Cybill Disobedience (12 page)

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 ovproduche 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. Kning 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.