make the biggest splash into a murky swimming pool. I really didn"t want to go
  near that pool but couldn"t resist one-upping the bubbas by doing a "can opener" leap I"d
  learned from the lifeguards at Chickasaw Country Club. The guys raced in dune buggies
  three or four abreast while shouting into walkie-talkies or sat around a long table with a
  thick top of beveled glass, eating their favorite deep-fried sandwiches. Elvis was the first
  person I ever saw drink bottled water, which he had imported from the Ozarks. "You
  drink enough of this," he said, "and it"ll keep you regular."
  I thought it was a little odd that he slept during the day, and I didn"t learn until
  many years later that he was actually terrified of falling asleep in the dark. He had heavy
  drapes, blackout shades on the windows, even aluminum foil taped to the glass to block
  out every bit of daylight. The sweet charm that I had seen in Memphis seemed to be
  draining away, replaced by unfortunate frat boy humor. When I emerged from the
  bathroom before dinner, he said, "I never knew a girl to take so many baths," which
  caused great guffaws among the cronies, even though his own bathroom had a six-drawer
  black box of cosmetics-he wore more makeup than I did. We were hardly ever alone
  and didn"t talk much when we were, not about his music or his marriage or his daughter
  or the lunacy of spending $40,000 to fly his entourage to Denver for a certain kind of
  sandwich (this, from a man whose father was once sentenced to three years in jail for
  forging a forty dollar check). He didn"t seem too interested in anything I said either, and
  he acted as if I was putting on airs if I mentioned the book I was reading. I was seeing the
  morbid cheese ball side of him, and it made me slightly nervous, as if I"d better not
  displease him or I could get myself in trouble. Fortunately, I was never asked to enact
  what I heard was one of Elvis"s favorite erotic scenarios: putting on waist-high cotton
  panties, eating cookies and milk, and wrestling with another girl.
  Toward the end of the summer, Elvis invited me to see him perform at the Las
  Vegas Hilton. I told Peter that I was spending the weekend with a girlfriend in San
  Francisco. The spectacle began with the orchestra playing the tone poem "Thus Spake
  Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss, better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  If ever there was music announcing the arrival of a god, this was it. A noisy procession of
  motorcycles swept onto the stage before Elvis appeared in a jeweled cape and jumpsuit-
  splendiferous but a little chubby. I"d always admired his voice, but now, I was moved in a
  way I had not expected, as if he were singing directly to me, and without thinking, I rose
  to my feet just like the rest of the audience. After the show, he sat at the piano in his suite
  and sang gospel songs with his background singers, wearing a custom-made blue velour
  lounging suit. Then he walked through curtained French doors into the bedroom and
  collapsed on an enormous four-poster bed.
  I didn"t know it, but what I was seeing was the full-throttle effect of drugs. I had
  an adjoining bedroom, and I wasn"t sure what I was supposed to do. Any possibility of
  nooky had evaporated-seemed far away and woozy, his eyes half closed, his speech
  slurred. Holding out a handful of pills, he said, "Here, take these."
  I was confused. "Are you going to take some of them?" I asked.
  "Oh, I already had mine," he said. "These are all for you."
  I went to my room and flushed them down the toilet. As I got into bed, I noticed a
  small black velvet box on the nightstand. I opened it to find a diamond and emerald ring
  that looked like a glob of porcupine bristles-too large, too elaborate, too hideous even
  for Liberace. I went to the desk and wrote Elvis a note on Hilton letterhead, thanking him
  but declining his generous and extravagant gift. Then I called the airline to change my
  return reservation.
  Earlier that day in Los Angeles, Peter was driving on Santa Monica Boulevard
  when he noticed a billboard announcing Elvis"s Vegas engagement. He"d been hearing
  me say that I was fascinated with Elvis (Peter deemed him boring) and had a purely
  intuitive feeling that I was with him. He called the Hilton, asked for me, and when I
  answered, he screamed, "You"re a goddamned liar!" Then he hung up. I called back to
  hear more of his invective. "You know what happens to liars?" he shouted. "They get
  their mouths washed out with soap. You get your ass back here, and I"m going to wash
  your mouth out with Ivory Soap."
  I only heard that he wanted me back, that the damage wasn"t irreparable. When I
  got home, he screamed and stomped so hard that the fake crystal chandeliers of the
  apartment shook, then issued a summary judgment: "That"s what I get for being with an
  actress." Fortunately, he wasn"t home a few days later when I got a call from one of the
  Memphis mob saying that Elvis needed to talk to me.
  "I can"t do that," I said.
  "He"s right around the corner," said the bubba. "Do me a favor, just talk to him
  because he"s really upset."
  When Elvis pulled into the oval driveway at Sunset Towers, he seemed sulky and
  remote-no kiss in greeting, no concern about my disappearance of a few nights before,
  just a statement of intention and an ultimatum.
  "I really enjoy spending time with you, but you"ve got to get rid of this
  Dogbanovic guy," he said, mangling the name a little. "It"s either him or me."
  I was thinking: What"s he talking about? Watching someone pass out cold when I
  was expecting a rollicking sexual romp was not my idea of fun. Perhaps it was a bit of
  posturing from a wounded ego, an attempt to regain control after my rejection of his ring
  and his drugs. Later I learned that I was a temporary filler for Linda Thompson, who was
  Miss Memphis State, Miss Liberty Bowl, and Miss Tennessee-a self-described virgin
  who quit college twelve credits short of her degree, gave up her acting ambitions, and let
  Elvis make all her decisions, even changing her sleeping habits to become what his
  buddies called a "lifer." Elvis was a goody I couldn"t resist, but I had a life with Peter I
  wasn"t about to give up. I wanted to make decisions, some of them foolish, on my own.
  Well, that"s it for us," he said. Those were his last words to me. We circled the
  block in silence until we got back to Sunset Towers, and he paused at the curb barely long
  enough for me to exit under the yellow and white awning. I said "Good-bye," but he
  didn"t answer. I never saw him again. Five years later he was dead. Peter, unrepentant
  about his opinion of Elvis, said it was the best career move he ever made.
  
  WHEN PETER WAS ENVISIONING DIRECTING A McMurtry western, he
  wanted Polly Platt to do the set design, but only on the condition that she knew I would
  be in the movie, and in her face. The western never got made, and instead they began
  working on Paper Moon, with Ryan O"Neal playing a Bible-selling con man and his
  daughter Tatum as the sharp-witted progeny he never knew about but unwittingly
  befriends. In the late fall of 1972, days before principal photography began in Hays,
  Kansas, Polly announced to Peter, "I can"t handle Cybill coming to the set." It was the
  end of any pretense of civility between them, and their relationship never healed,
  although I schemed to defy her, wishing I could make her deal with my presence just
  once. Peter"s whole life was his work, and I was excluded from it because he was
  working with his ex-wife again. She wasn"t even his ex-wife yet. (Their divorce would
  not be final for three years.) I spent most of my time driving around the depressed prairie
  towns, photographing dilapidated buildings, railroad yards, and old men"s faces,
  practicing my tap dancing on the linoleum flooring of our hotel room until the people
  below pounded on their ceiling with a broomstick. We were staying in the utilitarian Pony
  Express Motel in Elwood (still resting on its laurels of being the first Pony Express
  station in Kansas) because Polly and the crew were in the marginally better Ramada Inn.
  The tension must have gotten to Peter because the next to last day"s worth of footage was
  shot with a hair stuck in the "gate" as the raw film passed through the camera. (That"s
  why someone yells "Check the gate" after every take.) All these scenes appear slightly
  soft-focus in the movie, since Peter enlarged every frame just enough to eliminate the
  hair, but he refused to go back and reshoot, declaring, "It beats spending another day in
  that hellhole with Polly."
  Peter met Marlene Dietrich on his way to Kansas-the plane stopped first in
  Denver, where she was doing a one-woman show. He was not the sort of man who
  imagined that women were coming on to him when they weren"t, and he knew she had
  something in mind even before he walked into his Kansas hotel room. The phone was
  ringing: Dietrich saying in a smoky voice "I found you." When Paper Moon was
  completed, he invited her to its New York premiere, and she was not pleased when she
  saw me in the limousine, obviously anticipating a "date" with Peter. She sat between us,
  cooing into Peter"s ear and digging her left elbow into my side. Marlene Dietrich was the
  closest thing I had to a role model-a working mother who created sexually powerful
  roles (she wore pants before Katharine Hepburn) and ended her career with a triumphant
  cabaret act. I was so excited to be in her presence that I was happily impaled.
  The next day, a bellman knocked at our suite in the Waldorf Towers. "Flowers for
  Miss Shepherd," he said.
  I opened the door and saw him struggling with an arrangement so large that there
  was no table that could accommodate it and it had to sit on the floor. The card read
  "Love, Marlene." Well worth being ignored.
  It was about this time that I joined a unique sorority: ever since the release of The
  Last Picture Show, Playboy magazine had tried to get me to pose nude by throwing
  money at me. First I was offered $5,000, then $10,000, then $50,000, to no avail. Then
  they figured out how to get me for free. My unwelcome Christmas present that year was
  my naked likeness in the magazine"s year-end "Sex in Cinema" issue, also featuring Jane
  Fonda and Catherine Deneuve. Technology provided a method of making a frame
  enlargement from a 35-millimeter print of the movie that had been borrowed for a
  screening at the Playboy mansion. I called a lawyer and sued for the right to control my
  image, insisting that there was a difference between the legitimate press and a magazine
  like Playboy. The suit claimed that I was a young woman of "dignity, intelligence,
  modesty, and artistic and personal integrity"-a legally accurate if not quite apt self-
  description.
  The case dragged on for five years. Playboy started out treating it like a nuisance
  suit, using their local lawyer in Los Angeles, who coincidentally had been my lawyer"s
  professor at Stanford. When they realized that I was serious, they brought in the head of
  their Chicago law firm. My lawyer was looking through their files, and either they were
  pretty dumb or extremely honest because he found a smoking gun: a handwritten memo
  from Hugh Hefner to his secretary that said, "I"ve been stymied in every way to get
  pictures of Cybill Shepherd for the "Sex in Cinema" issue. I"m screening The Last Picture
  Show tonight, so have [Mario] come up here with his magic machine."
  Hef was willing to settle after that. But instead of asking for a shitload of money, I
  wanted a book that Playboy had under option, a novel by Paul Theroux called Saint Jack
  about an amiable Singapore pimp. Hefner came to my house, offering a formal apology
  and informal arrangements for a settlement. The standard Screen Actors Guild contract
  now includes a protective clause that prevents unauthorized use of movie frames for still
  photographs. It served as excellent protection for actors until the world of cyberspace,
  which is proving impossible to police. Not long ago, I discovered that anyone can pay
  fifty dollars and go to a Web site where my head is stuck on some other woman"s naked
  body in the anatomically graphic poses favored by smut magazines. If I decided to sue,
  I"d have to do it country by country because there"s no international law in this area, and
  the fabricated photos would just resurface in another form.
  
  I WENT TO THE PETER BOGDANOVICH SCHOOL OF Cinema. Peter
  didn"t want to exercise, sweat, get dirty-he only liked to watch movies, and he watched
  with a curator"s eye. When we went to a movie theater, he was always quick to tell the
  projectionist if a reel was out of focus. In our apartment, the focal point of the living
  room was a rebuilt 16-millimeter projector aimed at a blank wall. Several times a week
  we went to a studio screening room that smelled as if it hadn"t been opened since Fatty
  Arbuckle was thin. We"d eat moo shu pork out of paper cartons while we watched The
  Merry Widow-the silent Erich von Stroheim version with Mae Murray and John Gilbert
  (and an extra named Clark Gable)-then the 1934 remake with Jeanette MacDonald and
  Maurice Chevalier, and the other Ernst Lubitsch musicals: The Love Parade, Monte
  Carlo, One Hour with You. When we moved to a house, the first thing we added was a
  screening room that had bright red carpets and plush white couches with ottomans, the
  walls covered with classic movie posters. The film department at UCLA would let us
  borrow silver nitrate prints of the golden oldies, even though it was illegal to screen them
  at home: the film is flammable and explosive if it breaks, and the law stipulated two
  projectionists and a double-insulated flameproof projection room. But screening the only
  35-millimeter print of Ernst Lubitsch"s The Smiling Lieutenant that existed at the time
  was like seeing the way God sees: a face in sharp close-up, scenery in the distance, and
  everything clear in between. The expression "silver screen" comes from the actual silver
  in the film itself, which shimmered. All of modern technology can"t achieve that
  brilliance and depth of focus.
  My endurance level didn"t approach Peter"s (often a triple feature), and I
  sometimes fell asleep during the third movie. I learned that all kinds of acting can work:
  the broad energy of James Cagney or the minimalism of Gary Cooper. The only
  important question is: do we believe the actor? Can we suspend disbelief? Movies
  demand a leap of faith from the audience, a willingness to forget that what it"s seeing is
  fake. It was said that when Jimmy Stewart appeared on-screen, he annihilated disbelief.
  I would ask Peter, "You sure you don"t mind seeing this again? You"ve seen it
  twenty-seven times." He would say, "I"m looking at it with new eyes." Every week he"d
  mark the TV Guide for the films I should watch. Anything directed by John Ford, Howard
  Hawks, or Jean Renoir became required viewing. Living with Peter was like inhabiting
  these movies. We developed a private language, borrowing bits of dialogue, like "I close
  the iron door on you" (John Barrymore in Twentieth Century), or "Don"t you think it"s
  rather indecent of you to order me out after you"ve kissed me?" (Carole Lombard in My
  Man Godfrey). And we weren"t above quoting from The Last Picture Show ("Comb your
  hair, Sonny-you look like you smelled a wolf"). Sometimes when we were out, I"d
  stomp my feet and pound my fists, and people in the restaurant would think I had lost my
  mind, but Peter would crack up, knowing that I was doing one of Lombard"s tantrums
  from Twentieth Century.
  We were living in Bel Air at 212 Copa de Oro Drive, a Mediterranean-style house
  with a red-tiled roof that had belonged to a newlywed Clark Cable and his bride Kay
  Spreckels. I found that house in 1974, and Peter bought it with money borrowed from
  Warner Bros. against his next project. We moved in with only a mattress on the floor and
  filled the rooms with furniture by spending a whole day at a Beverly Hills store called
  Sloans. Each of us had a bedroom suite upstairs, connected by a large closet: after years
  of unlocked doors and a sister who pummeled me out of bed, I readily embraced Virginia
  Woolf"s fine idea about a room of one"s own. Peter"s room had a niche in the wall for an
  antique Italian daybed covered with champagne-colored raw silk. Mine had a waterbed
  with a patchwork quilt we bought in Big Sur. Every wall was white and hung with Peter"s
  father"s paintings.
  Peter and I were the couple du jour in Hollywood, but I often felt like an impostor
  among the real denizens of the film world, and I tended to be quiet in their company.
  When Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove, he sent me the galleys with an inscription
  that said, "You were the seed of so much of it. I started it fourteen years ago with
  Lorena"s silence-the silence of a woman who won"t give her voice arid heart to the
  world because she had concluded that the world would not hear it or understand it or love
  it. I felt such a silence in you." People often acted as if my brain was blonde and watched
  rather than listened when I spoke, as if wondering where the ventriloquist"s hand went.
  Even my agent, Sue Mengers, seemed to perceive me that way. "When you go to
  a meeting, don"t talk," she"d instruct. "Just wear a lot of makeup and do your hair." Sue
  was never known for her tact. She spoke very slowly to me, as if I needed extra time to
  process the information, Peter would get annoyed and tell her, "You don"t have to talk to
  Cybill that way." She"d speed up to normal for a while, then decelerate and say, "I"m so
  sorry, I did it again."
  My first real Hollywood party was at Sue"s faux chateau in the Hollywood Hills,
  at the end of a series of hairpin turns on a thrillingly narrow road. We had to park in what
  seemed like another town and arrived somewhat breathless to see Gregory Peck
  straddling a chair, drunk as a skunk. I felt as if I had entered a parallel universe in which
  my idols turned into their evil twins. I didn"t have the courage to start a conversation with
  anyone, and the only person who approached me was a producer who said, "So you"re an
  actress. Who are you studying with?"
  "Nobody," I answered.
  "That"s a mistake," said the producer with a sniff. "You"d better start soon
  because you"ll need all the help you can get."
  I put down my wineglass, fled outside, and was halfway to the car when Peter
  came to retrieve me.
  "They"re all phonies," I said. "They"re all horrible."
  "I know," he said, "but we can"t leave."
  When I did open my mouth, my irreverence sometimes backfired. Sue Mengers
  was hoping to foster the notion of my working with Dustin Hoffman, another of her
  clients, and she gave an intimate dinner for Peter and me, Dustin and his wife, Anne, and
  Sue"s husband, Jean-Claude Tremont. Entering the small dining room, Dustin sat down
  just long enough to look up at me, my rather long torso extending well above his, and
  then pushed up on his arms, as if trying to make himself taller.
  "Why don"t you ask Sue if she has a couple of phone books?" I said with
  misguided humor.
  Dustin looked as if he"d just been hit but didn"t know how to fall down, and the
  evening never recovered. The Hoffmans made a flimsy excuse and left early.
  Foolishly trying to mitigate that sin, I went to the set of Marathon Man, taking an
  inch-thick Beverly Hills phone book. I delivered it to Dustin, saying, "This is what I
  meant." He mumbled "thanks" and walked away. Perhaps this was one of those times
  when he stayed up for days to look appropriately scruffy and exhausted for a scene,
  prompting his costar, Laurence Olivier, to ask, "My dear boy, why don"t you try acting?"
  It would be an understatement to say that I failed to impress Marlon Brando. On a
  warm summer night Peter and I drove the great acting coach Stella Adler to a party in her
  honor at Brando"s home atop Mulholland Drive. There were Japanese lanterns strung
  through the trees, and I was seated on a garden bench next to Brando, but for once I was
  chattering away rather than deferring to the conversation of others. Brando was holding a
  beer bottle when he looked at me with unsubtle disgust.
  "If this girl doesn"t shut up," he said to no one in particular, "I"m going to hit her
  in the face with this bottle." Then he turned to me and said, "Would you get up and go
  over there so I can watch you walk away?"
  Years later, when I was doing the Cybill show, Brando was the only celebrity the
  writers knew they could malign with impunity. I"d say, "Just make it Brando, and I don"t
  have a problem with it," so the joke would become, "One beesting, and I swell up like
  Marlon Brando."
  
  PETER TOOK EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO SIT AT THE feet of great
  filmmakers, and I usually got the big toe. In 1972 he readily agreed to interview Charlie
  Chaplin for a documentary conducted at his home in Vevey, Switzerland, but Chaplin was
  in his dotage. At lunch, he suddenly stopped eating and said, "You know, my daughter
  Geraldine is very rich."
  We"d been there four hours, and those were the first words I"d heard him speak.
  "Really?" I replied. "That must be nice for her." Then I went back to my soup.
  One day Peter came home from a visit with Alfred Hitchcock, badly in need of
  black coffee and aspirin. Peter has little taste or tolerance for drink, but he had arrived at
  the great man"s hotel suite to find him pouring whiskey sours. Although Peter tried
  unobtrusively to nurse the drink, Hitchcock kept noticing and chastising him in that
  sonorous voice, "You"re not touching your glass."
  By the time the two of them left for dinner together, Peter had a nice little buzz
  going. They were descending in the hotel elevator full of people when Hitchcock turned
  to him and said, "So there he was, sprawled on the floor, blood pouring from every
  orifice and seeping into the carpet." Peter reeled. He was a little drunk, but had he
  blacked out momentarily and missed the earlier part of this conversation? Everyone else
  in the elevator was rapt as Hitchcock went on, "The music that had been playing in the
  next room stopped, and I could hear a scratching sound." Just as the elevator reached the
  ground floor, Hitchcock said, "So I kneeled over him, asking, "My God, man, what
  happened to you?" He grabbed my shirtfront, pulled me down and..."
  Just then the elevator door opened in the lobby. The other people were hanging
  back, straining to hear the end of the story but Hitchcock sailed past them, with Peter in
  tow, and began discussing the restaurant plans.
  "But Hitch," Peter said, "what happened to your friend?"
  "Oh, nothing," Hitchcock said, "that"s just my elevator story."
  In 1973, John Ford was to be given the Congressional Medal of Freedom, the first
  filmmaker so lauded. The public knew him as the director responsible for such classics as
  The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers. I knew him as a
  neighbor, living across the street, and as a flasher. By this time he was mostly confined
  to bed, dressed in a pajama top and a bedsheet that he liked to rearrange for shock value,
  often after drinking one of the two daily bottles of stout he was permitted. (Mary, his wife
  of fifty years, once told me, "Never believe anything you hear or read, and only half of
  what you see. And make sure the back of your skirt is clean because that"s where they"ll
  be looking.") On the night of the award ceremony, outside the hotel, Henry Fonda had to
  fight through the anti-Vietnam picketers led by his daughter. Cary Grant was standing on
  line ahead of us, and as we got to the reception table, he said to the ticket taker, "I"m
  terribly sorry, I"ve forgotten my invitation."
  "Name, please," said the woman, consulting her master list without looking up.
  "Cary Grant," he said.
  The woman glanced up over half-glasses. "You don"t look like Cary Grant," she
  said suspiciously.
  "I know," he said apologetically, "no one does."
  
  ORSON WELLES CAME TO COPA DE ORO FOR DINNER one night and
  stayed two years, intermittently with an elegant actress of Hungarian and Croatian
  descent named Oya Kodar, who had perfectly formed eyebrows and spoke in a thick,
  high voice, like the way a child would imitate a snooty librarian. She seemed too remote
  and exotic to be a pal, but we shared the same sort of alliance with bossy, self-involved
  men. Once, when the four of us were eating in a Paris restaurant, Orson and Peter were
  completely excluding us from the conversation, so we set our menus on fire with the
  candle on the table. Fortunately we got their attention before burning the restaurant to the
  ground. Orson was always broke-despite the accolades, his films weren"t profitable, and
  for years he had put all his money into his work. He never slept through the night, but he
  napped off and on around the clock, and I was instructed not to knock on the door of his
  room for any reason, day or night. Once he summoned me inside where he was playing
  with the cable TV box, channel-surfing by punching at a long row of numbered buttons.
  "Come and look at this," he said, his heroic voice heavy with excitement. "It"s the
  most brilliant show on television." The program that had elicited such praise was Sesame
  Street. His second favorite was Kojak. "The most frequent noises emanating from his
  room were the gurgles of Big Bird and Telly Savalas saying "Who loves ya, baby?" But
  he also encouraged me to study opera, which I did for three years. Working with a voice
  coach, a drama coach, and a language coach, on top of having a movie career, nearly did
  me in, and Orson finally told me, "You have to choose or you"re going to have a nervous
  breakdown. Opera or film." One of the reasons I chose the latter was that when I sang
  opera, people either stared as if they were watching Mount St. Helen erupt, or just
  laughed.
  It was Orson too who helped me with the talk-show circuit, where I kept making
  wrongheaded attempts to be clever. It took me a long time to figure out that the host must
  score with the first big laugh at my expense, that I was supposed to be smart and cute and
  funny, but not smarter, not cuter, and certainly not funnier than
  Johnny/Jay/Dave/Mike/Merv. "All you have to do," Orson instructed, "is ignore the
  audience and have a conversation with the guy behind the desk." Carson could really
  bring out the risqué in me: on one occasion, he put on a pair of horns, got down on his
  hands and knees, and let me lasso him. Another time he knocked a cup of coffee over on
  his desk, and I said, "If you"d spilled it in your lap, I could have cleaned it up." On Leno I
  used my hands to approximate the position of breasts that are not surgically lifted.
  (They"re so much more versatile with age-you can have them up, you can have them
  down, side to side, round and round, or you can swing them over your shoulder like a
  continental soldier.)
  Letterman posed a different challenge. "Don"t hug Dave too hard," warned his
  stage manager right before I was announced. (Same thing happened when Tony Bennett
  came on the Cybill show. Perhaps I have a reputation as a particularly effusive hugger?)
  Once when I was scheduled for his show but wasn"t traveling directly to New York, I had
  the suit I planned to wear sent ahead. Dave hung it on the set, poking fun at it every night
  for a week as a kind of countdown before my appearance. When I heard about the stunt, I
  decided I"d be damned if I"d wear that outfit and instead came out wrapped in a bath
  towel. Years later, during another appearance on his show, Dave did pay up on a $100 bet
  that I couldn"t lob a football into a canister after he"d missed it nine times. When we went
  down to the street with the former Super Bowl champ Joe Montana to see who could
  throw the ball through the window of a passing taxicab, I became Diana of the hunt. All
  those years of tossing a ball with my father paid off, and Dave was gracious in defeat,
  especially after I accidentally stomped his foot.
  Since Peter worked more than either of us, Orson and I were often left in each
  other"s company. One day we were drinking wine, sitting in the living room under a
  painting of Native American dancing. "You know," said Orson, looking up at the
  inspirational images, "there was a time when God was a woman." I told him I knew about
  Cybele from the Sistine Chapel, and he suggested I read The Greek Myths by Robert
  Graves, a kind of dictionary of religious stories throughout history. Reading that book
  cover to cover intensified my spiritual quest to learn more about the so-called Great
  Goddess.
  Orson ate my leftovers off the plate in four-star restaurants, especially if he had
  insisted on my ordering something strange and previously unknown to me such as tripe (I
  had no idea it was intestinal matter) or whitebait (I didn"t know the fish would come
  complete with heads and bones, curled into a position that looked like jumping). At home
  he would throw fits if we ran out of his favorite food.
  
  "WHO ATE THE LAST FUDGSICLE?" Orson would bellow. Everyone knew
  that he"d eaten it, but we were too polite to say so. "That"s just balls," he"d yell in a voice
  that sounded like God chastising Eve for eating that apple. "Everything you know is
  balls," he"d say. Then he"d make an omelette as an act of contrition, standing barefoot by
  the stove in a voluminous black kimono. One day in the laundry room I came across a
  pair of silk boxer shorts, three feet wide and custom-made on Savile Row, draped over
  the washing machine like the Shroud of Turin. He taught me how to cut and smoke fat,
  foot-long Monte Cristo A"s, obtained from Cuba through European connections, holding
  the smoke in my mouth without inhaling and tossing out the last half, which he
  considered slightly bitter.
  One afternoon I smelled smoke in the house and followed the smell to Orson"s
  room, right below mine. Standing outside the door, I tapped timidly and called to him.
  "Is everything all right?" I asked.
  "I"m fine," he roared. "It"s all taken care of. Go away."
  I didn"t know what "it" was until later. Orson had shoved a still-smoldering cigar
  into the pocket of a robe, which he dropped on a mat when he got in the shower. The
  cloth caught fire and burned into the rug before he realized the danger. The next day, as
  an apology, I received The Victor Book of the Opera, which he had inscribed with a play
  on an old nursery rhyme: "Ladybug, ladybug, go away home, your house is on fire and
  your houseguest, a hibernating bear, is too." The illustration was of my house leaping
  with flames, the smoke smudged, he said, with his own spit.
  In August of 1972, Peter and I were invited to meet Richard Nixon at a fund-
  raiser in San Clemente for the president"s Hollywood supporters. Our disinclination
  toward Republican politics paled in comparison to our annoyance that The Last Picture
  Show was deemed too racy to be screened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but nobody
  turns down an invitation to meet the president, even if it was Nixon. I ransacked my
  closet and came up with a full-length gown by Jean Patou that was as close to an
  American flag as a dress could be-a red-and-white-striped skirt with a blue bodice. The
  invitation had read, "Less than cocktail dress," but this was the president of the United
  States (even if it was Nixon). When we stopped to ask directions at a Shell station, the
  attendant simply pointed to the sky and the huge khaki green helicopters circling above
  an estate surrounded by chain-link fence. Granted admission, we felt like the Mel Brooks
  joke about going to a party where everyone is a tuxedo and you"re a brown shoe. There
  were Clint Eastwood, Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger with Jill St. John, Debbie
  Reynolds, Glen Campbell, Charlton Heston, and Jim Brown. Peter introduced me to John
  Wayne, who mentioned his admiration for The Last Picture Show. "But I"ll tell ya the
  truth," he said in his signature drawl, "I was a little embarrassed. I mean, my wife was
  there." Nixon gave a stuffy little speech paying homage to Wayne. "Whenever we want to
  run a picture at Camp David," he said, "I always say, "Let"s run a John Wayne picture.""
  Wayne, who had a drink in his hand, probably not his first, raised his glass and said,
  "Keep those coming"."
  An aide-de-camp informed us that the men should precede the women in the
  reception line on the grass, where the president was standing. When we came face-to-face
  with Nixon, I smiled and said, "I wore this dress especially for you, Mr. President."
  "And you look lovely, my dear," he said. Then, directed at Peter, "You ought to
  put her in a picture."
  "I did," Peter said. "It"s one you haven"t seen."
  Nixon looked perplexed. "What"s the name of that production?"" he asked with
  great formality.
  "The Last Picture Show," said Peter.
  Musing over the title, Nixon said, "That"s a black and white production, isn"t it,
  the one that takes place in Texas?""
  "That"s right," Peter said, genuinely surprised.
  "I saw that," said Nixon. "That"s a remarkable picture." Then he turned to me and,
  touching my arm in a kindly manner, said, "And what part did you play, my, dear?"
  Nearly stuttering, I finally got out the word "Jacy." Peter, who was enjoying my
  discomfiture way too much, added, "She"s the one who stripped on the diving board."
  Nixon and I both turned crimson. His hand kept patting my arm lightly while still
  maintaining eye contact with Peter as he said, "Well, everyone gave a remarkable
  performance in that film. And of course, I remember you very well now, my dear."
  Not long after, we were invited to visit the legendary director Jean Renoir, then in
  his eighties and living in Beverly Hills. Jean had repeated his father"s predilection for
  angering his compatriots: the French threw rotten vegetables at the Impressionist exhibit
  where they first saw Auguste Renoir"s paintings, and years later Jean Renoir"s film La
  Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) would be so severely panned that he would say he
  was either going to quit making films or leave France.
  When we first entered his home, the only thing I could see was a luminous
  portrait of a young man in the woods holding a rifle (a painting that now hangs in the Los
  Angeles County Museum of Art). So distracted was I by this glorious work of art that I
  didn"t even see Renoir himself until I heard a strange motorized sound and saw a sweet-
  looking old man being raised up to a standing position by an automated chair. He took a
  faltering step toward me, and I saw the bluest of eyes in a pale crinkly face, right out of
  the painting. His wife, Dido, who looked to be about thirty years younger, served white
  wine in short, very cold sterling silver cups that formed refreshing droplets of
  condensation, delightful in the heat of the summer day. We mentioned our visit to San
  Clemente, but naturally the talk turned to filmmaking. We were having an animated
  conversation with Dido, who had served as her husband"s script supervisor, about the
  unfortunate necessity of dubbing. Suddenly the great man looked agitated, his pale face
  flushed, and he started rising out of his chair again. "I have the answer to Richard
  Nixon," he said excitedly. "Nixon is dubbed! And in a civilized time, like the thirteenth
  century, men would have been burned at the stake for less!"
  
  IT IS FACINATING TO WATCH, ALTHOUGH I COULD hardly do so
  without passionate self-interest, as a budding career becomes a meteor. I"m talking about
  Peter here, not myself. Equally fascinating is the chronicle of the roads not taken. (Orson
  said, "Your career is made more by what you don"t do than by what you do.") Before The
  Last Picture Show had even opened, it was generating an expectant buzz in the industry,
  and Peter got a call from Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount, which had
  just bought a book about the Mafia by Mario Puzo. Peter had no interest in directing a
  film about organized crime and its peculiar ethos of la famiglia. Ten years later, Evans
  was still chastising him for bad career choices.
  "Hell, you even turned down The Godfather," said Evans.
  "No, I didn"t," said Peter.
  "Yeah, you did," said Evans, recounting their conversation. But Peter was able to
  do some reciprocal reproaching because Evans"s bad judgment had cost him his marriage.
  He had tried to recruit Peter once again, this time to direct The Getaway with Steve
  McQueen. Ali MacGraw, then Evans"s wife, was to costar, but the part was written for a
  barefoot southern girl, a prototype of which just happened to be living with Peter. "Ali
  MacGraw can"t play this," he insisted to Evans. "Isn"t she from Bennington, Vermont?"
  McQueen didn"t want me either (it"s much harder for the leading man to make a move on
  the leading lady if she"s the director"s babe, since the director is omnipresent).
  Disagreeing with the casting, Peter turned down the assignment. MacGraw got the part,
  and McQueen got MacGraw.
  When Evans began producing his own films, he asked Peter to direct a detective
  story in the Raymond Chandler tradition starring Jack Nicholson, with whom Peter had a
  friendly personal rivalry. (I"d made one date with Jack to spite Peter for going to a film
  expo with his ex-wife, which I took as a sign to the world that we didn"t really exist as a
  couple. When Peter called and apologized, I canceled the date. Jack has never spoken to
  me since, except for "Hi" at a party.) Again Peter wanted to cast me in the femme fatale
  role opposite Nicholson, but Evans declared me too young. He wanted Faye Dunaway, so
  Peter said no to Chinatown.
  
  I WAS BUSY MAKING MY OWN MISTAKES. THERE ARE whole
  chapters of my life that can be written with the postscript, "And the part went to..." The
  exalted director George Cukor had been acidly flattering about The Last Picture Show-
  he"d told Peter, "You"re going to put us old-timers out of work." Cukor was the
  undisputed king of comedy for brainy, beautiful women, and I had practically memorized
  his oeuvre-Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia
  Story, Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday. I was honored even to get an audition with him.
  But when I tried out for a small part in Travels with My Aunt, he said, "That was a really
  bad reading. Why don"t you take it home and study it? You can come back and try again
  tomorrow." Peter and I spent two or three hours on it, and the next day I went to Cukor"s
  office for another reading. I thought I didn"t do half badly considering that I hadn"t slept
  all night, visions of the bungled lines prancing before my eyes. But Cukor put down the
  script, looked at me over horn-rimmed glasses and said, "I"m going to give you some
  good advice, and if you have any sense, you"ll take it. You have no comedic talent. Never
  try it again." (The part went to... Cindy Williams, who became the latter half of Laverne
  and Shirley, and I developed an irrational hostility for her from which I never recovered.)
  A celebrated director had gone out of his way to be brutally discouraging, and I
  whimpered, worried, agonized, and almost believed him. But even though I"ve given up
  lots of times in my life, I usually only allow myself a week or two of sulk. Like the little
  engine that could, I get back on track. Ultimately no public or private humiliation has
  ever stopped me.
  Orson Welles had given me the novella Daisy Miller, about a rich, spoiled, brash
  but naive young woman from Schenectady, New York, trying to infiltrate nineteenth-
  century European society. "Henry James wrote this for you," he said, slipping me a slim
  volume bound in faded red linen. "You act wonderfully on camera just like Daisy, but
  you overact in real life. And either Peter or I should direct it for you." Peter got the job,
  and he filmed the book almost verbatim-there were perhaps three words in the dialogue
  that James didn"t write. Daisy chatters on, and on, and on, about her mother"s dyspepsia,
  about her nettlesome little brother, about strangers met in railroad carriages. Her manner
  of conversation and free spirit are judged harshly-one character says of her, "I don"t
  think she is capable of thought at all." Since people often felt the same of me, it seemed
  perfect typecasting. In 1972 I was doing essentially what Daisy did in 1865: pushing the
  limits of polite society and ruining her own reputation.
  Cloris Leachman gave one of her extraordinarily compelling performances as
  Daisy"s mother-permissive, whining, perpetually flustered-and Larry McMurtry"s son
  James (in his first acting job) was the bratty little brother who drones on like a fly that
  won"t be swatted away. The story is told completely from the point of view of Fredric
  Forsyth Winterbourne, the achingly correct young man who is infatuated with her but
  horrified by her defiance of curfews and convention. Peter had spoken to Jeff Bridges
  about casting Barry Brown (they had worked together in Bad Company), but no one
  realized that he was in the last stages of an addiction that would cause him to take his life
  just a few years later. He was glum and withdrawn, and his breakfast of champions
  consisted of beer, coffee, and Valium, a pattern that couldn"t help but affect the shooting
  schedule. Twilight is frustratingly evanescent for a film-maker-there are endless hours
  of preparation for a small window of opportunity-and Barry once staggered onto the set
  so drunk that we couldn"t shoot the scene before we lost the lovely light. Since he was in
  practically every scene, replacing him would have necessitated trashing all the film that
  had been shot and starting from scratch. "If he reaches for another drink," Peter yelled to
  an assistant, "break his fucking arm or I"ll shoot him."
  As the filming dragged on into the heat of tourist-clogged Rome in August, Peter
  and I both became rather brooding and testy. Daisy Miller necessitated meticulous period
  details and locations in Italy evocative of the society that wealthy Americans wanted to
  invade, but it was to be Peter"s first movie without Polly as set designer. The wardrobe
  was made by Tirelli of Rome, the penultimate movie costumer, and the only liberty taken
  with historical authenticity at the suggestion of costume designer John Furness, was to
  move the time forward by five years so the women didn"t have to wear such huge,
  exaggerated bustles. Fittings took eight hours, and I developed chronic back pain from
  the tight corsets of the period, which stretched all the way from the bust to the hip,
  creating a perpetual swayback. There were times when I had to stop and be unlaced or
  reach for the smelling salts to keep from passing out.
  One day I fell asleep in my dressing room and showed up half an hour past my
  call. "You will never be late again," Peter screamed. "I don"t care how big a star you
  become. Time is money in this business. It"s not only expensive, but it"s insulting to the
  rest of the cast and crew. Marilyn Monroe was fired from her last picture for being late."
  His tirade made an impression. In that scene, my eyes are puffy from crying, and I played
  the scene with exactly the right pervasive sadness. (Maybe he did it on purpose. You
  know how these amateur directors are.)
  Despite the fact that this movie was a dream opportunity for us, Peter and I
  weren"t having a lot of fun together, on or off the set. He was exhausted, often not feeling
  well, and he didn"t want to leave the hotel. I wanted a playmate to make a midnight
  gelato run to the Piazza Navona. I wanted to make weekend excursions to cool Tuscan
  villages. I wanted to make love in Roman ruins. As always, I was better at acting out than
  talking out.
  The perfect accomplice for hooky was a deputy producer my own age who had
  gotten his start working on Peter"s movies as a gofer (go for coffee, go for errands...).
  Our friendship began during The Last Picture Show, and we had spent afternoons by the
  pool of our Texas motel, taking turns bouncing on the diving board and pretending to
  jump into the freezing water fully clothed. We shared a love of music and a childhood
  informed by alcohol: his father was a jazz guitarist who went off the wagon at John
  Ford"s wake and died of a heart attack. The Producer had thinning brown hair, which
  never mattered to me (my first erotic fantasies were about Yul Brynner), and still had the
  carefree demeanor of a Southern California surfer: athletic and game for anything. We
  quickly became buddies, both of us pretending not to notice the powerful attraction
  because it was beyond inappropriate.
  I had to go to New York to crown the new Model of the Year, and since Peter
  couldn"t leave, he asked The Producer to accompany me, oblivious to any potential
  threat. We were making a quick turnaround, Rome to New York and back to Rome in less
  than twenty-four hours, so Charles Bluhdorn, who ran Gulf & Western, the parent
  company of Paramount, got his friend Edgar Bronfman, head of Seagram"s, to lend us his
  private Gulfstream II. The jet was a libertine playground, all shag carpet and free-flowing
  champagne. We managed to behave on the flight west, but there was no way these two
  steam engines on the same track were not going to collide, about ten seconds after
  checking into the Waldorf-Astoria. When I had to go off to the pageant, I could barely
  walk.
  I sent daisies, for obvious reasons, to the Producer"s room, reminding him of our
  pact: That was great, and that was all. We"re not going to do this again. However...
  when the heating system of the Gulfstream sputtered and failed on our return flight, we
  rationalized that mile-high sex would be the most efficient way to keep each other nice
  and warm. Back in Rome, we had to cool way down, trying not to touch or even to look
  at each other for fear of being discovered. We would not be lovers again until the filming
  was over. But we were both screwing the boss, and I found the deceit, the subterfuge, and
  the recklessness thrilling. The blend of sex and lies was comfortable and familiar territory
  for me. Betrayal? Not in my vocabulary.
  The budget for Daisy Miller was just over $2 million, a paltry sum considering
  the overseas locations and period costumes. Peter was proud of the work but doubtful of
  the box-office potential. "It doesn"t feel like an audience picture," he"d say over the
  dailies. His mood was not enhanced when he screened the rough print for Paramount
  executives.
  "It"s okay," said Frank Yablans, the chief of production, with a shrug and little
  emotion.
  ""Okay"?" Peter repeated, waiting for something more affirmative.
  "What do you want from me?" said Yablans. "You"re Babe Ruth, and you just
  bunted."
  When the film came out in the spring of 1972, Newsweek raved and the New York
  Times called it "a triumph for all concerned." We were invited to screen Daisy Miller at
  the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club. (We later found out that the student who carried our
  bags was Joel Silver, who would produce all the Die Hard movies.) But the movie critic
  Rex Reed recommended, "Go back to your blue jeans, Cybill." That was almost
  laudatory compared to some reviews. At the start of production, Peter had been quoted in
  Time saying, "I thought that if Henry James had gone to all the trouble to write a good
  part for Cybill, I should shoot it." The Time film critic didn"t agree: "Among all the flaws
  in this movie-the numbing literalness, the flagrant absence of subtlety-nothing is quite
  so wrong as Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich installed her in the lead as if she were some
  sort of electrical appliance being plugged into an outlet." I understand that reviewer is
  dead now. I had nothing to do with it.
  Daisy Miller was a box-office bomb, but it was our relationship, not the film, that
  most critics seemed eager to review. I believe that good reviews can be more dangerous
  than bad ones because it"s easier to believe them and stop striving. But there"s no way
  that actors don"t feel bad from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Peter and I
  didn"t have children, so our movies were our babies, and we were wounded by the
  reproach. We consoled each other by reading aloud from an anthology called Lexicon of
  Musical Invective, which detailed the critical assaults upon great composers. ("An
  American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and
  inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it." "Beethoven"s Second
  Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously rising wounded dragon that refuses to expire,
  and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.") We flaunted
  our solidarity, brazenly leaving a press junket to make love in the next room. We were the
  first live-in lovers on the cover of a new magazine called People, and on the inside pages
  we bragged insufferably about how living together was sexier than being married. We
  were arrogant and smug, the message being: we"re Cybill and Peter, and you"re not. He
  was constantly given credit for my career, as if he were Pygmalion sculpting Galatea, or
  Svengali controlling Trilby"s singing through hypnotic powers. (I jokingly called him
  "Sven," but he wasn"t allowed to call me "Trilby.")
  "Stop telling people you"re so in love and so happy," Cary Grant warned Peter.
  "Why?" he asked.
  "Because people are not in love and not happy," said Grant.
  "I thought all the world loves a lover," said Peter.
  "Don"t kid yourself," said Grant.
  It was around this time that I got a reassuring call from Cary. "Now listen, Cybill,
  you"re very intelligent and I can see they"re offering you really dumb parts, but don"t get
  discouraged. If I was still acting, you"re the kind of girl I"d like to work with. Whatever
  you do, don"t get depressed and start eating."
  Peter had an aura of superiority about him and could be rude. When people didn"t
  understand something he considered basic, he would act as if they belonged in a day care
  center. Suddenly wealthier than he"d ever imagined, he changed the way he dressed,
  favoring brass-buttoned blazers and ascots, and drove a two-toned Silver Cloud Rolls-
  Royce with red leather upholstery. I bought him a quarter horse and a hand-tooled
  Mexican saddle with his initials on a silver horn; he bought me an Appaloosa jumper and
  a Hermes saddle; both arrived, draped with red ribbon, outside our house in a trailer on
  Christmas morning. We were disgusting.
  However I might be deceiving him in private, I carried professional allegiance to
  extremes. When I was asked to present the 1972 Academy Award for Best Supporting
  Actor, I thought I"d have a little fun. "The nominees are John Houseman for Paper Moon
  -I mean The Paper Chase-and Randy Quaid for The Last Picture Show-I mean The
  Last Detail." I was astonished when I heard two weak chuckles and the dead silence of
  thousands. Billy Wilder wrote in Variety, "Hollywood is now united in its hatred of Peter
  Bogdanovich and Cybill Shepherd."
  
  I"VE ALWAYS BEEN INSPIRED BY A LINE FROM GOETHE: "Whatever
  you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." With great qualms, I
  decided to invade another medium and record an album of standards called Cybill Does It
  to Cole Porter. Peter agreed to produce the album, and his assistant, once again, was The
  Producer, who was conveniently living in an apartment less than a mile from our house.
  Peter had the idea to send advance cassettes to Orson Welles, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire,
  and Frank Sinatra, asking for blurbs to be quoted on the jacket cover. The first three sent
  glowing, appreciative comments, and I was hoping for the same from Sinatra. I"d met
  him once after a performance at Caesar"s Palace.
  "I love you," I gushed.
  He fixed his cerulean eyes on me. "I love you too, baby," he said.
  But he sent a telegram after listening to the album: "Marvelous what some guys
  will do for a broad!" Peter tried to convince me we were just one typo short of a rave, that
  a misplaced exclamation point would have made the review read, "Marvelous! What
  some guys will do for a broad."
  It was on the basis of this album that Peter convinced 20th Century-Fox to green-
  light our next collaboration, an original musical comedy called At Long Last Love that he
  wrote using Cole Porter songs, about a madcap but impoverished heiress who loves a
  millionaire playboy who loves a Broadway star who loves an Italian roue. In movie
  musicals, actors usually record the vocals in a studio long before the film is shot and then
  lip-sync to those tracks when filming, so the sound of their voices is perfected with
  millions of dollars of studio enhancement. Audiences are accustomed to hearing this kind
  of technical quality, which can"t be duplicated in live performance. But Peter was more
  interested in spontaneity than perfection. Inspired by the 1930s Lubitsch musicals, when
  it was impossible to record voice and orchestra separately, he loved the subtle changes in
  tempo afforded by musicians following the actors. He asked the sound department at Fox
  to invent a process by which he could record the actors" voices live while we heard a
  pianist on the set through tiny receivers in our ears, the antennae wired through our hair.
  One night when we were filming in downtown L.A. the police got suspicious of this
  equipment and threatened to arrest Peter for unlawful broadcasting.
  Today many people actually love At Long Last Love-presumably it inspired
  Woody Allen to do a musical called Everyone Says I Love You. But when it came out, it
  was almost universally ravaged. We had four weeks of rehearsal (Fred and Ginger had
  six), and the stress took its toll: two or three times a week, Burt Reynolds would start
  hyperventilating and had to breathe into a paper bag. The last day of shooting I slammed
  three fingers in various doors (I still have a scar in my thumbnail where a studio nurse
  punctured it with the end of a paper clip that had been held in a flame). I bounced
  bralessly through the movie in 1930s-style silk-satin gowns that wrinkled so badly, I
  couldn"t sit down, so I spent the long shooting days propped up against an old-fashioned
  "leaning board."
  Considering that this frothy cinematic cocktail was released in 1975, just as the
  country was reeling from a post-Watergate malaise combined with a serious recession,
  the timing could not have been worse. Though defending it in public, Peter and I
  privately referred to At Long Last Love as our debacle. There was a tremendous pressure
  from the studio to get the movie out in a hurry, and Peter felt he was talked into some bad
  editing choices, which he would spend $60,000 of his own money to correct. The film
  was one of the last to be shown before Radio City Music Hall closed its doors for years,
  prompting Orson Welles to chastise us, "You shut down the fucking Rockettes!" The film
  community was thrilled; they"d been waiting for us to fail. The movie critic Judith Crist
  called Peter before the picture was released and asked, "How is it?"
  "Pretty good," said Peter.
  "It better be," she said. "They"re waiting for you with their knives out." When
  Gene Shalit reviewed the film on the Today show, said, "In this movie Cybill Shepherd
  appears as if she cannot walk or talk, much less sing." Then he held up a sign that read
  BOMB and ended with "produced, written, directed, and ruined by Peter Bogdanovich."
  Vincent Canby at the New York Times, who"d had such kind words about me in Daisy
  Miller, wrote that "casting Cybil [sic] Shepherd in a musical comedy is like entering a
  horse in a cat show." Another critic, again reviewing the relationship, called Peter "an
  eager foil for Cybill Shepherd, his well-publicized but untalented girlfriend." I was
  crushed, humiliated, asking myself: Is it possible I am talentless? There"s an expression
  that goes, "If three people tell you you"re dead, lie down already." But I kept thinking:
  It"s not how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get back up.
  To that end, I met with the producer David Merrick and the director Jack Clayton,
  determined to have them cast me as another Daisy, opposite Robert Redford in The Great
  Gatsby. But when they asked for a screen test, I haughtily refused. "Can"t they see I"m
  perfect?" I asked my agent. (And the part went to... Mia Farrow.) I passed on a chance to
  do Agatha Christie"s Death on the Nile, since I would have spent most of the film as a
  corpse. (The part went to... Lois Chiles.) Certain actresses would become my nemesis:
  When John Schlesinger declared me too old and not vulnerable enough for The Day of
  the Locusts, the part went to... Karen Black. And she got the part 1 was hoping to play in
  Family Plot, which turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock"s final film.
  I was also hoping to play the fictionalized Norma Shearer role in The Last Tycoon,
  a roman a clef about Irving Thalberg, which Harold Pinter had adapted from the final
  novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The producer, Sam Spiegel, and the director, Elia Kazan,
  asked to meet me at a Beverly Hills hangout called the Bistro Gardens. It was mid-
  afternoon (possibly they"d heard about my appetite and didn"t want to spring for lunch?)
  so the restaurant was almost empty, save for the waiters rattling cutlery as they set up
  tables for the dinner service. I knew that Kazan was a major Hollywood player, that he
  had cofounded the Actors Studio (birthplace of "the Method"). He introduced James
  Dean to the movie-going public in East of Eden, exposed union corruption in On the
  Waterfront, and assailed anti-Semitism in Gentlemen"s Agreement. I also knew of his
  controversial testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his part
  in the Hollywood blacklisting. When he named colleagues who were suspected of being
  Communists, Stella Adler said that he committed matricide and patricide. But the luxury
  of turning down jobs based on political beliefs is something most actors can"t afford.
  Kazan was quiet during our meeting, but Spiegel talked about working in Nazi
  Germany in the early 1930s and using the pseudonym S. P. Eagle when he first came to
  this country, thinking it sounded classy and American. He kept looking at the red and
  blue scarf double-wrapped around my neck, as if it were making him itchy and finally
  said, "Honey, take that thing off."
  "I can"t," I said with what I thought was amusing drama, clutching my throat, "I
  have a hideous scar." Kazan perked up and exchanged a glance with Spiegel-if the
  scene had been a cartoon, the caption would have read: "How can she talk with her foot
  in her mouth?" (The part went to... Ingrid Boulting.)
  I went around serenading myself with a childhood rhyme that I would repeat with
  a certain self-absorption for years to come: "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,
  guess I"ll go eat worms. Big fat juicy ones, little tiny skinny ones. Boy how they"re gonna
  squirm." After my notices for At Long Last Love, it took granite ovaries to call the great
  jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and ask him to collaborate on an album called Mad About the
  Boy, named for the Cole Porter standard. The Producer produced the album. We were
  afraid to have Peter"s name anywhere near it, for fear of enflaming the critics, but the
  three of us financed it, putting up $10,000 each. Getz came on to me, and when I
  declined, he snarled, "It"s your fault if I go back to being a junkie and a juicehead,"
  ignoring me for the rest of the session. The album remained in limbo for four years, as I
  personally shopped it around and got turned down at the major record labels. (There"s
  nothing like rejection right in your face to keep you humble.) Miraculously, a few jazz
  critics actually heard it and liked it (being compared in the Los Angeles Times to Lee
  Wiley and Ella Fitzgerald is about as good as it gets). Eventually the album was released
  by a small company called Inner City Records, which went bankrupt a few years later.
  The company"s lawyer ended up with rights to the musical catalog, changed the name of
  my album to Cybill Getz Better, and informed me that the copies I requested would cost
  me an additional $10,000. I suggested he change the title to Cybill Getz Screwed.
  With Peter"s approval, I had decided to rent a room of my own, a tiny studio in a
  tall tower on the oceanfront in Santa Monica. It was decorated with photographs of
  Buster Keaton, a shrine to his comic genius complete with burning candles, and I had
  every surface except the floor covered with smoky mirrors. One drawer of my bureau
  was filled with naughty gifts from Peter intended to enliven our sex life-motorized
  erotic gadgetry, books about tapping the lower chakras for full sexual awakening, crotch-
  less panties from Frederick"s of Hollywood. (The toys were okay, but I"d just as soon go
  into the vegetable department of a store to find playthings, although the moral majority is
  probably working on legislation outlawing cucumbers.) Peter called the apartment the
  Love Pavilion (there was no place to sit except the king-size bed), and together we sang
  the lines about "our little den of iniquity" from a Rodgers and Hart lyric: "For a girlie and
  boy, a radio"s got so much class, and so"s a ceiling made of glass."
  I don"t know if Peter assumed he was the only "boy," but I was pretty sure I
  wasn"t the only "girlie" in his life. My dance instructor on At Long Last Love had told me
  about one of his flings. I was horrified, shocked, angered, and ultimately relieved. He
  never asked what went on in my apartment beyond his ken-we were still operating
  under our policy of mutual nondisclosure, and the apartment made it easier for me to see
  The Producer. But shuttling between two lovers did not preclude my taking a third, or
  fourth, or fifth. Perhaps my infidelity was a dysfunctional way of hedging my bets so I
  wasn"t as vulnerable as my mother, assuring I"d never be left by the man I loved. What
  was so unsatisfying about the relationship with Peter that I needed to do this? Was I
  trying to reclaim some control over the man who represented all the power, all the money,
  just as my grandfather had? Peter had given me sexual license, but he surely did not
  imagine that I would dare extracurricular activities quite so recklessly close to home,
  practically using his Rolodex as a personal dating service.
  The Director was someone whose work Peter and I both admired , a craggy-faced
  man more than twenty-five years my senior who tended to wear long gold chains and a
  thick gold ID bracelet and was married to a famous actress. We were on the same
  Hollywood party circuit, making the occasional foursome for dinner.
  Peter was out of town when The Director called, and while we were talking, I
  somehow ended up on the bathroom floor with the telephone cord looped around me
  twice. When he asked what I was doing, I embroidered the truth into something more
  provocative.
  "I"m lying in an empty bathtub," I said. "I often do that when I"m on the phone."
  He responded with a well-timed laugh and the appropriate question. "What do
  you wear while lying in the empty bathtub?"
  "What does one usually wear in the tub?" I answered.
  "Interesting," he said. "I never knew you were this crazy."
  I mentioned the shrine to Buster Keaton at my beach apartment. "I"d love to see
  it," he said. "Will Peter be upset if I take you to dinner?"
  "Surely not with you," I said.
  We arranged to meet at the apartment. "You smell incredible," he said when I
  opened the door. "What is that scent?"
  "Why honey, it"s magnolia oil," I replied in my best southern drawl. As he
  stepped past me, he jingled the change in his pocket distractedly and squirted his mouth
  with Binaca breath freshener. When I saw him looking for a place to sit, I ran to the
  balcony for a wooden stool, then changed my mind. "Let"s go to the pier," I said. ""It"ll be
  an adventure."
  The Santa Monica pier was a faded relic of the Roaring Twenties, with a few
  seafood shanties, some rundown souvenir stands, and a wonderful carousel, closed on
  this chilly, foggy night. I was peering through the locked gates at its painted stallions
  when I heard change jingling again. It seemed to be The Director"s version of clearing his
  throat.
  "Are you ready to go back?" he asked.
  No, I wanted to walk all the way out to the end of the pier, deserted except for a
  few fishermen, who avoided eye contact. He walked along with me, grudgingly admiring
  my hitch-kicks over several garbage cans. As we got back to his car, he looked at me with
  a cold, self-assured expression. "If this was a scene," he said, "I"d rewrite it."
  "How?" I asked.
  "Oh, I"d have to sit at my typewriter," he said. "That"s where the juices start
  flowing. I rent a house out in Malibu. It"s the only place in Los Angeles where I can
  breathe. Why don"t we go out there? You don"t have to worry. It"ll be perfectly all right."
  I didn"t know if he was reassuring me that he had no designs on me, that he wouldn"t
  overstep the boundaries of his friendship with Peter, or that we wouldn"t get caught. I
  didn"t know which I wanted. But if you have to ask, maybe you shouldn"t do it.
  The beach house was so close to the ocean that it vibrated with each breaker, and
  a depressing dampness filled the rooms and every surface, even the toilet seat. "Will you
  excuse me a minute?" he said rather formally. He was gone more than a half hour,
  performing, I assumed, some preseduction toilette. (I heard a Binaca spritz at least once.)
  We went for a walk on the beach while he smoked a loosely rolled joint, getting
  red-eyed and more withdrawn. Then we sat on the sofa making excruciating small talk
  until he finally said, "It"s getting late. I"d better take you home."
  He phoned the next afternoon. "I called my psychiatrist today," he said. "We"re
  just friends now-I finished my analysis three years ago-and I mentioned the situation
  with you. He thought that I was confused and guilty and that it would probably be healthy
  to indulge my impulses." "There was a lingering pause. "What kind of time did you have
  last night?"
  "Horrible," I admitted.
  "Me too," he said. "I wanted you, but I had no idea how you felt. I thought you
  found me unattractive, and I was afraid of being rejected."
  I reassured him that he was Everywoman"s idea of Adonis, and moved on to
  another card in the Rolodex.
  Peter and I were good friends of the director John Cassavetes and his wife, the
  actress Gena Rowlands. John was one of the world"s great flirts, but when I phoned him
  at his office one day, I couldn"t get him to play.
  "How are you?" I asked, an obvious siren call.
  "Why are you calling me here?" he said with irritation. "What are you doing?"
  Good question. I didn"t know what I was doing. I no longer believed that sexual
  desire meant love, but I was still convinced that I was out of control, therefore not
  culpable. I was using men and being used. (There is no coldheartedness toward someone
  else in which the cold heart is not also hurt.) As long as I didn"t get caught, I believed I
  was okay. I had learned early on that love is not about what you feel, but what you can
  get if you act lovingly, as I had with my grandfather. Men were supposed to want me, but
  I wasn"t supposed to want them. When I disconnected from my mother"s moral stance,
  which was based on the idea that my only value to the culture was sexual but I wasn"t
  supposed to enjoy it, I lost the protective, parental voice in my head, the voice that says:
  Cybill, what are you doing?
  It took years to gain some understanding of my desperate sexuality. I had to
  believe in myself as a person with value beyond the sexual, a person with boundaries, a
  person who can say yes when she means yes and no when she means no and know the
  difference. Up until then, I"d been trying to save my life the only way I knew how: lying.
  
  Chapter Seven
  "I NEED A CYBILL SHEPHERD TYPE"
  
  AN OLD HOLLYWOOD JOKE (OFTEN REPEATED WITH THE
  substitution of different names) lists the five stages of an actor"s career. First: Who is
  Dustin Hoffman? Second: Get me Dustin Hoffman. Third: Get me a Dustin Hoffman
  type. Fourth: Get me a young Dustin Hoffman. Fifth: Who is Dustin Hoffman?
  In 1975, when I was twenty-five years old, my agent, Sue Mengers, got a call
  from a young director named Martin Scorsese who was casting a movie called Taxi
  Driver.
  "I need a Cybill Shepherd type," he said.
  "How about the real thing?" she asked.
  I had to beg Sue to be truthful with me when we first worked together, and after
  that she was unfailingly, unflinchingly honest. "Just suck up to Marty," she instructed
  when Scorsese agreed to see me (invoking memories of Moma"s suggestion to "love up
  on Da-Dee"s neck"). "Be a nice, sweet, innocent girl. Smile and look pretty. Don"t talk a
  lot, don"t make jokes, and don"t tell him he needs to sit on a phone book."
  When I read the script that was sent over by messenger to my hotel in New York,
  I threw it across the room, trying to hit the wastebasket. The violence was so relentless,
  and my character, a political drone named Betsy, was such a cipher, that I couldn"t
  imagine breathing any life into her. My anxiety was palpable-what"s a Cybill Shepherd
  type anyway? With my little pilot light of insecurity fanned by a few years" worth of
  scathing reviews, I thought: Maybe I"m not even good enough to play my own type. But I
  admired all of Scorsese"s films-Mean Streets was a searing portrait of small-time hoods in
  Little Italy, and the evocative Alice Doesn"t Live Here Anymore had resulted in an
  Academy Award for Ellen Burstyn, my mother in The Last Picture Show.
  In person, Scorsese was energetic to the point of manic--he talked as if his life
  depended on maintaining a certain velocity. One of the people he talked about was the
  talented young actress he was hoping to cast in the role of the child prostitute Iris.
  "This girl Jodie Foster is so young, I don"t know if her mother will let her do it,"
  he said. "You know the nature of the material. But she"s so good. And she looks just like
  you when you were fourteen."
  Concomitant to the talks about Taxi Driver, Peter was planning our next project,
  entitled Nickelodeon, which would reunite him with Ryan O"Neal. Their friendship was
  improbable--Ryan was an enthusiastic participant in the recreational drug scene of
  Hollywood, while Peter rarely considered fogging his brain with even a cocktail. Ryan
  often greeted Peter by kissing him on the lips and grabbing him by the balls, and he never
  considered their camaraderie an impediment to chasing me--on the contrary, he had a
  reputation for pursuing the girlfriends of all his friends. He pinned me against a wall at
  one of Sue Mengers"s parties, ran his fingers through my hair, and whispered, "Let"s
  fuck." I giggled and slugged him in the solar plexus.
  One day I answered the phone to find Ryan on the other end calling Peter, who
  wasn"t home. "And how are you?" he inquired, all Irish charm. I"d just come from a
  dance class and told him that I was getting into shape. Carbohydrates had been my chief
  form of consolation after the debacle of At Long Last Love, and although Peter still liked
  me nice and round, I wasn"t sure about Martin Scorsese.
  "You"ll have to stop eating to lose weight," said Ryan, his charm suddenly
  dissipating. "I couldn"t believe Peter putting you in nothing but white for At Long Last
  Love. You looked like a beached beluga. And everybody"s starting to wonder if he"s lost
  it. The sound of that flop is still echoing through the Hollywood hills."
  Most other "friends" had been more tactful than to repeat such gossip to my face.
  I started to cry. "Look," he said, both guilty and triumphant, "we"re supposed to work
  together. I"ll come pick you up, we"ll drive to my house at the beach and talk."
  Red lights and warning buzzers should have been going off--STAND AWAY
  FROM THE DOOR, NOT A THROUGH STREET, TOXIC IF INGESTED--but I didn"t
  see or hear them. Since Ryan had just indicated he found me unappealingly fat, and since
  establishing some bond of friendship seemed a good preamble to working together, I
  agreed. Ryan barely acknowledged me when I got into his Porsche and almost knocked
  down the exit gate in his impatience to leave, giving me a filthy look as I buckled my seat
  belt. I couldn"t figure out if he was trying to keep me off balance by shifting his mood
  without warning. There was no possibility of conversation--was singing along to loud
  acid rock on the radio--he left the motor running with the music blaring when he pulled
  into a 7-Eleven. I could see him sharing some laughs with the counterman as he paid for a
  six-pack of Coors.
  Pulling up to his house off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, he touched a
  button on the dashboard and the garage door opened, revealing a wooden floor with a rich
  varnish like a gymnasium. I turned to comment on such unexpected elegance, but he had
  already vanished inside, leaving the door open behind him. I"d been in this house for a
  party once, had already seen the pool table, the stereo equipment, the brass-framed movie
  mementos ("To Ryan, with deep and sincerest affection, William Holden"), but then I was
  with Peter, and I"d stayed downstairs.
  "Ever seen my bedroom?" he asked. "C"mon upstairs. The view is fabulous."
  WRONG WAY: NO OUTLET, DANGEROUS CURVES--I still didn"t see the signs.
  Climbing the stairs, we entered a bachelor pad, decorated in earth tones with a fur
  spread on the bed-the real thing, I think. Suddenly there was a clatter of bottles coming
  from the bathroom. Ryan ran in and emerged a moment later, with a pretty girl in tow.
  She was wearing a cheap cotton shift and rubber gloves. "This is Sarah," he said
  familiarly. "She"s doing a little tidying up, but she"s going to come back later. Now beat
  it, honey," he said, giving her behind a playful slap. As soon as she left, he turned to me
  and said, "I don"t know why I let her in here--she has no idea what she"s doing." I didn"t
  know what she was doing either, but I had clearly interrupted something.
  Gesturing toward a couch, he said, "Have a seat," but he stood near the window
  with its spectacular view of the surf, pointing out the various celebrity homes up and
  down the beach. "I can see everything that _____does," he said, naming a well-known
  actor, "and believe me, he"s weird." Then he came to the sofa, standing over me. "You
  know, you could be really good if you had the right parts," he said. "Something has
  happened to Peter. He has to get back on track, and you"ve got more to do with it than
  anyone." As he tallied, he periodically used both hands to cup his balls, which were right
  at my eye level, a gesture that, at the time, I didn"t know as checking his package.
  The whole scene was starting to give me the creeps. I stood up, saying that it was
  getting late and I needed to get back. He stopped me by putting his arms around my
  shoulder, drawing me close to his chest, and making little moans of satisfaction as we
  swayed back and forth, one of his hands on my neck and the other at the small of my
  back. I started to pull away and felt his muscles resist, stop me for an instant and then
  relax. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I came out, he was looking at his
  watch--another mood shift.
  "I"d better be going too," he said irritably. "I"m supposed to pick my son up by
  six."
  On the way home, he put a Vivaldi cassette in the car"s tape deck. "If you like
  this," I said in a friendly tone, "I can turn you on to some music that makes this sound
  like shit."
  He snapped his head around. "How can you say this is shit?" he snarled.
  "I didn"t mean that," I said hastily, seeing that I had insulted his tastes and not
  wanting to provoke him. "I just meant that there"s some beautiful Beethoven I"d like to
  play for you..."
  "I know about Beethoven," he said, then popped out the Vivaldi and turned on the
  radio full blast, although it could barely be heard through the whoosh from the open
  sunroof. The Vivaldi turned out to be part of the soundtrack for Ryan"s next film, Barry
  Lyndon, and after I"d seen it, I sent him a copy of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4
  with the inscription, "This is a fitting tribute to your superb performance." He never
  responded.
  Both Nickelodeon and Taxi Driver were to be made for Columbia Pictures, whose
  president, David Begelman, announced that I had to choose between the two. It was a
  tough decision--Peter had written a part especially for me, incorporating my myopia into
  the character, which gave me an excuse to do a lot of pratfalls. But we were still in a
  public relations abyss--of the kinder assessments at the time labeled me "a no-talent dame
  with nice boobs and a toothpaste smile and all the star quality of a dead hamster." We
  both knew that anything we did together in this vitriolic atmosphere was doomed. And
  not working with Ryan O"Neal was the consolation prize. It was a crushing
  disappointment to give up Nickelodeon. The part went to... Jane Hitchcock, who"d
  modeled with me in New York. And Begelman got busted for embezzling money from
  the studio.
  In 1975, Robert De Niro still had a youthful, almost preppy quality, the antithesis
  of his character in Taxi Driver, the psychotic Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle. We used the
  same technique of scrawling microscopic notes on the script, covering every inch of the
  page, but I"d never seen an actor immerse himself in a role at De Niro"s level of intensity.
  He actually got a hack license, and during the preproduction phase, when he was still
  filming 1900 in Italy with Bernardo Bertolucci, he would leave Rome on a Friday, fly to
  New York, and drive a cab for the weekend. He went to an army base in northern Italy to
  tape-record the voices of some soldiers from an area in the Midwest that he wanted to use
  for Travis Bickle"s accent. Once we started filming, he stayed in character all the time.
  Waiting for the cameras to be set up for our "date" in Child"s Coffee Shop (airless in
  hundred-degree heat and perfumed by years of lard for deep-fat frying), he stared at me
  with a goofy but menacing half grin so disorienting that I called over the hairdresser to
  change the dynamic to a less threatening threesome.
  Scorsese, who was given to wearing white straw fedoras with colorful hatbands,
  used the sights and sounds of New York City like a big palette of colors to create a mood,
  and he dealt with the limited budget by shooting at night with a minimal crew and high-
  speed film, as if for an underground movie. He liked his actors to improvise and
  videotaped our efforts with a handheld black and white camera during rehearsals in his
  St. Regis hotel suite, inserting the bits of dialogue that worked best into the script. De
  Niro is a master at underplaying, doing little and having it be effective. That"s part of
  what makes it so terrifying when Travis Bickle does go off the deep end. The first day of
  shooting, I remarked to Scorsese that De Niro epitomized Hitchcock"s advice to actors:
  Don"t put a lot of scribble on your face. "I think I should try to match that," I said, and it
  became my pact with Scorsese.
  "Do less," he would say. Then , ""Now do even less." And then, ""Now. do even
  less than that."
  One day, De Niro and I were walking up Fifth Avenue together at the end of the
  day.
  "Do you want to get some barbecue?" he asked, fixing me with a sexy half-smile.
  In approximately an hour, I was expecting The Producer on my doorstep, after an
  absence of three or four weeks, and I wasn"t about to blow off what I knew would be a
  torrid reunion, not for this intense, inscrutable man who still seemed to be vaguely in
  character. "I can"t," I said. "I have someone, a friend, in town."
  "Oh," he said, "is Peter here?"
  "Not Peter."
  He grew rather quiet, walked me to the door of my apartment, and said good
  night. Other than as Travis Bickle, that was the last time he spoke to me during the
  filming.
  At the end of the shoot, I had a special taxi key chain made and inscribed for
  Scorsese-it cost the larger part of my salary. I was so grateful for the opportunity, but it
  wasn"t until twenty years later when the film came out on video disk that I could fast-
  forward quickly enough through the savage finale and realize that I"d been given an
  extraordinary last scene. Of course, I remembered shooting it, but wasn"t sure that it
  made the final cut: I"m a wimp about movie violence, even though I know it"s really
  chicken blood or Max Factor Technicolor Blood Number 5. Recently, I saw those final
  rearview mirror shots of Travis and Betsy, who has unknowingly gotten in his cab. At the
  end of her last ride, she leans through the window and starts to apologize to Travis. She
  appears to realize there"s no point and dejectedly asks, "How much was it?" I feel a
  subtext between Cybill Shepherd and Robert De Niro, almost as if I"m saying, "I"m sorry
  I didn"t give you a tumble," and he"s saying, "You better believe you"re sorry, baby. You
  can"t imagine what you missed."
  It wasn"t until the re-release of that film that I was credited with a performance of
  any merit--at the time I was still the no-talent dame with big boobs too closely associated
  with Peter Bogdanovich. Julia Phillips, one of the film"s producers, declared in You"ll
  Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that the only reason the Italian Scorsese had cast me
  was my big ass.
  
  OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, A SERIES OF STROKES had
  disabled and silenced my grandfather. Still physically capable of speech, he mostly sat in
  a chair seeming rather docile and lost, as if he didn"t know quite where he belonged, until
  he was summoned elsewhere, like the dinner table. Moma took him to Romania for
  monkey-gland injections, which, to the surprise of no one else in the family, did nothing
  to help. I"d gone home to see him propped up for their fiftieth wedding anniversary party.
  Failing in memory and strength, he spent the last year of his life in the Rosewood
  Nursing Home and died in the fall of 1975.
  My reaction was curiously impersonal and detached, more an acknowledgment of
  a milestone than a true sense of sorrow. I thought, in all naiveté, that Da-Dee had ceased
  to have any power over me or my direction in life. His funeral was to be the first I ever
  attended, not counting the time that our dog Freckles unsuccessfully tackled a car on
  Highland Park Place, a far more traumatic event in my life. I didn"t even want to go
  home, but my mother insisted, and it would have been unseemly to take Peter. He had not
  seen my mother since her insults at the premiere of Picture Show, and Peter is nothing if
  not grudge holding. The Producer volunteered to come along, and his twisted humor got
  me through the day--we exchanged irreverent glances about the wavering vibrato of the
  buxom redhead singing the gospel that Moma loved, along with the absolute latest in
  dying offered by the Memphis Memorial Gardens. There were three panels of automated
  curtains: the first opened to reveal the coffin to the immediate family; the second revealed
  the coffin to the larger group of mourners; the third revealed the family to the mourners. I
  stared at the folded freckled hands of the man in the open coffin, the only part of him that
  looked as elegant as in life, his once vibrant face shriveled and masked with makeup, his
  ungainly ears oddly flattened against his head by the mortician, and I thought I might
  throw up.
  My grandfather"s last words, according to my brother, were, "Don"t let the hens
  getcha." He had never placed much faith in Moma"s business acumen, and I remember
  more than one occasion when she"d say, "Cybill, darlin", rush to the bank with this cash.
  I"ve just bounced a check, and I don"t want Da-Dee to find out." Trying to ensure that my
  grandmother would never get control of Shobe, Inc., he named the bank as trustee, but
  Moma fought his posthumous bully pulpit in court for six years and won the right to run
  the firm herself. For the following twenty years, she used the company letterhead for all
  her correspondence, simply writing "Mrs." in front of her husband"s engraved name.
  A few months after my grandfather"s funeral, I was alone with Peter at Copa de
  Oro. It would be the first time we listened to my album Mad About the Boy together.
  Peter had already heard it and wanted to be free to give me notes, so he requested that
  The Producer not be present. That night I was talking to a friend on the phone when I
  heard a strange click on the line. Immediately I had the thought that someone was in the
  house. (We"d had two intruders there: an overzealous fan who walked through the gate
  behind a deliver), truck, with a picture of me in his wallet, and an escapee from a mental
  institution who ran through the halls screaming, "Where am I?") I quickly dialed the
  emergency number for the Bel Air Patrol, then went and got Peter from his office, and we
  locked ourselves upstairs, me wishing I"d been willed part of Da-Dee"s arsenal. When the
  security police arrived, they searched room by room, suddenly yelling from the basement:
  "We"ve got somebody. Says he knows you."
  My heart nearly stopped when two security men in gray uniforms brought The
  Producer upstairs, slumping, with a firm grip on each of his arms. He had his own set of
  keys to everything in our lives and had let himself in. "It"s okay," Peter said, "we know
  him." Once we declined to press charges and the cops left, The Producer gave us an
  explanation about being there--he had wanted to hear Peter"s unexpurgated comments
  about the Getz album, and he adamantly denied being the telephone eavesdropper. I was
  sure that Peter would find out about our secret past, but he seemed to accept the theory
  that The Producer had been temporarily wiggy and stressed out too.
  But I was growing weary of amorous subterfuge that smacked of my teenage
  years and remorseful about my duplicity. Having sex with another man"s business
  associate is pretty much beyond the pale. And living with a lie is a prescription for going
  crazy. Chekhov wrote that the quickest way to reduce the stature of a man is to lie to him.
  I had done that with both Peter and The Producer.
  Feeling the stress, I started grinding my teeth at night until my doctor prescribed
  Valium. I was dreaming about a clean slate, starting fresh, not lying. In a moment of
  unprecedented candor, I sat with The Producer in a Westwood coffee shop and told him it
  was over. He had been such a significant presence in my life--maybe not the creative
  partnership I had with Peter, nor the irresistible flame of Elvis, but an enduring passion.
  We used up half of the thin folded napkins in the metal dispenser as surrogate Kleenex.
  It would be so easy to dismiss the next decade of my life as the lost years, defined
  by unremarkable or irredeemable projects. There was a movie called Special Delivery
  with Bo Svenson, who introduced himself to me by knocking at my dressing-room door
  and dropping his pants. I couldn"t even get Michael Caine to kiss me as an adulterous sex
  kitten in Silver Bears. The first time I saw him coming across the ornate lobby of the
  lakeside hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, he seemed to glow from within--here was a real
  movie star. But shooting our love scenes, his mouth clamped shut, and a damp line of
  perspiration formed on his upper lip. The lack of heat was so obvious that the director,
  Ivan Passer, came to me privately and asked if I couldn"t warm things up.
  "He won"t kiss me," I protested.
  "Well, you know what to do," said Passer. Actually, I didn"t. But once the
  production moved to London, Caine"s attitude changed: he was frisky, enthusiastic,
  inspired.
  "Am I imagining it, or is the difference apparent?" I asked Passer.
  "Sure," he said, "Shakira"s in town." It seemed that Caine was a more passionate
  leading man when he could look past the camera and see his own wife on the set. But
  Silver Bears suffered the fate of being Columbia"s "other" movie, released in 1978 at the
  same time as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Almost no promotional efforts or
  finances were put into it, and the film disappeared.
  There would have been no problem playing love scenes with the cameraman,
  since we were acting them out privately. All my resolve about fidelity didn"t amount to a
  hill of beans. I saw, I wanted, I took. In my long career of sleeping with charming cads,
  he was among the charmingest and caddiest, a married rogue with long black hair and a
  goatee who liked to drive his Mercedes at a hundred miles an hour. During one lusty
  encounter, he sucked my chin so hard that the next day, I looked like a bruised peach, and
  when he viewed me through the camera lens, he started to laugh. When we were
  scheduled to shoot some footage in Las Vegas, I made sure I got to the location early so
  we could have some time together. The first night I came down to meet some of the
  movie people for dinner and saw him already sitting at the table, nuzzling another blonde.
  I could hardly justify outrage that a married man was not only cheating with me but on
  me. For several days, I lay around my room at Caesar"s Palace nursing a broken heart,
  writing self-pitying poems and listening to a constant odd hum that turned out to be the
  lights on the building"s facade. As much as I liked to believe, even announce, that I could
  have a relationship that would be purely physical, not emotional, I got hooked. Miserable
  and looking for distraction, I went to see Sinatra perform and found him strangely
  wooden and listless. I found out that he had chartered a plane to bring his mother out to
  Vegas--the same plane that had been used for the shooting of Silver Bears the previous
  day--nd it had crashed into the side of a mountain.
  Since I knew I had a lot more to learn about acting, I sought advice from Orson
  Welles. "I don"t know which direction to take," I said. "I may have an offer to do a
  revival of the play The Philadelphia Story in New York, or I have a definite offer from
  the Tidewater Dinner Theater in Norfolk, Virginia, to do A Shot in the Dark, or I could go
  study with Stella Adler in New York."
  "Do not take acting classes," he said. "When you walk through the door, you will
  be envied and despised because you are already more famous than most of them will ever
  be. Learn by doing theater, and do it anywhere but Los Angeles or New York. Just make
  sure that you talk loud enough so that people in the last row can understand what you"re
  saying. Nobody will support you, but it will be the most important thing you ever do. It
  will give you an opportunity to fall on your face. The audience will teach you what you
  need to know."
  The only person who thought this was a good idea was Gena Rowlands. "Oh,
  Cyb," she said, "it"s easy, and you"re going to have the time of your life." Everyone else
  acted as if there might be the need for an intervention, including Peter. (Stella Adler
  actually supported the theater plan, with a caveat. "No more ingénues," she said. "Play
  what you haven"t lived. It will help you with your life.") I went to Virginia, reprising
  Julie Harris"s murderous role in A Shot in the Dark. That"s when I really fell in love with
  acting. What I discovered is that film is more a medium for the director and the editor,
  but in the theater, the writer and the actor have more control. The preparation is intense,
  but once the performance starts, there"s no one saying, "Cut," or "That was a little over
  the top, Cybill, take it down a peg." Every night, from the entrance stage left to the final
  curtain, there is a full dramatic arc to follow. After opening night I felt: Not only do I
  have wings, but I can fly.
  In 1978 Peter was still depressed about the failure of Nickelodeon, thinking that
  his career was going to hell in a hand basket, even without me. He was set to direct Saint
  Jack, the book whose rights I"d won as part of the settlement in my suit against Playboy.
  There was never a part in it for me, but I thought it was an unusual story and even wrote a
  first-draft script.
  I was starting to feel an impetus for another kind of production, but Peter had
  always rejected the notion of his ever having another child. If I had been asked even a
  year before whether I wanted children, I would have said no. I was afraid it would keep
  me from doing what I wanted to do in my life. But at the age of twenty-eight, I began
  longing intensely for a baby.
  The last time I"d broached the subject with Peter, we had just made love. "Please
  don"t bring that up again," he said with mood-killing finality, grabbing a robe at the end
  of the bed and sitting down at his desk with his back toward me. Part-time single
  fatherhood was one long unending battle for Peter, and pushing the issue probably meant
  unconsciously scripting the end of our relationship.
  Sensing a last hurrah, a few months later I joined him on location for Saint Jack. I
  flew to London and then on to Singapore, where we stayed at the fabled Raffles Hotel--
  romantic in a slightly seedy way, cooled by ceiling fans reportedly invented for the hotel
  in the late 1900s by the Hunter Fan Company of Memphis, Tennessee, which had given
  me one of my first modeling jobs. One night we were sitting in the lounge drinking
  potent Singapore slings when I realized that the fans were no longer spinning, but the
  room was.
  There was a small part in the film played by a beautiful young Asian actress
  named Monika Subramaniam, who lowered her eyes when she met me and lit up like Las
  Vegas when she saw Peter. I didn"t confront him. He didn"t have to confess. I just knew.
  Our relationship was limping to an end anyway. This didn"t help.
  
  TWO THINGS HAVE ALWAYS SAVED MY LIFE: READING and singing.
  Books and music have comforted me, informed me, helped me define myself. It"s
  impossible to overstate their importance to my mental health, spiritual sustenance, and
  survival on the planet. The difference, of course, is that while reading is private, personal,
  unexamined, with no need to explain or justify, singing is quite the opposite. I put my
  voice out there to be examined, reviewed, sometimes reviled, as I"ve done since
  childhood, when my parents would ask me to sing for company and I always felt that
  people seemed a little disappointed. But I always come back to it. Every song has at least
  one character--and I don"t need a movie studio or TV network to finance it. Cabaret is an
  opportunity to tell stories around a fire. From an early age, long before the benefit of
  therapy, I have felt my heart healed by singing. But it takes the most courage of all. For
  the performer it"s like being stripped naked, and for the audience it"s like being in the
  performer"s living room--really torturous if you don"t like the person. I"ve had some
  mean things said about my voice. No matter: even if I felt that my singing was utterly
  unappreciated, it would remain a necessary component of my life.
  I was feeling disconnected from Peter, even though nothing had been articulated
  between us, and I had no movie or TV offers. So I went to New York and sang on
  Sundays at a glorified hamburger joint in Greenwich Village called the Cookery. The rest
  of the week belonged to the extraordinary blues artist and fellow Memphian Alberta
  Hunter, who had learned the music that played on the gramophone in the St. Louis
  brothel where she went to work as a ladies" maid when she was eleven years old. She
  wrote Bessie Smith"s first hit "Down-Hearted Blues" (""I"ve got the world in a jug and
  the stopper right here in my hand, and if you want me pretty papa, you better come under
  my command."). Her performance was so moving, so dignified, so authoritative. Music is
  about the pauses as much as the notes, and even her breathing between the phrases was
  powerful. Alberta called me "Memphis" and always greeted me with tremendous warmth,
  which was more than the audience did. I stood at a microphone in front of a small room,
  singing over the sounds of conversation and cutlery banging against crockery. Nobody
  wanted to hear me--one woman approached the stage and asked quite loudly, "Where"s
  the rest room, honey?"
  During the two weeks of my engagement, I slept in a tiny room at the Pierre Hotel
  with three different men in quick succession: one was the sexy young waiter at the
  Cookery, who roamed the room in a figure eight moaning "Woe is me. I"ve been in love
  with you my whole life, and now I can"t get it up." Two was an agent I met, a married
  father of five. (I know, I know.) Three was Charles Grodin. My Heartbreak Kid costar,
  who I had found distant, humorless, and unappealing, called when he heard about me
  performing and shocked me by making me laugh. Either he got funny or I finally had a
  sense of humor. We went to dinner at a dive not listed in any guidebook, the sort of dark
  and clandestine place that is the culinary equivalent of the No-Tell Motel. Our one-night
  stand never went beyond the morning after, when I found out that he was living with
  someone else.
  Suddenly, and rudely, my life as a sexual libertine caught up with me. The only
  protection I"d ever been taught was abstinence, based on an archaic morality. Condoms
  had become antiques--at that time there were no sexually transmitted diseases that
  couldn"t be treated out of a prescription bottle. When I moved to Los Angeles with Peter,
  I had been on the Pill since I was sixteen. When I was twenty-seven, I had a notoriously
  gallivanting Copper-7 IUD, which eventually got "lost" and X rays were required to
  locate and retrieve it. By the time I was in New York, I was using a diaphragm. But it was
  not fail-safe.
  Even a woman who feels passionately that abortion should be safe and legal does
  not terminate a pregnancy with an easy heart. For me it was testimony to another kind of
  failure, like going back to the sexually secretive dungeon of high school. I checked into a
  clinic under a false name on a Saturday when there were no other patients and vomited
  from the anesthesia by myself in the recovery room. I told no one what I was doing.
  The female body gearing up for pregnancy is a hormonal roller coaster. The hips
  automatically tilt forward; the body has more blood and fluid. (When I later became
  pregnant with twins, I needed a retainer because my bottom teeth started moving around.)
  The aftermath of my abortion was like hitting the wall. Along with the feeling of relief
  was a nagging wonder: will I get another chance? Regardless of how important and
  correct the choice was at the time, a woman always wonders about the child she didn"t
  choose to bring to life.
  Women will always end unwanted pregnancies, safely when they can, unsafely
  when it"s the only option, and several hundred thousand die every year as a result. I"ve
  marched for the right to choose, and I know, deep in my bones, that pregnancy as
  punishment is bad for both women and children.
  I knew I had done the right thing. But I was feeling the emptiness of sex with men
  who didn"t matter, feeling like I didn"t matter to them either. I actually felt like a hooker
  when the owner of the Cookery paid me for singing by saying, "Here, baby," and stuffing
  some crumpled twenty-dollar bills in my hand. Like a wounded animal, I called my
  mother, who listened, mostly silent, as I poured out my unhappiness. I heard my voice
  rise and soften like a little girl through sniffles and sobs. Finally my mother spoke, strong
  and reassuring. "Cybill," she said, "come home." She had gone through her own
  miserable and lonely post divorce odyssey, finally carving out a busy, optimistic life. At
  fifty-three, she met a charming and high-spirited widower named Mondo Micci which is
  pronounced "Mickey" in Memphis), a former Golden Gloves champion who used to
  climb up the fire escape at the Peabody Hotel to sneak into the rooftop dances there. For
  the first time in her life, she was being protected and cared for by someone else, making
  it so much easier for her to protect and care for me.
  
  I"M ALWAYS PRESSING MY NOSE TO THE AIRPLANE WINDOW as I
  fly into Memphis, searching for the first sign of the Mississippi, and I try to make out old
  channels in the river that look like imperfectly healed wounds in the earth. The markings
  of the land have become as familiar over the years as the lines in my own palms. I can
  even identify individual streets and buildings, the landmarks of my childhood, from a
  great height.
  One of those buildings feels like my foster child. A musician named Hillsman
  Wright was involved in a effort to save from demolition the grand old Orpheum Theater
  at Beale Street and Main, the ornate movie palace of my childhood dreams, where I"d
  seen The Ten Commandments and Gone With the Wind. He took me backstage, up rickety
  staircases, and across catwalks dating from its days on the vaudeville circuit, and he
  played Bach on a monster Wurlitzer pipe organ as it rose up from the orchestra pit. That
  was all I needed to get involved in the fund-raising campaign, making a public service
  announcement and eventually singing Hoagy Carmichael"s "Memphis in June" at the
  Orpheum"s fiftieth-anniversary celebration.
  One night I went with my brother to Blues Alley, a smoky club on Front Street
  near the riverbank. Leaning against the bar was a burly, dark-haired man whom I first
  mistook for the cameraman, the English cad who broke my heart. This was David Ford,
  who was twenty-five years old (three years younger than I), and still living with his
  parents in the suburb of White Haven and working as the manager of the parts department
  at a Mercedes repair shop near the airport to pay for classes at the University of
  Memphis. I sent him one of those nakedly undisguised C"mon-a-my-house looks that are
  possible between strangers in nightclubs, and before the evening had ended, I knew we
  were destined to be lovers. I thought: Maybe I can find happiness in Memphis with a
  regular guy.
  Thus began an interesting confluence of events, as my mother and I were both
  dating others but living under the same roof. While David and I were necking on the
  living room couch, I"d hear a car pull in the driveway, idling for too long until the motor
  shut off, when Mother would come inside with a satisfied smile. The first time David and
  I made love, we had to wait until my mother was asleep before we raced to my brother"s
  bedroom. After all those years, I was still sneaking around.
  Before urban renewal almost renewed Beale Street out of existence, most white
  folks went there in the wee small hours after too many martinis, observing a tradition
  known as Midnight Rambles. Back then, Beale Street was mainly whorehouses, pawn
  shops, and saloons like Pee Wee"s, where in 1912 William Christopher Handy first put
  the notes on paper for a song he called "Memphis Blues." No one had ever used the word
  blues in a song title before, and as a result, in the 1970s Congress proclaimed Handy
  "Father of the Blues" and declared Memphis "Home of the Blues."
  David Ford became my companion in the search for my musical roots. He
  introduced me to Ma Rainey II who, from a wheelchair, could whoop up "Got My Mojo
  Working" better than anybody. I also got to know Furry Lewis, another Memphis legend.
  Though his recording career had ended in the thirties, he"d had an amazing career revival
  in the sixties, opening for the Rolling Stones and making frequent appearances on the
  Tonight Show. During the lean years in between, he had been employed as a street
  sweeper for the Memphis sanitation department. His slide guitar technique, sweet voice,
  and songwriting skills were backed up by a dignified but wicked sense of humor. One
  time we visited his home where he sat on the side of his bed playing guitar, singing, and
  talking. He wore thick Coke-bottle spectacles to compensate for cataracts, and kept a
  saucer on the top of his glass. In between sips of Ten High Whiskey he said, "I can"t see
  too good and I want to be sure there"s nothin" in there but the High."
  I was privileged to get to know and work with many more great Memphis
  musicians: Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwaite, Jim Dickenson, Little Laura Dukes, Prince
  Gabe, Honeymoon Garner, L. T. Lewis, Harold Mabern, Don McMinn, Jamil Nasser,
  Calvin Newborn, Sid Selvidge, Bob Talley, William Thais, and Mose Vinson. Grandma
  Dixie Davis would so inspire me with her barrel-house version of Handy"s "Beale Street
  Blues that I would sing it for twenty years and finally record it in 1998 on my CD Talk
  Memphis to Me.
  When you hear the blues in Memphis, the musicians kind of sit back on the
  melody, playing a little behind the beat so that if the leader holds a phrase out for an extra
  measure they can follow with a kind of fa-lop. That"s what makes it funky. That"s what
  makes it Memphis. As Lee Baker used to say, "even the Memphis Symphony plays
  behind the beat."
  In 1978 I recorded Vanilla, my third album of standards, featuring the renowned
  jazz pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. The producer was tenor saxman Fred Ford (he had
  howled like a dog on Big Mama Thorton"s recording of "Hound Dog"). He was
  surrounded by his Beale Street USA Orchestra, usually twenty pieces but, as he said,
  "mortified down to twelve for this occasion."
  In 1978 I was quite optimistic about my first TV movie. A Guide for the Married
  Woman was a follow-up to A Guide for the Married Man, a clever romp about the art of
  adultery. David managed to take some time off and accompany me to Los Angeles,
  staying at my apartment. I sent David and a bad toothache to the dentist who treated Peter
  and me, and the two of them happened to cross paths in the office. The dentist mentioned
  that the shaggy-haired fellow, who"d just left was an out-of-town referral from me, and
  Peter figured it out. When I drove to Copa de Oro to see Peter, he confronted me with his
  suspicions. I admitted to the affair and in a fury he threw a heavy crystal ashtray across
  the room. It was a final gesture of disillusionment at the end of our grand plans. There
  was a visible dent where it shattered on the tile floor.
  We did have one last phone call. Feeling bad about the ashtray-throwing scene
  and knowing that both of us were in Los Angeles, I tried to reach out to him and called to
  ask if it was okay to come over and talk. I didn"t know that his latest squeeze, Monika,
  was also in residence and that he was hosting a party for a dozen of our mutual friends.
  "It"s really not a good time," he said with genuine discomfort in his voice. Later
  he would say that he wanted to make everyone else disappear. Although he"d never told
  me, I think he wanted to give our relationship another chance. But I was calling to repair,
  not renew. Our reparations would be postponed, but once made, they have endured to this
  day. Peter remains one of my only truly intimate friends, and I think the main reason for
  our abiding friendship is that I never took him to court to get money. When I moved out, I
  said, "Send me whatever you think is mine," and he sent rugs, books, his father"s
  paintings. There were no lawyers to extend the period of discontent. And we say "I love
  you" to each other as much now as when we were a couple.
  The best thing about A Guide for the Married Woman turned out to be the way,
  my hair looked. Next, in the summer of 1978, I was cast in a remake of the witty forty-
  year-old Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes, shooting at Pinewood Studios outside
  London and in the Austrian Alps. I was cast as a "madcap heiress" working with a Life
  photographer played by Elliott Gould to solve the disappearance of Angela Lansbury on a
  train. Though I"d played madcap before, this time I got the wardrobe right: a bias-cut
  white silk satin dress worthy of Carole Lombard. (The costume department made nine
  identical copies.) In one scene I was supposed to run alongside a vintage steam engine on
  fist-size sharp gray rocks, wearing high heels. I had sprained my ankle playing basketball
  in high school, so the director Anthony Page agreed to let me do it in high-tops, shooting
  me from the knees up and earning the eternal gratitude of my ligaments. Angela and I
  sang Gershwin together while waiting for scenes to be set up. But Gould was mercurial,
  seemingly detached from the process and easily miffed. One day we were told about
  some glitch in production.
  "Oy vey," I said with a weary sigh.
  "Don"t ever use that expression again!" snapped Gould. "You have no right."
  (Years later I would tell this story to the Jewish producer of Moonlighting, Glenn Caron,
  who said, "That"s ridiculous," and immediately wrote me an "Oy vey" scene.)
  I didn"t want to be away from David, but he knew that if he took any more time
  off from his job, he"d be fired, so his arrival in Europe, unemployed, was a rather
  emphatic declaration of love and commitment. The only discordant note in our reunion
  was a bellhop at the hotel asking him "Where shall I put your bags, Mr. Shepherd?"--a
  portent of things to come. We stayed near Pinewood at a three-hundred-year-old inn
  called something like the Crocked Bull, with ceilings so low that we had to bend over to
  climb the stairs. There was no central heating, and I had to report to the set in the frigid
  predawn, so David lovingly got up with me and filled the tub with the hottest water.
  When we made love, I had the primal, mystical, earliest awareness of conception.
  Not long ago, that child remarked, "I wish I"d been wanted." Extracting the knife
  from my heart, I convinced her that nothing could be further from the truth. Just because
  a pregnancy is unplanned doesn"t mean a child is unwelcome. My children were wanted,
  which is the most important message of pro-choice, for to be wanted is a child"s surest
  protection against being abandoned or abused. David and I decided to live in Memphis
  (naively, I thought it would be possible to have a career while bringing up my child in the
  place that felt like home, a feeling that eludes even native Californians). And we decided
  to marry, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the institution, because in my hometown,
  wedding bells are the socially acceptable antecedent to impending parenthood. When
  Michael Carreras, the film"s executive producer, heard there was to be a wedding, he
  asked if we"d like to be married in the Anglican church and signed an affidavit stipulating
  that we"d been staying with him in the parish to satisfy the residency requirements. But I
  had to fill out a lot of paperwork for the rector at St. Peter"s of Wynchecombe. He wore
  pince-nez over almost colorless eyes that indicated years of study in musty church
  archives, and had no discernible sense of humor.
  "How old are you?" the vicar asked.
  ""Twenty-eight," I said.
  "A spinster," he noted.
  "I am not," I said, heartily offended.
  "Miss," he said sternly, "if you"re over eighteen and unmarried, you"re a spinster."
  The wedding took place just before we left for the States. I recited the standard
  wedding vows about "honoring," eliminating the "obeying" part, but in private I made a
  heartfelt pledge to David. "I will never lie to you," I promised. "I will never cheat on
  you. I will always be honest with you. Just don"t ask me any questions if you don"t want
  to hear the answers. And don"t leave me alone." I didn"t have any illusions about happily
  ever after, and left to my own devices, I didn"t trust myself to be faithful. My wedding
  gown was a boldly printed red and black dress that was the best thing I had in my
  suitcase. I didn"t have a mother or a father there, but I had a producer and director:
  Michael Carreras walked me down the aisle, and Anthony Page was best man. But I was
  so violently nauseated, it was all I could do to keep from tossing my cookies at the altar
  (although my queasiness about marriage might have had something to do with my
  equilibrium), and I literally ran from the magnificent poached salmon at the wedding
  lunch, held in an old vicarage owned by Anthony"s sister. For months, the food that
  stayed down was avocados and digestive biscuits. And we lied to my grandmother about
  the date of the wedding.
  There was a glorious Victorian house for sale in a historic district of downtown
  Memphis, but Bob Sanderson, the real estate agent who was a friend of my mother, kept
  intoning in a solemn voice, "Dead in bed, you"ll be dead in bed." So we chose (and I paid
  for) a modest 1928 bungalow on Court Street, half a block from the apartment where my
  mother had lived as a baby. One of the two bedrooms had a deck shaded by a beautiful
  old dogwood, but what sold me was the huge wooden swing, big as a bed, on the front
  porch. My mother never forgave Bob for letting me pay the asking price. He said
  $75,000, and I said okay. I figured if I paid the full freight, they"d have to sell it to me.
  (The owners of another house I wanted had reneged on the deal when a better offer came
  along. As Kipling said, "There is no promise of God or man that goes north of ten
  thousand bucks.") And I went to the dealership where my grandfather bought a new
  white Cadillac El Dorado every year (my family had made a religion of white
  automobiles) and got myself a silver Caddy.
  David and I attended childbirth classes given by two certified nurse-midwives:
  Peg Burke, a former nun who had served in Vietnam during the war, and Linda Wheeler,
  who had worked for Vista. Their attitude was: even though there is no such thing as a
  "normal" birth, every woman should have the freedom and dignity of being prepared.
  They gave me an extensive reading list that included Childbirth Without Fear by Grantly
  Dick-Read. Nearing the age of thirty, I had heard next to nothing about menopause until I
  read these books, some of which reduced the process to a one-liner: you dry up and you
  take hormones. (I decided I"d skip that stage.)
  I gained forty-five pounds during my first pregnancy (even though I kept missing
  my mouth whenever I ate because my swollen belly kept me at some distance from the
  table), and just to keep me company, my husband, David, gained fifty. But our mutual
  leviathan state was not a deterrent to a satisfying sex life, proving once and for all that
  size has nothing to do with eroticism. Relatively late in my third trimester, I was given
  permission to fly to London for the premiere of The Lady Vanishes, my doctor figuring
  that I"d literally be in good hands, since it was a benefit for the Royal College of
  Obstetrics and Gynecology. But none of my maternity clothes were worthy of a premiere,
  let alone a royal one. A kindly saleswoman gave me the name of a shop in Palm Beach
  that catered to very wealthy, very large women. I was sent a fire-engine red dress
  festooned with read feathers and beads. I looked like a transvestite Santa Claus. I turned
  my instructions about meeting the queen into a little mnemonic verse (wear white gloves,
  don"t chew gum, call her Ma"am, which sounds like Mum), and I should have charged
  admission to the comic routine of a gigantic me trying to curtsy while towering over the
  petite and porcelain-skinned monarch.
  Guided by the midwives, David and I had made a list of things to take to the
  hospital: nuts, raisins, cheese, lollipops, a thermos, a plastic rolling pin, and a sock with a
  tennis ball for back labor, lotion for back rubs, Chapstick, breath freshener, tape recorder,
  guitar, change for the vending machines, and a pre-washed flannel baby bonnet. As I was
  packing the bag, we had a fight. I have no idea why. I couldn"t sleep, so I got up and
  cleaned the whole house. As I was dusting the bookcase, my water broke. There were no
  contractions, so we were told to go to the hospital. Room 518 had been reconfigured into
  a birthing center. Peg, Linda, and David took turns breathing with me, rubbing my
  shoulders, feeding me ice cubes, and keeping me as comfortable as possible. David tried
  to distract me by sticking an empty diaper box on his head and playing the guitar. But
  twenty-seven hours later I was exhausted but not fully dilated. I was given the synthetic
  hormone Pitocin to stimulate contractions. It felt like being electrocuted. I couldn"t
  handle any more pain and pleaded for drugs. My epidural lasted for forty-three minutes
  and then it started to wear off.
  "I"m ready for more, please," I announced.
  "You can have more," Peg said. "It"s your decision, but if you do, you might not
  be able to push the baby out when the time comes, and if that happens we"ll need
  forceps."
  "When is this motherfucker going to be born," I growled.
  She looked at the clock, which said 6:11 P.M. "Seven o"clock," she said.
  My darling Clementine arrived at 6:59 P.M., weighing eight pounds, two ounces.
  After the hardest work of my life, I was starving, and David brought me an enormous
  stack of blueberry pancakes with double bacon on the side.
  When she was christened six weeks later at Calvary Episcopal, I wore
  Birkenstocks. My mother and grandmother complained, but I told them Jesus wore
  sandals and would have understood.
  I"d never seen anyone nursing a baby until I was pregnant myself, at my first
  meeting with the La Leche League, an international network of women dedicated to
  promoting and sharing information about breast-feeding. I called the instructor for advice
  all the time, especially when I started to travel. Some doctor in a strange city would tell
  me I couldn"t nurse if I was taking a certain antibiotic for strep throat, but the La Leche
  leader would check the most updated list of medicines and assure me that Clementine
  would suffer no ill effects. It was a wonderful way to start parenting, a bonding
  experience that my own mother had been denied because of a breast infection, although
  she was horrified that I nursed in public places.
  "I just hope you don"t embarrass the family," she said. "How long do you intend
  to do this?"
  "I think Clementine should be weaned by the time she"s in first grade," I said.
  "Sarcasm does not become you," she harrumphed. "And of course you know
  you"ll lose your bustline. You"ll probably need one of those breast deductions."
  The first appearance I made after Clementine"s birth, when she was six months,
  was an album-signing for Vanilla, and just as I was chatting up the disc jockey of a local
  radio station, I started to feel the pins and needles that signaled my milk letting down. I
  was still wearing pregnancy clothes, and the sticky fluid seeped through the synthetic red
  knit material of my pantsuit jacket, making a rapidly expanding wet circle. I grabbed an
  album and held it in front of me until I could stop the leakage by pressing my wrists
  against my nipples.
  I was still about twenty pounds overweight when I tried out for an Albert Finney
  film called Wolfen, having been told that the director wanted "a Lauren Bacall type." I
  wore high heels thinking I"d look thinner. (I had to look it up to know that the part went
  to... Diane Venora.) Instead, I got to do The Return, not quite the worst movie ever made
  but close. The plot, such as it was, concerned aliens who come to Earth and inhabit cows.
  Raymond Burr played my father, Martin Landau was a scientist, and Jan-Michael Vincent
  was my love interest--a rather sad group of actors, all of us trying to resurrect our
  diminished careers. Burr read his lines off a teleprompter. To simulate the spaceships
  coming to Earth, there was a helicopter rigged with lights that created a dust bowl as it
  hovered above us, so noisy you couldn"t even hear yourself scream. I did the scene once,
  then walked over to the prop man and asked to borrow his walkie-talkie.
  "We"re going to try this one more time, Cybill," the director said through static.
  "I don"t think so," I said. It was just too scary. (A short while later, the actor Vic
  Morrow and two young children would be killed in a helicopter accident on a movie set,
  and the director, John Landis, would face criminal charges. He was ultimately acquitted.)
  That same night I had to be tied up in Bronson Cave near Griffith Park,
  surrounded by gas torches. The prop man kept trying to light them, and the gas kept
  blowing the match out. I could hear the sound of the gas getting louder in the one next to
  me--whoooooosh, then a sudden explosion, like the gas grill years before, and I couldn"t
  get loose. Ever since then, I have had an extreme aversion to being tied up.
  The Return was eminently forgettable in every way, though I"ll always remember
  it just because I had the largest breasts and wore the tightest jeans of my career. (The
  fashion of the time dictated that jeans were supposed be so snug that you had to lie flat in
  bed and lift your hips up to close the zipper.) I was still expressing breast milk while I
  was working outside the house so that it wouldn"t dry up, so I could continue nursing
  Clementine. First I bought a breast pump at the drugstore, a fiendish device worthy of the
  Spanish Inquisition, with a lever that clamped down and sucked my nipple into an
  elongated clear plastic tube, a perfect realization of the expression "a tit in the wringer."
  The La Leche League had taught me that the best breast pump is the human hand
  anyway, so I gave up the mechanics and stood over the sink, squeezing milk out like Elsie
  the Cow. When I"d ask the teamsters for yet another roll of paper towels to mop up the
  floor of my trailer, they"d groan, "Must be milking time again." I"d long since given up
  the Los Angeles apartment, so I stayed at a motel in Santa Monica and took the baby for
  walks in Ocean Park with all the local loonies, like the guy who wore a cowboy hat and a
  black ski mask.
  It turned out that one of the most valuable experiences of life was not being able
  to get a job in television or movies. The shrunken celebrity that I hauled around was
  getting old in an industry where you are only as good as whatever you did twenty minutes
  ago, and failure begets failure just as surely as success begets success. So I went back to
  the theater. I did Vanities in St. Louis, staying in a high-rise Holiday Inn where the
  windows were sealed shut and it rained incessantly, so it seemed to be dark all the time.
  David was petulant and distracted. One night we went to Toronto, where I"d been asked
  to sing on a talk show. It was a far piece down the road for a one-night stand, but I wasn"t
  exactly in high demand. Returning through Customs, a Royal Canadian Mountie found a
  tiny reliquary pebble of hashish in David"s guitar case and made a big deal about it. I was
  strip-searched, and not gently, by a Mountie-ette, but my interrogation was conducted by
  a man.
  "How much do you make a year?" he asked.
  "None of your fucking business," I said.
  "We"ve just arrested your husband," he said menacingly," and we"re trying to
  decide whether to charge him or not."
  It was probably the wrong time to stand on a principle of constitutional rights as
  an American citizen, so I told him my income. He seemed disappointed, which, under the
  circumstances, worked in my favor. Perhaps he felt I could ill afford to miss a
  performance. "Consider this your warning," he said, and let us go.
  When I did The Seven-Year Itch at Granny"s Dinner Theater in Dallas, I was so
  nervous that I read the entire New Testament in the suite reserved for the "talent," where
  the previous tenant, Robert Morse, had left a pair of Jockey shorts under the bed.
  Opening night I imagined Jesus floating in his robes in the fifth row of the theater. But I
  didn"t know why my costar, Joey Bishop, seemed so miserable. During a performance at
  the end of our first week, he said his lines, then cursed under his breath, just loud enough
  for me to hear, "Fuck you piece-of-shit bitch." I was so shocked that I forgot my next
  line, and during the long silence I wondered what monumental atrocity I had committed.
  Later that night I asked another actress about the incident.
  "I"ve had that happen," she said knowingly. "It"s a matter of one-upmanship,
  showing you who"s boss. If it happens again, stop, turn to him, and say loud enough for
  the audience to hear, "Excuse me, what did you say?" That will shut him up."
  Joey pulled his "asshole-piece-of-shit" act on me the next night, so I followed my
  colleague"s advice and asked him, pointedly and out loud, to repeat what he"d said. He
  froze, got momentarily lost, glared at me, and continued with his scripted lines. That
  night, he went to the theater manager and said he was having trouble working with me--
  I"d become too difficult. Luckily, it was a limited run.
  David showed promise as a jazz guitarist and had played with my band when I did
  cabaret at Reno Sweeney"s. But the dynamics changed when I was booked for a week at a
  New York club called Marty"s, sandwiched between appearances by Mel Torme and Tony
  Bennett, which finally made me think that my singing was giving someone besides me
  some pleasure. I hired a new musical director who selected his own musicians, and he
  wouldn"t have taken the job if told he had to work with my amateur husband. I had a
  sense of dread when I told David he was out, and his disappointment surely added to the
  tension and resentment in our marriage. I"ve often wondered if the power imbalance in
  my marriage was a reaction to, even a reversal of, my relationship with Peter. Perhaps it
  was my turn to be in charge.
  In our newly purchased mini-motor home, David and I drove from Memphis to
  New York, swatting mosquitoes the size of mice and plying Clementine with Cutter as we
  camped out in the national parks of the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Mountains (they
  seemed to be covered with snow, but in fact they were thick with dogwood blossoms).
  The day before my opening, I was diagnosed with bronchitis. "Don"t say a word you"re
  not paid for," instructed the ear/nose/throat specialist who wrote "SILENCE" on his
  prescription pad, and I had to shut down for two nights. I was certainly craving some
  spousal support, but David went out both nights--he said he wanted to see the music
  scene in New York with my musical director, who was temporarily sidelined because of
  me. One night after I"d recovered enough to perform, one of the musicians asked, "Can I
  borrow your bathroom?" It wasn"t until Richard Pryor nearly burned himself alive that I
  realized the musician had been freebasing cocaine, which explained why his tempo was
  way too fast. I"d had half a beer (the only time in my life when I performed under the
  influence of any substance), which made me a little mellow. Rhythmically, we were on
  two different planets.
  Most photographs of family occasions from Clementine"s childhood include a
  dignified woman with burnished copper skin, silver hair pulled back in a French knot,
  and a thousand-kilowatt smile. This is Myrtle Gray Boone, who worked as a housekeeper
  for both my mother and grandmother. When Clemmie was born, I didn"t want a trained
  baby nurse. I wanted Myrtle, mother of thirteen children, grandmother to thirty-two, an
  indomitable presence in my family for as long as I could remember. (Moma said she"d be
  the best nanny in the world but railed against the generous salary I offered and warned
  that I"d "spoil" Myrtle if I paid her a penny more than a hundred dollars a week.) Myrtle
  could quote Robert Louis Stevenson and hum Bach. Had she lived at another time, she
  could have been an ambassador instead of a domestic. When I asked her to go on the road
  with me, she said no at first, then called me back the next day and said she"d changed her
  mind. "Everybody else always gets to travel," she said. "Now it"s my turn." But while we
  were in New York, we got the news that Myrtle"s mother in Memphis had died. Tears
  streaming down our faces, David and I put Myrtle in a cab bound for the airport and
  promised to follow the next day in the motor home. We were still crying when we
  returned to our room, though I didn"t know that he was crying about something else.
  I"m an expert liar, and sometimes I recognize when people are lying to me. I"d felt
  a funny twinge of doubt those two nights David was out when I was sick, and I checked
  out his story, obliquely, with my musical director, who didn"t know enough to cover for
  him. I didn"t have the heart or the stomach to confront him for several days. But now I
  did.
  His words came out in soggy clumps. "Remember that actress who did Vanities
  with you in St. Louis?" he said. "She"s in New York. And I"ve been with her."
  I"ve heard such moments described as a body blow. But hearing David"s
  confession was more like watching an egg fall and shatter in slow motion. I went to
  Clementine"s rented crib, lowered the slotted side panel and picked her up, needing to
  feel the warmth of her body. Only when I saw that her pajamas were wet did I realize I
  was still crying.
  "Are we getting divorced?" I asked.
  "I don"t know," said David, sitting on the bed with his head in his hands.
  "How can I ever trust you again?" I asked.
  "I don"t even know why I told you," he said.
  "I know why," I said. "You want me to feel as bad as you do. People don"t like it
  when they do something rotten--it makes them feel terrible. And you think this is as much
  my fault as yours."
  We slept fitfully that night, lashed to opposite sides of the bed. In the morning, we
  drove back to Memphis for the funeral, spending one night in the camper to save money.
  I lay awake, drinking beer and listening to Billie Holiday sing "Good morning, heartache,
  you old gloomy sight, Good morning heartache, Thought we"d said good-bye last
  night..." I"d never really appreciated the raw pain in her voice. Now she was singing for
  me.
  I"m told that marriages survive infidelity, but neither David nor I had the tools.
  We tried to reconcile for almost a year, but the damage had been done, and not just
  because of his affair. In the early stages of our relationship, I must have seemed like a big
  blonde trophy, followed shortly by the realization that life with me could be a drag--the
  long and odd hours on location, the lack of privacy, the subtly dismissive treatment of the
  celebrity spouse by that partner"s entourage. Everyone deferred to my needs, wants,
  schedules. I began to lose respect for David as I watched him squander this chance to
  develop his musical talent. He had the time and opportunity, but not the discipline. As
  Clementine got older, David told her that he hadn"t wanted the divorce, and I think that
  was true, that he wanted to be forgiven, which explained his initially bitter and vindictive
  behavior about division of property: he demanded half of all my earnings. (Two words
  sum up divorce: how much?) But my lawyer made a suggestion. "Get a legal pad," he
  said. "Tell David you"re not promising anything, but make a list of everything he wants."
  He backed down, managing to extract some measure of revenge years later by selling a
  story about me to the tabloid press. I paid for him to move out to California and go to
  bartending school so he could be near Clementine, and to his credit, he has never tried to
  use our daughter as a pawn or bargaining chip.
  
  IN 1980 MY AGENT DIDN"T EXACTLY HAVE ME ON speed dial,
  inundated with offers of work, so I leapt when he told me about a chance to read for
  Sidney Lumet, who was directing a film called Just Tell Me W hat You Want. I wasn"t
  making much money to support my child, so it was a big deal to pay for my own plane
  ticket to California, leaving Clementine with her father. It was my first trip to Los
  Angeles since our marriage had dissolved, and we were still navigating a contentious
  divorce. When I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was so lonely that I sent flowers to my
  room, spending even more money I didn"t have. I called someone I thought was still my
  friend: The Producer. I didn"t know how to have a friendship with a man without being
  sexual, and we ended up in my hotel bed. The next day, he disappeared, never phoning or
  returning my call. (Actually, he returned the call years later, when he heard I was writing
  a book and asked me to sing in a show he was producing for the Atlanta Olympics. "I
  know I treated you badly that time," he said, "and I wanted you to know why. I had just
  gotten involved with the woman who"s now my wife.")
  When I showed up at the Universal lot and greeted Lumet, I got the feeling he
  wasn"t expecting me. "What are you doing these days?" he asked solicitously. When I
  mentioned reading for his film, he looked somewhat stricken. "Didn"t your agent tell
  you?" he said. "The role"s been cast." It was the last time that agent had the opportunity
  to screw up on my account, although even the satisfaction of firing him didn"t make up
  for the expense of plane, hotel, and flowers. (The part went to... Ali MacGraw.)
  There are skewed friendships in Hollywood. People assume every phone call has
  a hidden agenda of exacting a favor or trawling for work, and usually they"re right. I felt
  uncomfortable contacting anyone from my old Hollywood crowd, and a call to my former
  agent Sue Mengers proved that my instinct was correct. "Honey," she said, "I can"t get
  work for the ladies I already represent. Besides, you"ve been gone so long, you might as
  well be dead."
  The near dead, it turned out, are offered the straw hat circuit. I had auditioned for
  the Broadway Production of Lunch Hour, reading for the playwright, Jean Kerr. (The part
  went to ... Gilda Radner.) A few months later, I was having lunch with a producer at
  Sardi"s. A call came through for him, and a telephone was brought to the table (in the
  dark ages before cell phones). "I"m sitting here with Cybill Shepherd," he said. Ten
  minutes later I was offered a part in the national tour of Lunch Hour.
  We toured from Colorado to Michigan to Maine-every-where but New York and
  Los Angeles, just as Orson had advised me to do. At the Cape Cod Playhouse, I was
  honored to put on my makeup in the dressing room used by Gertrude Lawrence, even if
  there was water oozing from the walls. But I absorbed much of what I know about
  comedy from the audience, which is the ultimate teacher. I learned not to work too hard at
  being funny, not to imitate myself from the night before, to try to make each performance
  as if it were the first time I"d ever done it. Somewhere between Detroit and Denver, I got
  funny. And I mastered a most important theatrical adage: always check your props.
  There"s a famous story about Stella Adler being onstage one night and reaching for a gun
  that the prop department had forgotten to put out. She pointed her forefinger and said,
  "Bang," convincing everyone in the audience that she had a gun. Lunch Hour called for
  me to eat deviled eggs, made by the prop people in each theater. In Denver the eggs were
  perfect. In Detroit they were so dry, I almost choked. In Falmouth, Massachusetts, I threw
  myself on the mercy of the stagehands.
  "Can y"all help me out?" I begged. "It"s really important to get enough moisture
  in the egg yolk or I can"t say my lines."
  "Sure thing, Miss Shepherd," they said, and at the next performance, I picked up
  the egg to see the yellow part wobbling-a liquid yolk. I remembered the old actors" rule:
  use it. If you"re miserable because you have to pee or your costar has skunk breath or the
  egg tastes terrible, use it, and I developed a repertoire of broad faces, burps, drools, and
  dribbles. Acting is about specificity. One moment is: I"m happy to have the egg in my
  mouth; the next moment is: I don"t know about this; and the next is: I"m going to hurl.
  Most of the time, the audience loved it, although there was an entire mountain range in
  the Poconos where not a single person in a sold-out theater laughed. I learned that you
  can never get too full of yourself as an actor--every night there are different ways to fail
  and to triumph.
  I became friends with one of my costars, getting together for a bite to eat or a
  glass of wine, and during our rehearsals in New York I was thrilled to be invited for tea
  one day to the home of his mother. But the thrill was brief. "You know," she said
  dismissively as she poured from a silver teapot, "you"re really not one of us."
  When the tour was over, The Costar and I drove to the Chesapeake Bay to visit
  his friends in their sprawling ranch house. Though we had become lovers, we quickly
  progressed to the imperfect phase of the relationship, what one friend calls the
  "congealed fat in the frying pan" stage. That night the four of us had Maryland crab cakes
  for dinner, and The Costar had quite a lot of vodka. We went into the guest room where
  we would be sleeping and he came on to me. I was revolted by his alcoholic reek and,
  pulling away from him, said, "Fuck you, I don"t have to fuck you." I stormed into the
  kitchen, thinking I would find the car keys and leave, when he appeared behind me.
  "Don"t even think about going anywhere," he said, "because I have the keys right here in
  my pocket." Then he ripped off the delicate gold necklace that he"d given me, saying,
  "That doesn"t mean anything anymore." Then he shoved me to the ground. I got up, ran
  down the hall, and banged on his friends" bedroom door. "I"ll take care of it," said the
  husband, grabbing a robe and trudging down the hall with a weary sense of familiarity.
  "It"s better if The Costar just drinks beer."
  I sat with the wife until The Costar got quiet and fell asleep. We got up the next
  morning and drove in strained silence to Knoxville to see my friend Jane Howard as
  planned. Finally I said, "You knocked me down."
  "You fell down," he snarled. As soon as we got to Tennessee, I told him the
  relationship was over. No man I"d had sex with had ever made me fear for my physical
  safety before, and I didn"t want it to happen again. It took me many years to feel safe
  enough to spend the night with a man again.
  I hadn"t seen Peter Bogdanovich since he threw the crystal ashtray at me, but after
  my marriage ended, he began calling me every few months, taking blame for the end of
  our relationship, telling me he finally understood that I had been serious about wanting a
  child. When Peter called over the Christmas holiday of 1980, I had just spent several
  weeks writing, longhand on legal pads, a screenplay for a book called September,
  September by Shelby Foote, a haunting story about three white racists from Mississippi
  who kidnap the only grandson of one of America"s first black millionaires. I told Peter
  that I"d like to option it but couldn"t afford it. "Let me lend you the money," he said, and
  sent me a generous check that allowed me to option the novel. Foote, whom I met at a
  Memphis wine-and-cheese party, had spent twenty years writing The Civil War: A
  Narrative and looked like a Rebel general himself. When I told him I"d love to play the
  white-trash woman in the trio of kidnappers, he said in his honeyed Mississippi drawl,
  Mah dear, you"re fahhhhhhh too young for the part."
  I had stayed in touch with Larry McMurtry ever since The Last Picture Show, and
  our bond was really secured when he visited the set of Daisy Miller (his son played my
  brother) and sat with me in the lobby of the Hotel Trois Coronnes. rubbing my feet and
  reading aloud the gruesome "Crazy Jane" love poems by Yeats. He was physically, one of
  the least attractive men imaginable, but as a friend he was everything I wanted: a
  renaissance cowboy, an earthy intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner who could take
  pleasure in a dive that served two-dollar tacos. He became my touchstone in life, and for
  a brief time our collaboration became sexual.
  Our friendship never faltered because we became sexual or because we stopped.
  Larry always managed to come see me, in Los Angeles or Memphis or just about
  anywhere else I was working. He was always flying off to a remote corner of the
  maritime Alps or driving through the Ozarks in a U-Haul truck, buying up private
  libraries for his bookstores in Washington, D.C., and in Texas. I didn"t even have to give
  Myrtle a menu-I"d just say, "Larry will be here about four o"clock," and she"d say, "I"ll
  get the catfish." He felt he had to spend all his money to keep his creative edge, and he
  never entered my house without gifts, not just for me but for Clementine and Myrtle.
  (Myrtle is in the dedication of his novel The Evening Star, the follow-up to Terms of
  Endearment.) In between visits he kept up a steady correspondence-long, literate, ardent
  letters usually typed (with mistakes xxxxxxxx"ed out) on the same kind of cheap yellow
  paper he used for his books and scripts:
  Interestingly enough, since I"m a somewhat analytical man and have analyzed
  plenty of relationships, I feel no impulse to analyze us. I trust my affinities and I like the
  quality of our companionship very much, without needing to examine the components...
  You have brought joy and fragrance to my life. Your human fragrance is as
  complex as your new perfume: partly dry, light, of the brain; partly wet, deep, of the
  heart and loins...
  Of course, when you love someone very much, you have a natural fear that they
  will stop loving you. It"s part of what makes the whole business of need-desire-
  attachment-freedom-dependence so complicated. Love is so easily bruised and ruined, or,
  even more often, simply worn out and lost in the repetitiousness of life. I often have these
  fears where you are concerned, and yet mostly I have a deep trust in us...
  You"re a very wonderful woman; you"ll compel the love of many men. As long as
  you can learn to roughly distinguish those who mean you well from those who mean you
  ill, that"s as it should be--there would be something wrong in nature if men didn"t love
  and want you. Only learn not to get yourself hurt. I know you have learned now that
  actions speak louder than words. What men do is important, not what they say.
  Larry called me "the lost zygote of my family and was always encouraging me to
  expand my horizons. In 1981 it was his idea that I apply for entrance to the women
  directors" program of the American Film Institute, and as part of my application for
  admission, I submitted my script for September, September. Partly to assuage my
  disappointment when AFI rejected me, Larry agreed to work with me on the script, and
  on the strength of his name, we were given a developmental deal at Carson Productions,
  which operated under the auspices of Columbia Pictures. After working on it for almost a
  year, we were granted a meeting with Columbia chief Craig Baumgarten. The moment
  we entered his office, he said, "This is a hateful story that no one would want to see, and
  we wouldn"t dream of making it." We did get the go-ahead from Turner Broadcasting,
  although not with the director Stanley Kubrick, as Shelby Foote had hoped. (He declined
  with a nice handwritten note that ended, "Please say hello to the General.") When I
  finally went with Larry to see Shelby Foote in 1991, ten years after our first meeting, he
  opened the door to his house, looked at me, and said, "You"re old enough now."
  
  Chapter Eight
  "THE CYBILL SANDWICH"
  
  IN 1980 I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK, FINALLY READY TO TAKE acting
  classes with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio. I got a call from a Los Angeles casting
  director named Robin Lippen, offering me a guest appearance on the TV show Fantasy
  Island. To say that I was underwhelmed doesn"t begin to describe my qualms about this
  nadir of my career. I wasn"t even the lead guest star, and I didn"t get to arrive on the
  island as Tattoo shouted "The plane! The plane!" to Mr. Roarke.
  "Oh, Cybill, you should not be represented at a big agency," Robin said. "They"ll
  want to cast Goldie Hawn or Sally Field-clients who are going to make more money. If
  you do this role, you"ll get five thousand dollars and a plane ticket, and while you"re out
  here, I will set up meetings for you with the top independent agents, who will turn your
  career around."
  It was a great piece of advice, and with little to lose I accepted her offer. I checked
  into the Sheraton Universal, which I referred to as the Universal Sheraton because it
  sounded more important, and eventually met with an elfin and enthusiastic agent named
  David Shapira. The first job he got me was for a TV pilot called Masquerade produced
  by Aaron Spelling and distinguished by more takeoffs and landings of jets than any other
  pilot in the history of television.
  My second job was starring in the series The Yellow Rose. I was to play the
  widowed owner of a large Texas ranch, and Sam Elliott was the illegitimate son of my
  much older dead husband. I was called back to read four times, the last time to see if Sam
  and I had the right chemistry. When I walked into the production office, sitting on the
  couch, and waiting to read for the same part was Priscilla Presley. Hard to imagine a
  worse sign: There was, first of all, my history with Elvis, and I had no idea if she knew
  about it. It was like a marquee had been set up, flashing: "One of you will not get the
  part." Both of us were uncomfortable, but we smiled and exchanged pleasantries.
  Shapira called with good news/bad news. "You got the part," he said, "but you"ve
  been fucked." Sometime before, I"d gone up for another NBC pilot about race car drivers.
  I didn"t get the part, but my agent at the time had agreed to a fee of $1,000 an episode.
  Even though other actors on Yellow Rose were demanding and getting much more, the
  network knew what it could get me for.
  The bargain-basement salary was maddening, but it was enough to put a down
  payment on a town house in Studio Village, with what I referred to as a view overlooking
  the Los Angeles River, which was nothing more than a giant concrete chute created by
  the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Most of the time there was just a trickle so
  insignificant that kids would skateboard through, but a heavy rain could create a giant
  flow of rushing water. Beyond was a lovely field of wildflowers, my own Tuscan
  landscape, dotted by the soundstages of what was called the Mary Tyler Moore studio. I
  spent many afternoons looking longingly across the L.A. River wondering if I"d ever get
  a chance to work there. The loveliness of the setting paled when I learned that the
  condominium complex had been the site of two grisly murders by bludgeoning, including
  the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, whose friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan
  had been the stuff of tabloid headlines, sometimes alongside headlines about me.
  Sam Elliott and I were asked to come to New York to take part in the network"s
  announcement of new fall programming. But when we went to meet the producers for
  lunch at the "21" Club, I was refused admittance because I was wearing running shoes, a
  New Balance model that cost $150. I went down the street and paid $11 for black rubber
  flats, then made a grand show of sitting in the restaurant"s reception area to change,
  daintily doing a striptease with my socks. No sneakers allowed? Watch me.
  Exteriors for the series were shot in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles--
  wide open country meant to approximate Texas, with a panorama ranging from snow-
  capped mountains to the Mojave Desert. Sam seemed to grow even more despondent as
  the show sank into soap opera territory, a conspicuous imitation of the runaway hit
  Dallas, involving the kind of weekly intrigue, deception, and lust that couldn"t possibly
  take up the time of real ranchers or else we"d all be vegetarians. (Larry McMurty wrote to
  me, "There were not a few steals from Hud, I observed. The cook and the boy seem a
  little Patricia Neal and Brandon de Wilde-ish.") Sam had signed on to do a TV series that
  was a western, while I had signed on to do a TV series that was a job. I had few
  complaints: it was the first long-term work I"d ever had, and I was getting paid to ride a
  horse. I talked to the show wranglers and got involved in choosing my own championship
  roper named Red that I could guide with my knees.
  Two weekends a month, the wranglers went out to practice their roping technique
  at Castaic Lake Arena and invited me to come along. Quarter horses are the fastest
  horseflesh on the planet for one quarter of a mile--they can outrun any thoroughbred at
  Santa Anita for that distance--and I could feel their power like g- force in my chest. The
  horse is backed up into a box with no door, a bell rings, and the horse and steer are
  released at the same time into the rodeo ring. The horse"s job is to line up the rider so he
  or she can swing and throw the rope, jerk the slack, and tighten the noose around the
  steer"s horns or neck. When you tie off the rope on the saddle horn, the horse stops, and
  the steer gets yanked to the ground. The most important rule, I was told, is: keep your
  thumb up when you"re tying off. Anyone who tried to teach me to rope had fingers
  missing, having gotten them tangled in the rope when the horse stopped but the steer kept
  moving.
  A dedicated actor wants to do as much of the stunt, safely, as possible to "sell" it
  to the audience, making it believable and giving the director the ability to edit in the
  expert. A movie set is really a construction site, an inherently dangerous place, with
  jagged pieces of wood and nails everywhere and huge sources of illumination called
  "nine-lights" tottering on skinny retractable rods. One day I was inside a corral, having
  done my side of the scene on horseback, but the director asked me to mount my horse to
  do the other side of the scene for the other actors (a professional courtesy called "off
  camera"). Horses can "shy" or panic because of the ways their eyes are placed, with a
  blind spot in the middle, so objects can appear to jump. I love them, but they have a brain
  the size of an orange in a two-thousand-pound body.
  I"ll never know what frightened Red, but he backed up and caught an electrical
  cord from a nine-light between his right rear shoe and hoof. It fell forward, bouncing and
  sparking, and he took off, dragging it around the ring. "There was no dismounting, and no
  one could approach--the camera crew went running for their lives when faced with a
  runaway horse.
  I used a technique learned in my horse-crazed childhood called "pulley rein,"
  gradually slowing the animal down to increasingly smaller circles, until R. L. Tolbert, the
  stunt coordinator, could get close enough to gently take the reins and let me dismount.
  That was the last time I was ever "off camera" on the back of a horse. From then on, it
  was a ladder for me.
  R. L. was a former rodeo champ with thick silver hair that formed a widow"s
  peak. He was a wonderful reference source about cowboys. He made gentle fun of the hat
  I wore for the show, which did not meet his standards. A proper cowboy"s hat has
  profound, immutable requirements, and much of the unwritten code is about brims. When
  you put the hat on a table, you lay it crown down so the brim isn"t misaligned. Your hat
  must never blow off (this constitutes a huge loss of face among peers). When you remove
  it, there had better be a deep red impression in your forehead, and hat hair is a badge of
  pride. I was apparently walking around with a scandalously loose, battered-brim hat, and
  he helped me pick out a proper one.
  One weekend he invited me to the rodeo at Santa Barbara. On a shining Saturday
  afternoon, we drove up the Pacific coast in his big white pickup truck (it was the first
  time I ever saw a date spit tobacco into a cup). When I see water, I want to swim, and I
  don"t go anywhere without a bathing suit in my bag. R.L. didn"t have one. "But I know a
  beach," he said, "where we don"t need them." I learned where the term redneck comes
  from: R.L. had a burnished tan on his neck and hands, but the rest of his body was fish-
  belly white. At the rodeo we bought big cups of 7-UP, drank them halfway down, and
  then filled them back up with Jack Daniel"s. When I started getting sleepy, he instructed,
  "You have to keep drinking so your blood alcohol doesn"t go down." By the time we
  arrived at a crummy little beach motel, I was ready to test out R. L."s private stunt work.
  Ever restless, I soon moved on to another stuntman. It was his idea that I learn
  Formula Ford racecar driving--I think he liked the idea of Miss Teenage Memphis
  chewing up the track with the big boys. I took a three-day course at Riverside to qualify
  for the Toyota Grand Prix, then remembered that I was the mother of a small child, so I
  never actually competed. But the training served one good purpose: I never again needed
  to drive fast for the thrill of it.
  The Stuntman was an energetic, imaginative lover. And in my sexual odyssey, this
  was the experience that confirmed something enlightened women know but men never
  quite believe: size doesn"t matter. There are all kinds of places inside a woman that a man
  can move a small penis, and he knew how to find them. One night, in a playful mood, we
  were talking about sexual fantasies, and I admitted that I"d imagined being with two men.
  "I"d like to make that one come true for you," he said with a twinkle.
  "Don"t be crazy" I countered. "Do you have any idea how much the National
  Enquirer would pay for that story?"
  But he had a proposal: his close friend, another stuntman of guaranteed discretion.
  "If you ever meet again," he promised, "there will see no indication that it ever
  happened." I was intrigued, excited, and quite scared. An hour before the friend was to
  arrive, I said I couldn"t go through with it. The Stuntman said, "You don"t want to back
  out now. Have a little snort of coke."
  There"s a real argument to be made that if you need controlled substances to make
  something acceptable, maybe you shouldn"t be doing it. In the 1970s there was a sense of
  self-righteousness about drug taking, a supposition that it would be enlightening, that
  artists needed to expand their minds. In the "me decade" of the 1980s, everyone I knew
  was still getting high with some regularity. At parties there were sugar bowls full of
  cocaine (not yet considered addictive), and nonparticipants were regarded as weird. I was
  hardly a doper--on the contrary, I"d always been the safety monitor in my crowd, the one
  who insisted on buckling up seat belts and warned about the perils of cigarettes.
  "The Cybill sandwich" turned out to be a positive sexual experience. Having all
  the pleasure points being attended to simultaneously rather than sequentially made me
  feel adored, emancipated, and more relaxed about sex. Years later, an episode of
  Moonlighting called for a chain saw fight, and the fellow hired to train me turned out to
  be the ménage partner. True to his word, he was circumspect and discreet. "Cybill," he
  said warmly, extending his hand, "I haven"t seen you in a few years." He didn"t even
  linger over the word seen.
  The Stuntman started acting overly involved in my career, presenting me with too
  many ideas for merchandising tie-ins with The Yellow Rose, like my name on a map of
  Texas that he wanted to sell. He had the same obsession with ladylike hands as my
  grandfather, even to the point of offering to polish my nails. (This turned out to be
  surprisingly erotic. He brought three color choices, and it took hours.) One night while he
  was out, I was waiting at his house, talking on the phone to my gynecologist. We were
  admitting that we were attracted to each other when he was married and I was with Peter,
  and I told him I"d been close to having an orgasm when he put in my IUD. (I know, I
  know.) The next day, The Stuntman accused me of being depraved. "That"s revolting," he
  said angrily, "to get off with your gynecologist." There was no way. he could have known
  that secret, and I discovered that he was recording every phone call made to or from his
  house. I think his paranoia had more to do with his drug connections than with spying on
  me, but it was an alarm that signaled the beginning of the end of that relationship.
  Perfect opening (you should pardon the expression) for The Gynecologist. He was
  an attractive, man, and any sense of impropriety did not override my life motto: Why not?
  He lived in a contemporary palace high in the canyons with a collection of modern art
  and a teenage son who hated me on sight, baring his teeth like a cat when he spoke to me.
  One night the doctor and I were eating steaks he had grilled on the barbecue. Suddenly
  his face went pale, his shoulders went up, and he wasn"t making any noise. Running into
  the boy"s room, I yelled, "Come quickly, I think your father"s choking!"
  He looked up without even feigned interest and said, "Give me a fucking break."
  "Listen, you little worm," I screamed, "you may hate me, but unless you want to
  inherit the Hockneys tonight, get your ass in here and help me do Heimlich!" The doctor
  survived, but the affair didn"t.
  My hairdresser on The Yellow Rose was a lively woman who raised turkeys on her
  farm-"all natural," she told me, "none of those chemicals and hormones and poisons
  and shit-and she offered me one for Thanksgiving. On our last day of shooting before
  the holiday, she told me, "I brought you a beautiful bird. It"s out in my truck." Peeking
  over the back door, I saw what appeared to be a small hatbox. That couldn"t be it, I
  thought. Then I heard the squawk. It was alive but packed so it couldn"t move, like
  something out of Boxing Helena. Undaunted, I called around to various restaurants,
  asking euphemistically, "Where can I have this taken care of?" and finally, someone
  suggested Chinatown.
  My friend Jane Howard was visiting for the holiday, and walked around the
  crowded streets looking for a shop with dead poultry hanging in the windows. We hadn"t
  heard another peep out of that turkey--I think it had conceded its fate. An accommodating
  butcher took the box from my hands with little fanfare and five minutes later, handed me
  a parcel wrapped in brown paper, no longer moving. The turkey was cooked by my
  housekeeper, who brought it to the table, according to her family tradition, with its two
  claws crossed upright. And it was tough as shoe leather. Give me a Butterball shot full of
  chemicals any day.
  It was extraordinary for me to be working on a studio lot like the ones where the
  movies I"d watched with Peter were shot, and the day I found out for sure that Yellow
  Rose would not be picked up for another season, I went over to the Warner Bros. Burbank
  studios and walked around the set sobbing. Movie camp was over, and I thought I"d never
  work again--not an irrational thought considering the sobering statistic that something
  like 90 percent of the Screen Actors Guild members are unemployed.
  When you bump into people you haven"t seen for a while in Hollywood, they
  seldom ask the mechanical "How are you?" They ask, and they really want to know,
  "What are you doing now?" I had no answer.
  
  Chapter Nine
  "TV"S SEXIEST SPITFIRE"
  
  GLENN GORDON CARON SAYS THAT HALFWAY THOUGH THE pilot
  of Moonlighting he realized he was writing the character Maddie Hayes as Cybill
  Shepherd. He asked if there was any way he could get a meeting with me. When my
  agent sent me those fifty pages, I immediately recognized the part I"d been hankering to
  do for a long time. For years I"d studied the screwball comedies directed by Howard
  Hawks, especially Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and His Girl
  Friday (1940). These films glorified Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind
  Russell-they talked fast and acted sexy, smart, and funny .
  Glenn was only thirty but no wunderkind. He"d done a couple of failed pilots, and
  his main credit was for Remington Steele. I was invited to meet him and his colleague Jay
  Daniel at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Glenn was boyish, charming, portly,
  clearly excited by the presence of Maddie Hayes incarnate and not afraid to show it--he
  later said that his negotiating strength had been hampered when his chin hit the table and
  his tongue hit the floor. He remarked that he"d seen me in a movie wearing "that dress"
  (the bias-cut satin from The Lady Vanishes). The first thing I said to Glenn after hello was
  "I know what this is--it"s a Hawksian comedy." He had no idea what I was talking about,
  so I suggested we screen my three favorites to see how overlapping dialogue was handled
  by the "masters," and he agreed. We talked about the way the Moonlighting script played
  with my image as a spoiled bitch, although Glenn claimed to have been largely unaware
  of my reputation as the most clobbered actress in Hollywood." There wasn"t an actor in
  the world who hadn"t been in an ill-suited movie, he said. I"d just had more than my
  share.
  City of Angels is run, none too efficiently, by a character named David Addison,
  whose creed is "Live fast, die young, leave clean underwear," and who convinces Maddie
  to become his partner, renaming the agency Blue Moon after the shampoo for which she
  was a well-known spokeswoman in her modeling days. Addison is described as an
  emotional adolescent, cocky and sexually aggressive, whose humor and puerile charm
  ameliorate his obnoxious behavior and language. Apparently there were three thousand
  men who saw themselves with those attributes because that"s how many actors answered
  the casting call. Chemistry between actors is either there or it isn"t. I"m not sure you can
  act chemistry on-screen any more than you can in real life when your well-intentioned
  cousin sets you up on a blind date with a troglodyte. I thought it was imperative that the
  chemistry between Maddie and David be genuine, since the show was driven by snappy,
  overlapping banter and palpable sexual tension. I had casting approval, and when the pile
  of resumes from David-wannabes was winnowed down to a lean half-dozen, I went to
  meet them.
  ABC"s offices were located in a tall glass tower in Century City, and the casting
  sessions took place in a long conference room with a wall of shuttered windows. Several
  candidates came and went, but nothing especially magical was happening. By mid-
  afternoon, I was weary, picking at bits of tuna arid lettuce from the salads that had been
  brought in for lunch, when Bruce Willis entered the room.
  He was, I would later learn, five years younger than I, wearing an army fatigue
  jacket, several earrings, and what looked to be the compensatory three-day beard of a
  man with a receding hairline, the rest of his hair punkishly cut and moussed. There was a
  careless, desultory way he walked around the perimeter of the big table, keeping his
  distance from me and sauntering over to Glenn and Jay. His eyes were crinkled and his
  lips pressed into a mocking smile, a composite that was to become the signature David
  Addison smirk.
  Bruce had been earning a living as a bartender in New York, sharing a walk-up in
  Hell"s Kitchen with large rats while playing mostly uncredited bit parts, like "courtroom
  observer" in Paul Newman"s legal drama The Verdict or "diner customer" in a Frank
  Sinatra movie, The First Deadly Sin, and he had just been turned down for a role in
  Desperately Seeking Susan that went to Aidan Quinn. Unlike the other actors who"d
  auditioned, he didn"t especially flatter me; in fact, he actually avoided eye contact,
  directing most of his vaguely smart-ass male-bonding comments to Glenn, like "Just got
  off my shift at the bar." But there was definite chemistry between us, and it escaped no
  one--the temperature in the room jumped about twenty degrees. After he"d left, I leaned
  over and murmured, as much to myself as to Glenn, "He"s the one."
  "Are you sure?" he responded. Glenn knew it would require Herculean effort to
  convince the ABC brass that this quirky, attitudinous guy with negligible professional
  experience and rather unconventional looks was perfectly cast for a prime-time hit on
  their network, which was then third place in the ratings. The suits saw him playing
  "heavies," declared he was "not leading man material" and asked me to read with better-
  known actors. The part was actually offered to a clean-cut actor named Robert Hayes,
  who turned it down in favor of I don"t know what. The only way Bruce Willis would be
  considered was if I agreed to do a screen test with him. With the camera rolling just as we
  were about to do the scene, he looked at me with perfect satisfaction and said, "I can"t
  concentrate. You"re too beautiful." The suits were convinced.
  The week before we shot the pilot, Glenn, Bruce, and I watched His Girl Friday
  and Bringing Up Baby, as I had suggested. They were the gold standard for the
  overlapping dialogue we were going to use in Moonlighting. When we showed up on
  Stage 20 at 20th Century-Fox for the first time, it felt as if both of us were playing roles
  that were custom-fit by a meticulous tailor. The first time my face is seen is in a montage
  of photographs on the wall: real Vogue and Glamor magazines, Cover Girl and Clairol
  ads from my modeling days. Maddie Hayes would be the ultimate bitch goddess who gets
  her comeuppance, with a nemesis who engenders conflicting feelings of outrage and
  attraction. The character of David Addison was bearable, even likable, precisely because
  he just loved being a jerk, as, I was to discover, did Bruce Willis.
  In the pilot"s climactic scene, we were being chased by a diamond thief onto the
  roof of the historic Eastern building in downtown Los Angeles, where I was suspended
  from the minute hand of a clock face twenty-five feet above the fourteenth floor. I"m a
  gung-ho girl, and I declared that I wanted to do enough of the stunt so the audience
  believed it was really me. Half a dozen crew members were lined up single file on the
  narrow plywood platform of a steel scaffold that was swaying in the Santa Ana winds.
  The hairdresser was terrified of heights and had declared in the lobby, "I"m going to have
  to do your hair down here," but my makeup man, Norman Leavitt, gamely came up to the
  roof, passing powder puffs and lip stick stuck into a Kleenex box out to me from his
  precarious perch. The director of photography, Michael Margulies, was communicating
  via miked headphones to the four camera crews. Suddenly I panicked, and grabbing two
  handfuls of Michael"s brown leather jacket from behind, I screamed, "I can"t do this! I
  can"t do this!" But he couldn"t hear me. When he felt the tug, he turned around and said,
  "Did you say something?"
  "No, I"m okay." And, having momentarily vented, I was.
  For two weeks of shooting, Bruce was upbeat, lighthearted, fun. But it wasn"t
  long before his mood darkened, particularly during visits from his girlfriend, the former
  wife of Geraldo Rivera, who sat in the wings with her arms crossed, looking as if she had
  smelled something bad. ("She disapproves of me doing television," he confided one day.)
  Her visits became less frequent, eventually ending altogether, but he remained cranky and
  aloof. Almost automatically, we had off-camera spats just before our scripted ones, but
  they seemed like a harmless way of working up to the emotion of the scene. It did not
  escape me that the growing attraction between Maddie and David mirrored what was
  developing between the actors who portrayed them. After one particularly heated
  rehearsal, I walked off the set with him and said, "Are we going to do something about
  this or what?"
  He looked startled but not unpleasantly so, and then squinted his familiar half
  smile. "Why don"t I come over to your place tonight?" he said.
  There was a bottle of Gentleman Jim in his hand when he knocked on the door of
  my apartment, and it wasn"t long before we were passionately sucking face. "Maybe we
  shouldn"t do this," I said, feeling ambivalent and aware of the potential complications.
  "We might be working together a long time." But we were quickly too far gone in a lusty,
  missionary embrace, leaning halfway back on a La-Z-Boy lounger that tilted almost to
  the point of toppling over.
  Suddenly he stopped, arched his back, and looked at me with lines creasing his
  forehead. "Maybe you"re right," he said, grabbing the wide arm of the chair for support
  as he pushed off and stood up. Rearranging himself as well as his remaining clothes, he
  announced, "I think I"ll go to the bathroom." When he returned, he picked his jacket up
  from the floor where it had landed, mumbled something about getting a good night"s
  sleep, and was gone. Maybe Bruce liked the chase better than the catch. Maybe he
  preferred the character to the real woman. We never did finish what we started in private,
  but anytime we had a kissing scene, he stuck a big camel tongue halfway down my
  throat.
  For the pilot of Moonlighting, my hair was sleek and unteased. Before every
  scene, I"d bend forward and brush it out, but Glenn and Jay said that took too long, so for
  some of the later episodes, my hair was teased and sprayed into an effusive helmet that
  looked like a wig. Unsolicited, Bruce commented that my hair was "dippy," which I
  assumed to be a derisive colloquialism from his New Jersey boyhood. No one had taken
  such an interest in my hair since my mother obsessed about my darkening blonde tresses.
  Certainly L"Oreal thought enough of me for all those commercials in which I purred,
  "I"m worth it." And Bruce was on thin ice: his own bare scalp was filled in with greasy
  dark cosmetic pencils for the camera. After one too many sarcastic remarks, I snapped,
  "At least I have some hair." Turns out he did too, just not on his head. Bruce liked to
  moon the crew, and I got so tired of seeing his hairy ass that I finally said, "Could you
  give me some warning so I don"t have to look at it every time?"
  I averted my eyes from the lively procession of young women in and out of
  Bruce"s motor home, until he met Demi Moore and settled into some version of
  monogamy. (I can attest to the fact that she taught him how to kiss.) But I was hardly in a
  position to judge anyone else"s personal life. A cousin was getting married in Memphis,
  and I had no prospects of an interesting escort for the wedding. (If the tabloids had only
  known the headline they were missing: FORMER BEAUTY QUEEN DATELESS.) I
  asked a friend to set me up with a warm male body, and her suggestion turned out to be a
  broad-shouldered, six-foot-four cycling champ who"d missed qualifying for the Olympics
  by a millisecond. He picked me up wearing Clark Kent glasses and a tailored tuxedo
  jacket over a tartan kilt, complete with sporran, the furry-pouch that substitutes for a
  pants pocket. (What are men supposed to be carrying around in there anyway?) He had
  impeccable manners, spoke with ease about a variety of subjects from sports to feminism,
  and it wasn"t long before I discovered that real Scotsmen don"t wear anything under their
  kilts. But I was thirty-five and he was eighteen.
  If the ages had been reversed, our romance wouldn"t have caused so much as a
  ripple of censure. As it was, we were a perfect sexual match. We ignored public opinion
  and defied our families by continuing to see each other for the duration of my stay and on
  subsequent visits. When he picked me up at my mother"s house for a bike ride wearing
  the kind of cyclist shorts that hug the thighs and leave little to the imagination, Mother
  took me aside and chided, "Cybill, he"s nasty in those pants." After a few months of long-
  distance romance, he left his job in the family business and followed me to Los Angeles.
  He rented his own apartment, but I couldn"t prevent Clementine from developing a five-
  year-old"s crush on him, getting into my makeup and doing a pretty good imitation of a
  mini-femme fatale when she knew he was coming over. His affluent father stepped up the
  campaign to separate us by implying that I was a gold digger, even offering to retire if his
  son came back to run the company, and finally issued an ultimatum: the business or the
  blonde. It was up to me to decide my young lover said, and I couldn"t ask him to stay. I
  didn"t want to get into another situation where I was supporting a man, I had no interest
  in marriage, I couldn"t even promise fidelity. I suppose I was really waiting for some
  grand gesture from him, something along the lines of "I don"t care what my family says,
  you"re the only woman in the world for me." Asking me what to do was tantamount to
  telling me he wasn"t ready to commit. I relinquished any hold.
  I left home at 5 A.M. each day. Moonlighting scripts were close to a hundred
  pages, half again as long as the average one-hour television series. Almost from the
  moment the cameras started rolling, we were behind schedule, sometimes completing as
  few as sixteen episodes per season and never achieving the standard twenty-two. It
  became customary to make up time with a "tow shot": loading a car onto a trailer and
  pulling it. Since we were just sitting in the car, there was no need to rehearse or "block"
  our places during the scene. We literally cut up the pages of script and taped the scraps to
  the dashboard--no time to memorize. The only respite was when the writers gave long
  speeches of "exposition" to guest stars, but Bruce and I were so exhausted that while we
  listened we often looked as if we were sleeping with our eyes open. Some of our highly
  touted innovations--like "breaking the fourth wall" and speaking directly to the camera in
  a prologue or a postscript--were born of necessity, to fill time, since we spoke the
  dialogue so quickly.
  At $1.5 million per episode, Moonlighting was reportedly the most expensive
  show on television at the time. But it was one of the first in-house productions at a
  network, one of the rare hits for ABC (still in third place), and nobody was going to tell
  Glenn Caron how to run his show. His reputation, an image that he enjoyed and
  cultivated, was that he thrived on deadlines. In a Time magazine article that called the
  show "ABC"s classiest hit and biggest headache," he blustered, "It sounds pompous, but
  maybe it"s irresponsible to bring a television show in on time and on budget every week
  and have it be on nothing." (There was a private joke in an episode that featured a tabloid
  parody called The National Pit with a headline claiming: "Dr. Caron Discovers Antidote
  for Stress.") He often went to the studio before dawn to write a new scene, handing us
  pages of dialogue when we showed up later that morning. The writing was inspired and
  edgy, and I"ll take last-minute changes that good any day. But the routine was grueling.
  We"d start on Monday at 7 A.M. and work until 9 P.M. Union rules stipulated the length
  of time actors need to break before reporting back to work, and we had to be paid an
  extra $1,000 if we didn"t get a twelve-hour turnaround--it"s called a "forced call." To
  avoid that expensive penalty to the producers, we"d start on Tuesday at 9 A.M. and go
  until 11 P.M. Then on Wednesday we"d start at 11 A.M. and go until 1 or 2 in the
  morning. And I"m not a night person. Plus there was a different director every week
  because the previous week"s director was in the editing room. It took me ten long years to
  make my comeback and only one to feel trapped by my success.
  As soon as I found out we were to do a mammoth food fight, I went directly to
  Glenn"s office and asked him if Bruce and I could get hit in the face with pies. Glenn
  laughed and told me that if I wanted to be hit in the face with a pie I would have to ask
  Bruce myself, which I did. Bruce chuckled for a minute and then asked, "Who"s going to
  throw the pie?" I suggested someone neutral like our stunt coordinator, Chris Howel, and
  Bruce agreed. He and I clocked in a twenty-two-hour day for that food fight with the
  reward at the end being a refreshing pie in the face, accurately heaved by Chris. It was
  one of the finest moments for all involved.
  
  BURNOUT IS A GIVEN IN SERIES TELEVISION, BUT IT doesn"t come
  with a warning label, and my experience is that it doesn"t bring out the best in people. I"d
  recover a little less each weekend until finally I never recovered, feeling the kind of
  fatigue that depletes every resource, including civility. Once when we were filming at the
  Ambassador Hotel, a woman in the lobby approached me for an autograph at just the
  wrong moment and I snapped. "Leave me alone," I said dismissively, and when she
  looked rightfully aghast, I countered, "I have a right to be a bitch." I really lost it at the
  end of one fourteen-hour day when I was called down to a basement on the old 20th
  Century-Fox lot for looping: redoing dialogue that hasn"t been recorded clearly or doesn"t
  have the right inflection of voice. The sound engineer was late, and I finally said, "Get
  another sound man." Then for an hour the bucktoothed associate producer gave me line
  readings on how to improve my performance ("Do it faster, now do it slower, really be
  angry, now a little less angry"). It was a manipulative power trip to make me jump
  through hoops. I was furious, and thrashing my arms in lieu of tearing out my hair, my
  hand came smashing down on the script stand, sending it crumpling to the floor.
  I was almost sleepwalking. Once you reach that level of fatigue, it doesn"t matter
  how much money you"re making. The whole crew is affected, but they don"t have
  expectations of physical perfection imposed on them as the on-camera people do, and it"s
  worse for women. The face that stares back from the mirror at 5 A.M. under that kind of
  strain is not a pretty sight. I developed the clenched look of a soldier with post-traumatic
  stress disorder. But I was held to a much more stringent standard of beauty than Bruce,
  with two or three hours in hair and makeup every day compared to his fifteen minutes. I
  was blamed if I looked exhausted, whereas squinty eyes and a two-day stubble only
  added to David Addison"s rakish allure. I insisted on wearing outfits with cinched waists:
  I have an old-fashioned hourglass figure, with broad shoulders and a big butt, and if my
  waist isn"t accentuated, I tend to look like a Green Bay Packer. Our characters often wore
  sunglasses to look cool--a special design with flat rather than curved lenses that didn"t
  reflect the set lights--that had the added benefit of covering dark circles. Gerald
  Finnerman, the director of photograph., very kindly had a special sliding filter made for
  the lens of the camera, so when it panned from Bruce to me, the heavier diffusion was
  slid into place to make me look "prettier."
  Angela Lansbury, my esteemed colleague from The Lady Vanishes, was starring
  in Murder, She Wrote, and I asked her to dinner, seeking wise counsel from someone with
  a similar daily grind. "There"s no way to survive an hour television format unless there
  are some ground rules," she said. "I come in at six A.M. and I leave at six P.M. Period.
  And I never start the season with fewer than eight scripts." But when I went to Glenn
  with this supplication, he just laughed.
  "You might as well forget that," he said, "because it"ll never happen."
  At the beginning of our second season, Orson Welles agreed to introduce an
  episode called ""The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice"--an astonishing favor to me,
  rarer than a returned phone call in Hollywood. Standing on a set rigged to look like his
  office, he cautioned viewers not to be alarmed (an homage to his 1938 Mercury Theater
  broadcast of The War of the Worlds when, as a Halloween prank, he described a Martian
  invasion so vividly that thousands of listeners panicked). Approximately twelve minutes
  later, he explained, the picture would change from color to black and white. I was
  working at another location the day the scene was shot, and I kept thinking: I have to go
  see Orson, but I waited too long, eerily like Marlene Dietrich"s character in Orson"s
  classic film Touch of Evil: Marlene runs after Orson to say good-bye but arrives too late
  and finds him floating face up, dead in the water. Two weeks after he did his
  Moonlighting bit, Orson died in his own office, slumped over a typewriter, and was
  buried in a Spanish bullfighters" graveyard. The episode, which was dedicated to him,
  unfolded from conflicting points of view like Rashomon (also reflecting what was
  happening on the set), switching between bad-David-good-Maddie and good-David-bad-
  Maddie, giving Bruce vintage ribald innuendo ("We would see more of each other, then
  all of each other") and me variations on Mae West"s signature "When I"m good, I"m
  good, but when I"m bad, I"m better."
  After a long professional drought, I reveled in the reviews and ratings for
  Moonlighting, lapping up my new designation as "TV"s sexiest spitfire" in an "ouch-
  she"s-hot comeback." (Perhaps most satisfying was Peter"s report of a call from Cary
  Grant saying, "You were right about her all along.") But our first year on the air, the
  Emmy nominating committee lumped the show into the comedy category with sitcoms,
  which are, by definition, joke-driven. The competition was Family Ties, Cheers, Kate &
  Allie, Night Court, and The Cosby Show (which won). Moonlighting didn"t get any
  nominations until 1986, when we were reclassified as a drama, "leading the pack" with
  sixteen nominations. It was a huge disappointment that we only won one--for editing.
  You can get pushed over the edge of exhaustion on a crappy job too, but when the
  material is good and the people are passionate about it, everyone tends to be in even more
  denial, making excuses for their bad behavior. You tell yourself: This is so clever, so
  classy, so valuable, that it"s worth the sacrifice, and meanwhile a little voice inside your
  head is screaming for sleep, sanity, salvation. In scientific studies, too many rats in a
  cage will attack and eat one another alive, even if they have enough food. It"s an apt
  metaphor for the Moonlighting set, and we were all under pressure. Bruce Willis had
  never experienced anything close to this kind of success, and his reaction to it
  exacerbated the situation. The man whose high school yearbook recorded that his
  ambition was "to become deliriously happy, or a professional harp player was suddenly
  rich beyond imagination. He bought a black Mercedes and a 1966 Corvette. I understood
  the heady mix of fame, money, groupies, and feel-good treats. I"d already been there and
  back, but Bruce was on his maiden voyage. The first time I experienced sudden success, I
  had my insufferable moments too.
  There was a real cultural difference between a guy from "Joisey" and a girl from
  Memphis. In the South, what is considered acceptable behavior has at least a patina of
  courtesy and formality. That kind of ingrained etiquette has both positive and negative
  aspects: you may not know what someone really thinks of you and there"s a lot of "Honey
  child this" and "Darlin" that" covering up savage feelings, but on the surface it"s Sunday
  school gracious. The roots of my steel-magnolia temperament run deep, and I always try
  to alleviate tension with humor. I had my fan photo made into a dartboard and sent one to
  Bruce and one to Glenn, complete with darts and a poem: "I"m giving you my picture, I
  hope you"ll treat it nice, you can hang it in the attic to scare away mice."
  I indulged in regular therapeutic massage to help cope with the stress of the
  shooting schedule, during which I could feel body and soul coming back together. One
  day my masseuse opened her big canvas bag and pulled out a tape called Woman"s Spirit,
  a guided meditation with one"s female ancestors. Lying on the backseat of my limousine
  on the way to the studio, I would listen to the tape and imagine myself in a field, holding
  my mother"s hand, who was holding her mother"s hand, who was holding her mother"s
  and going back to a time of safety and peace. I was searching for a spiritual anchor, I
  needed to make God a holy and forgiving mother.
  Despite massage, I developed debilitating headaches and a back stiff enough to
  build condominiums. A friend recommended a chiropractor who was known to make
  house calls and "set calls" for actors. When Bruce Oppenheim came to treat me during a
  late shoot, it was close to midnight and there was hardly room for his table in my trailer.
  I"d never had chiropractic work, but he had such strong hands and worked so quickly that
  I didn"t have time to get nervous. The disappearance of my headaches made me an instant
  believer, and his twisted sense of humor made me laugh. I started having "adjustments"
  about once a month, and with my skewed sense of boundaries, it didn"t seem to matter if
  I was dating a health-care professional who was treating me. He didn"t seem to be
  troubled by it either.
  With the first serious money of my life, I bought a house at the end of a cul-de-sac
  in the Encino hills, framed by two stone lions. I removed the previous owner"s expensive
  bad taste, and replaced it with my own expensive bad taste. Mother always said, "All
  your taste is in your mouth, girl." Behind sliding glass doors was a pool lined with small
  gold tiles that made me feel like I was swimming in liquid gold. Bruce brought me tea
  and melon in bed at the crack of dawn, then biked with me a dozen miles to the studio.
  Right before we left, I"d have a can of Mountain Dew plus a cup of coffee, so I felt like I
  had been shot out of a cannon. A teamster would drive me and the bike back at the end of
  the day, and Bruce often cooked dinner while I spent a little time with my daughter. He
  let me know that he"d never really considered having children of his own, but his
  relationship with seven-year-old Clementine was warm and affectionate. We already felt
  like a family.
  Even though I was bone weary, I well knew the lesson about striking while the
  iron was hot--and I had lived through some cool-iron times--so I spent a springtime hiatus
  from Moonlighting doing a television remake of The Long Hot Summer, based on a short
  story called ""The Hamlet" by William Faulkner. I wanted to play the role originated by
  Joanne Woodward but was pronounced "too pretty" (although hardly prettier than Don
  Johnson, the hot star of Miami Vice, who was playing the Paul Newman role). Such
  distinctions seemed unfathomable anyway when they gave the part to Judith Ivey, a
  lovely-looking actress who was deemed more serious, after making her do four screen
  tests and telling her she wasn"t pretty enough. I was cast as the libidinous daughter-in-law
  originally played by Lee Remick.
  The opulent homestead of the fictitious Varner family in "Frenchman"s Bend,
  Mississippi" was replicated by the Oak Alley Plantation in Thibodaux, Louisiana. It had
  an unpaved road lined by stately two-hundred-year-old live oaks draped with Spanish
  moss, leading up to the white-columned mansion. Its several caretaker cabins with
  screened porches had been converted to guest houses. A high levee with a gravel road on
  top separated the house and the river, and I walked there every chance I got.
  On a job with such a large ensemble cast, there"s lots of time to sit around, which
  means more time to read. One afternoon while waiting on the screen porch of one of the
  converted caretakers" cabins, the book I chose would have an enormous impact on the
  direction of my life. It was Outrageous Acts & Everyday Rebellion by Gloria Steinem.
  Although I had called myself a feminist for fifteen years, I realized I had not committed a
  single Outrageous Act in any public way to support women"s reproductive freedom or
  any other civil rights issue. It was also around this time I became aware that Congress
  had disallowed funding for abortions for poor women. Pregnancy as punishment because
  you"re poor? It was one of those big moments in life when you say, "Hold on a minute
  missy, that ain"t right!" Determined finally to become part of the solution, I called Ms.
  magazine and asked to speak to Gloria Steinem, the magazine"s founder, whom I had met
  briefly at a party in Manhattan a few years earlier. She took my call immediately and
  without wasting time. I asked what I could do to help the cause.
  There"s a political action committee I"m involved with called Voters for Choice,
  she began. "They"re in need of a strong morally committed spokesperson. Would you
  consider that?"
  "Yes," I said without hesitation. I was finally on my way toward exorcising the
  demon of political inaction and apathy that had been brewing since my childhood when I
  had been surrounded by the racism of the segregated south. But once I started speaking
  out there was no stopping me. I marched on Washington for reproductive freedom and
  women"s equality, I spoke at fund-raisers for pro-choice candidates like Ann Richards
  (governor of Texas), Barbara Boxer (senator from California), and Bill Clinton (president
  of the United States of America). I marched again on Washington for gay and lesbian
  rights, I helped dedicate the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and was called to testify
  before a House subcommittee on the U.S. approval for RU-486. To this day, I believe that
  any excuse to discriminate against any group of human beings violates their civil rights.
  Regardless of their skin color, religion, sex, or sexual preference, all people must be
  treated equally. To do otherwise is un-American. Because of my advocacy for these basic
  civil rights, Gloria Allred, my longtime friend and fighter for feminist issues, asked me to
  seriously consider running for president of the United States in the year 2000.
  But let"s go back to the fun and games on the set of The Long Hot Summer. Don
  Johnson and I were aware of an intense attraction the minute we met. When ten
  journalists arrived for a press junket wanting to photograph the steamy scenes between
  us, they were astonished to hear that in the four-hour miniseries, there were none. I told
  the director and the producer, both separately and together, "You"re crazy if you don"t
  write at least one scene for Don and me." Unfortunately, it was assumed that I was trying
  to pad my part. Just because we were forbidden to explore our flirtation on-screen didn"t
  mean we couldn"t follow up on it in private. One night, as I relaxed on the screen porch
  of my little cabin, I heard a man"s voice purr, "Ohhh, Miss Eula" (my character"s name).
  I responded, "Why, Mr. Ben Quick" (Don"s character"s name). "What are you
  doing here?"
  "I"d just like to pay my respects, ma"am."
  I opened the screen door a wedge. ""Why don"t you come on in and sit a spell."
  We lasted a nanosecond on the porch and then rapidly progressed to my bed. It
  was like wolfing down a candy bar when you"re starving--fast, furious, intense--and it
  was all over in five minutes. Somehow we never got around to another five minutes,
  since "Mr. Quick" moved on to one of the hairdressers, who thereafter acted as if I had
  bad breath.
  The gracious and genial Jason Robards, who was playing the family patriarch,
  was well loved by the crew, but Don was not a favorite. He told too many of them too
  often how they could do their jobs better. A palpable tension seemed to arise when he
  walked on the set and disappeared when he left. Everyone was in awe of Ava Gardner,
  who was playing the mistress of the domineering Will Varner. We hadn"t done our one
  scene together yet and nobody, had bothered to introduce us. One night while we were
  shooting out in the middle of a swamp, the air-conditioning in my tiny trailer kept
  breaking down, and I decided to walk over to her trailer to say hi and introduce myself, I
  had just raised my hand to knock when the door flew open and slammed against the side
  of her trailer. Fortunately, I had leaped back into the darkness in the nick of time. I froze
  and watched, unseen in the shadows. Her hair was in rollers, and she was swaying ,
  holding a bottle of white wine by the neck. Suddenly, she began screaming,
  "JASONNNNNNNNN!" I hightailed it out of there, but later that night, as the crew was
  setting up the dramatic fire finale and we were taking our places, I dared to approach her
  again.
  "Ms. Gardner, I am thrilled to be working with you." It took her a while to focus
  on me. Then she belched out a slurpy, "SHADDDUPP!"
  The next day around the motel pool, she seemed alert and agreeable, throwing her
  glorious neck back with a rich and lustful laugh I. took one more risk. "Ms. Gardner," I
  said, extending a tentative handshake, "I"m Cybill Shepherd."
  "Oh, hello!" She beamed, flashing that profoundly sexy Ava Gardner smile. "It"s
  so nice to meet you." The previous night had never happened.
  Almost immediately I could tell that The Long Hot Summer was going to be a
  stinker. In one scene I actually begged not to have a close-up, and they agreed. The
  miniseries was so bad it was appropriately dismissed as "irredeemable, paltry and barren"
  by the Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, who noted of my performance, "She seems
  playfully aware that the movie is garbage." It was shown on CBS opposite Moonlighting.
  Moonlighting won the time slot.
  
  IN JANUARY 1987 I WAS GETTING DRESSED FOR THE Golden Globe
  Awards, and my dress didn"t fit. There was no mistaking the reason. The stomach
  pooches out more quickly in a second pregnancy because the muscles have been pregnant
  before. By the time I scheduled a doctor"s appointment, a test was a formality--I was so
  violently nauseated I couldn"t eat.
  When the obstetrician got the results back from the lab, she called me. "Either
  you"re further along in your pregnancy than you thought," she said, "or you"re having
  twins."
  I dismissed this possibility, even though my grandmother"s sister and their
  grandmother had had twins.
  It was recommended that I see a specialist for an early ultrasound. Two hours
  before the time of my appointment I was supposed to drink eight glasses of water (a full
  bladder lifts the uterus into a good position for a sonogram). I forgot and didn"t start
  chugging on a big bottle of water until I was in the car on the way to the appointment, so
  when the doctor moved the probe over my abdomen, his face registered concern: he saw
  two amniotic sacs but he could detect only one heartbeat. I tried not to panic as I lay on
  the table in an ungainly position, pushing images of dead babies out of my head, while
  we waited for the water to do its thing. When the doctor came back to make another pass,
  his face brightened. A second heart was beating in syncopated rhythm with its sibling.
  When I called Bruce at his office, I started with, "Honey, I want you to sit down."
  "Why?" he said.
  "Just do it," I insisted. "We"re having twins." There was no response at first, then
  a slow "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-"
  "It could be worse," I interrupted. "It could be triplets."
  A twin pregnancy is considered high risk for any woman, let alone one closing in
  on forty, and I had to see three different OB-GYNs before I found one who didn"t make
  me feel doomed, reading me a riot act list of all the horrible things that could happen. I
  called Peg Burke, one of the midwives who had attended Clementine"s birth eight years
  earlier.
  "The rate of cesareans in Southern California is twenty-five percent," she said
  sympathetically. "Lotsa luck."
  "There"s got to be one doctor in Los Angeles who"ll give me a chance for a
  natural delivery," I said. "Isn"t there a nurse-midwife I can call?"
  She suggested Nancy Boles, head of the midwifery program at the University of
  Southern California Medical School. I told her I understood that I needed to have a doctor
  present, but I wanted the same kind of midwife support I"d had when my first child was
  born.
  "Yeah, I know," she said, the voice of resignation, "even though I"ve delivered
  two thousand sets of twins myself." I asked her to recommended a doctor, and she
  mentioned Jeffrey Phelan, who had recently published an article about a technique called
  "version," in which the doctor turns the unborn child into the proper position for birth. He
  had won Nancy"s heart when she heard that he made his male medical students get up in
  the stirrups to see how their female patients felt during a pelvic exam.
  People can be really dumb about a twin pregnancy. No woman who"s given birth
  would ever say chirpily, "That"s the way to do it: get it over with all at once." Dr. Phelan
  had a more experienced take. "I wish twin pregnancies on my enemies," he told me
  sympathetically, acknowledging the difficulty of dealing with twice the hormones, twice
  the heartburn, twice the discomfort, twice the nausea, twice the risk. I was not going to be
  a radiant bride.
  I have a photograph of my mother and stepfather, Mondo (they had married eight
  years earlier), holding a shotgun at my wedding to Bruce, who made a happy adjustment
  in his thinking about parenthood. A rabbi pronounced us man and wife in the shortest
  ceremony possible that was still legal. My gown was an antique ceremonial silk kimono,
  cream-colored with gold and orange fans. It was a wedding gift from my friend Kaori
  Turner (her mother had worn it), who also procured a black kimono for Bruce and a pink
  one for Clementine. The dining room of our house had been made into a Japanese
  tearoom, with rice-paper walls and tatami flooring. No shoes, which have always seemed
  a form of bondage to me, and no rings--I"ve never been big on jewelry.
  Helicopters were circling over the house, trying to get a shot of us or celebrity
  guests. (There were none, just twenty close friends. My father couldn"t be in the same
  room as my mother, my sister didn"t want to travel, and my brother and I weren"t talking
  to each other because we had a dispute about money. The photo exclusive went to David
  Hume Kennerly, who was one of Bruce"s friends and had won a Pulitzer for his Vietnam
  War coverage and had been the White House photographer during the Ford
  administration. A tiered white cake with a porcelain bride and groom and two baby
  carriages followed a steak dinner--ironic, since I had been fired as a spokesperson for the
  Beef Council because a journalist wrote that I was trying to eat less red meat. My mother,
  who knew me to lick the steak platter before I washed it, had exclaimed. "Are they
  crazy?" and threatened to write the council a letter. But my attorney later told me that the
  real reason was because I was pregnant before I was married, a highly publicized fact.) I
  was asleep by seven o"clock. The next morning, I reported back to the set, and Bruce
  went into his office, working underneath an eight-by-ten glossy of me from my days as
  his patient, inscribed, "Dear Bruce, I"ve seldom had such a laying on of hands. Love and
  thanks, Cybill."
  My pregnancy further widened the chasm between me and the producers, who
  reacted as if the news was a thoughtless inconvenience. Other television actresses had
  been allowed to work real-life pregnancies into plotlines and production schedules. When
  I suggested a similar approach to Glenn Caron, his response was a tepid, "Well, you don"t
  leave me much choice." Despite the fact that I developed gestational diabetes and was
  forbidden to work during my last trimester, I occasionally went to the studio against
  doctor"s orders. But Glenn continued to act as if I were personally, purposefully screwing
  him over (and would later claim that my pregnancy had destroyed Moonlighting). He
  attempted to accommodate the situation by having Maddie meet a short, stocky man on a
  train and marry him three days later. When I strongly voiced my objection that the
  character we had created in Maddie would never do such a thing, Glenn said words to the
  effect of "Just shut up and do your job, you"re not producing this show."
  I had doctor appointments every few days to ensure that the twins, whose welfare
  was compromised by the diabetes, were healthy and developing on schedule.
  Eight-year-old Clementine, who had been begging for siblings, announced that
  she wanted to be present for their arrival. My midwife put together a slide show of some
  of her other births to prepare Clem for the noises Mommy would make, the presence of
  blood, and the fact that I would be in pain. After only two slides, Clementine put up her
  hand and said, "I don"t want to see anymore, Mommy. Just call me when the babies are
  cleaned up.""
  Soon thereafter, she announced, "I"ve changed my mind. I"ve decided I don"t
  really want a brother and sister."
  "Well, what should we do when they"re born?" I asked calmly. "Should we throw
  them out the window?"
  She frowned. "Nobody ever asked me about this, you know," she said.
  A few weeks later, she came to me with a proud plan. "When we get home from
  the hospital," she said brightly, "I"d like to put the babies in the washing machine."
  "Really, honey?" I asked. "Why?"
  "Because," she said, "I"d like to see them go around and around and around."
  By my third trimester, I was so huge I began to resemble Marlon Brando. I could
  no longer get up off my futon on the floor, so I had a large platform built at the height of
  a normal bed. I still had to crawl to the edge and then push myself up. One early morning,
  I was awakened by an earthquake and in terror I stood straight up and jumped off the
  platform, running to see if Clementine was okay. She was, but my groin was not. I felt
  like I was walking around carrying two bowling balls between my legs. Every night I
  prayed, "Please God, let me get over this pain before I go into labor."
  A few weeks before my October due date, Mother and Mondo drove out to
  California in a motor home. Every night, we"d sit in the yard taking a moon bath, soaking
  up the beams and watching the waxing crescent get fatter and brighter. The moon affects
  all bodies of water, I figured, and my babies were floating in their own private pool. On
  October 6, 1987, the moon went full at 12:03 A.M. My water broke at 12:08. I listened to
  a tape of Kathleen Battle singing "Ave Maria" as Mother, Mondo, Bruce, and I drove to
  the brand-new California Medical Center downtown..
  Molly Ariel and Cyrus Zachariah were born thirteen hours later, both named for
  their great-grandparents but known by their middle names, with a hyphenated Shepherd-
  Oppenheim. But those thirteen hours were harrowing.
  In transit down the birth canal, Ariel had pushed Zach out of the way (a very
  determined female from the get-go), and he turned sideways. Something, probably his
  foot, lodged up under my ribs and felt like it was pulling me apart one bone at a time. At
  this point, I began begging for drugs and screaming, "Kill me! Kill me! Cut the babies
  out!" A few moments later, and before any drugs could be given, Ariel was born (five
  pounds, eleven ounces) followed by Zachariah (seven pounds, two ounces).
  My entourage took over almost a whole floor of the hospital-Bruce, Mother,
  Mondo, Clementine, Myrtle, the midwife, three nurses, and a bodyguard. (I had forgotten
  to include the doctor"s name on a list of people to be allowed admittance, and he had
  trouble getting in to see me.) I guess this was the most famous I"ve ever been. There
  were two photos on the front page of the New York Daily News, accompanying the
  headline: "ROBERT BORK LOSES/CYBILL"S TWINS DOING GREAT." This was
  great news all around. Not only were the twins healthy and happy, but the anti-choice
  Supreme Court nominee had been defeated. The paparazzi had been waiting at the front
  door of the hospital since before the babies were born, and everyday the guard caught
  someone who managed to sneak through with a camera. I knew that the best way to get
  photographers to stop swarming around me was not to try to run from them, but Bruce
  was afraid of flashes going off in the sensitive eyes of our newborns. We arranged for his
  brother to leave the hospital with a nurse in a blond wig, holding two Cabbage Patch
  dolls, while we attempted a more private exit out back. No one was fooled, and Bruce
  and I almost crashed into a lamppost when one photographer jumped on the hood of our
  car--a small risk, he probably considered, since photos of the babies were said to fetch up
  to $100,000.
  Going from one to three children felt like going from one to ten; the effort and
  responsibility involved in parenthood increases exponentially. Before going back to work,
  I bought a forty-foot motor home, with plenty of room for the twins and their
  paraphernalia, including Bruce Willis" gift of a teeter-totter and Glenn Caron"s two giant
  pandas. Beloved Myrtle kept insisting that she could handle the nannying single-handedly
  (she"d had thirteen children herself), but I didn"t want to put that much of a burden on
  her, and finding capable, trustworthy people for child care is the challenge of every
  working mother. I hired one woman who seemed to have impeccable credentials, only to
  discover that she kept a bottle of rum in her purse. Another simply disappeared and was
  apprehended a few weeks later in Scottsdale, Arizona, wandering nude with pictures of
  Ariel and Zack in her hand, saying she was looking for her babies.
  
  THE YEAR 1988 BEGAN PROPITIOUSLY WITH A ceremony in which I
  was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and it only cost me $4,322. Bruce
  Willis sent a telegram saying, "Sorry I can"t be there, but one of us has to work." During
  this season of Moonlighting my dissatisfaction grew with the inimical atmosphere and
  changes in the way my character was written. Not only was she a virago, but she was
  starting to act bipolar. In an episode called "Yours Very Deadly," Maddie urges a female
  client to continue a correspondence with someone who has been sending the woman
  threatening letters. Maddie actually goes to this man"s apartment, unarmed, pounding on
  the door, even though she knows him to be deaf and believes him to be a murderer. "No
  sane person would encourage a woman to engage with a harasser," I told Glenn, "and
  people who have experienced some fame are particularly sensitive to the dangers. I know
  that, and as a former model, Maddie Hayes would know it too." But Glenn was adamant
  that we keep to the story, and I gave it my best shot: the character acts bipolar, but with
  conviction. The next episode, "All Creatures Great and Small," dropped the little bomb
  that Maddie is an atheist. So. not only is she a cold bitch but she doesn"t believe in God.
  My character could go no lower: a feminist atheist.
  Or so I thought. When Glenn came to talk to me about his idea for an episode
  called "Atomic Shakespeare" that would satirize The Taming of the Shrew, my first
  question was "Who"s going to play the shrew?" I was serious when I suggested some
  contemporary gender bending, making David Addison the termagant. Glenn was not
  amused. When I read the script, I found that my Elizabethan character was to be bound,
  gagged, and married off against her will while a whole town cheered, as part of her
  husband"s bet with her father. Kate aka Maddie aka Cybill was made to be an impossibly
  unsympathetic character so that Petruchio aka David aka Bruce could score. I was
  certainly aware that Moonlighting was entertainment, not a political treatise, as I was
  aware that some women are aroused by bondage. Maddie was definitely not turned on. In
  this case, binding and gagging was a symbol of violence against women--even
  Shakespeare didn"t tame his shrew with ropes.
  "Atomic Shakespeare" won more awards than any other episode, including
  Emmys for directing, editing, and costume design. I wore a sleeveless black velvet
  evening gown and Day-Glo orange high-tops to the ceremony, fully intending to change
  into pumps. It"s a long ride to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and I had time to consider
  the prospect of an evening in pain. As my limousine pulled up to the curb, the driver said,
  "I"ll wait for you to change your shoes."
  "You can open the door now," I said. "I"m ready." I knew what I was doing--it
  was my personal rebellion against the tyranny of high heels--but people reacted as if I
  were naked. Actually, I felt that half the women there were cheering "Right on, sister,"
  and half were muttering "You bitch." To this day, people are always checking out what
  I"ve got on my feet and seem disappointed if I"m in anything fancier than sneakers.
  Bruce Willis was nominated again that year, but I was not. I went to the ceremony
  thinking: I"ll be okay as long as he doesn"t win. (Nice team spirit.) He won. I smiled and
  applauded. I understand that many actors have done good work for years and not gotten
  awards for it, but this felt like a slap in the face, as if he were the motor that drove the
  show, as if I were dispensable.
  In the episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street," when David Addison"s former
  brother-in-law dies, he goes to New York, and Maddie, in a show of support, crashes the
  funeral. In a moving scene, David recalls marrying his pregnant girlfriend and hoping
  that he won"t end up in a blue Sunoco uniform with DAVE stitched over the pocket, then
  trying to keep the marriage going after his wife miscarries, only to come home one day to
  find the census taker on top of her, "getting all kinds of pertinent information that isn"t on
  the form." When David"s ex-wife admits that this infidelity was not with another man but
  with a woman, Maddie"s reaction to this jaw-dropping news was cut. Even if the intent
  was to showcase Bruce, it would not have lessened the impact of his performance to see
  Maddie"s reaction, and it hurt my character because it didn"t show her humanity. The
  mutual sovereignty of the characters, the conflict between fully realized equals, was
  compromised. When I registered my complaint, Glenn told me I hadn"t played the scene
  very well. The unspoken message was that I was a bitch; the salt in the wound was the
  news that I was a bad actress.
  "Big Man on Mulberry Street" also had a musical number beautifully
  choreographed by Stanley Donen, the legendary director of Singing in the Rain, with a
  soundtrack by Billy Joel. It was supposed to be Maddie"s dream, but to me it looked a lot
  more like David"s fantasy. Glenn said that he wasn"t interested in my opinion, and when I
  approached Donen with my reservations, I saw him go absolutely cold, almost as if he"d
  been prepared for my being impossible. As I left the set after a rehearsal, I was so
  frustrated that I picked up a director"s chair and threw it at the wall. The tabloids reported
  that I had heaved the chair at Glenn. (If I had wanted to hit him, I wouldn"t have missed.)
  The distinctive door slamming that became a leitmotif of the show was something
  I learned from Ernst Lubitsch movies, and studio carpenters had to rebuild the Blue
  Moon Agency doors every season because we slammed them so hard. But one of my
  most painful memories revolved around the door slamming in "Symphony in Knocked
  Flat." The script called for Maddie to arrive at work and slam her way through the office
  in a rage because she had a boring date the night before. I didn"t think that a boring date
  the night before was enough motivation for a hysterical tirade, and I ignored the stage
  direction, playing the scene more thoughtfully. I got away with it that time, but my next
  scene that required rage brought Glenn and Jay down to the set. We did it over and over,
  each time Glenn repeating, "That"s not angry enough. Do it again." I felt so humiliated
  and upset that I began forgetting the lines I had known perfectly well when we started.
  I watched the "Symphony" episode again recently and came away proud that I
  had followed my instincts and underplayed those two scenes. Though I still cringe at the
  thought of Glenn"s and Jay"s bullying, I"m so glad I defended the integrity of my
  character, Maddie, in the face of public embarrassment. That episode represents truly
  wonderful work on everyone"s part. And besides, how many people get to work with The
  Temptations and perform "Psychedelic Shack," like I did in the prologue to that episode?
  Bruce became disenchanted with the classic David Addison smarminess,
  sometimes throwing a script across the room and calling it shit. Actors make a mistake
  when they act superior to the material. Good acting is like a tennis match. But somewhere
  along the way it felt like Bruce disconnected from what I was doing. It seemed as if he
  had already figured out all the moves, and it was far less exciting when the match
  between us was over.
  One April day in 1988, I arrived for work fifteen minutes late to find an all points
  bulletin out for me. An assistant director approached my car as I drove onto the lot and
  said, "Cybill, don"t bother getting out." Then he told the driver, "Take her right to Glenn"s
  office." I felt like an intractable student summoned to the principal after sliding down the
  school banister--a bad acid flashback, and I"d never even taken acid. Jay Daniel and
  several people I didn"t recognize were sitting in Glenn"s office; Glenn was standing in
  front of his pinball machine and his jukebox loaded with 1960s rock and roll and every
  song by Tammy Wynette.
  "You don"t give a fuck about your work," he screamed the moment I walked in
  the door. "Your standards are down, and your ideas are crap." I could hardly respond, his
  rage was so vehement. And while he screamed, Jay sat silent, not uttering a word in my
  defense.
  A few weeks later, when we came to the end of the shooting season, I wrote
  Glenn a letter. "I want to do everything in my control to help the show," I wrote. "But I
  need you to know that for me to work effectively, it is absolutely necessary to avoid
  another performance like the one you gave when I was summoned to your office several
  weeks ago to hear your diatribe--all in the presence of complete strangers. I have
  enormous respect for the work you have done and for the show you have created, but I do
  not respect that behavior and I will not willingly be subjected to the kind of abuse that
  you unleashed at that meeting. I take my share of responsibility for some of the problems
  we have had in the past and will do everything I can to correct those problems."
  During the hiatus I made a film called Chances Are, a fantasy about a woman who
  remains devoted to the memory of her dead husband and falls in love with him again,
  reincarnated in the form of Robert Downey Jr. The producer was a pal of Ryan O"Neal
  and lobbied for him to play the family friend who"s really been in love with my character
  all along. Considering our history, Ryan was the last person I wanted to work with.
  "Casting him is a great way to ruin this movie," I warned. But everybody else kept
  turning down the role, so we got him by default. (Turned out I was wrong. He was
  terrific.) I had avoided a love scene with him in real life, but I couldn"t stop my nervous
  laughter when I had to kiss him on-camera. The director, Emile Ardolino, took me aside
  and whispered, "Could you please stop giggling? It"s upsetting Ryan." Not an
  unreasonable request, and I stopped laughing by thinking of deaths in the family and
  biting my upper lip.
  I thought the script would have been improved by dispensing with the
  reincarnation storyline and exploring a romance seldom seen on film between an older
  woman and a younger man, a relationship I"ve often played out in real life. The first day
  of rehearsal, Downey didn"t show up or respond to phone calls. Somebody from the
  production office got the manager of his hotel to open the door of his room and found
  him in bed with a woman, sleeping off a bad night. It was apparent that he had substance
  abuse problems, and he was told that if he was ever late again, he would be fired. A
  monitor in the guise of a "trainer" was hired to keep him out of trouble for the remainder
  of the shooting schedule. I relished the experience of working with Emile Ardolino. As a
  director he pushed me beyond what I had thought of as my "dramatic limits" as an actor.
  Some years later, Emile stopped returning my phone calls. This is a common occurrence
  in Hollywood but hardly what I would have expected from Emile. About six months later,
  a mutual friend called and told me the sad truth: "Emile died of AIDS today." Now,
  whenever I cry as an actor part of my motivation is always the thought of Emile and
  missing him.
  When production started on the new season of Moonlighting, I received a
  "personal and confidential" letter from the lawyers for Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., as did
  Bruce Willis. Attached was a list of "guidelines" regarding production, stating the
  network"s right to cancel episodes or the series if the guidelines were not strictly
  followed. (Bruce and I would be responsible for the loss of revenue in such an event.)
  The normal day onstage, the memo stated, was from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., but night work
  was at the producer"s discretion. The production company would make every effort to
  deliver scripts one day in advance of shooting, but the script was nevertheless to be
  learned. The producers were to maintain a written record of the actors" work pattern
  during each day of production, including the time elapsed after being called to the set,
  which was not to exceed five minutes. Bathroom breaks were also limited to five
  minutes.
  My lawyer responded to this demeaning memo by reminding ABC that I already
  had a contract governing my services; that nowhere in my agreement was the network
  given the right to impose additional terms and conditions, particularly those more suitable
  to a reform school; that I resented any attempt to impute to me responsibility for their
  cost overruns; and that such insinuations were defamatory, injurious to my reputation,
  and the cause of severe emotional distress.
  One more letter arrived from ABC. Dispensing with the legalese, the gist of it was
  "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And with such posturing, the tempest was over.
  In the fall of 1988, Glenn Caron left the show, stating that it was him or me and he
  didn"t think the network would choose him. What had begun as an alliance between
  Glenn and me, as well as a newcomer named Bruce Willis, had turned into Glenn and
  Bruce against Cybill. Not only David Addison but Bruce Willis had become Glenn"s
  alter ego and I became the troublemaker, the difficult one out to get them (whatever part I
  had in creating this I will forever regret). Recently, the pilot of Moonlighting was released
  on DVD. The disc includes almost nonstop commentary on the making of the series by
  the creator, Glenn Caron, and the star, Bruce Willis. Needless to say, I was not thrilled to
  be excluded, but now there can be no doubt that there had been and still is a boys" club to
  which I"m not invited. Glenn describes himself and Bruce as being virtually the same.
  They have similar backgrounds, the same things disgust them, and the same things make
  them laugh. The only thing that really matters is that a whole new audience is enjoying
  Moonlighting on DVD as well as nightly on the Bravo network. And I"m really proud of
  the good work we did together. In any case, Jay Daniel took over as executive producer,
  and Roger Director, already working on the show as promoted to head writer. (He later
  wrote the roman a clef A Place to Fall, about a neurotic, petulant actor, and Bruce Willis
  threatened to punch him out.) The show lasted for two more years, and Peter
  Bogdanovich made a memorable guest appearance in an episode about all the men in
  Maddie"s past. But with the success of the Die Hard movies, it became clear that Bruce
  was ready to move on, that he had outgrown Moonlighting. He was so disdainful of the
  material that he often hadn"t bothered to read it before arriving on the set. He was
  impatient about any time I spent in the trailer with the twins, although he increasingly
  wanted to leave early himself. I put up a punching bag on the set, suggesting that we hit it
  instead of each other. One day, when filming threatened to delay his early getaway, the
  whole set started to vibrate from Bruce"s pummeling. Thank God for that bag.
  One day, as nursing time for the twins approached, I asked to be released for a
  twenty-five-minute break. The first assistant director kept delaying it, so after about an
  hour, my motor-home driver turned on the walkie-talkie so that the whole set could hear
  the two screaming infants and announced "Cybill, it"s time!" After that, I was free to go.
  The final episode surely echoed the sentiments of viewers. "Can you really blame
  the audience?" a silhouetted producer asks Maddie and David. "A case of poison ivy is
  more fun than watching you two lately."
  I was breaking up with two Bruces at once--Bruce Willis and Bruce Oppenheim. I
  will always regret that I never got to raise kids beyond the age of two with their fathers
  present. Children don"t know from incompatibility. They only want Mom and Dad to live
  together in love with each other and with them. When Bruce got angry, he shouted, and
  when I got angry, I ran away. I"d never heard my parents have an argument. I observed
  their brawls and mutually cold, silent treatment. I had no sense of two people being able
  to negotiate conflict and come to a reasonable compromise. Operating under a veil of
  exhaustion and frustration from work, I gave up on my marriage.
  Bruce and I were forced to work with a court-appointed counselor, both of us
  legitimately afraid that divorce would mean seeing the children a lot less. Our separation
  was the catalyst for what was surely long overdue therapy for me. I wheeled a big rolling
  rack of baggage into the therapist"s office and took out one suitcase at a time, asking, "Is
  this because I"m an asshole?"
  Not long after the separation, I was walking on the treadmill and watching MTV.
  A video came on of a song by Martha Venessa Sharron, Ronald Lee Miller, and Kenny
  Hirsch called "If I Could." The lyrics moved me instantly to tears: "If I could. I"d teach
  you all the things I never learned / And help you cross all those bridges that I burned." I
  started weeping so profusely that I had to push the emergency button on the treadmill to
  keep from falling down.
  
  CHAPTER TEN
  "I"M CYBILL SHEPHERD, YOU KNOW,
  THE MOVIE STAR?"
  
  I WAS TERRIFIED ABOUT MY PROSPECTS WHEN MOONLIGHTING
  ended, and it didn"t help to hear Joan Rivers dismiss me on her talk show as the head of
  the "Fucking Lucky Club." It seemed like my luck was running out. I spent several years
  doing projects of no particular consequence, playing a collection of wives, nurses,
  bitches, and sociopaths.
  The 1990 TV movie, Which Way Home was based on a true story about a nurse
  who rescues five orphans from a refugee camp substituting Thailand for Cambodia. I
  asked my doctor for something to help me sleep on the long flight over, and he gave me
  Halcion, a potent narcotic that can erase short-term memory. When I arrived, somebody
  had to tell me where I was and why I was there. But I have distinct memories of a
  location shoot fraught with water problems. We were filming several hours south of
  Bangkok, staying in a city called Hua Hin (nicknamed Whore Hin by the crew for
  obvious reasons), and I swam in the soothing warm waters of the South China Sea, which
  glows at night with bioluminescent plankton. During one swim, some terrible creature
  wrapped itself around my calves, and I ran shrieking from the water to discover that my
  attacker was a plastic bag used to wrap the beach towels.
  The ceiling, floor, even the wastebasket in my room were made of teak, and I kept
  thinking: This is where the rain forest is going. The water in my shower contained some
  chemicals with interesting special effects. A week into shooting, the director of
  photography requested a private meeting. "I"m sorry to mention this," he said, "but your
  hair appears somewhat greenish on camera." I squeezed every available lemon in
  Southeast Asia on my head and sat in the sun.
  When we moved farther south to Bang Sephon, the floor, walls, and ceiling of my
  hotel bathroom were tiled. There was no shower curtain because the drain was in the
  middle of the room. I noticed that whatever was deposited in the toilet each morning
  would still be there at night. Not a good sign. When I returned at the end of the first day
  of shooting, covered from head to toe with sand and who knows what else from slogging
  through murky lagoons, I got into the shower and turned on the water. There were a few
  weak sputters and then nothing. Other crew members confirmed that they were
  experiencing the same drought, and I placed a call to the producer. "I"m a trooper," I said,
  "but I draw the line at a hot shower and a functional toilet. If the water isn"t restored, I"m
  leaving for someplace where I know the plumbing works, like Southern California." The
  next day, in the predawn light, something that looked like a cement truck rumbled into
  the parking lot and disappeared behind the building. There were noises of plumbing and
  pipe fitting, and I had a trickly but wet shower.
  What I loved best about Thailand was the food: savory soups for breakfast,
  midmorning snacks of cashews freshly roasted over fires, sticky rice with mangoes that
  look green but are lusciously ripe. There are a hundred different fruits never seen outside
  the country, and the familiar ones are as abundant as apples. You can hail a boat coming
  down the Chaou Praya River in Bangkok and buy a sack of fresh litchi nuts from the
  farmer (although I never did develop the local enthusiasm for one fruit whose name
  translates into "tastes like heaven, smells like hell"). What I didn"t love about the location
  was my dressing room: a bus with the seats taken out and furniture that rolled around as
  if on casters. I literally couldn"t fit into its minuscule bathroom, so when I had to use the
  facilities, I cleared everybody out and stood in the hallway hoping for the best as I
  launched my ass back toward the toilet.
  
  PETER BOGDANOVICH HAD THE RIGHTS TO LARRY McMurtry"s
  book Texasville, a return to the characters of The Last Picture Show some thirty years
  later. (The frontispiece of the 1987 novel reads "For Cybill Shepherd.") Miraculously the
  entire cast from Picture Show was reassembled.
  The friendship between Peter and Larry had always been shaky--like two unfixed
  dogs, they snarled at each other from separate corners--but Larry and I were friends for
  life, or so I thought. A month before I went to Texas, he stopped returning my phone calls
  essentially vanishing from my life. It was odd to be filming the book he had dedicated to
  me and not even know if I might turn a corner in Archer City and bump into him. There
  were other reasons why it wasn"t my happiest experience: I felt like I was confronting the
  ghosts of the mistakes Peter and I had made, wreaking havoc in everyone"s lives and not
  even ending up together. But the worst part of it was a custody court judge ordering my
  twenty-month-old twins to fly back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles every other
  week to see their father, accompanied by a nanny. This forced separation meant that I had
  to stop nursing, which was physically and emotionally traumatic for me and the babies.
  Larry McMurtry was the first person who"d ever sent me lilies, and he used to
  send them regularly. About a year after Texasville, a huge vase of cut lilies arrived at my
  home, and I ripped open the gift card with excitement, hoping that his long silence was
  broken. The flowers were from someone else, but they inspired me to write Larry a note
  about how much I missed him and our friendship, and he finally responded. That was
  when he explained why we weren"t friends anymore. He thought I had acted too hastily
  in divorcing Bruce, accusing me of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" somehow
  he turned himself into the rejected "baby"). When he realized he couldn"t protect me
  from my "recklessness," he bolted. I resented his implication that my unhappiness wasn"t
  real. Just became I had a pattern of being with the wrong man didn"t mean I should stay
  with the latest wrong man.
  In 1992 I was in Monte Carlo to shoot the feature Once Upon a Crime. One day I
  was sitting across from Sean Young, one of the other actors. Out of the corner of my eye,
  I noticed something... missing. Was it possible? Good God, she wasn"t wearing
  underpants. I finally said to her, "I"m shootin" squirrel from where I"m sitting." She
  smiled and crossed her legs, an agreeable colleague.
  We were shooting at night, beginning when the last customer had left the grand
  casino and ending before the first customer arrived the next morning. While we waited
  for the casino to empty out one night, the cast went gambling. I didn"t bet, but every
  person I stood next to lost. The next night, after I had filmed a scene with George
  Hamilton, he asked, "How would you like to come with me for breakfast?" The casino
  restaurant was closed, but George is a high roller, well known to the management, so they
  opened up just for us. We were still wearing our movie costumes--he in an immaculately
  cut tuxedo (his teeth blindingly white against his ubiquitous tan) and me in a Versace
  gown. We had raspberry soufflé and Louis Roederer blush champagne.
  As we walked through the restaurant"s double doors, there was a roulette table.
  "I"m going to prove to you right now that you"re not a jinx," said George. "Pick a
  number." I stood next to him breathless with worry and watched as he racked up $5,000,
  $10,000, $25,000, $50,000--in wins, not losses. "Let"s go to Cartier and I"ll buy you a
  watch," he suggested. I declined. I already had a watch.
  
  AS SPOKESPERSON FOR VOTER"S CHOICE, I WAS invited--along with
  many others, including Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas and Whoopie Goldberg--to
  Washington, D.C., to lead the March for Women"s Lives. At the fund-raiser the evening
  before I was seated next to a political consultant, born and raised in Chicago, who had
  stayed in Boston after law school and had become a kind of consigliere to the younger
  generation of Kennedys. He was a smart, funny, athletic feminist who had massive
  amounts of curly brown hair with glints of red and gold. I fell.
  He was also G.U.--Geographically Undesirable. It was a struggle to find time
  together, and when I decided to build a house in Memphis he thought I was insane,
  suggesting Nantucket or Aspen as more appropriately exciting places. Though I had lots
  of family and old friends in Memphis I would have never considered building a home
  there if I hadn"t made new, close friends: one is Sid Selvidge a brilliant folk singer and
  songwriter who produced my fourth CD, Somewhere Down the Road (which featured a
  duet with Peabo Bryson, one of the great voices of pop music); the other new friend was
  Betsy Goodman Burr Flannagan Belz. Like me, she"s had three children with two
  different men. Betsy is a beautiful woman, and I find in her friendship a refreshing lack
  of envy. With Sid and Betsy, I gained a new brother and sister.
  I finally got to build my dream house in downtown Memphis, up on the bluff
  overlooking the Mississippi River, and the local newspaper chose my home as one of the
  three worst eyesores in the city of Memphis. The other two are Pat"s Pizza, which has
  been closed for twenty-five years, and my favorite junkyard on Main Street, filled with
  old carbine wheels, tow trucks, and patinated pieces of machinery.
  In the fall of that year, I agreed to speak in San Francisco at a fund-raiser for Ann
  Richards, who was running for governor of Texas. The Consultant agreed to meet me
  there. It was the same day the Giants were playing the A"s in the World Series at
  Candlestick Park. I got to the hotel first and had champagne and oysters waiting in the
  room. We had just started to make love when the earth moved, literally.
  "What"s happening?" he asked.
  "An earthquake," I said.
  "What do we do?"
  "Get under the bed." Of course, there was no way to squeeze under a box spring
  for protection, and we huddled in the doorway until the earth stopped moving. The phone
  wasn"t working, and we didn"t know what kind of pandemonium we"d find outside, but
  my first thought was: Who knows when we"ll get to eat again? So we quickly polished off
  the champagne and oysters before walking downstairs to the lobby, dimly lit with
  emergency lighting. I looked over at the bar and thought: If I"m going to die, I might as
  well die happy. Several margaritas later, we poked our heads outside, aware that the
  sounds of the city had been silenced, and saw a long black limousine parked in front of
  the hotel. I knocked on the driver"s side, motioning for him to lower the window.
  "Excuse me," I said deliberately, uttering words I had never used in my life, "I"m
  Cybill Shepherd. You know, the movie star? Could you please let me use your phone so I
  can call my kids and tell them I"m okay?" From the back of the limo, I heard a man"s
  voice. "Cybill Shepherd? We"re from Memphis. We"re here for the World Series. Come
  on inside." We got in the car and saw the collapsed Bay Bridge on the tiny TV.
  Returning to the hotel, we were each handed a lit candle for the walk up seven flights,
  and all night long we listened to the repetition of inexplicable noises coining from Union
  Square: pop, pop, crash. Pop, pop, crash. It turned out that many of the windows in the
  Neiman Marcus building had cracked, and maintenance crews were knocking out the
  shards of glass before they could fall on pedestrians. The moment it was light, we made it
  to the airport. San Francisco survived the earthquake; our relationship didn"t. But The
  Consultant will always be my favorite mistake.
  Sometime in October 1992 I got a call from a mutual friend involved in the
  women"s movement. There was going to be what turned out to be the largest march in
  history for gay and lesbian rights in Washington, and I immediately agreed to attend. As
  the April 1993 date approached, the march began to garner a good deal of publicity. I
  was told that because Roseanne was planning to charter a jet and bring a plane full of
  Hollywood celebrities, they really didn"t need me. I asked if they had a seat for me on the
  plane. The answer was no. I called Patricia Ireland, the head of the National Organization
  for Women, to check to make sure I shouldn"t go. She said that I should definitely go and,
  furthermore asked if I could attend a major fund-raiser the night before for the Human
  Rights Campaign Fund. I said sure, and the night of the event we raised a lot of money
  and lifted a lot of spirits. It turned out that Roseanne and her plane full of celebrities
  never materialized. The only Hollywood personalities whom I remember being there
  were Judith Light and myself. On the day of the march I was told that only gays and
  lesbians would be allowed to carry the banner. I staged my own little protest. I asked
  them, "Do you think Martin Luther King would have refused to let me carry the banner
  with him because of the color of my skin?" So I was allowed to carry the banner. It was a
  great honor, and it was one of my proudest moments as a parent when my thirteen-year-
  old daughter Clementine told me that since she felt so strongly about the issue, she
  wanted to march with me.
  There had been talk in Memphis for years about someday building an interactive
  facility around the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was killed. It was to be
  called the National Civil Rights Museum, and I was invited to speak at the dedication
  ceremony on January 20, 1992. It took me thirty-four years to actively become involved
  in the fight against racism. I received a plaque inscribed with the motto "equal
  opportunity and human dignity," followed by "Thank you Cybill Shepherd for helping
  break the chain of oppression."
  When I arrived in Memphis, my mother picked me up at the airport and said "I"ve
  never been as proud of you as I am today." Tears streamed down my face as I spoke of
  my hope that this museum would give us all a chance to start healing the destructive
  hatred of the racism that had surrounded us for so long.
  Moments before the ceremony began, however, my then-publicist, Cheryl Kagen,
  appeared, pulling a tall, distinguished-looking man by the arm. She introduced me to
  Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who had flown in to attend the ceremony but had not
  been scheduled to speak. When he arrived a few minutes late, he was refused a seat on
  the podium. No one recognized him. In the coming months, I would speak at three
  different fund-raisers for the Clinton/Gore campaign. At an event in Little Rock, Clinton
  and I waited backstage, and I realized, as so many women have, how intelligent, warm,
  and charismatic he is. I realized I was staring into his eyes and caught myself. "You know
  what?" I said. "You"re entirely too attractive. You better stand on the other side of the
  room."
  
  In 1993 CBS OFFERED ME A ROLE AS THE MOTHER OF a kidnapped
  child in a made-for-TV movie called There was a Little Boy. I pushed successfully for the
  director to be Mimi Leder, a woman whose work I had admired from the series China
  Beach, even though she was not on the CBS "approved" list. She went on to direct The
  Peacemaker, with a $50 million budget, and Deep Impact, at $80 million, becoming one
  of a handful of women making major action features.) I always explain to colleagues that
  I have a particular way of trying to develop and sustain a mood that usually involves
  some quiet and reflection before a scene, but not all actors need to work that way. John
  Heard, who was playing my husband, can make wisecracking comments right up to the
  moment the film starts rolling and a moment later have tears streaming down his cheeks.
  Mimi had been the frequent brunt of his teasing humor, but one day he went a little too
  far and asked her, "What makes you think you can direct?" She turned to him and said
  evenly, "When I hired you, I thought I was hiring John Hurt." Mimi was well liked and
  the crew applauded.
  We were filming at a high school in an area that was considered the drive-by
  shooting capital of the world. One night, just moments after I"d left, a man was shot and
  killed half a block away from my trailer. My manager called one of the executives at
  Lorimar to request a bodyguard for me, and he absolutely refused, so I arranged and paid
  for an off-duty LAPD officer myself.
  It was a good thing. About a week later, we were working in a neighborhood that
  was the home turf of some notoriously violent gangs. I was waiting for the setup of a
  scene that called for me to cross the street pushing a baby carriage, when my bodyguard
  said, "Don"t move until I get back," and dashed off to grab a walkie-talkie from one of
  the crew. I was oblivious to what had caught his eye: a group of men who appeared to be
  smoking dope on the balcony of a nearby apartment building, one of whom suddenly
  started waving a gun in my direction. Within moments a police helicopter hovered
  overhead, and officers on foot entered the building. Filming stopped as the revelers were
  arrested, but no weapons were ever found.
  
  IF THERE"S ONE THING I"VE LEARNED, IT"S THAT THE tide goes out
  and the tide comes in. But I never expected to see Jay Daniels, part of my misery on
  Moonlighting, washed up on the beach as another piece of flotsam. I was almost struck
  mute (an uncommon occurrence for me) on the day in 1994 when my manager told me
  Jay had called, asking to meet with me in hopes of persuading me to go back to television
  as both star and executive producer of my own show. There was no way I wanted to talk
  with let alone work with, a man who had stood by passively while Glenn Caron ripped
  into me. Jay kept calling, and my manager kept repeating my answer: no. But he claimed
  to have done a lot of thinking about my troubled Moonlighting experience during his
  subsequent four years on Roseanne and had concluded that I"d been the victim of what
  amounted to a sexist boys club. He repeated this to me directly when I agreed to a
  meeting at my house. And I believed him.
  We ended up at Carsey-Werner Productions, a "boutique" studio that had
  produced The Cosby Show and had Roseanne and Grace Under Fire on the air. In
  agreeing to do the Cybill show, Marcy Carsey (a former actress herself) and Tom Werner
  were, for the first time, taking on a project developed outside the auspices of their studio.
  But they hated our first script and asked us to start from scratch, reluctantly agreeing to
  the original plan of my character being an actress. It felt like the show would never get
  made.
  For several years I had given up singing in public because of all the
  discouragement. But on a visit to New York in 1994, I saw my good friend Jimmy Viera,
  who still makes me a blonde with his own two hands even though he"s no longer an
  executive at L"Oreal and I"m no longer the company spokeswoman. "I"m going to take
  you to hear Dixie Carter at the Cafe Carlyle," he said, and during her performance, he
  leaned over and whispered, "You should be back on that stage again." On the next two
  nights we saw Andrea Marcovicci at the Algonquin and Annie Ross at Rainbow and
  Stars. Somewhere along the way I had lost the spirit to say "watch me." Jimmy gave me
  that voice back--and soon there was a microphone to amplify it. I was offered a three-
  week engagement, five nights a week, two shows a night, at Rainbow and Stars. I hired a
  new musical director, who brought several new musicians to my home, including one
  who sang backup, and played sax and keyboards. I will call him "Howard Roark."
  I happen to be1ieve that people identify themselves to us within the first days,
  sometimes within the first moments, of our acquaintance--we often choose not to hear or
  believe what is patently obvious. It was inappropriate for Roark, at a band rehearsal, to
  hand me a valentine with a Superman figure he"d altered to be "Safety Man." Strike One.
  On our second date, He told me that when he"d seen The Heartbreak Kid years before,
  he"d vowed, "Someday I"m going to get that babe." Strike Two. But it didn"t stop me
  from spending the next three hours in bed. After our romp, we took a walk in a wildlife
  preserve near my house, still damp after a heavy rain. The light was dreaming through the
  clouds, and two wild mallards flew across our path.
  "Maybe that"s a good omen," I said, feeling a little mystical. "They"re on parallel
  paths, and they"re crossing ours."
  "Nah," he said, "that"s just two dumb birds." Strike Three.
  Roark was going through a bitter divorce, living over a friend"s garage, and
  moved into my guest room almost immediately. Only a few weeks later, he announced
  that he had an offer to go on the road as a backup musician for a rock band. "I understand
  that you have to make a living," I told him, "but I"m going to date other men while you"re
  gone." A few days later he said that he wanted to turn the job down and stay in town with
  me, but that would only be possible if he were made musical director of my show. I
  didn"t have a show at that point and made it clear I could never guarantee such a thing.
  Strike Four through Thirty-seven.
  Since Jay Daniel was a producer but not a writer, Carsey-Werner suggested that I
  meet the head writer from Grace Under Fire. Everyone warned me that Chuck Lorre, a
  talented writer, could be difficult. But at our first meeting, he was sweet and funny. When
  he left, Marcy"s mouth was agape. "That was amusing," she said "I"ve never seen Chuck
  so smitten, or so polite."
  The arc of Cybill Sheridan"s story was closely drawn from my own checkered
  career and private belly flops: she"s a single mother with two ex-husbands, the sort of
  journeyman actress I would have been had I not been lucky enough to have The Last
  Picture Show or Moonlighting. Chuck dissuaded me from making the character a mother
  of small children, as I was in real life. "It curtails the shooting schedule," he said, "but
  more importantly you can"t get away with adult material. The network doesn"t like using
  sexy double entendres in front of kids."
  Jay made many contributions to Cybill, one of which was its use of the
  Hollywood Walk of Fame as the title sequence. The camera pans the sidewalk stars of
  Carole Lombard, Lana Turner, Kim Novak, Jean Harlow and Lassie (all famous
  Hollywood blondes). I suggested mine be a fake star, drawn in chalk.
  My strongest objection to the original pilot script was the absence of any
  sustaining female friendships. I knew that I didn"t want to reprise the icy bitchiness of
  Maddie in Moonlighting, insisted on a best friend who was more of an uptight glamour
  queen so I could be the clown. (You know me, always beggin" for pies in the face.) Chuck
  created just such a character: Maryann Thorpe, a cynical, hilariously vindictive divorcee
  who guzzles martinis and refers to her credit card as her therapist, "Dr. Gold." My first
  choice for the part was Paula Poundstone, a stand-up comedienne with a twisted, wacky
  charm, I"d met her years before at a party, and as I approached her to shake hands, it
  looked as if her breasts were motorized. "Just a minute," she said. Then she reached
  down the front of her shirt and said, "Stop that, Fluffy." I was thinking: This woman has
  a real problem. Her breasts are doing figure eights, and she"s talking to them. Then she
  pulled out a kitten.
  But Paula was otherwise engaged, on a variety show, and I began reading with
  other actresses. It came down to a choice between Sally Kellerman and Christine
  Baranski. The latter was a Carsey-Werner favorite--she had been considered for their new
  show 3rd Rock from the Sun, a role that went to Jane Curtin. Christine has fabulous legs,
  and she arrived wearing a tight, horizontally striped miniskirt that practically showed
  goose bumps, but evincing a chilly attitude that I interpreted as ""This is beneath me."
  Since she had a theatrical background in New York, where she"d won two Tony awards, I
  checked her out with some New York theater friends, and everyone said the same thing:
  her work was respected, she was serious and talented, but watch your back. So I knew
  going in, just as I did with Bruce Willis, that this wasn"t necessarily Mr. Nice Guy. But
  when she read for the network, she hit a home run, nailed all the laughs. It was obvious,
  as it had been on Moonlighting, that this was the best person for the part.
  We settled on Tom Wopat as the sweetly Neanderthal stuntman ex-husband and
  Alan Rosenberg as the overwrought Jewish intellectual ex-husband. But we agonized
  over the role of the younger daughter, Zoey. Even though the titian-haired Alicia Witt was
  a real-life musical prodigy and had an interesting snotty appeal, she had almost no acting
  experience. She was already on her way home after the reading at the network, when we
  decided to call her back and tell her she had the part. The security police stopped her at
  the gate and sent her back up. I walked out to meet her, put my arms around her, and said,
  "Congratulations." The role of my elder daughter, Rachel, went to Dedee Pfeiffer (sister
  of Michelle), and when I suggested, "Why don"t we make Rachel pregnant?" Chuck said,
  "You"d agree to play a grandmother? You"re so brave."
  Working with Chuck was like a romance without the sex (although if I hadn"t just
  taken up with Roark, we might have crossed that line). He took me out for sushi, he sent
  me bouquets of out-of-season peonies, he practically moved into my house, and he
  transcribed my stories as fodder for the show. Much of the pilot was inspired by
  anecdotes I related, and he asked to have Clementine read the script to make sure the
  dialogue seemed plausible from a teenager"s perspective. A journalist had once teased me
  about being "an old spotted cow," and Chuck borrowed the phrase to convey the sense of
  fear about aging in public. Losing cats who wander into the canyons after dark and get
  eaten by coyotes was my experience too. The set designer even visited my house and
  modeled Cybill Sheridan"s home after it, although the set was too clean, and I kept
  urging, "It"s not like home. Make it messier."
  If Cybill Sheridan was the heart of the show, Maryann Thorpe was the sharp
  tongue. Christine delivered her clever barbs with perfect acerbic timing, but her character
  was more of a caricature, so it was easier to write her jokes. Every Friday night, I would
  receive my executive producer"s script, and sometimes we needed another pass before it
  went to the actors--the writers often had to come in on Saturdays to revise. My notes on
  every script were the same from the beginning: make all the characters smarter. Don"t
  trade their intelligence for dumb jokes. Never underestimate the viewers. Suspense is
  more interesting than surprise, and a joke is funnier if the audience sees it coming.
  It"s also true that the rhythm shouldn"t be predictable. Sometimes we got into a
  rut, with my character setting up the joke and Maryann delivering the punch line. When
  Christine won the Emmy and I did not, it fed a growing conspiracy theory in the press
  that asserted I was trying to sabotage Christine"s lines and enhance my part at the expense
  of her character. The gossip went something like this: I had been jealous when
  Moonlighting made Bruce Willis a star, and now it was deja vu all over again. Once a
  template gets made, the press tends to regurgitate all the old adjectives. The grain of truth
  in this controversy was that of course I was envious. Who doesn"t want to win an Emmy?
  My complaints about wardrobe added fuel to the flames of contention. I chose to
  work again with Robert Turturice, who had won an Emmy for his costuming on
  Moonlighting. For Cybill Sheridan, he often chose the square, shapeless clothes of a
  septuagenarian librarian, while Maryann"s skirts were so short that the world was her
  gynecologist. Christine didn"t need jokey clothes to be funny, and the tackiness of her
  wardrobe was sometimes distracting.
  Nominated for an Emmy for Cybill, Turturice became progressively less willing
  to consider new ideas and was replaced the second season by Leslie Potts, who gave both
  characters sophisticated and chic wardrobes. When she won an Emmy, you"d think it
  might have validated my original objections, but the theory, I believe, went: Cybill is
  jealous that Christine is thinner and wears sexier clothes. Christine once called Leslie into
  her dressing room and complained about one stunning cocktail sheath that I wore,
  arguing that Cybill Sheridan wouldn"t be able to afford such a dress. She was the victim, I
  was the monster, and there was little I could do to counter the accusations of self-
  promoting bitchery.
  Almost immediately, the show garnered loyal audiences and dream reviews. I did
  not take it for granted. I felt like a phoenix rising from the ashes. And if I didn"t have an
  Emmy, at least I was a figure at Madame Tussaud"s Wax Museum in London. The
  sculptor from the museum came to California with a bowlful of eyeballs, measuring
  every square inch of my body and every hair on my head--it took him eight hours. When
  I balked at doing the revolting dental impressions that make you gag, he convinced me to
  do it by saying, "Tony Bennett did it."
  Part of my job satisfaction was working with the man I loved. Chuck and Jay
  asked Roark to compose some of the "incidental" music for the show. I was very pleased
  they offered him a job, but keeping to an old pattern, I had fallen in love from the neck
  down.
  Roark could be cruelly insensitive, prone to pick a fight at the worst possible
  moment, like an opening night. But our biggest source of friction was his allegiance to a
  pseudo-philosophy called objectivism, promoted by the novelist Ayn Rand and based on
  the theory that reality is not subjective. There"s only one correct point of view, and
  anybody who doesn"t subscribe to it is wrong. In the hope of resolving our conflict, I
  agreed to finance "couples" therapy, and at our first session, the shrink announced, "This
  will never work." The relationship was too unbalanced, and Roark was dependent on me
  for his livelihood. So I made a mental adjustment: Roark"s belief was rather like voting
  Republican--alien to me but something I could overlook. He had recently become my
  musical director and I thought that music, along with our sex life, was a strong enough
  bond.
  In 1995 both Christine and I were nominated for Emmys. What the public
  generally doesn"t know is that actors have to put forth their own names to be nominated
  for these awards: the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences sends out a big book with
  all the names that have been submitted, and then the entire acting membership votes for
  five in each category. Those nominees each choose an episode that represents their best
  work from the previous season, and a "blue-ribbon" panel of industry volunteers watches
  the videotapes in a Beverly Hills hotel suite before voting.
  Because I was cohosting the awards that year, I was doing an interview at the
  back of the auditorium when Christine won for Best Supporting Actress. By the time they
  got around to announcing Best Actress, I was standing in the wings, listening to my heart
  beating, hearing people laugh heartily at the footage from my show but applaud more for
  Candice Bergen"s clips from Murphy Brown. I was prepared to lose, so when the camera
  panned to me, I took a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel"s that had been emptied and
  filled with Snapple. It was history repeating itself. Candice announced that it was
  embarrassing to keep winning and disqualified herself the following year, but it"s pretty
  damn embarrassing to keep losing too. Actors are telling the truth when they say that the
  real thrill is to be nominated but it"s only a thrill until thirty seconds after the nomination
  is announced. Then all you care about is winning because this time you deserve it, more
  than anyone else. Please, God? (To quote David Addison, God must have been otherwise
  engaged.) As the winner walks up the aisle, you"re smiling graciously and thinking: Die,
  bitch, die, it should have been me.
  Every actor has bad habits. I"m sometimes guilty of the kind of shameless
  mugging that inappropriately comments on the material while pulling the viewer"s focus
  away from the other actors. Orson Welles used to say, "Actors are either getting better or
  worse. There"s no standing still." I was able to do more self-correcting on Cybill because
  for the first time, as executive producer, I had the right to look at dailies. Not so for the
  others. Alan Rosenberg is a terrific actor, trained at the Yale School of Drama, but he
  often spoke his lines so fast that it was difficult to understand him, and he made a
  chewing motion with his jaw after nearly every punch line, like Charlie McCarthy.
  Christine Baranski went to Julliard, and she breathed fire and magic into her
  characterization, but she had a couple of bad habits--gazing directly into the camera
  lens--in movie parlance, it"s known as "looking down the barrel."
  (The camera operator is supposed to let the director know if an actor is doing it.) There"s
  also a bad habit known as "buying it back," laughing at her own joke. Sometimes we had
  to cut away from her best take at such a moment. The biggest problem was she often
  refused to hold for laughs, especially when it was my joke. In other words, she would say
  her lines while the audience was still laughing. As a result, they wouldn"t hear the setup
  for the next joke and wouldn"t laugh.
  I wanted to have a friendship with Christine, but she turned down so many
  invitations to visit my home that I finally said, "Look, you"ll just have to tell me when
  you"d like to come over." We were both mothers working outside the home, but she
  worked in L.A. and her children lived in New York City, which meant that she spent most
  weekends on the red-eye, usually rushing off after the Friday filming without taking
  curtain calls. Her wardrobe assistant would come to my dressing room and say,
  "Christine"s so sorry she couldn"t say good-bye, but she had to make a plane." Sometimes
  she returned late on Monday morning, understandably jet-lagged and acting as if the
  Cybill set was the last place on earth she wanted to be. She couldn"t have read the script
  because she was flying cross-country when it was distributed on Sunday night.
  Everybody could see when something was troubling Christine--the writers kept
  asking, "What"s wrong with her?" But she never came to me directly to say she wasn"t
  happy. That was not her way. Sometimes I would ask, but there wasn"t a lot of time for
  that kind of solicitation during the craziness of the production week and when I did have
  some time, on weekends or during hiatus weeks, she was back East. For both of us, time
  with our children was the most precious commodity, and just about every moment not
  working was spent with them. There was little opportunity to develop an off-site
  camaraderie, even a phony one, which might have been helpful. When performers have
  some degree of off-camera friendship, it can help develop a basis of mutual trust.
  Jay and Chuck never intended to film the show with an audience. From the
  beginning the plan was to play the finished episode in front of people for the laugh track.
  The studio audience, they argued, is not a real audience anyway; they"re just tourists
  herded onto the soundstage, and they"re weird because they know they"re being recorded.
  By not having a live audience, Jay and Chuck kept control out of the hands of the
  executives and actors. It"s true that just because an actor gets a laugh doesn"t mean it"s a
  good laugh. Christine got some of her biggest ones playing falling-down-dead drunk. We
  couldn"t use them because then her character would be a serious alcoholic and we"d have
  to take Maryann back to the Betty Ford Clinic, and that"s not so funny.
  With a live audience, a show becomes more of an actor"s medium--you have the
  opportunity to say, "See, they didn"t laugh. Write me something else." And the buses
  carry the studio audience away by eleven o"clock, making it imperative to finish by then.
  Without that limitation, we were at the mercy of Jay and Chuck, who could keep us as
  late as they liked, while we did take after take.
  Even though our ratings were good, Carsey-Werner wanted us to have a live
  audience. As we approached the second season, they asked for a meeting to talk me into
  it. "Make sure you say no," Jay instructed. But what the hell, I thought it"d be fun, more
  like theater. Jay was furious. "You"re real popular now," he sniffed. "They call you the
  "good witch."" And Marcy Carsey sent me a Barbie doll dressed as Glinda from The
  Wizard of Oz.
  The first time we did the show before a live audience was the second season
  opener. One of the executives at CBS came to the filming I said my thoughts out loud to
  The Suit. "You"re an executive at CBS? You"re so attractive." He smiled, pleased with
  the flirtation. That spring I got a call from an assistant to The Suit saying that he wanted
  to take me to dinner. I assumed it was a pleasant way to have an official meeting. I knew
  that he was married, and as far as I was concerned, so was I.
  I was ten or fifteen minutes late arriving at Pinot, an Italian restaurant in the San
  Fernando Valley, and The Suit was already at a table having a cocktail. He stood to greet
  me, said something complimentary about my outfit, and commented on the fact that a
  driver had brought me.
  About halfway through dinner, he asked, "So, are you involved with someone?"
  "Yes," I said, mentioning Roark. "We"re very committed, very much in love."
  We talked about children, his and mine. And then, quite out of the blue, he said,
  "My wife doesn"t really turn me on anymore."
  I know there was fish on my plate and a few mounds of vegetables because I
  looked down for a while, thinking, I"ve heard this before. Those were almost the exact
  words my dad said to me when he was getting ready to leave my mother. Wrenching
  myself back into the present, I looked up at him and said, "I"m sorry to hear that."
  "Mmmmm," he said, "I"ve had a number of affairs."
  "With whom?" I asked, and he mentioned one well-known actress. I was curious:
  how much would he spill?
  Just as the check came and he was reaching for his credit card, he said, "Why
  don"t you tell your driver to go home?"
  I was trying to handle the situation without bruising his ego. It was a bad idea for
  so many reasons. "You"re very attractive," I said smiling "but this wouldn"t be a good
  thing. I don"t fool around, I"m happy where I am, and we have a really important business
  relationship here."
  There was an uncomfortable pause. As he handed the signed receipt to the waiter
  and rose to leave, he said, "Maybe you"re right. Suppose we broke up and I didn"t like
  you anymore?" That might not be good for your show. The network might have to cancel
  your show."
  I don"t know what emotion my face registered, but I recovered enough to
  exchange cordial good-byes. I sent The Suit a handwritten letter, thanking him for dinner
  and carefully wording a comment about valuing our business relationship. He sent me
  flowers. I thought we were okay.
  But, as John Ford used to say, it was my turn in the barrel. My days at CBS were
  numbered.
  I had not spoken to Bruce Willis since the last days of Moonlighting, except in
  passing at an awards show. Perhaps inspired by the rapprochement with Jay Daniel,
  another alumnus of the show, I had called him during the hiatus. Neither of us apologized
  for anything that had transpired between us, but I was empathetic about the difficulty of
  becoming famous, about how hard it is to have a private life and give your family a sense
  of normalcy. "Hey," he said when we"d made amends, "if you like, I could come on your
  show and do a walk-on."
  "That would be wonderful," I said "would you like to talk to the writers?"
  "Nah," he said, "just have them come up with something and send it to me."
  They wrote a perfect Bruce Willis cameo into the first episode of our second
  season. I had suggested that spirituality was a rich area to mine for comedy, and in
  "Cybill Discovers the Meaning of Life," the writers created a character who was Cybill
  Sheridan"s "spirit guide." It seemed ironically appropriate to have Bruce play the part,
  since goddess spiritually had become an indelible part of my life as a direct result of my
  angst during the Moonlighting years. I knew that some of my views met with glazed--
  over eyes and could only imagine what hits I took behind my back--I tended to say
  "Goddess bless" when anybody sneezed and was probably a little mischievous in
  directing such a blessing to the most recalcitrant souls. Some people on the show resented
  any suggestion that we explore these themes, protesting what they considered a soapbox.
  If the audience laughs, it"s not a soapbox.
  In the second-season opener, my character is about to become a grandmother, and
  drags a reluctant Maryann into the Mojave to meditate.
  Cybill: "The desert is a power place."
  Maryann: "Spago is a power place."
  Cybill: "People have been having profound experiences in the desert for
  thousands of years."
  Maryann: "Name three."
  Cybill: "Jesus, Moses and Bugsy Siegel." Cybill is chanting to Mother Earth;
  Maryann is distracted and bored.
  Maryann: "You"re the one who"s all screwed up with this self indulgent, New
  Age yuppie crap--meditating, fasting, raising the cone of silence."
  Cybill: "It"s a cone of power."
  Maryann: "It"s a cone of crap."
  If I had wanted a soapbox, that line would have been cut. It was a way to poke fun
  at my own beliefs, and I thought it would be even more fun to have "David Addison"
  show up in the desert. But Bruce Willis" agent said he didn"t have time. Read whatever
  you want into the fact that he did cameos on Ally McBeal and Mad About You (the latter
  was head-to-head with my show on Sunday nights for a while).
  Second season, second episode: I was thrilled that Tony Bennett was signed as a
  guest star. I said to Chuck, "Hey, why don"t Tony and I sing a duet?"
  "We can"t change the script," he said. "Tony has already approved it."
  That was how I learned that a guest star had read the script before the star and
  executive producer, namely me. "How did that happen?" I asked Chuck.
  He hemmed and hawed, deflecting blame, and said, "If you want him to sing,
  you"ll have to ask him yourself." When Tony Bennett arrived to film his spot and came to
  my dressing room, he graciously agreed to sing two diets with me, "I Left My Heart in
  San Francisco" as well as "Nice Work If You Can Get It," the song that I performed over
  the opening credits every week. Afterward I gave Chuck an ultimatum: "Don"t ever send
  out a script that I haven"t approved to a guest star." He rolled his eyes. He had done
  something inappropriate, and I don"t think he ever forgave me for it.
  Perhaps my worst infraction was once asking to swap lines with Christine. In the
  opening scene of the "Zing!" episode, Cybill and Maryann are relaxing in chaise lounges
  under a ludicrous camouflage of hats, protective clothes, and sunglasses. Cybill was to
  say, "I miss the ozone layer," and Maryann was to respond, "What a price to pay for
  decent hair spray." Chuck interpreted my request as an attempt to steal Christine"s joke.
  Both of us got big laughs, but it was considered the final straw of my evil intent, and
  Chuck and I would never be the same.
  Whenever I argued with Chuck about something that didn"t ring true for me, he
  inferred a hidden agenda. In the third episode of the season, called "Since I Lost My
  Baby," Cybill goes shopping with her infant grandson, and Maryann absentmindedly
  leaves with the wrong baby, a girl. She discovers the mistake in the process of changing
  the baby"s diaper and says, "My God, that is the worst circumcision I"ve ever seen." I
  hated that line. Referring to the female anatomy as if it is inherently defective because
  something has been cut off smacks of the most archaic Freudian penis envy. The joke was
  demeaning and gratuitously disrespectful to all women.
  I knew that the line would get a big laugh, but again, audiences sometimes laugh
  for the wrong reason. Jay implied, none too subtly, that I was simply trying to sabotage a
  huge laugh for Christine. If they had given me the line, I would have refused to say it.
  But I was told: too bad, it"s staying in. Christine got a big laugh. Looking back, I realize it
  would not have been uncharacteristic of Maryann"s consciousness to say such a thing.
  The logical fix would have been to simply give Cybill Sheridan a follow-up line that
  reflected her feminist perspective. Who knows? My response could have been funny. I
  wish I had thought of that then.
  From the beginning Marcy Carsey gave me enormous support. "I was on every
  show, in every single story session," she defended me in a TV Guide interview. "Cybill is
  smart, she is supportive of Christine. Story meeting by story meeting, she said, "Can"t we
  do more for Christine here?"" And by the fall of 1995, when virtually every decision with
  Chuck Lorre involved a fractious disagreement, Marcy was prepared to let him go. Since
  Chuck is Jewish, she respectfully waited to deliver the bad news until after Yom Kippur,
  the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, but he still demurred in the press that the timing of
  his dismissal was insensitive to his religious traditions, without mentioning that his
  replacement was Jewish too: a kindly-looking bearded fellow named Howard Gould,
  who"d done an excellent job as supervising producer on the show. When we were looking
  around to replace Chuck, I kept saying, "Howard can do it, Howard can do it, Howard
  can do it." Jay Daniel and Carsey-Werner kept responding, "Howard can"t do it, Howard
  can"t do it, Howard can"t do it." I won that round and Howard did it.
  It was Dedee Pfeiffer who suggested hiring her friend Don Smith as our makeup
  man, and he soon became buddies with Christine as well, often driving her to and from
  work. He was let go after one season, but that didn"t stop Christine from bringing him as
  her date to the Golden Globe awards, making an uncomfortable evening for me. (How
  would you like to have the man you just canned sitting across the dinner table?)
  Every few months, there seemed to be a story in the tabloid press, always
  scurrilous and unattributed and usually about me. Christine was the target of one
  particularly obnoxious item, claiming that she was afraid to kiss a homosexual actor for
  fear of contracting AIDS (her children saw the paper in a store and brought it home, a
  virgin experience for her but one I"ve had over and over). It was obvious that someone
  close to the show was peddling "information." Finally, a well-respected journalist I knew
  called me and said, "I thought you might want to know that the source of those stories
  about your show is Don Smith."
  When I shared the journalist"s information Christine looked stricken. "I"d heard
  that might be true," she said quietly, "but I didn"t want to believe it." It was the closest I
  ever felt to her. Dedee was equally dismayed but seemed to put his treachery behind her:
  When she and a new boyfriend became engaged she called my assistant and said, "Look,
  I really can"t invite Cybill to the wedding because Chuck Lorre and Don Smith are going
  to be there."
  Howard Gould and I worked like a finely calibrated piece of machinery for most
  of his first year, but there was something about the first hiatus that changed the dynamics
  just as it had with Chuck Lorre. In an episode called "Mourning Has Broken," Maryann
  is convinced that the lawyer Cybill is dating murdered his wife. The two women sneak
  into his house, and the script called for us to blacken our faces. This came on the heels of
  a huge contretemps when Ted Danson was made up in vaudevillian blackface for the
  Friars Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, and the couple spent weeks in
  public relations purgatory, defending their odd sense of humor.
  "We can"t do that," I told Howard. "It"s demeaning to black people."
  "It"s just a little smudge," he argued.
  "You know what?" I said. "I am on the advisory board of the National Civil
  Rights Museum in Memphis. Let"s call the museum director and ask what she thinks."
  He exploded. "I lost family in the Holocaust," he screamed, "and if anybody
  knows about discrimination, it"s me."
  "Why don"t we use panty hose pulled down over our faces?" I suggested. "That
  will look funnier anyway," but he stormed out of the room. The panty hose were
  hilarious, with the feet dangling like tassels, but Howard never forgave me for my
  defiance. When he quit the show the next season, he had to be dragged from my trailer,
  practically foaming at the mouth and shouting, "I"m leaving, but I"m a better person than
  you are."
  "Things became Byzantine when Peter Bogdanovich told me his daughters had
  heard a rumor that my show was too expensive and was about to be canceled. Part of the
  reason was Jay Daniel, who sometimes demanded extravagant sets and had an expensive
  predilection for myriad takes of every shot. There"s an adage in the business that film is
  cheap but time is money, which justifies doing it "one more time" to make sure you "get
  it" and don"t have to come back later. But that"s not true for a situation comedy with four
  35-millimeter cameras moving in a complicated dance across the stage floor between the
  actors and the audience, each requiring a camera operator riding a dolly, a dolly grip to
  push, and a focus puller. Video is infinitely cheaper, but film is more aesthetic, more
  sharply defined, more flattering. We figured out that it cost about $1,000 per foot of film.
  For at least a year, Carsey-Werner had complained about going over budget and
  persistently urged that we fire Jay. I defended him but took a stand: "Three takes--that"s
  it. If the actors get the words right and don"t fall down, we have to move on."
  There was an entire building on the CBS Studio City lot in which every office
  was filled with people involved in the making of my show. Or so I thought. One day I
  went in the side door and was walking briskly down the hall, a little late for an editing
  meeting, when I heard my name called. It was an unpleasant voice from the past, but I
  didn"t identify it until I turned around. What the hell was Polly Platt doing there?
  "Cybill," she enthused, "guess what? I"m heading up the new feature film division
  for Carsey-Werner."
  Pause. "How wonderful," I said, knowing that I was up shit"s creek without a
  paddle. Who"s the absolutely last person on God"s green earth I would want whispering
  in the ears of the people who sign my paychecks? It is unlikely that I"ll ever work in a
  Polly Platt production. The source of Peter"s rumor was apparent, and from then on I used
  a different entrance to the building, nowhere near her office. A short time later, Polly sent
  me a handwritten note on Carsey-Werner letterhead, with a little heart drawn next to my
  name, telling me that her elder daughter, Antonia, an aspiring actress, had submitted a
  reel of her work to Jay Daniel, who had promised to get her a small part on my show.
  "Could you help?" the note pleaded. "It would mean a great deal to her, and of course, to
  me." The note was signed, "My very best to you Cybill." I passed the note on to Jay.
  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 Maryann 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 absent 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 grandmother for 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.
  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, "Christine just
  left.") I was later told that she went to the wardrobe 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 emergency 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"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 said, "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.
  "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 the little 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 facilitator, 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 whole 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 the 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.
  As a teenager, I was one of the lucky ones. I never had the need to end an
  unwanted pregnancy because my family doctor provided me with birth control. I had a
  freemdom that many women still don"t have today. I"m going to keep speaking out for
  those girls who weren"t so lucky, for my daughters and for other women--if not from the
  Oval Office, then from a multiplex or Web site or orangecrate podium near you. Watch
  me.
  
  NOT LONG AGO I READ FOR A PART WITH A YOUNG director who
  asked me, "How does it feel to have been in three great American movies?" (The part
  went to... to be announced.) Yes, that"s me in The Last Picture Show, The Heartbreak
  Kid, and Taxi Driver. But we are more than the sum of our work, and we"re not only as
  good as the last thing we did.
  I was thinking of these things on a trip to Graceland last year, almost thirty years
  since my last visit. Weeping behind my sunglasses, I stood at Elvis" grave in the
  meditation garden that was his pride and joy. At the time he took me there, I did not
  understand the symbolism in the lotus flower design of his beautiful stained-glass
  windows. I know that the unfolding petals of the lotus blooming in the mud suggest the
  expansion of the soul through suffering and adversity. Elvis was on to something but that
  enlightenment couldn"t save him. I wish he were still alive because I think we would be
  friends now. One of the realms on the Buddhist wheel of life is that of "hungry ghosts"
  where beings are tormented by unfulfilled longing and are never satisfied. I think I got
  stuck in that realm and tried to resolve my anger and pain with men, taking pleasure as if
  it had no consequence.
  With a girlfriend along as moral support, I decided to check out the plot I"d
  reserved for myself at Memorial Garden Park, on a wide verdant heath near Moma and
  Da-Dee. (Actually, I bought four plots, not knowing who might want to accompany me to
  the great beyond,) The very thought of eternal life made us hungry so we sat in the
  cemetery parking lot, stuffing our faces with fried cat-fish and hush puppies from Captain
  D"s takeout before venturing into the mortuary office, where it took some time to find me.
  "How do you spell your name?" the mortician kept asking, eventually recognizing
  this as a photo op and requesting that I pose in front of a display of headstones.
  "What are all those?" I asked, looking at the slabs of marble, the various tints and
  typefaces.
  "Those are your choices," he said cheerfully. "Would you like to make some
  decisions as long as you"re here?" He was enthusiastic about a newly available option:
  the dearly departed"s face in bas-relief on the marker. "We can go look at Charlie Rich,"
  he offered and drove us over to the plot. Poor old Charlie looked exactly like Leslie
  Nielsen, so I declined.
  My friend was mortified, considering it weird and macabre to be hanging out at a
  graveyard on this clement spring day, discussing whether or not I should be embalmed
  before being cremated--prettified with a final "hair-and-makeup" for the few moments in
  the coffin before I turn to ash. But I feel peaceful in this place where my aunt Ruby took
  me to play when I was a little girl. And I am comforted to imagine that someone in the
  twenty-first century will remember a big, brassy blonde who tried to use humor as the
  Krazy Glue for life"s necessary reparations, a stranger who will stand with a smile at my
  final resting place, reading a tombstone that says, "We"ll make this a comedy yet..."
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