Cybill Disobedience (16 page)

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 viloquist’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 bee sting, and I swell up like Marlon Brando.”

PETER TOOK EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO SIT AT
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,rson 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 man.” 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.”