Cybill Disobedience (29 page)

The distinctive door slamming that became a leitmotif of the show was something I learned from Ernst Lubitsch movies, and studio carpenters had to rebuild the Blue Moon Agency doors every season because we slammed them so hard. But one of my most painful memories revolved around the door slamming in “Symphony in Knocked Flat.” The script called for Maddie to arrive at work and slam her way through the office in a rage because she had a boring date the night before. I didn’t think that a boring dt befohe night before was enough motivation for a hysterical tirade, and I ignored the stage direction, playing the scene more thoughtfully. I got away with it that time, but my next scene that required rage brought Glenn and Jay down to the set. We did it over and over, each time Glenn repeating, “That’s not angry enough. Do it again.” I felt so humiliated and upset that I began forgetting the lines I had known perfectly well when we started.

I watched the “Symphony” episode again recently and came away proud that I had followed my instincts and underplayed those two scenes. Though I still cringe at the thought of Glenn’s and Jay’s bullying, I’m so glad I defended the integrity of my character, Maddie, in the face of public embarrassment. That episode represents truly wonderful work on everyone’s part. And besides, how many people get to work with The Temptations and perform “Psychedelic Shack,” like I did in the prologue to that episode?

Bruce became disenchanted with the classic David Addison smarminess, sometimes throwing a script across the room and calling it shit. Actors make a mistake when they act superior to the material. Good acting is like a tennis match. But somewhere along the way it felt like Bruce disconnected from what I was doing. It seemed as if he had already figured out all the moves, and it was far less exciting when the match between us was over.

One April day in 1988, I arrived for work fifteen minutes late to find an all points bulletin out for me. An assistant director approached my car as I drove onto the lot and said, “Cybill, don’t bother getting out.” Then he told the driver, “Take her right to Glenn’s office.” I felt like an intractable student summoned to the principal after sliding down the school banister--a bad acid flashback, and I’d never even taken acid. Jay Daniel and several people I didn’t recognize were sitting in Glenn’s office; Glenn was standing in front of his pinball machine and his jukebox loaded with 1960s rock and roll and every song by Tammy Wynette.

“You don’t give a fuck about your work,” he screamed the moment I walked in the door. “Your standards are down, and your ideas are crap.” I could hardly respond, his rage was so vehement. And while he screamed, Jay sat silent, not uttering a word in my defense.

A few weeks later, when we came to the end of the shooting season, I wrote Glenn a letter. “I want to do everything in my control to help the show,” I wrote. “But I need you to know that for me to work effectively, it is absolutely necessary to avoid another performance like the one you gave when I was summoned to your office several weeks ago to hear your diatribe--all in the presence of complete strangers. I have enormous respect for the work you have done and for the show you have created, but I do not respect that behavior and I will not willingly be subjected to the kind of abuse that you unleashed at that meeting. I take my share of responsibility for some of the problems we have had in the past and will do everything I can to correct those problems.”

During the hiatus I made a film called
Chances Are
, a fantasy about a woman who remains devoted to the memory of her dead husband and falls in love with him again, reincarnated in the form of Robert Downey Jr. The producer was a pal of Ryan O’Neal and lobbied for him to play the family friend who’s really been in love with my character all along. Considering our history, Ryan was the last person I wanted to work with. “Casting him is a great way to ruin this movie,” I warned. But everybody else kept turning down the role, so we got him by default. (Turned out I was wrong. He was terrific.) I had avoided a love scene with him in real life, but I couldn’t stop my nervous laughter when I had to kiss him on-camera. The director, Emile Ardolino, took me aside and whispered, &lquo;Could you please stop giggling? It’s upsetting Ryan.” Not an unreasonable request, and I stopped laughing by thinking of deaths in the family and biting my upper lip.

I thought the script would have been improved by dispensing with the reincarnation storyline and exploring a romance seldom seen on film between an older woman and a younger man, a relationship I’ve often played out in real life. The first day of rehearsal, Downey didn’t show up or respond to phone calls. Somebody from the production office got the manager of his hotel to open the door of his room and found him in bed with a woman, sleeping off a bad night. It was apparent that he had substance abuse problems, and he was told that if he was ever late again, he would be fired. A monitor in the guise of a “trainer” was hired to keep him out of trouble for the remainder of the shooting schedule. I relished the experience of working with Emile Ardolino. As a director he pushed me beyond what I had thought of as my “dramatic limits” as an actor. Some years later, Emile stopped returning my phone calls. This is a common occurrence in Hollywood but hardly what I would have expected from Emile. About six months later, a mutual friend called and told me the sad truth: “Emile died of AIDS today.” Now, whenever I cry as an actor part of my motivation is always the thought of Emile and missing him.

When production started on the new season of
Moonlighting
, I received a “personal and confidential” letter from the lawyers for Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., as did Bruce Willis. Attached was a list of “guidelines” regarding production, stating the network’s right to cancel episodes or the series if the guidelines were not strictly followed. (Bruce and I would be responsible for the loss of revenue in such an event.) The normal day onstage, the memo stated, was from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., but night work was at the producer’s discretion. The production company would make every effort to deliver scripts one day in advance of shooting, but the script was nevertheless to be learned. The producers were to maintain a written record of the actors’ work pattern during each day of production, including the time elapsed after being called to the set, which was not to exceed five minutes. Bathroom breaks were also limited to five minutes.

My lawyer responded to this demeaning memo by reminding ABC that I already had a contract governing my services; that nowhere in my agreement was the network given the right to impose additional terms and conditions, particularly those more suitable to a reform school; that I resented any attempt to impute to me responsibility for their cost overruns; and that such insinuations were defamatory, injurious to my reputation, and the cause of severe emotional distress.

One more letter arrived from ABC. Dispensing with the legalese, the gist of it was “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And with such posturing, the tempest was over.

In the fall of 1988, Glenn Caron left the show, stating that it was him or me and he didn’t think the network would choose him. What had begun as an alliance between Glenn and me, as well as a newcomer named Bruce Willis, had turned into Glenn and Bruce against Cybill. Not only David Addison but Bruce Willis had become Glenn’s alter ego and I became the troublemaker, the difficult one out to get them (whatever part I had in creating this I will forever regret). Recently, the pilot of
Moonlighting
was released on DVD. The disc includes almost nonstop commentary on the making of the series by the creator, Glenn Caron, and the star, Bruce Willis. Needless to say, I was not thrilled to be excluded, but now there can be no doubt that there had been and still is a boys’ club to which I’m not invited. Glenn describes himself and Bruce as being virtually the same. They have similar backgrounds, the same things disgust them, and the same things make them laugh. The only ng that really matters is that a whole new audience is enjoying
Moonlighting
on DVD as well as nightly on the Bravo network. And I’m really proud of the good work we did together. In any case, Jay Daniel took over as executive producer, and Roger Director, already working on the show as promoted to head writer. (He later wrote the roman
a
clef
A Place to Fall
, about a neurotic, petulant actor, and Bruce Willis threatened to punch him out.) The show lasted for two more years, and Peter Bogdanovich made a memorable guest appearance in an episode about all the men in Maddie’s past. But with the success of the
Die Hard
movies, it became clear that Bruce was ready to move on, that he had outgrown
Moonlighting
. He was so disdainful of the material that he often hadn’t bothered to read it before arriving on the set. He was impatient about any time I spent in the trailer with the twins, although he increasingly wanted to leave early himself. I put up a punching bag on the set, suggesting that we hit it instead of each other. One day, when filming threatened to delay his early getaway, the whole set started to vibrate from Bruce’s pummeling. Thank God for that bag.

One day, as nursing time for the twins approached, I asked to be released for a twenty-five-minute break. The first assistant director kept delaying it, so after about an hour, my motor-home driver turned on the walkie-talkie so that the whole set could hear the two screaming infants and announced “Cybill, it’s time!” After that, I was free to go.

The final episode surely echoed the sentiments of viewers. “Can you really blame the audience?” a silhouetted producer asks Maddie and David. “A case of poison ivy is more fun than watching you two lately.”

I was breaking up with two Bruces at once--Bruce Willis and Bruce Oppenheim. I will always regret that I never got to raise kids beyond the age of two with their fathers present. Children don’t know from incompatibility. They only want Mom and Dad to live together in love with each other and with them. When Bruce got angry, he shouted, and when I got angry, I ran away. I’d never heard my parents have an argument. I observed their brawls and mutually cold, silent treatment. I had no sense of two people being able to negotiate conflict and come to a reasonable compromise. Operating under a veil of exhaustion and frustration from work, I gave up on my marriage.

Bruce and I were forced to work with a court-appointed counselor, both of us legitimately afraid that divorce would mean seeing the children a lot less. Our separation was the catalyst for what was surely long overdue therapy for me. I wheeled a big rolling rack of baggage into the therapist’s office and took out one suitcase at a time, asking, “Is this because I’m an asshole?”

Not long after the separation, I was walking on the treadmill and watching MTV. A video came on of a song by Martha Venessa Sharron, Ronald Lee Miller, and Kenny Hirsch called “If I Could.” The lyrics moved me instantly to tears: “If I could. I’d teach you all the things I never learned / And help you cross all those bridges that I burned.” I started weeping so profusely that I had to push the emergency button on the treadmill to keep from falling down.

I WAS TER
RIFIED ABOUT MY PROSPECTS WHEN
MOONLIGHTING
ended, and it didn’t help to hear Joan Rivers dismiss me on her talk show as the head of the “Fucking Lucky Club.” It seemed like my luck was running out. I spent several years doing projects of no particular consequence, playing a collection of wives, nurses, bitches, and sociopaths.

The 1990 TV movie,
Which Way Home
was based on a true story about a nurse who rescues five orphans from a refugee camp substituting Thailand for Cambodia. I asked my doctor for something to help me sleep on the long flight over, and he gave me Halcion, a potent narcotic that can erase short-term memory. When I arrived, somebody had to tell me where I was and why I was there. But I have distinct memories of a location shoot fraught with water problems. We were filming several hours south of Bangkok, staying in a city called Hua Hin (nicknamed Whore Hin by the crew for obvious reasons), and I swam in the soothing warm waters of the South China Sea, which glows at night with bioluminescent plankton. During one swim, some terrible creature wrapped itself around my calves, and I ran shrieking from the water to discover that my attacker was a plastic bag used to wrap the beach towels.

The ceiling, floor, even the wastebasket in my room were made of teak, and I kept thinking:
This is where the rain forest is going.
The water in my shower contained some chemicals with interesting special effects. A week into shooting, the director of photography requested a private meeting. “I’m sorry to mention this,” he said, “but your hair appears somewhat greenish on camera.” I squeezed every available lemon in Southeast Asia on my head and sat in the sun.

When we moved farther south to Bang Sephon, the floor, walls, and ceiling of my hotel bathroom were tiled. There was no shower curtain because the drain was in the middle of the room. I noticed that whatever was deposited in the toilet each morning would still be there at night. Not a good sign. When I returned at the end of the first day of shooting, covered from head to toe with sand and who knows what else from slogging through murky lagoons, I got into the shower and turned on the water. There were a few weak sputters and then nothing. Other crew members confirmed that they were experiencing the same drought, and I placed a call to the producer. “I’m a trooper,” I said, “but I draw the line at a hot shower and a functional toilet. If the water isn’t restored, I’m leaving for someplace where I know the plumbing works, like Southern California.” The next day, in the predawn light, something that looked like a cement truck rumbled into the parking lot and disappeared behind the building. There were noises of plumbing and pipe fitting, and I had a trickly but wet shower.

What I loved best about Thailand was the food: savory soups for breakfast, midmorning snacks of cashews freshly roasted over fires, sticky rice with mangoes that look green but are lusciously ripe. There are a hundred different fruits never seen outside the country, and the familiar ones are as abundant as apples. You can hail a boat coming down the Chaou Praya River in Bangkok and buy a sack of fresh litchi nuts from the farmer (although I never did develop the local enthusiasm for one fruit whose name translates into “tastes like heaven, smells like hell”). What I didn’t love about the location was my dressing room: a bus with the seats taken out and furniture that rolled around as if on casters. I literally couldn’t fit into its minuscule bathroom, so when I had to use the facilities, I cleared everybody out and stood in the hallway hoping for the best as I launched my ass back toward the toilet.