Cybill Disobedience
Cybill DisobedienceHOW I SURVIVED
BEAUTY PAGEANTS,
ELVIS, SEX,
BRUCE WILLIS,
LIES, MARRIAGE,
MOTHERHOOD,
HOLLYWOOD,
AND THE
IRREPRESSIBLE URGE
TO SAY WHAT I THINK
Cybill Shepherd
with Aimee Lee Ball
From wholesome beauty queen to saucy cover girl, from heartbreaking movie star (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, TAXI DRIVER) to one of television's most loved comediennes (MOONLIGHTING, CYBILL), Cybill Shepherd is renowned as sassy, shocking and sexy. In CYBILL DISOBEDIENCE, she opens her heart with the wit and honesty of a star who's seen and knows it all.
“A fun, dirt-flinging read” TOTAL FILM
“A blistering autobiography” NEWS OF THE WORLD
“Wild and wicked” WOMAN’S OWN
“Amazingly frank” THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
“Her finest piece of work to date” DAILY EXPRESS
“A riveting, candid, fresh and self-revealing book.” LIZ SMITH
“Gutsy.” SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
“Nobody kisses and tells like Cybill Shepherd.” NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
COPYRIGHT © River Siren Productions, Inc.
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.
One.
“Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
”
Five.
“Make Sure There’s a Lot of Nudity”
Seven.
“I Need a Cybill Shepherd Type”
Ten.
“I’m Cybill Shepherd, You Know, the Movie star?”
Twelve.
“We’ll Make This a Comedy Yet...”
Los Angeles, California, Oct. 30, 1999
6:17 P.M.-
In 123 minutes I’m appearing onstage in my cabaret act at the Cinegrill of the fabled old Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. However, right now I’m on the Hollywood freeway in bumper-to-bumper traffic. At this pace, one inch every five minutes, I’ll just make it at eight-thirty in the year 2004.
7:12 P.M.-
Turning off Highland onto Hollywood Boulevard, we’re rear-ended by a station wagon.
7:14 P.M.-
I have no choice. Leaving my driver, Tom, to take care of that situation, I take off running, dragging behind me a rolling suitcase filled with my costume, makeup, and sheet music. I’m wearing a black leather cap, black high-tops, black jeans, and a bodywear top that I hadn’t exactly planned on publicly displaying in an area of town where this kind of cleavage can either get you arrested or hired. Heading west toward Mann’s Chinese Theatre, a greasy-looking wino calls out “C’mon, baby, gimme some of that!” Without breaking stride, I holler back, “Normally I would, but right now I don’t have time.”
7:16 P.M.-
Reaching the north corner of the intersection of Orange and Hollywood Boulevard, I look up and freeze in fear. My name is
not
on the marquee. This is not good. Could it be I’m here on the wrong night? I dart through traffic and leaping safely onto the far sidewalk, quickly glance down at my star on the Walk of Fame. I notice a wad of gum on it. I try to kick it off. Now I’ve got a glob of purple goo stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I yank off the shoe and hobble into the Roosevelt lobby.
7:20 P.M.-
To my enormous relief, I see a placard that says Cybill Shepherd
is
performing here tonight. Carrying my shoe, dragging my suitcase, I hurtle across the lobby and pound on the elevator button. The doors open almost immediately, but the elevator is full. I jam myself, my shoe, and my suitcase in anyway, gasping for breath. A woman behind me squeals, “Are you who I think you are?”
“I certainly hope so,” I answer, trying to maintain some semblance of composure.
7:25 P.M.-
My assistant, Jason, anxiously paces at the door of my fourth-floor dressing room as I rush in and begin frantically unpacking my bag.
“Your hairdresser’s stuck in traffic on the freeway,” Jason says, taking in my disheveled appearance, trying hard to hide his horror. The eighteen-hour makeup that gives my face and arms a flawless resurfacing has leaked out over everything in my bag: brushes, rollers, makeup, hairspray. It’s time for prayer, “Please God, let my hairdresser get here in the next five minutes.”
7:29 P.M.-
The stage manager knocks: “One hour, Cybill! Do you need anything?” I want to say yes, I need my hairdresser to be here. I need my makeup to be scraped out of the bottom of the bag, I need my sheet music to be dried out, but I can’t say any of that because my cell phone is ringing.
7:30 P.M.-
It’s my older daughter, Clementine, calling from the car. She and my younger daughter, Ariel, are stuck on yet another freeway taking our beloved black pug petunia to the vet. Obviously, Clementine and Ariel are going to be late for my show. I understand. They have their priorities too.
7:35 P.M.-
My twelve-year-old son, Zachariah, rushes in from the adjoining room with a look of consternation. He has forgotten until this very moment that tonight is the biggest party of the year, thrown by his best friend. “Can you please take me right now, Mom?” Before I can answer, the doorbell rings. It’s Cathy, my hairdresser. Right behind her is a woman I’ve never seen before, who grabs me by the arm and gushes: “Oh, Cybill, I can’t wait for your book to come out. My marriage is falling apart, my kids are driving me crazy, and I’m premenopausal too. I take one look around me--at my pleading son, my ringing cell phone, the accoutrements of my soon-to-be onstage self strewn all over the floor, and my only thought is
But clearly I’m writing more of a How-Not-to book.
8:20 P.M.-
“Mmmraahhh. Mmmmmmrraaahhhh.” I’m vocalizing. While Cathy teases my hair, I console Clementine on the cell phone about the state of Petunia’s kidneys, and the stage manager pops in with the ten-minute warning while I try to remember the lyrics to “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
8:30 P.M.-
“Please, Mom, can’t you take me now,” Zach implores as I slop on some makeup and throw on my clothes.
“I love you,” I say, trying to remember the lyrics to “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show,” “but Mom has to work now and I can’t go anywhere except onstage in about thirty-eight seconds.”
8:33 P.M.-
Outside the door of the Cinegrill, the stage manager hands me my microphone as I slip into my shoes. I’ve mollified Zach. He’s upstairs doing his homework. Petunia’s kidneys have resumed functioning. And Clementine and Ariel are on the way. The band jumps into the intro of “That Old Black Magic” as the announcer intones, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... direct from polishing her star on Hollywood Boulevard... Cybill Shepherd.
“Who’s the Fairest of Them All?”
PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER LIVED THROUGH AN EARTHQUAKE
assume that one of its salient features is noise--the sounds of splintering glass, the symphony of physical destruction, the uncanny moaning of buildings as steel and wood and concrete are strained to some implausible degree. But that’s quickly over. Far more shocking is the eerie quietude: the power failure that eliminates the humming of air-conditioning and refrigerators, the absence of music, the traffic that has come to a standstill. It’s as if a mute button has been pushed on the world. That’s what it’s like when a television series ends. The lights go out, the people scatter, the magic has died. And the Cybill show did not go gently. I did not go gently.
Over a thirty-year career, I had died before--cacophonous, public, psychically bloody deaths engineered at the box office and hands of critics--but this demise was singularly painful. I’d given my name and much of my identity to the series, blurring the line between real life and fiction, much more than is customary in television. (
Murphy Brown
was not called
Candice
, and the character didn’t grow up with a wooden dummy for a brother.) Every door on our CBS soundstage had a plaque with CYBILL inscribed inside a blue chalk star, just like the one used under the opening title that pans across the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Gunsmoke
was produced on that stage for eighteen years, but there was no trace of iconic piece of American television history in the wings. As I drove off the lot for the last time, I knew how quickly my presence would evaporate, how soon the studio maintenance department would remove those plaques and the billboard-size CYBILL on the side of the stage.
The eulogies were not kind. While the real reasons for the show’s demise were never made public, I was accused of professional paranoia and megalomania, of being, as Lady Caroline Lamb famously said of Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” I was labeled a jealous egomaniac, a self-promoting bitch, and a few other well-chosen words whose invocation would have gotten my mouth washed out with Camay in my Memphis childhood. I preserved all the poison-pen notices as a record, hard evidence of what I had survived and the proof that I wasn’t paranoid. I had clearly made people exceedingly angry, committed some unpardonable transgression. It was not the first time.
What got me in trouble, what has always gotten me in trouble, was disobedience. On the
Cybill
show, I had been 57 different kinds of disobedient. From the beginning, my strategy was to challenge--always with humor--the conventional wisdom about “appropriate” subjects for television audiences. I was the first baby boomer to have a prime-time hot flash, and we skewered the injustice of a culture that pretends women over forty are invisible. I persuaded the writers to incorporate ideas from my own odyssey of discovery, like cultivating a reverence for three symbolic states of a woman’s life: maiden, mother, and crone. (Okay, okay, there’s a brief cheerleader phase in there that can’t be ignored.) I had the temerity to become a grandmother on American television, one experience not replicated in real life, but when my character cooed to her TV daughter, “And you even got married first!” it was a mocking reference to my own pregnancies before marriage. When my character’s two ex-husbands happened to be in the living room just as her date showed up on the doorstep, art was mirroring my life, as it was in an episode about male impotence (delicately referred to on the show as “failing to perform”).
Strange to think that these themes were considered radical by network executives and reviewers, but women who represent the cultural gamut of sizes and ages aren’t too welcome in any media. After nearly a decade of murmuring “I’m worth it” for L’Oreal, I was fired because my hair got too old--approximately as old as I was. It’s okay for Robert Mitchum to get up early in the morning and look like Robert Mitchum, but it was not okay for me to wake up in the morning and look like Robert Mitchum. Fans are always asking why Bruce Willis and I don’t reprise our
Moonlighting
roles for the big screen. The answer is: studio executives would consider me too old for him now.
With few exceptions, American television has become the Bermuda Triangle for female over forty. There was a wide variety of middle-aged women on the air in 1998, and they were all gone by 1999. Not only
Cybill
, but
Murphy Brown
,
Ellen
,
Roseanne
,
Grace Under Fire
, and
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
all disappeared the same year. It’s true that these shows had been around for a while and may have run their course, so this chorus of swsongs takes on a deeper significance when we see the replacements:
Felicity
,
Darma & Greg
,
Moesha
,
Ally McBeal
,
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and those very skinny
Friends
. No one over thirty need apply.