Cybill Disobedience (37 page)

This is what fifty looks like, so far not surgically corrected (but never say never). Ancient artifact that I am, my pictures are still on the makeup counter at the drugstore, so I know the response to my lamentations may be: shut up, Cybill Shepherd. But I still have to confront the bathroom mirror--no retouching, no flattering lighting. As an aging beauty in America, I have an interesting perspective. I’m ready for my Shelley Winters parts now, and I have less vanity than you can imagine. My kids beg, “Before you pick us up, could you please comb the back of your hair?”

I’ve chosen to work in a field that has brought me success and money, much of it by allowing strangers to know the most intimate things about me and by having every private moment examined with the precision of gemstone cutting. Demi Moore was castigated for employing three nannies on a movie set to care for her three children. Nobody asked about Bruce Willis’ whereabouts or the boundaries of his responsibility. The list of what’s required to be considered a good enough father is about pinky length, but the list for a good enough mother is the interstate. There are times when I don’t do a scene as well as I could because I’ve been up all night with a sick child, and there are times when I miss one of my kids’ basketball games because I have to be on the set. Interviewers have always asked me, “How do you do it all?” The truth is, I only
appear
to be doing it all. Every day I fail, but I’ve developed the ability to improvise. I have to force time to be relative; I have to make five minutes count for five hours. Those balls that I seem to be juggling so effortlessly are, in fact, dropping all around me. What the public sees are moments of perfection, all the balls in the air, frozen for that instant, like in a still photograph.

As a teenager, I was one of the lucky ones. I never had the need to end an unwanted pregnancy because my family doctor provided me with birth control. I had a freedom that many women still don’t have today. I’m going to keep speaking out for those girls who weren’t so lucky, for my daughters and for other women--if not from the Oval Office, then from a multiplex or website or orangecrate podium near you. Watch me.

NOT LONG AGO I READ FOR A PART WITH A YOUNG
director who asked me, “How does it feel to have been in three great American movies?” (The part went to... to be announced.) Yes, that’s me in
The Last Picture Show, The Heartbreak Kid,
and
Taxi Driver.
But we are more than the sum of our work, and we’re not only as good as the last thing we did.

I was thinking of these things on a trip to Graceland last year, almost thirty years since my last visit. Weeping behind my sunglasses, I stood at Elvis’ grave in the meditation garden that was his pride and joy. At the time he took me there, I did not understand the symbolism in the lotus flower design of his beautiful stained-glassg to dows. I know that the unfolding petals of the lotus blooming in the mud suggest the expansion of the soul through suffering and adversity. Elvis was on to something but that enlightenment couldn’t save him. I wish he were still alive because I think we would be friends now. One of the realms on the Buddhist wheel of life is that of “hungry ghosts” where beings are tormented by unfulfilled longing and are never satisfied. I think I got stuck in that realm and tried to resolve my anger and pain with men, taking pleasure as if it had no consequence.

With a girlfriend along as moral support, I decided to check out the plot I’d reserved for myself at Memorial Garden Park, on a wide verdant heath near Moma and Da-Dee. (Actually, I bought four plots, not knowing who might want to accompany me to the great beyond,) The very thought of eternal life made us hungry so we sat in the cemetery parking lot, stuffing our faces with fried cat-fish and hush puppies from Captain D’s takeout before venturing into the mortuary office, where it took some time to find me.

“How do you spell your name?” the mortician kept asking, eventually recognizing this as a photo op and requesting that I pose in front of a display of headstones.

“What are all those?” I asked, looking at the slabs of marble, the various tints and typefaces.

“Those are your choices,” he said cheerfully. “Would you like to make some decisions as long as you’re here?” He was enthusiastic about a newly available option: the dearly departed’s face in bas-relief on the marker. “We can go look at Charlie Rich,” he offered and drove us over to the plot. Poor old Charlie looked exactly like Leslie Nielsen, so I declined.

My friend was mortified, considering it weird and macabre to be hanging out at a graveyard on this clement spring day, discussing whether or not I should be embalmed before being cremated--prettified with a final “hair-and-makeup” for the few moments in the coffin before I turn to ash. But I feel peaceful in this place where my aunt Ruby took me to play when I was a little girl. And I am comforted to imagine that someone in the twenty-first century will remember a big, brassy blonde who tried to use humor as the Krazy Glue for life’s necessary reparations, a stranger who will stand with a smile at my final resting place, reading a tombstone that says, “We’ll make this a comedy yet....”

I OWE THIS BOOK, AND MUCH MORE, TO THE CREATIVE
juices, tender asylum, and occasional
galvanizing cattle prod of many people: to my editor, David Hirshey, who never gave up hope that this undertaking was worthwhile; to Roger Director, who first suggested to David, “Cybill Shepherd—now
that’s
a story”; to Jesse Gerstein, for endless overtime patience; the gang at HarperCollins, for going the extra mile; to Peter Bogdanovich, Herma Bogdanovich, Frances Bruno, James Cass Rogers, Stella Adler, Larry McMurtry, and Orson Welles, for incalculable mentoring; to Glenn Gordon Caron, Jay Daniel, Chuck Lorre, Howard Gould, Bob Myer, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, Caryn Mandabach, Bruce Willis, and Christine Baranski, for all the great work we did together; to Jane Howard, Toni Gmuer, Linda Mathes, Martha Maiden, Dr. Ernest Bates, Linda Wallem, Joan Zajac, and James Vierra, for their support; to Henry Lange, Heidi Schaeffer, Wendy Morris, Donald Steele, Walter Teller, and Judy Hofflund, for professional lifelines; to Sid Selvidge and Elizabeth Belz, for Memphis grounding; to Myrtle Boone, for her wisdom, inspiration, mothering and really good fried catfish; to my children, Clementine Shepherd-Ford, Molly Ariel Shepherd-Oppenheim, and Cyrus Zachariah Shepherd-Oppenheim, for enduring with good humor the inevitable, unsolicited limelight that comes wto Daviaving me as a mom; to Jason Martin, for his brilliant assistance; to Stephen Fell, for helping this book get to E-land; to Aimee Lee Ball, for helping me put into words what was in my heart and giving it gravitas. And to my mother and brother William, all love.

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