Cybill Disobedience (31 page)

For several years I had given up singing in public because of all the discouragement. But on a visit to New York in 1994, I saw my good friend Jimmy Viera, who still makes me a blonde with his own two hands even though he’s no longer an executive at L’Oreal and I’m no longer the company spokeswoman. “I’m going to take you to hear Dixie Carter at the Cafe Carlyle,” he said, and during her performance, he leaned over and whispered, “You should be back on that stage again.” On the next two nights we saw Andrea Marcovicci at the Algonquin and Annie Ross at Rainbow and Stars. Somewhere along the way I had lost the spirit to say “watch me.” Jimmy gave me that voice back--and soon there was a microphone to amplify it. I was offered a three-week engagement, five nights a week, two shows a night, at Rainbow and Stars. I hired a new musical director, who brought several new musicians to my home, including one who sang backup, and played sax and keyboards. I will call him “Howard Roark.”

I happen to believe that people identify themselves to us within the first days, sometimes within the first moments, of our acquaintance--we often choose not to hear or believe what is patently obvious. It was inappropriate for Roark, at a band rehearsal, to hand me a valentine with a Superman figure he’d altered to be “Safety Man.”
Strike One.
On our second date, e told me that when he’d seen
The Heartbreak Kid
years before, he’d vowed, “Someday I’m going to get that babe.”
Strike
Two. But it didn’t stop me from spending the next three hours in bed. After our romp, we took a walk in a wildlife preserve near my house, still damp after a heavy rain. The light was dreaming through the clouds, and two wild mallards flew across our path.

“Maybe that’s a good omen,” I said, feeling a little mystical. “They’re on parallel paths, and they’re crossing ours.”

“Nah,” he said, “that’s just two dumb birds.”
Strike Three.

Roark was going through a bitter divorce, living over a friend’s garage, and moved into my guest room almost immediately. Only a few weeks later, he announced that he had an offer to go on the road as a backup musician for a rock band. “I understand that you have to make a living,” I told him, “but I’m going to date other men while you’re gone.” A few days later he said that he wanted to turn the job down and stay in town with me, but that would only be possible if he were made musical director of my show. I didn’t have a show at that point and made it clear I could never guarantee such a thing. Strike Four through Thirty-seven.

Since Jay Daniel was a producer but not a writer, Carsey-Werner suggested that I meet the head writer from
Grace Under Fire
. Everyone warned me that Chuck Lorre, a talented writer, could be difficult. But at our first meeting, he was sweet and funny. When he left, Marcy’s mouth was agape. “That was amusing,” she said “I’ve never seen Chuck so smitten, or so polite.”

The arc of Cybill Sheridan’s story was closely drawn from my own checkered career and private belly flops: she’s a single mother with two ex-husbands, the sort of journeyman actress I would have been had I not been lucky enough to have
The Last Picture Show
or
Moonlighting
. Chuck dissuaded me from making the character a mother of small children, as I was in real life. “It curtails the shooting schedule,” he said, “but more importantly you can’t get away with adult material. The network doesn’t like using sexy double entendres in front of kids.”

Jay made many contributions to Cybill, one of which was its use of the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the title sequence. The camera pans the sidewalk stars of Carole Lombard, Lana Turner, Kim Novak, Jean Harlow and Lassie (all famous Hollywood blondes). I suggested mine be a fake star, drawn in chalk.

My strongest objection to the original pilot script was the absence of any sustaining female friendships. I knew that I didn’t want to reprise the icy bitchiness of Maddie in
Moonlighting
, insisted on a best friend who was more of an uptight glamour queen so I could be the clown. (You know me, always beggin’ for pies in the face.) Chuck created just such a character: Maryann Thorpe, a cynical, hilariously vindictive divorcee who guzzles martinis and refers to her credit card as her therapist, “Dr. Gold.” My first choice for the part was Paula Poundstone, a stand-up comedienne with a twisted, wacky charm, I’d met her years before at a party, and as I approached her to shake hands, it looked as if her breasts were motorized. “Just a minute,” she said. Then she reached down the front of her shirt and said, “Stop that, Fluffy.” I was thinking:
This woman has a real problem. Her breasts are doing figure eights, and she’s talking to them.
Then she pulled out a kitten.

But Paula was otherwise engaged, on a variety show, and I began reading with other actresses. It came down to a choice between Sally Kellerman and Christine Baranski. The latter was a Carsey-Werner favorite--she had been considered for their new show
3rd Rock from the Sun,
a role that went to Jane Curtin. Christine has fabulous legs, and she arrived wearing a tight, horizontally striped miniskirt that practically showed goose bumps, but evincing a chilly attitude that I interpreted as “‘This is beneath me.” Since she had a theatrical background in New York, where she’d won two Tony awards, I checked her out with some New York theater friends, and everyone said the same thing: her work was respected, she was serious and talented, but watch your back. So I knew going in, just as I did with Bruce Willis, that this wasn’t necessarily Mr. Nice Guy. But when she read for the network, she hit a home run, nailed all the laughs. It was obvious, as it had been on
Moonlighting,
that this was the best person for the part.

We settled on Tom Wopat as the sweetly Neanderthal stuntman ex-husband and Alan Rosenberg as the overwrought Jewish intellectual ex-husband. But we agonized over the role of the younger daughter, Zoey. Even though the titian-haired Alicia Witt was a real-life musical prodigy and had an interesting snotty appeal, she had almost no acting experience. She was already on her way home after the reading at the network, when we decided to call her back and tell her she had the part. The security police stopped her at the gate and sent her back up. I walked out to meet her, put my arms around her, and said, “Congratulations.” The role of my elder daughter, Rachel, went to Dedee Pfeiffer (sister of Michelle), and when I suggested, “Why don’t we make Rachel pregnant?” Chuck said, “You’d agree to play a grandmother? You’re so brave.”

Working with Chuck was like a romance without the sex (although if I hadn’t just taken up with Roark, we might have crossed that line). He took me out for sushi, he sent me bouquets of out-of-season peonies, he practically moved into my house, and he transcribed my stories as fodder for the show. Much of the pilot was inspired by anecdotes I related, and he asked to have Clementine read the script to make sure the dialogue seemed plausible from a teenager’s perspective. A journalist had once teased me about being “an old spotted cow,” and Chuck borrowed the phrase to convey the sense of fear about aging in public. Losing cats who wander into the canyons after dark and get eaten by coyotes was my experience too. The set designer even visited my house and modeled Cybill Sheridan’s home after it, although the set was too clean, and I kept urging, “It’s not like home. Make it messier.”

If Cybill Sheridan was the heart of the show, Maryann Thorpe was the sharp tongue. Christine delivered her clever barbs with perfect acerbic timing, but her character was more of a caricature, so it was easier to write her jokes. Every Friday night, I would receive my executive producer’s script, and sometimes we needed another pass before it went to the actors--the writers often had to come in on Saturdays to revise. My notes on every script were the same from the beginning: make all the characters smarter. Don’t trade their intelligence for dumb jokes. Never underestimate the viewers. Suspense is more interesting than surprise, and a joke is funnier if the audience sees it coming.

It’s also true that the rhythm shouldn’t be predictable. Sometimes we got into a rut, with my character setting up the joke and Maryann delivering the punch line. When Christine won the Emmy and I did not, it fed a growing conspiracy theory in the press that asserted I was trying to sabotage Christine’s lines and enhance my part at the expense of her character. The gossip went something like this: I had been jealous when
Moonlighting
made Bruce Willis a star, and now it was deja vu all over again. Once a template gets made, the press tends to regurgitate all the old adjectives. The grain of truth in this controversy was that of course I was envious. Who doesn’t want to win an Emmy?

My complaints about wardrob added fuel to the flames of contention. I chose to work again with Robert Turturice, who had won an Emmy for his costuming on
Moonlighting
. For Cybill Sheridan, he often chose the square, shapeless clothes of a septuagenarian librarian, while Maryann’s skirts were so short that the world was her gynecologist. Christine didn’t need jokey clothes to be funny, and the tackiness of her wardrobe was sometimes distracting.

Nominated for an Emmy for Cybill, Turturice became progressively less willing to consider new ideas and was replaced the second season by Leslie Potts, who gave both characters sophisticated and chic wardrobes. When she won an Emmy, you’d think it might have validated my original objections, but the theory, I believe, went: Cybill is jealous that Christine is thinner and wears sexier clothes. Christine once called Leslie into her dressing room and complained about one stunning cocktail sheath that I wore, arguing that Cybill Sheridan wouldn’t be able to afford such a dress. She was the victim, I was the monster, and there was little I could do to counter the accusations of self-promoting bitchery.

Almost immediately, the show garnered loyal audiences and dream reviews. I did not take it for granted. I felt like a phoenix rising from the ashes. And if I didn’t have an Emmy, at least I was a figure at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London. The sculptor from the museum came to California with a bowlful of eyeballs, measuring every square inch of my body and every hair on my head--it took him eight hours. When I balked at doing the revolting dental impressions that make you gag, he convinced me to do it by saying, “Tony Bennett did it.”

Part of my job satisfaction was working with the man I loved. Chuck and Jay asked Roark to compose some of the “incidental” music for the show. I was very pleased they offered him a job, but keeping to an old pattern, I had fallen in love from the neck down.

Roark could be cruelly insensitive, prone to pick a fight at the worst possible moment, like an opening night. But our biggest source of friction was his allegiance to a pseudo-philosophy called objectivism, promoted by the novelist Ayn Rand and based on the theory that reality is not subjective. There’s only one correct point of view, and anybody who doesn’t subscribe to it is wrong. In the hope of resolving our conflict, I agreed to finance “couples” therapy, and at our first session, the shrink announced, “This will never work.” The relationship was too unbalanced, and Roark was dependent on me for his livelihood. So I made a mental adjustment: Roark’s belief was rather like voting Republican--alien to me but something I could overlook. He had recently become my musical director and I thought that music, along with our sex life, was a strong enough bond.

In 1995 both Christine and I were nominated for Emmys. What the public generally doesn’t know is that actors have to put forth their own names to be nominated for these awards: the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences sends out a big book with all the names that have been submitted, and then the entire acting membership votes for five in each category. Those nominees each choose an episode that represents their best work from the previous season, and a “blue-ribbon” panel of industry volunteers watches the videotapes in a Beverly Hills hotel suite before voting.

Because I was cohosting the awards that year, I was doing an interview at the back of the auditorium when Christine won for Best Supporting Actress. By the time they got around to announcing Best Actress, I was standing in the wings, listening to my heart beating, hearing people laugh heartily at the footage from my show but applaud more for Candice Bergen’s clips from
Murphy Brown.
I was prepared to lose, so when the camera panned to me, I took a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that had been emptied and filled with Snappe. It was history repeating itself. Candice announced that it was embarrassing to keep winning and disqualified herself the following year, but it’s pretty damn embarrassing to keep losing too. Actors are telling the truth when they say that the real thrill is to be nominated but it’s only a thrill until thirty seconds after the nomination is announced. Then all you care about is winning because this time you deserve it, more than anyone else. Please, God? (To quote David Addison, God must have been otherwise engaged.) As the winner walks up the aisle, you’re smiling graciously and thinking:
Die, bitch, die, it should have been me.

Every actor has bad habits. I’m sometimes guilty of the kind of shameless mugging that inappropriately comments on the material while pulling the viewer’s focus away from the other actors. Orson Welles used to say, “Actors are either getting better or worse. There’s no standing still.” I was able to do more self-correcting on
Cybill
because for the first time, as executive producer, I had the right to look at dailies. Not so for the others. Alan Rosenberg is a terrific actor, trained at the Yale School of Drama, but he often spoke his lines so fast that it was difficult to understand him, and he made a chewing motion with his jaw after nearly every punch line, like Charlie McCarthy. Christine Baranski went to Julliard, and she breathed fire and magic into her characterization, but she had a couple of bad habits--gazing directly into the camera lens--in movie parlance, it’s known as “looking down the barrel.” (The camera operator is supposed to let the director know if an actor is doing it.) There’s also a bad habit known as “buying it back,” laughing at her own joke. Sometimes we had to cut away from her best take at such a moment. The biggest problem was she often refused to hold for laughs, especially when it was my joke. In other words, she would say her lines while the audience was still laughing. As a result, they wouldn’t hear the setup for the next joke and wouldn’t laugh.