Cybill Disobedience (30 page)

PETER BOGDANOVICH HAD THE RIGHTS TO LARRY
McMurtry’s book
Texasville
, a return to the characters of
The
Last
Picture Show
some thirty years later. (The frontispiece of the 1987 novel reads “For Cybill Shepherd.”) Miraculously the entire cast from
Picture Show
was reassembled.

The friendship between Peter and Larry had always been shaky--like two unfixed dogs, they snarled at each other from separate corners--but Larry and I were friends for life, or so I thought. A month before I went to Texas, he stopped returning my phone calls essentially vanishing from my life. It was odd to be filming the bo he had dedicated to me and not even know if I might turn a corner in Archer City and bump into him. There were other reasons why it wasn’t my happiest experience: I felt like I was confronting the ghosts of the mistakes Peter and I had made, wreaking havoc in everyone’s lives and not even ending up together. But the worst part of it was a custody court judge ordering my twenty-month-old twins to fly back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles every other week to see their father, accompanied by a nanny. This forced separation meant that I had to stop nursing, which was physically and emotionally traumatic for me and the babies.

Larry McMurtry was the first person who’d ever sent me lilies, and he used to send them regularly. About a year after Texasville, a huge vase of cut lilies arrived at my home, and I ripped open the gift card with excitement, hoping that his long silence was broken. The flowers were from someone else, but they inspired me to write Larry a note about how much I missed him and our friendship, and he finally responded. That was when he explained why we weren’t friends anymore. He thought I had acted too hastily in divorcing Bruce, accusing me of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” somehow he turned himself into the rejected “baby”). When he realized he couldn’t protect me from my “recklessness,” he bolted. I resented his implication that my unhappiness wasn’t real. Just became I had a pattern of being with the wrong man didn’t mean I should stay with the latest wrong man.

In 1992 I was in Monte Carlo to shoot the feature
Once Upon a Crime
. One day I was sitting across from Sean Young, one of the other actors. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something... missing Was it possible? Good God, she wasn’t wearing underpants. I finally said to her, “I’m shootin’ squirrel from where I’m sitting.” She smiled and crossed her legs, an agreeable colleague.

We were shooting at night, beginning when the last customer had left the grand casino and ending before the first customer arrived the next morning. While we waited for the casino to empty out one night, the cast went gambling. I didn’t bet, but every person I stood next to lost. The next night, after I had filmed a scene with George Hamilton, he asked, “How would you like to come with me for breakfast?” The casino restaurant was closed, but George is a high roller, well known to the management, so they opened up just for us. We were still wearing our movie costumes--he in an immaculately cut tuxedo (his teeth blindingly white against his ubiquitous tan) and me in a Versace gown. We had raspberry soufflé and Louis Roederer blush champagne.

As we walked through the restaurant’s double doors, there was a roulette table. “I’m going to prove to you right now that you’re not a jinx,” said George. “Pick a number.” I stood next to him breathless with worry and watched as he racked up $5,000, $10,000, $25,000, $50,000--in wins, not losses. “Let’s go to Cartier and I’ll buy you a watch,” he suggested. I declined. I already had a watch.

AS SPOKESPERSON FOR VOTER’S CHOICE, I WAS
invited--along with many others, including Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas and Whoopie Goldberg--to Washington, D.C., to lead the March for Women’s Lives. At the fund-raiser the evening before I was seated next to a political consultant, born and raised in Chicago, who had stayed in Boston after law school and had become a kind of consigliere to the younger generation of Kennedys. He was a smart, funny, athletic feminist who had massive amounts of curly brown hair with glints of red and gold. I fell.

He was also G.U.--Geographically Undesirable. It was a struggle to find time together, and when I decided to build a house in Memphis he thought I was insane, suggesting Nantucket or Aspen as more appropriately exciting places. Though I had lots of family and old friends in Memphis I would have never considered building a home there if I hadn’t made new, close friends: one is Sid Selvidge a brilliant folk singer and songwriter who produced my fourth CD,
Somewhere Down the Road (
which featured a duet with Peabo Bryson, one of the great voices of pop music); the other new friend was Betsy Goodman Burr Flannagan Belz. Like me, she’s had three children with two different men. Betsy is a beautiful woman, and I find in her friendship a refreshing lack of envy. With Sid and Betsy, I gained a new brother and sister.

I finally got to build my dream house in downtown Memphis, up on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and the local newspaper chose my home as one of the three worst eyesores in the city of Memphis. The other two are Pat’s Pizza, which has been closed for twenty-five years, and my favorite junkyard on Main Street, filled with old carbine wheels, tow trucks, and
patinated
pieces of machinery.

In the fall of that year, I agreed to speak in San Francisco at a fund-raiser for Ann Richards, who was running for governor of Texas. The Consultant agreed to meet me there. It was the same day the Giants were playing the A’s in the World Series at Candlestick Park. I got to the hotel first and had champagne and oysters waiting in the room. We had just started to make love when the earth moved, literally.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“An earthquake,” I said.

“What do we do?”

“Get under the bed.” Of course, there was no way to squeeze under a box spring for protection, and we huddled in the doorway until the earth stopped moving. The phone wasn’t working, and we didn’t know what kind of pandemonium we’d find outside, but my first thought was:
Who knows when we’ll get to eat again
? So we quickly polished off the champagne and oysters before walking downstairs to the lobby, dimly lit with emergency lighting. I looked over at the bar and thought:
If I’m going to die, I might as well die happy
. Several margaritas later, we poked our heads outside, aware that the sounds of the city had been silenced, and saw a long black limousine parked in front of the hotel. I knocked on the driver’s side, motioning for him to lower the window.

“Excuse me,” I said deliberately, uttering words I had never used in my life, “I’m Cybill Shepherd. You know, the movie star? Could you please let me use your phone so I can call my kids and tell them I’m okay?” From the back of the limo, I heard a man’s voice. “Cybill Shepherd? We’re from Memphis. We’re here for the World Series. Come on inside.” We got in the car and saw the collapsed Bay Bridge on the tiny TV. Returning to the hotel, we were each handed a lit candle for the walk up seven flights, and all night long we listened to the repetition of inexplicable noises coining from Union Square: pop, pop, crash. Pop, pop, crash. It turned out that many of the windows in the Neiman Marcus building had cracked, and maintenance crews were knocking out the shards of glass before they could fall on pedestrians. The moment it was light, we made it to the airport. San Francisco survived the earthquake; our relationship didn’t. But The Consultant will always be my favorite mistake.

Sometime in October 1992 I got a call from a mutual friend involved in the women’s movement. There was going to be what turned out to be the largest march in history for gay and lesbian rights in Washington, and I immediately agreed to attend. As the April 1993 date approached, the march began to garner a good deal of publicity. I was told that because Roseanne was planning to charter a jet and bring a plane full of Hollywood celebrities, they really didn’t need me. I asked if they had a seat for me on the plane. The answer was no. I called Paricia Ireland, the head of the National Organization for Women, to check to make sure I shouldn’t go. She said that I should definitely go and, furthermore asked if I could attend a major fund-raiser the night before for the Human Rights Campaign Fund. I said sure, and the night of the event we raised a lot of money and lifted a lot of spirits. It turned out that Roseanne and her plane full of celebrities never materialized. The only Hollywood personalities whom I remember being there were Judith Light and myself. On the day of the march I was told that only gays and lesbians would be allowed to carry the banner. I staged my own little protest. I asked them, “Do you think Martin Luther King would have refused to let me carry the banner with him because of the color of my skin?” So I was allowed to carry the banner. It was a great honor, and it was one of my proudest moments as a parent when my thirteen-year-old daughter Clementine told me that since she felt so strongly about the issue, she wanted to march with me.

There had been talk in Memphis for years about someday building an interactive facility around the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was killed. It was to be called the National Civil Rights Museum, and I was invited to speak at the dedication ceremony on January 20, 1992. It took me thirty-four years to actively become involved in the fight against racism. I received a plaque inscribed with the motto “equal opportunity and human dignity,” followed by “Thank you Cybill Shepherd for helping break the chain of oppression.”

When I arrived in Memphis, my mother picked me up at the airport and said “I’ve never been as proud of you as I am today.” Tears streamed down my face as I spoke of my hope that this museum would give us all a chance to start healing the destructive hatred of the racism that had surrounded us for so long.

Moments before the ceremony began, however, my then-publicist, Cheryl Kagen, appeared, pulling a tall, distinguished-looking man by the arm. She introduced me to Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who had flown in to attend the ceremony but had not been scheduled to speak. When he arrived a few minutes late, he was refused a seat on the podium. No one recognized him. In the coming months, I would speak at three different fund-raisers for the Clinton/Gore campaign. At an event in Little Rock, Clinton and I waited backstage, and I realized, as so many women have, how intelligent, warm, and charismatic he is. I realized I was staring into his eyes and caught myself. “You know what?” I said. “You’re entirely too attractive. You better stand on the other side of the room.”

In 1993 CBS OFFERED ME A ROLE AS THE MOTHER OF
a kidnapped child in a made-for-TV movie called
There was a Little Boy.
I pushed successfully for the director to be Mimi Leder, a woman whose work I had admired from the series
China Beach
, even though she was not on the CBS “approved” list. She went on to direct
The Peacemaker,
with a
$50
million budget, and
Deep Impact
, at $80 million, becoming one of a handful of women making major action features.) I always explain to colleagues that I have a particular way of trying to develop and sustain a mood that usually involves some quiet and reflection before a scene, but not all actors need to work that way. John Heard, who was playing my husband, can make wisecracking comments right up to the moment the film starts rolling and a moment later have tears streaming down his cheeks. Mimi had been the frequent brunt of his teasing humor, but one day he went a little too far and asked her, “What makes you think you can direct?” She turned to him and said evenly, “When I hired you, I thought I was hiring John Hurt.” Mimi was well liked and the crew applauded.

We were filming at a high school in an area that was considered the drive-by shooting capital of the wor One night, just moments after I’d left, a man was shot and killed half a block away from my trailer. My manager called one of the executives at Lorimar to request a bodyguard for me, and he absolutely refused, so I arranged and paid for an off-duty LAPD officer myself.

It was a good thing. About a week later, we were working in a neighborhood that was the home turf of some notoriously violent gangs. I was waiting for the setup of a scene that called for me to cross the street pushing a baby carriage, when my bodyguard said, “Don’t move until I get back,” and dashed off to grab a walkie-talkie from one of the crew. I was oblivious to what had caught his eye: a group of men who appeared to be smoking dope on the balcony of a nearby apartment building, one of whom suddenly started waving a gun in my direction. Within moments a police helicopter hovered overhead, and officers on foot entered the building. Filming stopped as the revelers were arrested, but no weapons were ever found.

IF THERE’S ONE THING I’VE LEARNED, IT’S THAT THE
tide goes out and the tide comes in. But I never expected to see Jay Daniels, part of my misery on
Moonlighting,
washed up on the beach as another piece of flotsam. I was almost struck mute (an uncommon occurrence for me) on the day in 1994 when my manager told me Jay had called, asking to meet with me in hopes of persuading me to go back to television as both star and executive producer of my own show. There was no way I wanted to talk with let alone work with, a man who had stood by passively while Glenn Caron ripped into me. Jay kept calling, and my manager kept repeating my answer: no. But he claimed to have done a lot of thinking about my troubled
Moonlighting
experience during his subsequent four years on
Roseanne
and had concluded that I’d been the victim of what amounted to a sexist boys club. He repeated this to me directly when I agreed to a meeting at my house. And I believed him.

We ended up at Carsey-Werner Productions, a “boutique” studio that had produced
The Cosby Show
and had
Roseanne
and
Grace Under Fire
on the air. In agreeing to do the
Cybill
show, Marcy Carsey (a former actress herself) and Tom Werner were, for the first time, taking on a project developed outside the auspices of their studio. But they hated our first script and asked us to start from scratch, reluctantly agreeing to the original plan of my character being an actress. It felt like the show would never get made.