Cybill Disobedience (24 page)

“Can y’all help me out?” I begged. “It’s really important to get enough moisture in the egg yolk or I can’t say my lines.”

“Sure thing, Miss Shepherd,” they said, and at the next performance, I picked up the egg to see the yellow part wobbling—a liquid yolk. I remembered the old actors’ rule: use it. If you’re miserable because you have to pee or your costar has skunk breath or the egg tastes terrible, use it, and I developed a repertoire of broad faces, burps, drools, and dribbles. Acting is about specificity. One moment is:
I’m happy to have the egg in my mouth
; the next moment is:
I don’t know about this
; and the next is:
I’m going to hurl.
Most of the time, the audience loved it, although there was an entire mountain range in the Poconos where not a single person in a sold-out theater laughed. I learned that you can never get too full of yourself as an actor--every night there are different ways to fail and to triumph.

I became friends with one of my costars, getting together for a bite to eat or a glass of wine, and during our rehearsals in New York I was thrilled to be invited for tea one day to the home of his mother. But the thrill was brief. “You know,” she said dismissively as she poured from a silver teapot, “you’re really not one of us.”

When the tour was over, The Costar and I drove to the Chesapeake Bay to visit his friends in their sprawling ranch house. Though we had become lovers, we quickly progressed to the imperfect phase of the relationship, what one friend calls the “congealed fat in the frying pan” stage. That night the four of us had Maryland crab cakes for dinner, and The Costar had quite a lot of vodka. We went into the guest room where we would be sleeping and he came on to me. I was revolted by his alcoholic reek and, pulling away from him, said, “Fuck you, I don’t have to fuck you.” I stormed into the kitchen, thinking I would find the car keys and leave, when he appeared behind me. “Don’t even think about going anywhere,” he said, “because I have the keys right here in my pocket.” Then he ripped off the delicate gold necklace that he’d given me, saying, “That doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Then he shoved me to the ground. I got up, ran down the hall, and banged on his friends’ bedroom door. “I’ll take care of it,” said the husband, grabbing a robe and trudging down the hall with a weary sense of familiarity. “It’s better if The Costar just drinks beer.”

I sat with the wife until The Costar got quiet and fell asleep. We got up the next morning and drove in strained silence to Knoxville to see my friend Jane Howard as planned. Finally I said, “You knocked me down.”

“You fell down,” he snarled. As soon as we got to Tennessee, I told him the relationship was over. No man I’d had sex with had ever made me fear for my physical safety before, and I didn’t want it to happen again. It took me many years to feel safe enough to spend the night with a man again.

I hadn’t seen Peter Bogdanovich since he threw the crystal ashtray at me, but after my marriage ended, he began calling me every few months, taking blame for the end of our relationship, telling me he finally understood that I had been serious about wanting a child. When Peter called over the Christmas holiday of 1980, I had just spent several weeks writing, longhand on legal pads, a screenplay for a book called
September, September
by Shelby Foote, a haunting story about three white racists from Mississippi who kidnap the only grandson of one of America’s first black millionaires. I told Peter that I’d like to option it but couldn’t afford it. “Let me lend you the money,” he said, and sent me a generous check that allowed me to option the novel. Foote, whom I met at a Memphis wine-and-cheese party, had spent twenty years writing
The Civil War: A Narrative
and looked like a Rebel general himself. When I told him I’d love to play the white-trash woman in the trio of kidnappers, he said in his honeyed Mississippi drawl, Mah dear, you’re fahhhhhhh too young for the part.”

I had stayed in touch with Larry McMurtry ever since
The Last Picture Show,
and our bond was really secured when he visited the set of
Daisy Miller
(his son played my brother) and sat with me in the lobby of the Hotel Trois Coronnes. rubbing my feet and reading aloud the gruesome “Crazy Jane” love poems by Yeats. He was physically, one of the least attractive men imaginable, but as a friend he was everything I wanted: a renaissance cowboy, an earthy intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner who could take pleasure in a dive that served two-dollar tacos. He became my touchstone in life, and for a brief time our collaboration became sexual.

Our friendship never faltered because we became sexual or because we stopped. Larry always managed to come see me, in Los Angeles or Memphis or just about anywhere else I was working. He was always flying off to a remote corner of the maritime Alps or driving through the Ozarks in a U-Haul truck, buying up private libraries for his bookstores in Washington, D.C., and in Texas. I didn’t even have to give Myrtle a menu—I’d just say, “Larry will be here about four o’clock,” and she’d say, “I’ll get the catfish.” He felt he had to spend all his money to keep his creative edge, and he never entered my house without gifts, not just for me but for Clementine and Myrtle. (Myrtle is in the dedication of his novel
The Evening Star,
the follow-up to
Terms of Endearment.)
In between visits he kept up a steady correspondence—long, literate, ardent letters usually typed (with mistakes xxxxxxxx’ed out) on the same kind of cheap yellow paper he used for his books and scripts:

Interestingly enough, since I’m a somewhat analytical man and have analyzed plenty of relationships,
I
feel no impulse to analyze us. I trust my affinities and I like the quality of our companionship very much, without needing to examine the components....

     
You have brought joy and fragrance to my life. Your human fragrance is as complex as your new perfume: partly dry, light, of the brain; partly wet, deep, of the heart and loins...

     
Of course, when you love someone very much, you have a natural fear that they will stop loving you. It’s part of what makes the whole business of need-desire-attachment-freedom-dependence so complicated. Love is so easily bruised and ruined, or, even more often, simply worn out and lost in the repetitiousness of life. I often have these fears where you are concerned, and yet mostly I have a deep trust in us....

     
You’re a very wonderful woman; you’ll compel the love of many men. As long as you can learn to roughly distinguish those who mean you well from those who mean you ill, that’s as it should be--there would be something wrong in nature if men didn’t love and want you. Only learn not to get yourself hurt. I know you have learned now that actions speak louder than words. what men do is important, not what they say.

Larry called me “the lost zygote of my family and was always encouraging me to expand my horizons. In 1981 it was his idea that I apply for entrance to the women directors’ program of the American Film Istitute, and as part of my application for admission, I submitted my script for
September, September.
Partly to assuage my disappointment when AFI rejected me, Larry agreed to work with me on the script, and on the strength of his name, we were given a developmental deal at Carson Productions, which operated under the auspices of Columbia Pictures. After working on it for almost a year, we were granted a meeting with Columbia chief Craig Baumgarten. The moment we entered his office, he said, “This is a hateful story that no one would want to see, and we wouldn’t dream of making it.” We did get the go-ahead from Turner Broadcasting, although not with the director Stanley Kubrick, as Shelby Foote had hoped. (He declined with a nice handwritten note that ended, “Please say hello to the General.”) When I finally went with Larry to see Shelby Foote in 1991, ten years after our first meeting, he opened the door to his house, looked at me, and said, “You’re old enough now.”

IN 1980 I ARRIVED IN NEW YO
RK, FINALLY READY TO TAKE
acting classes with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio. I got a call from a Los Angeles casting director named Robin Lippen, offering me a guest appearance on the TV show
Fantasy Island.
To say that I was underwhelmed doesn’t begin to describe my qualms about this nadir of my career. I wasn’t even the lead guest star, and I didn’t get to arrive on the island as Tattoo shouted “The plane! The plane!” to Mr. Roarke.

“Oh, Cybill, you should not be represented at a big agency,” Robin said. “They’ll want to cast Goldie Hawn or Sally Field—clients who are going to make more money. If you do this role, you’ll get five thousand dollars and a plane ticket, and while you’re out here, I will set up meetings for you with the top independent agents, who will turn your career around.”

It was a great piece of advice, and with little to lose I accepted her offer. I checked into the Sheraton Universal, which I referred to as the Universal Sheraton because it sounded more important, and eventually met with an elfin and enthusiastic agent named David Shapira. The first job he got me was for a TV pilot called
Masquerade
produced by Aaron Spelling and distinguished by more takeoffs and landings of jets than any other pilot in the history of television.

My second job was starring in the series
The Yellow Rose
. I was to play the widowed owner of a large Texas ranch, and Sam Elliott was the illegitimate son of my much older dead husband. I was called back to read four times, the last time to see if Sam and I had the right chemistry. When I walked into the production office, sitting on the couch, and waiting to read for the same part was Priscilla Presley. Hard to imagine a worse sign: There was, first of all, my history with Elvis, and I had no idea if she knew about it. It was like a marquee had been set up, flashing: “One of you will not get the part.” Both of us were uncomfortable, but we smiled and exchanged pleasantries.

Shapira called with good news/bad news. “You got the part,” he said, “but you’ve been fucked.” Sometime before, I’d gone up for another NBC pilot about race car drivers. I didn’t get the part, but my agent at the time had agreed to a fee of $1,000 an episode. Even though other actors on
Yellow Rose
were demanding and getting much more, the network knew what it could get me for.

The bargain-basement salary was maddening, but it was enough to put a down payment on a town house in Studio Village, with what I referred to as a view overlooking the Los Angeles River, which was nothing more than a giant concrete chute created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Most of the time there was just a trickle insignificant that kids would skateboard through, but a heavy rain could create a giant flow of rushing water. Beyond was a lovely field of wildflowers, my own Tuscan landscape, dotted by the soundstages of what was called the Mary Tyler Moore studio. I spent many afternoons looking longingly across the L.A. River wondering if I’d ever get a chance to work there. The loveliness of the setting paled when I learned that the condominium complex had been the site of two grisly murders by bludgeoning, including the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale, whose friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan had been the stuff of tabloid headlines, sometimes alongside headlines about me.

Sam Elliott and I were asked to come to New York to take part in the network’s announcement of new fall programming. But when we went to meet the producers for lunch at the “21” Club, I was refused admittance because I was wearing running shoes, a New Balance model that cost $150. I went down the street and paid $11 for black rubber flats, then made a grand show of sitting in the restaurant’s reception area to change, daintily doing a striptease with my socks. No sneakers allowed? Watch me.

Exteriors for the series were shot in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles--wide open country meant to approximate Texas, with a panorama ranging from snow-capped mountains to the Mojave Desert. Sam seemed to grow even more despondent as the show sank into soap opera territory, a conspicuous imitation of the runaway hit Dallas, involving the kind of weekly intrigue, deception, and lust that couldn’t possibly take up the time of real ranchers or else we’d all be vegetarians. (Larry McMurty wrote to me, “There were not a few steals from
Hud
, I observed. The cook and the boy seem a little Patricia Neal and Brandon de Wilde-ish.”) Sam had signed on to do a TV series that was a western, while I had signed on to do a TV series that was a job. I had few complaints: it was the first long-term work I’d ever had, and I was getting paid to ride a horse. I talked to the show wranglers and got involved in choosing my own championship roper named Red that I could guide with my knees.

Two weekends a month, the wranglers went out to practice their roping technique at Castaic Lake Arena and invited me to come along. Quarter horses are the fastest horseflesh on the planet for one quarter of a mile--they can outrun any thoroughbred at Santa Anita for that distance--and I could feel their power like g- force in my chest. The horse is backed up into a box with no door, a bell rings, and the horse and steer are released at the same time into the rodeo ring. The horse’s job is to line up the rider so he or she can swing and throw the rope, jerk the slack, and tighten the noose around the steer’s horns or neck. When you tie off the rope on the saddle horn, the horse stops, and the steer gets yanked to the ground. The most important rule, I was told, is: keep your thumb up when you’re tying off. Anyone who tried to teach me to rope had fingers missing, having gotten them tangled in the rope when the horse stopped but the steer kept moving.

A dedicated actor wants to do as much of the stunt, safely, as possible to “sell” it to the audience, making it believable and giving the director the ability to edit in the expert. A movie set is really a construction site, an inherently dangerous place, with jagged pieces of wood and nails everywhere and huge sources of illumination called “nine-lights” tottering on skinny retractable rods. One day I was inside a corral, having done my side of the scene on horseback, but the director asked me to mount my horse to do the other side of the scene for the other actors (a professional courtesy called “off camera”). Horses can “shy” or panic because of the ways their eyes are placed, with a blind spot in the middle, so objects can appear to jump. I love them, but they have a brain the size of an orange in a two-thousand-pound body.