Cybill Disobedience (25 page)

I’ll never know what frightened Red, but he backed up and caught an electrical cord from a nine-light between his right rear shoe and hoof. It fell forward, bouncing and sparking, and he took off, dragging it around the ring. ‘There was no dismounting, and no one could approach--the camera crew went running for their lives when faced with a runaway horse.

I used a technique learned in my horse-crazed childhood called “pulley rein,” gradually slowing the animal down to increasingly smaller circles, until R. L. Tolbert, the stunt coordinator, could get close enough to gently take the reins and let me dismount. That was the last time I was ever “off camera” on the back of a horse. From then on, it was a ladder for me.

R. L. was a former rodeo champ with thick silver hair that formed a widow’s peak. He was a wonderful reference source about cowboys. He made gentle fun of the hat I wore for the show, which did not meet his standards. A proper cowboy’s hat has profound, immutable requirements, and much of the unwritten code is about brims. When you put the hat on a table, you lay it crown down so the brim isn’t misaligned. Your hat must never blow off (this constitutes a huge loss of face among peers). When you remove it, there had better be a deep red impression in your forehead, and hat hair is a badge of pride. I was apparently walking around with a scandalously loose, battered-brim hat, and he helped me pick out a proper one.

One weekend he invited me to the rodeo at Santa Barbara. On a shining Saturday afternoon, we drove up the Pacific coast in his big white pickup truck (it was the first time I ever saw a date spit tobacco into a cup). When I see water, I want to swim, and I don’t go anywhere without a bathing suit in my bag. R.L. didn’t have one. “But I know a beach,” he said, “where we don’t need them.” I learned where the term
redneck
comes from: R.L. had a burnished tan on his neck and hands, but the rest of his body was fish-belly white. At the rodeo we bought big cups of 7-UP, drank them halfway down, and then filled them back up with Jack Daniel’s. When I started getting sleepy, he instructed, “You have to keep drinking so your blood alcohol doesn’t go down.” By the time we arrived at a crummy little beach motel, I was ready to test out R. L.’s private stunt work.

Ever restless, I soon moved on to another stuntman. It was his idea that I learn Formula Ford racecar driving--I think he liked the idea of Miss Teenage Memphis chewing up the track with the big boys. I took a three-day course at Riverside to qualify for the Toyota Grand Prix, then remembered that I was the mother of a small child, so I never actually competed. But the training served one good purpose: I never again needed to drive fast for the thrill of it.

The Stuntman was an energetic, imaginative lover. And in my sexual odyssey, this was the experience that confirmed something enlightened women know but men never quite believe: size doesn’t matter. There are all kinds of places inside a woman that a man can move a small penis, and he knew how to find them. One night, in a playful mood, we were talking about sexual fantasies, and I admitted that I’d imagined being with two men.

“I’d like to make that one come true for you,” he said with a twinkle.

“Don’t be crazy” I countered. “Do you have any idea how much the National Enquirer would pay for that story?”

But he had a proposal: his close friend, another stuntman of guaranteed discretion. “If you ever meet again,” he promised, “there will see no indication that it ever happened.” I was intrigued, excited, and quite scared. An hour before the friend was to arrive, I said I couldn’t go through with it. The Stuntman said, “You don’t want to back out now. Have a little snor body wke.”

There’s a real argument to be made that if you need controlled substances to make something acceptable, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. In the 1970s there was a sense of self-righteousness about drug taking, a supposition that it would be enlightening, that artists needed to expand their minds. In the “me decade” of the 1980s, everyone I knew was still getting high with some regularity. At parties there were sugar bowls full of cocaine (not yet considered addictive), and nonparticipants were regarded as weird. I was hardly a doper--on the contrary, I’d always been the safety monitor in my crowd, the one who insisted on buckling up seat belts and warned about the perils of cigarettes.

“The Cybill sandwich” turned out to be a positive sexual experience. Having all the pleasure points being attended to simultaneously rather than sequentially made me feel adored, emancipated, and more relaxed about sex. Years later, an episode of
Moonlighting
called for a chain saw fight, and the fellow hired to train me turned out to be the ménage partner. True to his word, he was circumspect and discreet. “Cybill,” he said warmly, extending his hand, “I haven’t seen you in a few years.” He didn’t even linger over the word
seen
.

The Stuntman started acting overly involved in my career, presenting me with too many ideas for merchandising tie-ins with
The Yellow Rose,
like my name on a map of Texas that he wanted to sell. He had the same obsession with ladylike hands as my grandfather, even to the point of offering to polish my nails. (This turned out to be surprisingly erotic. He brought three color choices, and it took hours.) One night while he was out, I was waiting at his house, talking on the phone to my gynecologist. We were admitting that we were attracted to each other when he was married and I was with Peter, and I told him I’d been close to having an orgasm when he put in my IUD. (I know, I know.) The next day, The Stuntman accused me of being depraved. “That’s revolting,” he said angrily, “to get off with your gynecologist.” There was no way. he could have known that secret, and I discovered that he was recording every phone call made to or from his house. I think his paranoia had more to do with his drug connections than with spying on me, but it was an alarm that signaled the beginning of the end of that relationship.

Perfect opening (you should pardon the expression) for The Gynecologist. He was an attractive, man, and any sense of impropriety did not override my life motto: Why not? He lived in a contemporary palace high in the canyons with a collection of modern art and a teenage son who hated me on sight, baring his teeth like a cat when he spoke to me. One night the doctor and I were eating steaks he had grilled on the barbecue. Suddenly his face went pale, his shoulders went up, and he wasn’t making any noise. Running into the boy’s room, I yelled, “Come quickly, I think your father’s choking!”

He looked up without even feigned interest and said, “Give me a fucking break.”

“Listen, you little worm,” I screamed, “you may hate me, but unless you want to inherit the Hockneys tonight, get your ass in here and help me do Heimlich!” The doctor survived, but the affair didn’t.

My hairdresser on
The Yellow Rose
was a lively woman who raised turkeys on her farm—“all natural,” she told me, “none of those chemicals and hormones and poisons and shit—and she offered me one for Thanksgiving. On our last day of shooting before the holiday, she told me, “I brought you a beautiful bird. It’s out in my truck.” Peeking over the back door, I saw what appeared to be a small hatbox.
That couldn’t b
e
it,
I thought. Then I heard the squawk. It was alive but packed so it couldn’t move, like sometng out of
Boxing Helena.
Undaunted, I called around to various restaurants, asking euphemistically, “Where can I have this taken care of?” and finally, someone suggested Chinatown.

My friend Jane Howard was visiting for the holiday, and walked around the crowded streets looking for a shop with dead poultry hanging in the windows. We hadn’t heard another peep out of that turkey--I think it had conceded its fate. An accommodating butcher took the box from my hands with little fanfare and five minutes later, handed me a parcel wrapped in brown paper, no longer moving. The turkey was cooked by my housekeeper, who brought it to the table, according to her family tradition, with its two claws crossed upright. And it was tough as shoe leather. Give me a Butterball shot full of chemicals any day.

It was extraordinary for me to be working on a studio lot like the ones where the movies I’d watched with Peter were shot, and the day I found out for sure that
Yellow Rose
would not be picked up for another season, I went over to the Warner Bros. Burbank studios and walked around the set sobbing. Movie camp was over, and I thought I’d never work again--not an irrational thought considering the sobering statistic that something like 90 percent of the Screen Actors Guild members are unemployed.

When you bump into people you haven’t seen for a while in Hollywood, they seldom ask the mechanical “How are you?” They ask, and they really want to know, “What are you doing now?” I had no answer.

GLENN GORDON CARON SAYS T
HAT HALFWAY THOUGH THE
pilot of
Moonlighting
he realized he was writing the character Maddie Hayes as Cybill Shepherd. He asked if there was any way he could get a meeting with me. When my agent sent me those fifty pages, I immediately recognized the part I’d been hankering to do for a long time. For years I’d studied the screwball comedies directed by Howard Hawks, especially
Twentieth Century
(1934),
Bringing Up Baby
(1938), and
His Girl Friday
(1940). These films glorified Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell—they talked fast and acted sexy, smart, and funny.

Glenn was only thirty but no wunderkind. He’d done a couple of failed pilots, and his main credit was for
Remington Steele.
I was invited to meet him and his colleague Jay Daniel at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Glenn was boyish, charming, portly, clearly excited by the presence of Maddie Hayes incarnate and not afraid to show it--he later said that his negotiating strength had been hampered when his chin hit the table and his tongue hit the floor. He remarked that he’d seen me in a movie wearing “that dress” (the bias-cut satin from
The Lady Vanishes
). The first thing I said to Glenn after hello was “I know what this is--it’s a Hawksian comedy.” He had no idea what I was talking about, so I suggested we screen my three favorites to see how overlapping dialogue was handled by the “masters,” and he agreed. We talked about the way the
Moonlighting
script played with my image as a spoiled bitch, although Glenn claimed to have been largely unaware of my reputation as the most clobbered actress in Hollywood.” There wasn’t an actor in the world who hadn’t been in an ill-suited movie, he said. I’d just had more than my share.

City of Angels is run, none too efficiently, by a character named David Addison, whose creed is “Live fast, die young, leave clean underwear,” and who convinces Maddie to become his partner, renaming the agency Blue Moon after the shampoo for which she was a well-known spokeswoman in her modeling days. Addison is described as an emotional adolescent, cocky and sexually aggressive, whose humor puerile charm ameliorate his obnoxious behavior and language. Apparently there were three thousand men who saw themselves with those attributes because that’s how many actors answered the casting call. Chemistry between actors is either there or it isn’t. I’m not sure you can act chemistry on-screen any more than you can in real life when your well-intentioned cousin sets you up on a blind date with a troglodyte. I thought it was imperative that the chemistry between Maddie and David be genuine, since the show was driven by snappy, overlapping banter and palpable sexual tension. I had casting approval, and when the pile of resumes from David-wannabes was winnowed down to a lean half-dozen, I went to meet them.

ABC’s offices were located in a tall glass tower in Century City, and the casting sessions took place in a long conference room with a wall of shuttered windows. Several candidates came and went, but nothing especially magical was happening. By mid-afternoon, I was weary, picking at bits of tuna arid lettuce from the salads that had been brought in for lunch, when Bruce Willis entered the room.

He was, I would later learn, five years younger than I, wearing an army fatigue jacket, several earrings, and what looked to be the compensatory three-day beard of a man with a receding hairline, the rest of his hair punkishly cut and moussed. There was a careless, desultory way he walked around the perimeter of the big table, keeping his distance from me and sauntering over to Glenn and Jay. His eyes were crinkled and his lips pressed into a mocking smile, a composite that was to become the signature David Addison smirk.

Bruce had been earning a living as a bartender in New York, sharing a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen with large rats while playing mostly uncredited bit parts, like “courtroom observer” in Paul Newman’s legal drama
The Verdict
or “diner customer” in a Frank Sinatra movie,
The First Deadly Sin,
and he had just been turned down for a role in
Desperately Seeking Susan
that went to Aidan Quinn. Unlike the other actors who’d auditioned, he didn’t especially flatter me; in fact, he actually avoided eye contact, directing most of his vaguely smart-ass male-bonding comments to Glenn, like “Just got off my shift at the bar.” But there was definite chemistry between us, and it escaped no one--the temperature in the room jumped about twenty degrees. After he’d left, I leaned over and murmured, as much to myself as to Glenn, “He’s the one.”

“Are you sure?” he responded. Glenn knew it would require Herculean effort to convince the ABC brass that this quirky, attitudinous guy with negligible professional experience and rather unconventional looks was perfectly cast for a prime-time hit on their network, which was then third place in the ratings. The suits saw him playing “heavies,” declared he was “not leading man material” and asked me to read with better-known actors. The part was actually offered to a clean-cut actor named Robert Hayes, who turned it down in favor of I don’t know what. The only way Bruce Willis would be considered was if I agreed to do a screen test with him. With the camera rolling just as we were about to do the scene, he looked at me with perfect satisfaction and said, “I can’t concentrate. You’re too beautiful.” The suits were convinced.