Cybill Disobedience (2 page)

But I had defied convention beyond my approach to
Cybill
’s subject matter. From the start, I let it be known that I wanted an ensemble cast, that everybody’s part should be great. I meant me too. I wanted the star of this show to have funny dialogue, clever story lines, and interesting dilemmas, without dumbing or dulling down the other characters. In insisted on having the grown-up female friendship that was the centerpiece of the show, a relationship with a side-kick rich in outrageous comic potential perhaps last tapped when Lucy Ricardo got Ethel Mertz to work in the candy factory. But that show was called
I Love Lucy
, not
Lucy and Ethel
. When I acted as an advocate for my character, trying to take the show in certain directions and expressing concern that the humor had become predictable, my efforts were viewed as territorial, the demands of an overblown ego afraid of being overshadowed. Three of my producers left, all rancorously: one said he had failed to save me from myself; another called me insensitive, bordering on anti-Semitic (rather ignoring that his replacement was Jewish and that I have two half-Jewish children); the third was dragged from my presence screaming “I’m a better person that you are.” The studio producing my show cut me off at the knees the minute I was off camera, arrogating my authority as executive producer. And my costar, handpicked for the role and richly rewarded for her good work with money and accolades, walked out on the rehearsal of the last episode.

It was a clusterfuck of a year. Ten days after filming the last episode of
Cybill
, I found myself in the hospital with a gut-wrenching pain. A doctor I’d never seen before was telling me that I needed emergency abdominal surgery and that the scar wouldn’t be pretty. My intestines, it turned out, were twisted into something resembling fusilli marinara, and I can’t help making metaphysical metaphors about the gut being the site of intuition, about literally going under the knife at the same time that I was being cut and killed off on CBS. As it happened, my worst turncoat was much closer at hand, and a few months later, with stunning surgical precision (last metaphor, I promise) I was eviscerated by the man I thought would be sharing my dotage and my denture cup at the Old Actors’ Home. He was my lover, my friend, my colleague, and my supposed life partner. But he concluded his business with me, after making sure he was paid, and announced that our relationship was over. In the blink of a Saturday afternoon, he was gone.

THE LONGEST, DEEPEST STREAK OF DISOBEDIENCE
in my life has been about sex. Although the strictures of southern womanhood were honed to a fine edge in my family and I followed some of them flawlessly, I never observed the sexual canons. I did exactly as I pleased, and what pleased me was sex--early with a man I naively thought would be the love of my life, later with a dispensable succession of partners. Sex became politicized and endorsed by my generation, made safe with the advent of the Pill, even though such behavior was still a moral issue for lots of people, including my parents. I was a very, very bad girl, living out the epiphany of the 1970s for women: that sex and love aren’t necessarily the same thing.

I don’t know if I’ve accrued more than my fair share of lost loves, but I’m something of a haunted person from the damage. Many times I was confused about the men I slept with, not knowing for sure whether I was genuinely attracted to them, or if the impetus was their attraction to me. I had to be kicked in the head by a few mules; now I’ve given up riding. In one of life&rquo;s little full circles, I have become a creature of the sexually retrograde 1990s, just as I was of the sexually voracious 1960s. Society has been reindoctrinated to idealize monogamy and all the other virtues our mothers preached, but these days I’m sleeping alone. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, put on blue eye shadow, and try to learn country line dancing in front of the TV. At least there are other people on the video.

Not until now have I realized how supremely important it was for me to confront and embrace my lifelong sense of profound loneliness, to stop making choices based on avoiding that demon. There’s loneliness in being the child of parents whose own problems divert their attention, as mine did. Now that a grown daughter has already left the nest and her younger siblings have their wings spread, I’m facing down the devil once again, wondering what will be next? Is it okay for a woman to be alone? Is monogamy necessary? Will I only feel safe with a partner if there’s a clearly delineated “yours”, “mine”, and “ours”? Can I trust someone who doesn’t have as much to lose as I do? And who would that person be?

Three decades ago I fell in love with a married man who turned his life inside out because of me. He would be one of the most significant people in my life, a mentor and lifelong friend, but I was deemed a “home wrecker”, someone who showed up unbidden with self-aggrandizing motives that bordered on the immoral and violated cultural bylaws. Forever after, it seemed, I was slated to be the bad girl. People said, “She has no right to_____,” and fill in the blank. I decided I had to trust myself, which has led to some ungainly ups and downs. I’ve had two failed marriages and a few real-life soap operas. There are people in Hollywood who won’t return my calls or run screaming from the room at the mention of my name. I’ve been in a few films that could serve as paradigms of the form, and more than I care to count of the straight-to-video kind.

I can’t escape the conviction that fate has something to do with appearance, with the perception of personality or merit based on veneer. I earned by living on my looks for a long time, and it taught me that the accident of beauty incurs resentment --why should something that requires no effort or skill be rewarded? People seldom let their envy show so blatantly as a teaching assistant in an English class who once gave me a C for a poem that her supervisor later upgraded to an A+. At eighteen my looks were as close to perfect as they would ever be, but I was deeply insecure because I knew that appearance constituted my sole value, and eighteen is ephemeral.

Sometimes I wore my looks like a mantle with a certain degree of discomfort. People, especially men people, happily inconvenience themselves for a woman so marked, but she’ll pay one way or another. I always knew that the power I gleaned from beauty dwarfed any other kind of achievement. No matter how hard I worked, I was credited only for the one thing that was effortless. The looks I was born with meant that I never lacked sexual partners but also meant that I could rarely discern who really cared about me. I learned from Yeats: “Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.”

The vain, murderously envious queen in
Snow White
poisons the young beauty but still doesn’t feel safe when told that her rival is dead. She continues to look in the mirror, asking, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” I grew up with this fairy tale and with the presumption of female envy. My mother absorbed this common cultural belief and passed it on to me, but I’d like to think that I’ve protected my daughters from it. When I look at my eldest now, I know absolutely who the fresh young beauty is, without begrudging her the role. I’ve already played it, and I’d prefer not to play the evil queen, in life anyway.

THERE’S A DIXIE CHICKS SONG WITH A WISE AND
placating lyric that goes, “You gotta make big mistakes.” I’ve made my share, and I ask for no jeremiads. I’ve been blessed with success in public life. Early on I fed readily and greedily off the seductive culture of narcissism and celebrity worship that abandons and replaces its acolytes at warp speed. Sometimes I’ve failed to hold myself accountable. Now I’m looking at my own trajectory, hoping to discern Cybill the Good and Cybill the Bad, trying to understand in order to be understood. I want to figure out how I became one of the Furies --me, the same person voted Most Cooperative at Camp Pickwick in 1959.

Some people have asked why I’d subject myself to the scrutiny of public confession when there are so many reasons not to; it’s painful, I’m too young, I will be harshly judged. But events of the last year, symbolized by the not-so-pretty scar that means I’ve worn my last bikini, have forced me to realize that there are no guarantees about our time on the planet. Last year I went on
Good Morning America
, discussing menopause and a recently published list of sex symbols over the age of fifty. Just shy of my fiftieth birthday at the time, I didn’t qualify, but if I’m not on the list next year, I’m coming after them. (Hell, if Judge Judy can make the cut, I’d better be included.) Just before we went “live” with the interview, Diane Sawyer leaned over to me and said, “If you had to choose one song to sum up your whole life, what would it be?” I frantically mused for just an instant before the song popped into my mind: “For all we know, this may only be a dream; we come and go, like a ripple in a stream...”

So I’d like to tell my story now. I’ve actually been doing autobiography in front of the public for along time, but the standards of memoir are daunting. Memory is revisionist and selective by nature, and it is tempting to edit out the nasty, unflattering, what-was-I-thinking parts. “Tell it all Mom,” my elder daughter advised me. (Hell, no, I’d end up in jail.) I’ve given sobriquet to a few key players who don’t deserve to have their names spelled right. This is how I remember it. And if my mother objects to any reminiscence in these pages... it didn’t happen.

THERE IS AN IMAGE ENGRAVED IN MY MEMORY VIVID
enough to evoke a smell (the red vinyl of a well-used armchair) and a sound (the flick of a cigarette holder against a metal ashtray): it’s the image of a twelve-year-old me, gangly and no longer a towhead, much to the chagrin of my mother, who seemed to greet the natural darkening of my blonde hair as a dereliction of filial duty. Also to her dismay, I was utterly contemptuous of most girlish playthings but fanatically preoccupied with horses. The school librarian looked squint-eyed at me for years, suspecting I’d stolen a copy of
Olympic Horseman
(I had), and I saved up the nickels allocated for orange Creamsicles to buy miniature plastic horses and Black Stallion books at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center. At times I morphed into equine behavior myself, cantering around the house with a jump rope in my mouth and a bath mat belted on as a saddle. I would make a steeplechase out of the hedges separating the yards on our street and neigh in response to questions. But owning a horse was an extravagance far beyond the middle-class means of my parents, for whom canned asparagus constituted a luxury. The necessary deep pockets were worn by my grandfather.

We called him Da-Dee (accent on the second syllable), and my grandmother was always Moma, resistant to the notion of being “Grandma” and relegating her ownr to the more formal “Mother.” Outside of the family, they were Cy and Tommy, both nicknamed for their fathers. Norville Shapleigh “Cy” Shobe, the son of Missouri poultry farmers, was an electronics wizard, just a boy when he made front-page news in Kansas City by assembling the first homemade radio in the state-- strangers from half a dozen counties drove right up to the porch in four-wheeled surreys to hear the raspy wonder of it. When the family moved to Arkansas, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old Gladys “Tommy” Toler, whose father owned a dry goods store, and married her within the year. (At the time, the term
child bride
was more custom than pejorative.) To the newlyweds, Memphis was The City, where the delta was said to begin in the gilded lobby of the Peabody Hotel, and it was the only place for a young man with prospects.

My grandfather was named for the hardware store where his father earned the money for the chicken farm, and it was with a letter of introduction from Mr. Shapleigh that he got a job interview in Memphis at Orgil Brothers Hardware, agreeing to be a salesman only if they would agree to sell radios. From there he started his own business distributing wholesale appliances, and it provided well: in 1950, the year I was born, Shobe, Inc., grossed $5 million, a fortune half a century ago. (The company logo, a rooster boasting “We’re crowin’ because we’re growin’,” was immortalized in various shades of red stained glass on the porch door of my grandparents’ house.) It was this honeypot that could yield the horse and riding lessons I wanted. “You go on into the sitting room,” Moma told me in a conspiratorial whisper, “and love up on Da-Dee’s neck. He’ll give you anything you want.”

My grandfather was a lank and looming man, the angular contours of his body seeking out the familiar dents and curves of the red easy chair that served as his sanctum sanctorum in the second-floor study. His cherished pastimes were shooting and flying, and he sat beneath a gun rack and a pilots’ flight map of the United States. There were hints of tobacco and chicoried coffee in his clothes as I climbed onto his lap, ludicrously big for such an assignment, and nuzzled against his neck with my request. At first he responded with a low growl, more theatrical than alarming, to my “pretty please with sugar on top,” and his right had tapped ashes off the Camel in its crystalline holder. Then the tiny pings stopped, and his muscular hands tightened around my skinny arms. He wouldn’t answer, and he wouldn’t let go. He held me down on this lap, his body stiffening. In some inchoate way, I knew to run from such an encounter, although I didn’t recognize that it represented an exchange of money for feminine charms and wouldn’t know until much later what such a transaction was called. All thoughts of a horse vaporized as I managed to wriggle out of his grasp. I ran from the room, his muffled laughter mocking my retreat.

Love up on Da-Dee’s neck. More than any other fillip of memory, those words summon up the paramount message and mandate of my childhood: I was pretty, and my looks were a kind of currency. Nobody would care what I did, what I said, what I read, but beauty had magical powers, a kind of legerdemain especially effective with men. It was like being taught double-entry bookkeeping. At that moment I was to hug my grandfather not because it was good to express affection but because I had blonde and blue-eyed assets that might get me a horse.