Cybill Disobedience (15 page)

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 troubleortunately, 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 rmp 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 at 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 right 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 minimalisim 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
.