Cybill Disobedience (21 page)

Since I knew I had a lot more to learn about acting, I sought advice from Orson Welles. “I don’t know which direction to take,” I said. “I may have an offer to do a revival of the play
The Philadelphia Story
in New York, or I have a definite offer from the Tidewater Dinner Theater in Norfolk, Virginia, to do
A Shot in the Dark
, or I could go study with Stella Adler in New York.”

“Do not take acting classes,” he said. “When you walk through the door, you will be envied and despised because you are already more famous than most of them will ever be. Learn by doing theater, and do it anywhere but Los Angeles or New York. Just make sure that you talk loud enough so that people in the last row can understand what you’re saying. Nobody will support you, but it will be the most important thing you ever do. It will give you an opportunity to fall on your face. The audience will teach you what you need to know.”

The only person who thought this was a good idea was Gena Rowlands. “Oh, Cyb,” she said, “it’s easy, and you’re going to have the time of your life.” Everyone else acted as if there might be the need for an intervention, including Peter. (Stella Adler actually supported the theater plan, with a caveat. “No more ingénues,” she said. “Play what you haven’t lived. It will help you with your life.”) I went to Virginia, reprising Julie Harris’s murderous role in
A Shot in the Dark.
That’s when I really fell in love with acting. What I discovered is that film is more a medium for the director and the editor, but in the theater, the writer and the actor have more control. The preparation is intense, but once the performance starts, there’s no one saying, “Cut,” or “That was a little over the top, Cybill, take it down a peg.” Every night, from the entrance stage left to the final curtain, there is a full dramatic arc to follow. After opening night I felt: Not only do I have wings, but I can fly.

In 1978 Peter was still depressed about the failure of
Nickelodeon,
thinking that his career was going to hell in a hand basket, even without me. He was set to direct
Saint Jack,
the book whose rights I’d won as part of the settlement in my suit against
Playboy.
There was never a part in it for me, but I thought it was an unusual story and even wrote a first-draft script.

I was starting to feel an impetus for another kind of production, but Peter had always rejected the notion of his ever having another child. If I had been asked even a year before whether I wanted children, I would have sai no. I was afraid it would keep me from doing what I wanted to do in my life. But at the age of twenty-eight, I began longing intensely for a baby.

The last time I’d broached the subject with Peter, we had just made love. “Please don’t bring that up again,” he said with mood-killing finality, grabbing a robe at the end of the bed and sitting down at his desk with his back toward me. Part-time single fatherhood was one long unending battle for Peter, and pushing the issue probably meant unconsciously scripting the end of our relationship.

Sensing a last hurrah, a few months later I joined him on location for
Saint Jack.
I flew to London and then on to Singapore, where we stayed at the fabled Raffles Hotel--romantic in a slightly seedy way, cooled by ceiling fans reportedly invented for the hotel in the late 1900s by the Hunter Fan Company of Memphis, Tennessee, which had given me one of my first modeling jobs. One night we were sitting in the lounge drinking potent Singapore slings when I realized that the fans were no longer spinning, but the room was.

There was a small part in the film played by a beautiful young Asian actress named Monika Subramaniam, who lowered her eyes when she met me and lit up like Las Vegas when she saw Peter. I didn’t confront him. He didn’t have to confess. I just knew. Our relationship was limping to an end anyway. This didn’t help.

TWO THINGS HAVE ALWAYS SAVED MY LIFE: READING
and singing. Books and music have comforted me, informed me, helped me define myself. It’s impossible to overstate their importance to my mental health, spiritual sustenance, and survival on the planet. The difference, of course, is that while reading is private, personal, unexamined, with no need to explain or justify, singing is quite the opposite. I put my voice out there to be examined, reviewed, sometimes reviled, as I’ve done since childhood, when my parents would ask me to sing for company and I always felt that people seemed a little disappointed. But I always come back to it. Every song has at least one character--and I don’t need a movie studio or TV network to finance it. Cabaret is an opportunity to tell stories around a fire. From an early age, long before the benefit of therapy, I have felt my heart healed by singing. But it takes the most courage of all. For the performer it’s like being stripped naked, and for the audience it’s like being in the performer’s living room--really torturous if you don’t like the person. I’ve had some mean things said about my voice. No matter: even if I felt that my singing was utterly unappreciated, it would remain a necessary component of my life.

I was feeling disconnected from Peter, even though nothing had been articulated between us, and I had no movie or TV offers. So I went to New York and sang on Sundays at a glorified hamburger joint in Greenwich Village called the Cookery. The rest of the week belonged to the extraordinary blues artist and fellow Memphian Alberta Hunter, who had learned the music that played on the gramophone in the St. Louis brothel where she went to work as a ladies’ maid when she was eleven years old. She wrote Bessie Smith’s first hit “Down-Hearted Blues” (‘’I’ve got the world in a jug and the stopper right here in my hand, and if you want me pretty papa, you better come under my command.”). Her performance was so moving, so dignified, so authoritative. Music is about the pauses as much as the notes, and even her breathing between the phrases was powerful. Alberta called me “Memphis” and always greeted me with tremendous warmth, which was more than the audience did. I stood at a microphone in front of a small room, singing over the sounds of conversation and cutlery banging against crockery. Nobody wanted to hear me--one woman approached the stage and asked quite loudly, “Where’s the rest room, honey?”e in my>During the two weeks of my engagement, I slept in a tiny room at the Pierre Hotel with three different men in quick succession: one was the sexy young waiter at the Cookery, who roamed the room in a figure eight moaning “Woe is me. I’ve been in love with you my whole life, and now I can’t get it up.” Two was an agent I met, a married father of five. (I know, I know.) Three was Charles Grodin. My
Heartbreak Kid
costar, who I had found distant, humorless, and unappealing, called when he heard about me performing and shocked me by making me laugh. Either he got funny or I finally had a sense of humor. We went to dinner at a dive not listed in any guidebook, the sort of dark and clandestine place that is the culinary equivalent of the No-Tell Motel. Our one-night stand never went beyond the morning after, when I found out that he was living with someone else.

Suddenly, and rudely, my life as a sexual libertine caught up with me. The only protection I’d ever been taught was abstinence, based on an archaic morality. Condoms had become antiques--at that time there were no sexually transmitted diseases that couldn’t be treated out of a prescription bottle. When I moved to Los Angeles with Peter, I had been on the Pill since I was sixteen. When I was twenty-seven, I had a notoriously gallivanting Copper-7 IUD, which eventually got “lost” and X rays were required to locate and retrieve it. By the time I was in New York, I was using a diaphragm. But it was not fail-safe.

Even a woman who feels passionately that abortion should be safe and legal does not terminate a pregnancy with an easy heart. For me it was testimony to another kind of failure, like going back to the sexually secretive dungeon of high school. I checked into a clinic under a false name on a Saturday when there were no other patients and vomited from the anesthesia by myself in the recovery room. I told no one what I was doing.

The female body gearing up for pregnancy is a hormonal roller coaster. The hips automatically tilt forward; the body has more blood and fluid. (When I later became pregnant with twins, I needed a retainer because my bottom teeth started moving around.) The aftermath of my abortion was like hitting the wall. Along with the feeling of relief was a nagging wonder: will I get another chance? Regardless of how important and correct the choice was at the time, a woman always wonders about the child she didn’t choose to bring to life.

Women will always end unwanted pregnancies, safely when they can, unsafely when it’s the only option, and several hundred thousand die every year as a result. I’ve marched for the right to choose, and I know, deep in my bones, that pregnancy as punishment is bad for both women and children.

I knew I had done the right thing. But I was feeling the emptiness of sex with men who didn’t matter, feeling like I didn’t matter to them either. I actually felt like a hooker when the owner of the Cookery paid me for singing by saying, “Here, baby,” and stuffing some crumpled twenty-dollar bills in my hand. Like a wounded animal, I called my mother, who listened, mostly silent, as I poured out my unhappiness. I heard my voice rise and soften like a little girl through sniffles and sobs. Finally my mother spoke, strong and reassuring. “Cybill,” she said, “come home.” She had gone through her own miserable and lonely post divorce odyssey, finally carving out a busy, optimistic life. At fifty-three, she met a charming and high-spirited widower named Mondo Micci which is pronounced “Mickey” in Memphis), a former Golden Gloves champion who used to climb up the fire escape at the Peabody Hotel to sneak into the rooftop dances there. For the first time in her life, she was being protected and cared for by someone else, making it so much easier for her to protect and care for me.

I’M ALWAYS PRESSING MY NOSE TO THE AIRPLANE WINDOW

One of those buildings feels like my foster child. A musician named Hillsman Wright was involved in a effort to save from demolition the grand old Orpheum Theater at Beale Street and Main, the ornate movie palace of my childhood dreams, where I’d seen
The Ten Commandments
and
Gone With the Wind.
He took me backstage, up rickety staircases, and across catwalks dating from its days on the vaudeville circuit, and he played Bach on a monster Wurlitzer pipe organ as it rose up from the orchestra pit. That was all I needed to get involved in the fund-raising campaign, making a public service announcement and eventually singing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June” at the Orpheum’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration.

One night I went with my brother to Blues Alley, a smoky club on Front Street near the riverbank. Leaning against the bar was a burly, dark-haired man whom I first mistook for the cameraman, the English cad who broke my heart. This was David Ford, who was twenty-five years old (three years younger than I), and still living with his parents in the suburb of White Haven and working as the manager of the parts department at a Mercedes repair shop near the airport to pay for classes at the University of Memphis. I sent him one of those nakedly undisguised C’mon-a-my-house looks that are possible between strangers in nightclubs, and before the evening had ended, I knew we were destined to be lovers. I thought:
Maybe I can find happiness in Memphis with a regular guy.

Thus began an interesting confluence of events, as my mother and I were both dating others but living under the same roof. While David and I were necking on the living room couch, I’d hear a car pull in the driveway, idling for too long until the motor shut off, when Mother would come inside with a satisfied smile. The first time David and I made love, we had to wait until my mother was asleep before we raced to my brother’s bedroom. After all those years, I was still sneaking around.

Before urban renewal almost renewed Beale Street out of existence, most white folks went there in the wee small hours after too many martinis, observing a tradition known as Midnight Rambles. Back then, Beale Street was mainly whorehouses, pawn shops, and saloons like Pee Wee’s, where in 1912 William Christopher Handy first put the notes on paper for a song he called “Memphis Blues.” No one had ever used the word blues in a song title before, and as a result, in the 1970s Congress proclaimed Handy “Father of the Blues” and declared Memphis “Home of the Blues.”

David Ford became my companion in the search for my musical roots. He introduced me to Ma Rainey II who, from a wheelchair, could whoop up “Got My Mojo Working” better than anybody. I also got to know Furry Lewis, another Memphis legend. Though his recording career had ended in the thirties, he’d had an amazing career revival in the sixties, opening for the Rolling Stones and making frequent appearances on the
Tonight Show.
During the lean years in between, he had been employed as a street sweeper for the Memphis sanitation department. His slide guitar technique, sweet voice, and songwriting skills were backed up by a dignified but wicked sense of humor. One time we visited his home where he sat on the side of his bed playing guitar, singing, and talking. He wore thick Coke-bottle spectacles to compensate for cataracts, and kept a saucer on the top of his glass. In between sips of Ten High Whiskey he said, “I can’t see too good and I want to be sure there’s nothin’ in there but the High.”

I was privileged to get to know and work with many more great Memphis musicians: Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwaite, Jim Dickenson, Little Laura Dukes, Prince Gabe, Honeymoon Garner, L. T. Lewis, Harold Mabern, Don McMinn, Jamil Nasser, Calvin Newborn, Sid Selvidge, Bob Talley, William Thais, and Mose Vinson. Grandma Dixie Davis would so inspire me with her barrel-house version of Handy’s “Beale Street Blues that I would sing it for twenty years and finally record it in 1998 on my CD
Talk Memphis to Me.

When you hear the blues in Memphis, the musicians kind of sit back on the melody, playing a little behind the beat so that if the leader holds a phrase out for an extra measure they can follow with a kind of
fa-lop.
That’s what makes it funky. That’s what makes it Memphis. As Lee Baker used to say, “even the Memphis Symphony plays behind the beat.”