Cybill Disobedience (26 page)

The week before we shot the pilot, Glenn, Bruce, and I watched
His Girl Friday
and
Bringing Up Baby
, as I had suggested. They were the gold standard for the overlapping dialogue we were going to use in
Moonlighting
. When we showed up on Stage 20 at 20th Century-Fox for the first time, it felt as if both of us were playing roles that were custom-fit by a meticulous tailor. The first time my face is seen is in a montage of photographs on the wall: real
Vogue
and
Glamor
magazines, Cover Girl and Clairol ads fm my modeling days. Maddie Hayes would be the ultimate bitch goddess who gets her comeuppance, with a nemesis who engenders conflicting feelings of outrage and attraction. The character of David Addison was bearable, even likable, precisely because he just loved being a jerk, as, I was to discover, did Bruce Willis.

In the pilot’s climactic scene, we were being chased by a diamond thief onto the roof of the historic Eastern building in downtown Los Angeles, where I was suspended from the minute hand of a clock face twenty-five feet above the fourteenth floor. I’m a gung-ho girl, and I declared that I wanted to do enough of the stunt so the audience believed it was really me. Half a dozen crew members were lined up single file on the narrow plywood platform of a steel scaffold that was swaying in the Santa Ana winds. The hairdresser was terrified of heights and had declared in the lobby, “I’m going to have to do your hair down here,” but my makeup man, Norman Leavitt, gamely came up to the roof, passing powder puffs and lip stick stuck into a Kleenex box out to me from his precarious perch. The director of photography, Michael Margulies, was communicating via miked headphones to the four camera crews. Suddenly I panicked, and grabbing two handfuls of Michael’s brown leather jacket from behind, I screamed, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” But he couldn’t hear me. When he felt the tug, he turned around and said, “Did you say something?”

“No, I’m okay.” And, having momentarily vented, I was.

For two weeks of shooting, Bruce was upbeat, lighthearted, fun. But it wasn’t long before his mood darkened, particularly during visits from his girlfriend, the former wife of Geraldo Rivera, who sat in the wings with her arms crossed, looking as if she had smelled something bad. (“She disapproves of me doing television,” he confided one day.) Her visits became less frequent, eventually ending altogether, but he remained cranky and aloof. Almost automatically, we had off-camera spats just before our scripted ones, but they seemed like a harmless way of working up to the emotion of the scene. It did not escape me that the growing attraction between Maddie and David mirrored what was developing between the actors who portrayed them. After one particularly heated rehearsal, I walked off the set with him and said, “Are we going to do something about this or what?”

He looked startled but not unpleasantly so, and then squinted his familiar half smile. “Why don’t I come over to your place tonight?” he said.

There was a bottle of Gentleman Jim in his hand when he knocked on the door of my apartment, and it wasn’t long before we were passionately sucking face. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” I said, feeling ambivalent and aware of the potential complications. “We might be working together a long time.” But we were quickly too far gone in a lusty, missionary embrace, leaning halfway back on a La-Z-Boy lounger that tilted almost to the point of toppling over.

Suddenly he stopped, arched his back, and looked at me with lines creasing his forehead. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, grabbing the wide arm of the chair for support as he pushed off and stood up. Rearranging himself as well as his remaining clothes, he announced, “I think I’ll go to the bathroom.” When he returned, he picked his jacket up from the floor where it had landed, mumbled something about getting a good night’s sleep, and was gone. Maybe Bruce liked the chase better than the catch. Maybe he preferred the character to the real woman. We never did finish what we started in private, but anytime we had a kissing scene, he stuck a big camel tongue halfway down my throat.

For the pilot of
Moonlighting,
my hair was sleek and unteased. Before every scene, I’d bend forward and brush it out, but Glenn and Jay said that took too long, so for some of the later episodes, my hair was teased and sprayed into an effusive helmet that looked like a wig. Unsolicited, Bruce commented that my hair was “dippy,” which I assumed to be a derisive colloquialism from his New Jersey boyhood. No one had taken such an interest in my hair since my mother obsessed about my darkening blonde tresses. Certainly L’Oreal thought enough of me for all those commercials in which I purred, “I’m worth it.” And Bruce was on thin ice: his own bare scalp was filled in with greasy dark cosmetic pencils for the camera. After one too many sarcastic remarks, I snapped, “At least I have some hair.” Turns out he did too, just not on his head. Bruce liked to moon the crew, and I got so tired of seeing his hairy ass that I finally said, “Could you give me some warning so I don’t have to look at it every time?”

I averted my eyes from the lively procession of young women in and out of Bruce’s motor home, until he met Demi Moore and settled into some version of monogamy. (I can attest to the fact that she taught him how to kiss.) But I was hardly in a position to judge anyone else’s personal life. A cousin was getting married in Memphis, and I had no prospects of an interesting escort for the wedding. (If the tabloids had only known the headline they were missing: FORMER BEAUTY QUEEN DATELESS.) I asked a friend to set me up with a warm male body, and her suggestion turned out to be a broad-shouldered, six-foot-four cycling champ who’d missed qualifying for the Olympics by a millisecond. He picked me up wearing Clark Kent glasses and a tailored tuxedo jacket over a tartan kilt, complete with sporran, the furry-pouch that substitutes for a pants pocket. (What are men supposed to be carrying around in there anyway?) He had impeccable manners, spoke with ease about a variety of subjects from sports to feminism, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that real Scotsmen don’t wear anything under their kilts. But I was thirty-five and he was eighteen.

If the ages had been reversed, our romance wouldn’t have caused so much as a ripple of censure. As it was, we were a perfect sexual match. We ignored public opinion and defied our families by continuing to see each other for the duration of my stay and on subsequent visits. When he picked me up at my mother’s house for a bike ride wearing the kind of cyclist shorts that hug the thighs and leave little to the imagination, Mother took me aside and chided, “Cybill, he’s nasty in those pants.” After a few months of long-distance romance, he left his job in the family business and followed me to Los Angeles. He rented his own apartment, but I couldn’t prevent Clementine from developing a five-year-old’s crush on him, getting into my makeup and doing a pretty good imitation of a mini-femme fatale when she knew he was coming over. His affluent father stepped up the campaign to separate us by implying that I was a gold digger, even offering to retire if his son came back to run the company, and finally issued an ultimatum: the business or the blonde. It was up to me to decide my young lover said, and I couldn’t ask him to stay. I didn’t want to get into another situation where I was supporting a man, I had no interest in marriage, I couldn’t even promise fidelity. I suppose I was really waiting for some grand gesture from him, something along the lines of “I don’t care what my family says, you’re the only woman in the world for me.” Asking me what to do was tantamount to telling me he wasn’t ready to commit. I relinquished any hold.

I left home at 5 A.M. each day.
Moonlighting
scripts were close to a hundred pages, half again as long as the average one-hour television series. Almost from the moment the cameras started rolling, we were behind schedule, sometimes completing as few as sixteen episodes per season and never achieviming ove standard twenty-two. It became customary to make up time with a “tow shot”: loading a car onto a trailer and pulling it. Since we were just sitting in the car, there was no need to rehearse or “block” our places during the scene. We literally cut up the pages of script and taped the scraps to the dashboard--no time to memorize. The only respite was when the writers gave long speeches of “exposition” to guest stars, but Bruce and I were so exhausted that while we listened we often looked as if we were sleeping with our eyes open. Some of our highly touted innovations--like “breaking the fourth wall” and speaking directly to the camera in a prologue or a postscript--were born of necessity, to fill time, since we spoke the dialogue so quickly.

At $1.5 million per episode,
Moonlighting
was reportedly the most expensive show on television at the time. But it was one of the first in-house productions at a network, one of the rare hits for ABC (still in third place), and nobody was going to tell Glenn Caron how to run his show. His reputation, an image that he enjoyed and cultivated, was that he thrived on deadlines. In a
Time
magazine article that called the show “ABC’s classiest hit and biggest headache,” he blustered, “It sounds pompous, but maybe it’s irresponsible to bring a television show in on time and on budget every week and have it be on nothing.” (There was a private joke in an episode that featured a tabloid parody called
The National Pit
with a headline claiming: “Dr. Caron Discovers Antidote for Stress.”) He often went to the studio before dawn to write a new scene, handing us pages of dialogue when we showed up later that morning. The writing was inspired and edgy, and I’ll take last-minute changes that good any day. But the routine was grueling. We’d start on Monday at 7 A.M. and work until 9 P.M. Union rules stipulated the length of time actors need to break before reporting back to work, and we had to be paid an extra $1,000 if we didn’t get a twelve-hour turnaround--it’s called a “forced call.” To avoid that expensive penalty to the producers, we’d start on Tuesday at 9 A.M. and go until 11 P.M. Then on Wednesday we’d start at 11 A.M. and go until 1 or 2 in the morning. And I’m not a night person. Plus there was a different director every week because the previous week’s director was in the editing room. It took me ten long years to make my comeback and only one to feel trapped by my success.

As soon as I found out we were to do a mammoth food fight, I went directly to Glenn’s office and asked him if Bruce and I could get hit in the face with pies. Glenn laughed and told me that if I wanted to be hit in the face with a pie I would have to ask Bruce myself, which I did. Bruce chuckled for a minute and then asked, “Who’s going to throw the pie?” I suggested someone neutral like our stunt coordinator, Chris Howel, and Bruce agreed. He and I clocked in a twenty-two-hour day for that food fight with the reward at the end being a refreshing pie in the face, accurately heaved by Chris. It was one of the finest moments for all involved.

BURNOUT IS A GIVEN IN SERIES TELEVISION, BUT IT
doesn’t come with a warning label, and my experience is that it doesn’t bring out the best in people. I’d recover a little less each weekend until finally I never recovered, feeling the kind of fatigue that depletes every resource, including civility. Once when we were filming at the Ambassador Hotel, a woman in the lobby approached me for an autograph at just the wrong moment and I snapped. “Leave me alone,” I said dismissively, and when she looked rightfully aghast, I countered, “I have a right to be a bitch.” I really lost it at the end of one fourteen-hour day when I was called down to a basement on the old 20th Century-Fox lot for looping: redoing dialogue that hasn’t been recorded clearly or doesn’t have the right inflection of voice. The sound engineer was late, and I finally said, “Get another sound man.” Then for an hour the bucktoothed associate producer gave me line readings on how to improve my performance (“Do it faster, now do it slower, really be angry, now a little less angry”). It was a manipulative power trip to make me jump through hoops. I was furious, and thrashing my arms in lieu of tearing out my hair, my hand came smashing down on the script stand, sending it crumpling to the floor.

I was almost sleepwalking. Once you reach that level of fatigue, it doesn’t matter how much money you’re making. The whole crew is affected, but they don’t have expectations of physical perfection imposed on them as the on-camera people do, and it’s worse for women. The face that stares back from the mirror at 5 A.M. under that kind of strain is not a pretty sight. I developed the clenched look of a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. But I was held to a much more stringent standard of beauty than Bruce, with two or three hours in hair and makeup every day compared to his fifteen minutes. I was blamed if I looked exhausted, whereas squinty eyes and a two-day stubble only added to David Addison’s rakish allure. I insisted on wearing outfits with cinched waists: I have an old-fashioned hourglass figure, with broad shoulders and a big butt, and if my waist isn’t accentuated, I tend to look like a Green Bay Packer. Our characters often wore sunglasses to look cool--a special design with flat rather than curved lenses that didn’t reflect the set lights--that had the added benefit of covering dark circles. Gerald Finnerman, the director of photograph., very kindly had a special sliding filter made for the lens of the camera, so when it panned from Bruce to me, the heavier diffusion was slid into place to make me look “prettier.”

Angela Lansbury, my esteemed colleague from
The Lady Vanishes
, was starring in
Murder, She Wrote
, and I asked her to dinner, seeking wise counsel from someone with a similar daily grind. “There’s no way to survive an hour television format unless there are some ground rules,” she said. “I come in at six A.M. and I leave at six P.M. Period. And I never start the season with fewer than eight scripts.” But when I went to Glenn with this supplication, he just laughed.

“You might as well forget that,” he said, “because it’ll never happen.”

At the beginning of our second season, Orson Welles agreed to introduce an episode called “‘The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice”—an astonishing favor to me, rarer than a returned phone call in Hollywood. Standing on a set rigged to look like his office, he cautioned viewers not to be alarmed (an homage to his 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
when, as a Halloween prank, he described a Martian invasion so vividly that thousands of listeners panicked). Approximately twelve minutes later, he explained, the picture would change from color to black and white. I was working at another location the day the scene was shot, and I kept thinking:
I have to go see Orson,
but I waited too long, eerily like Marlene Dietrich’s character in Orson’s classic film
Touch of Evil
: Marlene runs after Orson to say good-bye but arrives too late and finds him floating face up, dead in the water. Two weeks after he did his
Moonlighting
bit, Orson died in his own office, slumped over a typewriter, and was buried in a Spanish bullfighters’ graveyard. The episode, which was dedicated to him, unfolded from conflicting points of view like
Rashomon
(also reflecting what was happening on the set), switching between bad-David-good-Maddie and good-David-bad-Maddie, giving Bruce vintage ribald innuendo (“We would see more of each other, then all of each other”) and me variations on Mae West’s signature “When I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”