Cybill Disobedience (13 page)

(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 I still thought of marriage as an outdated institution left over from the era of chastity belts, but Peter said he had to give his own marriage a chance.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 originlly 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 peole 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.

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&rsqor 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.