Cybill Disobedience (17 page)

I didn’t know what “it” was until later. Orson had shoved a still-smoldering cigar into the pocket of a robe, which he dropped on a mat when he got in the shower. The cloth caught fire and burned into the rug before he realized the danger. The next day, as an apology, I received
The Victor
Book of
the Opera,
which he had inscribed with a play on an old nursery rhyme: “Ladybug, ladybug, go away home, your house is on fire and your houseguest, a hibernating bear, is too.” The illustration was of my house leaping with flames, the smoke smudged, he said, with his own spit.

In August of 1972, Peter and I were invited to meet Richard Nixon at a fund-raiser in San Clemente for the president’s Hollywood supporters. Our disinclination toward Republican politics paled in comparison to our annoyance that
The Last Picture Show
was deemed too racy to be screened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but nobody turns down an invitation to meet the president, even if it was Nixon. I ransacked my closet and came up with a full-length gown by Jean Patou that was as close to an American flag as a dress could be—a red-and-white-striped skirt with a blue bodice. The invitation had read, “Less than cocktail dress,” but this was the president of the United States (even if it was Nixon). When we stopped to ask directions at a Shell station, the attendant simply pointed to the sky and the huge khaki green helicopters circling above an estate surrounded by chain-link fence. Granted admission, we felt like the Mel Brooks joke about going to a party where everyone is a tuxedo and you’re a brown shoe. There were Clint Eastwood, Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger with Jill St. John, Debbie Reynolds, Glen Campbell, Charlton Heston, and Jim Brown. Peter introduced me to John Wayne, who mentioned his admiration for
The Last Picture Show.
“But I’ll tell ya the truth,” he said in his signature drawl, “I was a little embarrassed. I mean, my wife was there.” Nixon gave a stuffy little speech paying homage to Wayne. “Whenever we want to run a pnded by Camp David,” he said, “I always say, ‘Let’s run a John Wayne picture.’” Wayne, who had a drink in his hand, probably not his first, raised his glass and said, “Keep those coming’.”

An aide-de-camp informed us that the men should precede the women in the reception line on the grass, where the president was standing. When we came face-to-face with Nixon, I smiled and said, “I wore this dress especially for you, Mr. President.”

“And you look lovely, my dear,” he said. Then, directed at Peter, “You ought to put her in a picture.”

“I did,” Peter said. “It’s one you haven’t seen.”

Nixon looked perplexed. “What’s the name of that production?’’ he asked with great formality.

“The Last Picture Show,”
said Peter.

Musing over the title, Nixon said, “That’s a black and white production, isn’t it, the one that takes place in Texas?’’

“That’s right,” Peter said, genuinely surprised.

“I saw that,” said Nixon. “That’s a remarkable picture.” Then he turned to me and, touching my arm in a kindly manner, said, “And what part did you play, my, dear?”

Nearly stuttering, I finally got out the word “Jacy.” Peter, who was enjoying my discomfiture way too much, added, “She’s the one who stripped on the diving board.”

Nixon and I both turned crimson. His hand kept patting my arm lightly while still maintaining eye contact with Peter as he said, “Well, everyone gave a remarkable performance in that film. And of course, I remember you very well now, my dear.”

Not long after, we were invited to visit the legendary director Jean Renoir, then in his eighties and living in Beverly Hills. Jean had repeated his father’s predilection for angering his compatriots: the French threw rotten vegetables at the Impressionist exhibit where they first saw Auguste Renoir’s paintings, and years later Jean Renoir’s film
La Regle du Jeu (The
Rules of the Game) would be so severely panned that he would say he was either going to quit making films or leave France.

When we first entered his home, the only thing I could see was a luminous portrait of a young man in the woods holding a rifle (a painting that now hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). So distracted was I by this glorious work of art that I didn’t even see Renoir himself until I heard a strange motorized sound and saw a sweet-looking old man being raised up to a standing position by an automated chair. He took a faltering step toward me, and I saw the bluest of eyes in a pale crinkly face, right out of the painting. His wife, Dido, who looked to be about thirty years younger, served white wine in short, very cold sterling silver cups that formed refreshing droplets of condensation, delightful in the heat of the summer day. We mentioned our visit to San Clemente, but naturally the talk turned to filmmaking. We were having an animated conversation with Dido, who had served as her husband’s script supervisor, about the unfortunate necessity of dubbing. Suddenly the great man looked agitated, his pale face flushed, and he started rising out of his chair again. “I have the answer to Richard Nixon,” he said excitedly. “Nixon is dubbed! And in a civilized time, like the thirteenth century, men would have been burned at the stake for less!”

IT IS FACINATING TO WATCH, ALTHOUGH I COULD
hardly do so without passionate self-interest, as a budding career becomes a meteor. I’m talking about Peter here, not myself. Equally fascinating is the chronicle of the roads not taken. (Orson said, “Your career is made more by what you don’t do than by what you do.”) Before
The Last Picture Show
had even opened, it was enerating an expectant buzz in the industry, and Peter got a call from Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount, which had just bought a book about the Mafia by Mario Puzo. Peter had no interest in directing a film about organized crime and its peculiar ethos of
la famiglia
. Ten years later, Evans was still chastising him for bad career choices.

“Hell, you even turned down The Godfather,” said Evans.

“No, I didn’t,” said Peter.

“Yeah, you did,” said Evans, recounting their conversation. But Peter was able to do some reciprocal reproaching because Evans’s bad judgment had cost him his marriage. He had tried to recruit Peter once again, this time to direct
The Getaway
with Steve McQueen. Ali MacGraw, then Evans’s wife, was to costar, but the part was written for a barefoot southern girl, a prototype of which just happened to be living with Peter. “Ali MacGraw can’t play this,” he insisted to Evans. “Isn’t she from Bennington, Vermont?” McQueen didn’t want me either (it’s much harder for the leading man to make a move on the leading lady if she’s the director’s babe, since the director is omnipresent). Disagreeing with the casting, Peter turned down the assignment. MacGraw got the part, and McQueen got MacGraw.

When Evans began producing his own films, he asked Peter to direct a detective story in the Raymond Chandler tradition starring Jack Nicholson, with whom Peter had a friendly personal rivalry. (I’d made one date with Jack to spite Peter for going to a film expo with his ex-wife, which I took as a sign to the world that we didn’t really exist as a couple. When Peter called and apologized, I canceled the date. Jack has never spoken to me since, except for “Hi” at a party.) Again Peter wanted to cast me in the femme fatale role opposite Nicholson, but Evans declared me too young. He wanted Faye Dunaway, so Peter said no to
Chinatown.

I WAS BUSY MAKING MY OWN MISTAKES. THERE ARE
whole chapters of my life that can be written with the postscript, “And the part went to...” The exalted director George Cukor had been acidly flattering about
The Last Picture Show-
-he’d told Peter, “You’re going to put us old-timers out of work.” Cukor was the undisputed king of comedy for brainy, beautiful women, and I had practically memorized his oeuvre--Jean Harlow in
Dinner at Eight,
Katharine Hepburn in
The Philadelphia Story,
Judy Holiday in
Born Yesterday.
I was honored even to get an audition with him. But when I tried out for a small part in
Travels with My Aunt,
he said, “That was a really bad reading. Why don’t you take it home and study it? You can come back and try again tomorrow.” Peter and I spent two or three hours on it, and the next day I went to Cukor’s office for another reading. I thought I didn’t do half badly considering that I hadn’t slept all night, visions of the bungled lines prancing before my eyes. But Cukor put down the script, looked at me over horn-rimmed glasses and said, “I’m going to give you some good advice, and if you have any sense, you’ll take it. You have no comedic talent. Never try it again.” (The part went to... Cindy Williams, who became the latter half of
Laverne and Shirley,
and I developed an irrational hostility for her from which I never recovered.) A celebrated director had gone out of his way to be brutally discouraging, and I whimpered, worried, agonized, and almost believed him. But even though I’ve given up lots of times in my life, I usually only allow myself a week or two of sulk. Like the little engine that could, I get back on track. Ultimately no public or private humiliation has ever stopped me.

Orson Welles had given me the novella
Daisy Miller,
about a rich, spoiled, brash but naive young woman frm Schenectady, New York, trying to infiltrate nineteenth-century European society. “Henry James wrote this for you,” he said, slipping me a slim volume bound in faded red linen. “You act wonderfully on camera just like Daisy, but you overact in real life. And either Peter or I should direct it for you.” Peter got the job, and he filmed the book almost verbatim--there were perhaps three words in the dialogue that James didn’t write. Daisy chatters on, and on, and on, about her mother’s dyspepsia, about her nettlesome little brother, about strangers met in railroad carriages. Her manner of conversation and free spirit are judged harshly--one character says of her, “I don’t think she is capable of thought at all.” Since people often felt the same of me, it seemed perfect typecasting. In 1972 I was doing essentially what Daisy did in 1865: pushing the limits of polite society and ruining her own reputation.

Cloris Leachman gave one of her extraordinarily compelling performances as Daisy’s mother--permissive, whining, perpetually flustered--and Larry McMurtry’s son James (in his first acting job) was the bratty little brother who drones on like a fly that won’t be swatted away. The story is told completely from the point of view of Fredric Forsyth Winterbourne, the achingly correct young man who is infatuated with her but horrified by her defiance of curfews and convention. Peter had spoken to Jeff Bridges about casting Barry Brown (they had worked together in Bad Company), but no one realized that he was in the last stages of an addiction that would cause him to take his life just a few years later. He was glum and withdrawn, and his breakfast of champions consisted of beer, coffee, and Valium, a pattern that couldn’t help but affect the shooting schedule. Twilight is frustratingly evanescent for a film-maker--there are endless hours of preparation for a small window of opportunity--and Barry once staggered onto the set so drunk that we couldn’t shoot the scene before we lost the lovely light. Since he was in practically every scene, replacing him would have necessitated trashing all the film that had been shot and starting from scratch. “If he reaches for another drink,” Peter yelled to an assistant, “break his fucking arm or I’ll shoot him.”

As the filming dragged on into the heat of tourist-clogged Rome in August, Peter and I both became rather brooding and testy.
Daisy Miller
necessitated meticulous period details and locations in Italy evocative of the society that wealthy Americans wanted to invade, but it was to be Peter’s first movie without Polly as set designer. The wardrobe was made by Tirelli of Rome, the penultimate movie costumer, and the only liberty taken with historical authenticity at the suggestion of costume designer John Furness, was to move the time forward by five years so the women didn’t have to wear such huge, exaggerated bustles. Fittings took eight hours, and I developed chronic back pain from the tight corsets of the period, which stretched all the way from the bust to the hip, creating a perpetual swayback. There were times when I had to stop and be unlaced or reach for the smelling salts to keep from passing out.

One day I fell asleep in my dressing room and showed up half an hour past my call. “You will never be late again,” Peter screamed. “I don’t care how big a star you become. Time is money in this business. It’s not only expensive, but it’s insulting to the rest of the cast and crew. Marilyn Monroe was fired from her last picture for being late.” His tirade made an impression. In that scene, my eyes are puffy from crying, and I played the scene with exactly the right pervasive sadness. (Maybe he did it on purpose. You know how these amateur directors are.)

Despite the fact that this movie was a dream opportunity for us, Peter and I weren’t having a lot of fun together, on or ofset. He was exhausted, often not feeling well, and he didn’t want to leave the hotel. I wanted a playmate to make a midnight gelato run to the Piazza Navona. I wanted to make weekend excursions to cool Tuscan villages. I wanted to make love in Roman ruins. As always, I was better at acting out than talking out.

The perfect accomplice for hooky was a deputy producer my own age who had gotten his start working on Peter’s movies as a gofer (go for coffee, go for errands...). Our friendship began during
The Last Picture Show,
and we had spent afternoons by the pool of our Texas motel, taking turns bouncing on the diving board and pretending to jump into the freezing water fully clothed. We shared a love of music and a childhood informed by alcohol: his father was a jazz guitarist who went off the wagon at John Ford’s wake and died of a heart attack. The Producer had thinning brown hair, which never mattered to me (my first erotic fantasies were about Yul Brenner), and still had the carefree demeanor of a Southern California surfer: athletic and game for anything. We quickly became buddies, both of us pretending not to notice the powerful attraction because it was beyond inappropriate.