Cybill Disobedience (20 page)

The whole scene was starting to give me the creeps. I stood up, saying that it was getting late and I needed to get back. He stopped me by putting his arms around my shoulder, drawing me close to his chest, and making little moans of satisfaction as we swayed back and forth, one of his hands on my neck and the other at the small of my back. I started to pull away and felt his muscles resist, stop me for an instant and then relax. I excused myself to use the bathroom, and when I came out, he was looking at his watch--another mood shift.

“I’d better be going too,” he said irritably. “I’m supposed to pick my son up by six.”

On the way home, he put a Vivaldi cassette in the car’s tape deck. “If you like this,” I said in a friendly tone, “I can turn you on to some music that makes this sound like shit.”

He snapped his head around. “How can you say this is shit?” he snarled.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said hastily, seeing that I had insulted his tastes and not wanting to provoke him. “I just meant that there’s some beautiful Beethoven I’d like to play for you....”

“I know about Beethoven,” he said, then popped out the Vivaldi and turned on the radio full blast, although it could barely be heard through the whoosh from the open sunroof. The Vivaldi turned out to be part of the soundtrack for Ryan’s next film,
Barry Lyndon
, and after I’d seen it, I sent him a copy of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4 with the inscription, “This is a fitting tribute to your superb performance.” He never responded.

Both
Nickelodeon
and
Taxi Driver
were to be made for Columbia Pictures, whose president, David Begelman, announced that I had to choose between the two. It was a tough decision--Peter had written a part especially for me, incorporating my myopia into the character, which gave me an excuse to do a lot of pratfalls. But we were still in a public relations abyss--of the kinder assessments at the time labeled me “a no-talent dame with nice boobs and a toothpaste smile and all the star quality of a dead hamster.” We both knew that anything we did together in this vitriolic atmosphere was doomed. And not working with Ryan O’Neal was the consolation prize. It was a crushing disappointment to give up
Nickelodeon.
The part went to... Jane Hitchcock give u’d modeled with me in New York. And Begelman got busted for embezzling money from the studio.

In 1975, Robert De Niro still had a youthful, almost preppy quality, the antithesis of his character in
Taxi Driver,
the psychotic Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle. We used the same technique of scrawling microscopic notes on the script, covering every inch of the page, but I’d never seen an actor immerse himself in a role at De Niro’s level of intensity. He actually got a hack license, and during the preproduction phase, when he was still filming 1900 in Italy with Bernardo Bertolucci, he would leave Rome on a Friday, fly to New York, and drive a cab for the weekend. He went to an army base in northern Italy to tape-record the voices of some soldiers from an area in the Midwest that he wanted to use for Travis Bickle’s accent. Once we started filming, he stayed in character all the time. Waiting for the cameras to be set up for our “date” in Child’s Coffee Shop (airless in hundred-degree heat and perfumed by years of lard for deep-fat frying), he stared at me with a goofy but menacing half grin so disorienting that I called over the hairdresser to change the dynamic to a less threatening threesome.

Scorsese, who was given to wearing white straw fedoras with colorful hatbands, used the sights and sounds of New York City like a big palette of colors to create a mood, and he dealt with the limited budget by shooting at night with a minimal crew and high-speed film, as if for an underground movie. He liked his actors to improvise and videotaped our efforts with a handheld black and white camera during rehearsals in his St. Regis hotel suite, inserting the bits of dialogue that worked best into the script. De Niro is a master at underplaying, doing little and having it be effective. That’s part of what makes it so terrifying when Travis Bickle does go off the deep end. The first day of shooting, I remarked to Scorsese that De Niro epitomized Hitchcock’s advice to actors: Don’t put a lot of scribble on your face. “I think I should try to match that,” I said, and it became my pact with Scorsese.

“Do less,” he would say. Then, ‘’Now do even less.” And then, ‘’Now. do even less than that.”

One day, De Niro and I were walking up Fifth Avenue together at the end of the day.

“Do you want to get some barbecue?” he asked, fixing me with a sexy half-smile.

In approximately an hour, I was expecting The Producer on my doorstep, after an absence of three or four weeks, and I wasn’t about to blow off what I knew would be a torrid reunion, not for this intense, inscrutable man who still seemed to be vaguely in character. “I can’t,” I said. “I have someone, a friend, in town.”

“Oh,” he said, “is Peter here?”

“Not Peter.”

He grew rather quiet, walked me to the door of my apartment, and said good night. Other than as Travis Bickle, that was the last time he spoke to me during the filming.

At the end of the shoot, I had a special taxi key chain made and inscribed for Scorsese—it cost the larger part of my salary. I was so grateful for the opportunity, but it wasn’t until twenty years later when the film came out on video disk that I could fast-forward quickly enough through the savage finale and realize that I’d been given an extraordinary last scene. Of course, I remembered shooting it, but wasn’t sure that it made the final cut: I’m a wimp about movie violence, even though I know it’s really chicken blood or Max Factor Technicolor Blood Number 5. Recently, I saw those final rearview mirror shots of Travis and Betsy, who has unknowingly gotten in his cab. At the end of her last ride, she leans through the window and starts to apologize to Travis. She appears to realize there’s no point and dejectedly asks, “How much was it I feel a subtext between Cybill Shepherd and Robert De Niro, almost as if I’m saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a tumble,” and he’s saying, “You better believe you’re sorry, baby. You can’t imagine what you missed.”

It wasn’t until the re-release of that film that I was credited with a performance of any merit--at the time I was still the no-talent dame with big boobs too closely associated with Peter Bogdanovich. Julia Phillips, one of the film’s producers, declared in
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
that the only reason the Italian Scorsese had cast me was my big ass.

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, A SERIES OF STROKES
had disabled and silenced my grandfather. Still physically capable of speech, he mostly sat in a chair seeming rather docile and lost, as if he didn’t know quite where he belonged, until he was summoned elsewhere, like the dinner table. Moma took him to Romania for monkey-gland injections, which, to the surprise of no one else in the family, did nothing to help. I’d gone home to see him propped up for their fiftieth wedding anniversary party. Failing in memory and strength, he spent the last year of his life in the Rosewood Nursing Home and died in the fall of 1975.

My reaction was curiously impersonal and detached, more an acknowledgment of a milestone than a true sense of sorrow. I thought, in all naiveté, that Da-Dee had ceased to have any power over me or my direction in life. His funeral was to be the first I ever attended, not counting the time that our dog Freckles unsuccessfully tackled a car on Highland Park Place, a far more traumatic event in my life. I didn’t even want to go home, but my mother insisted, and it would have been unseemly to take Peter. He had not seen my mother since her insults at the premiere of
Picture Show
, and Peter is nothing if not grudge holding. The Producer volunteered to come along, and his twisted humor got me through the day--we exchanged irreverent glances about the wavering vibrato of the buxom redhead singing the gospel that Moma loved, along with the absolute latest in dying offered by the Memphis Memorial Gardens. There were three panels of automated curtains: the first opened to reveal the coffin to the immediate family; the second revealed the coffin to the larger group of mourners; the third revealed the family to the mourners. I stared at the folded freckled hands of the man in the open coffin, the only part of him that looked as elegant as in life, his once vibrant face shriveled and masked with makeup, his ungainly ears oddly flattened against his head by the mortician, and I thought I might throw up.

My grandfather’s last words, according to my brother, were, “Don’t let the hens getcha.” He had never placed much faith in Moma’s business acumen, and I remember more than one occasion when she’d say, “Cybill, darlin’, rush to the bank with this cash. I’ve just bounced a check, and I don’t want Da-Dee to find out.” Trying to ensure that my grandmother would never get control of Shobe, Inc., he named the bank as trustee, but Moma fought his posthumous bully pulpit in court for six years and won the right to run the firm herself. For the following twenty years, she used the company letterhead for all her correspondence, simply writing “Mrs.” in front of her husband’s engraved name.

A few months after my grandfather’s funeral, I was alone with Peter at Copa de Oro. It would be the first time we listened to my album
Mad About the Boy
together. Peter had already heard it and wanted to be free to give me notes, so he requested that The Producer not be present. That night I was talking to a friend on the phone when I heard a strange click on the line. Immediately I had the thought that someone was in the house. (We’d had two intruders there: an overzealous fan who walked ough the gate behind a deliver), truck, with a picture of me in his wallet, and an escapee from a mental institution who ran through the halls screaming, “Where am I?”) I quickly dialed the emergency number for the Bel Air Patrol, then went and got Peter from his office, and we locked ourselves upstairs, me wishing I’d been willed part of Da-Dee’s arsenal. When the security police arrived, they searched room by room, suddenly yelling from the basement: “We’ve got somebody. Says he knows you.”

My heart nearly stopped when two security men in gray uniforms brought The Producer upstairs, slumping, with a firm grip on each of his arms. He had his own set of keys to everything in our lives and had let himself in. “It’s okay,” Peter said, “we know him.” Once we declined to press charges and the cops left, The Producer gave us an explanation about being there--he had wanted to hear Peter’s unexpurgated comments about the Getz album, and he adamantly denied being the telephone eavesdropper. I was sure that Peter would find out about our secret past, but he seemed to accept the theory that The Producer had been temporarily wiggy and stressed out too.

But I was growing weary of amorous subterfuge that smacked of my teenage years and remorseful about my duplicity. Having sex with another man’s business associate is pretty much beyond the pale. And living with a lie is a prescription for going crazy. Chekhov wrote that the quickest way to reduce the stature of a man is to lie to him. I had done that with both Peter and The Producer.

Feeling the stress, I started grinding my teeth at night until my doctor prescribed Valium. I was dreaming about a clean slate, starting fresh, not lying. In a moment of unprecedented candor, I sat with The Producer in a Westwood coffee shop and told him it was over. He had been such a significant presence in my life--maybe not the creative partnership I had with Peter, nor the irresistible flame of Elvis, but an enduring passion. We used up half of the thin folded napkins in the metal dispenser as surrogate Kleenex.

It would be so easy to dismiss the next decade of my life as the lost years, defined by unremarkable or irredeemable projects. There was a movie called
Special Delivery
with Bo Svenson, who introduced himself to me by knocking at my dressing-room door and dropping his pants. I couldn’t even get Michael Caine to kiss me as an adulterous sex kitten in
Silver Bears.
The first time I saw him coming across the ornate lobby of the lakeside hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, he seemed to glow from within--here was a real movie star. But shooting our love scenes, his mouth clamped shut, and a damp line of perspiration formed on his upper lip. The lack of heat was so obvious that the director, Ivan Passer, came to me privately and asked if I couldn’t warm things up.

“He won’t kiss me,” I protested.

“Well, you know what to do,” said Passer. Actually, I didn’t. But once the production moved to London, Caine’s attitude changed: he was frisky, enthusiastic, inspired.

“Am I imagining it, or is the difference apparent?” I asked Passer.

“Sure,” he said, “Shakira’s in town.” It seemed that Caine was a more passionate leading man when he could look past the camera and see his own wife on the set. But
Silver Bears
suffered the fate of being Columbia’s “other” movie, released in 1978 at the same time as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Almost no promotional efforts or finances were put into it, and the film disappeared.

There would have been no problem playing love scenes with the cameraman, since we were acting them out privately. All my resolve about fidelity didn’t amount to a hill of beans. I saw, I wanted, I took. In my long career of sleeping with charming cads, he was among the charmingest and caddiest, a married rogue with long black hair and a goatee who liked to drive his Mercedes at a hundred miles an hour. During one lusty encounter, he sucked my chin so hard that the next day, I looked like a bruised peach, and when he viewed me through the camera lens, he started to laugh. When we were scheduled to shoot some footage in Las Vegas, I made sure I got to the location early so we could have some time together. The first night I came down to meet some of the movie people for dinner and saw him already sitting at the table, nuzzling another blonde. I could hardly justify outrage that a married man was not only cheating with me but on me. For several days, I lay around my room at Caesar’s Palace nursing a broken heart, writing self-pitying poems and listening to a constant odd hum that turned out to be the lights on the building’s facade. As much as I liked to believe, even announce, that I could have a relationship that would be purely physical, not emotional, I got hooked. Miserable and looking for distraction, I went to see Sinatra perform and found him strangely wooden and listless. I found out that he had chartered a plane to bring his mother out to Vegas--the same plane that had been used for the shooting of
Silver Bears
the previous day--nd it had crashed into the side of a mountain.