Chapter Ten
I WAS TERRIFIED ABOUT MY PROSPECTS WHEN MOONLIGHTING ended, and it didn’t help to hear Joan Rivers dismiss me on her talk show as the head of the “Fucking Lucky Club.” It seemed like my luck was running out. I spent several years doing projects of no particular consequence, playing a collection of wives, nurses, bitches, and sociopaths.
The 1990 TV movie, Which Way Home was based on a true story about a nurse who rescues five orphans from a refugee camp substituting Thailand for Cambodia. I asked my doctor for something to help me sleep on the long flight over, and he gave me Halcion, a potent narcotic that can erase short-term memory. When I arrived, somebody had to tell me where I was and why I was there. But I have distinct memories of a location shoot fraught with water problems. We were filming several hours south of Bangkok, staying in a city called Hua Hin (nicknamed Whore Hin by the crew for obvious reasons), and I swam in the soothing warm waters of the South China Sea, which glows at night with bioluminescent plankton. During one swim, some terrible creature wrapped itself around my calves, and I ran shrieking from the water to discover that my attacker was a plastic bag used to wrap the beach towels.
The ceiling, floor, even the wastebasket in my room were made of teak, and I kept thinking: This is where the rain forest is going. The water in my shower contained some chemicals with interesting special effects. A week into shooting, the director of photography requested a private meeting. “I’m sorry to mention this,” he said, “but your hair appears somewhat greenish on camera.” I squeezed every available lemon in Southeast Asia on my head and sat in the sun.
When we moved farther south to Bang Sephon, the floor, walls, and ceiling of my hotel bathroom were tiled. There was no shower curtain because the drain was in the middle of the room. I noticed that whatever was deposited in the toilet each morning would still be there at night. Not a good sign. When I returned at the end of the first day of shooting, covered from head to toe with sand and who knows what else from slogging through murky lagoons, I got into the shower and turned on the water. There were a few weak sputters and then nothing. Other crew members confirmed that they were experiencing the same drought, and I placed a call to the producer. “I’m a trooper,” I said, “but I draw the line at a hot shower and a functional toilet. If the water isn’t restored, I’m leaving for someplace where I know the plumbing works, like Southern California.” The next day, in the predawn light, something that looked like a cement truck rumbled into the parking lot and disappeared behind the building. There were noises of plumbing and pipe fitting, and I had a trickly but wet shower.
What I loved best about Thailand was the food: savory soups for breakfast, midmorning snacks of cashews freshly roasted over fires, sticky rice with mangoes that look green but are lusciously ripe. There are a hundred different fruits never seen outside the country, and the familiar ones are as abundant as apples. You can hail a boat coming down the Chaou Praya River in Bangkok and buy a sack of fresh litchi nuts from the farmer (although I never did develop the local enthusiasm for one fruit whose name translates into “tastes like heaven, smells like hell”). What I didn’t love about the location was my dressing room: a bus with the seats taken out and furniture that rolled around as if on casters. I literally couldn’t fit into its minuscule bathroom, so when I had to use the facilities, I cleared everybody out and stood in the hallway hoping for the best as I launched my ass back toward the toilet.
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.
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.
I wanted to have a friendship with Christine, but she turned down so many invitations to visit my home that I finally said, “Look, you’ll just have to tell me when you’d like to come over.” We were both mothers working outside the home, but she worked in L.A. and her children lived in New York City, which meant that she spent most weekends on the red-eye, usually rushing off after the Friday filming without taking curtain calls. Her wardrobe assistant would come to my dressing room and say, “Christine’s so sorry she couldn’t say good-bye, but she had to make a plane.” Sometimes she returned late on Monday morning, understandably jet-lagged and acting as if the Cybill set was the last place on earth she wanted to be. She couldn’t have read the script because she was flying cross-country when it was distributed on Sunday night.
Everybody could see when something was troubling Christine--the writers kept asking, “What’s wrong with her?” But she never came to me directly to say she wasn’t happy. That was not her way. Sometimes I would ask, but there wasn’t a lot of time for that kind of solicitation during the craziness of the production week and when I did have some time, on weekends or during hiatus weeks, she was back East. For both of us, time with our children was the most precious commodity, and just about every moment not working was spent with them. There was little opportunity to develop an off-site camaraderie, even a phony one, which might have been helpful. When performers have some degree of off-camera friendship, it can help develop a basis of mutual trust.
Jay and Chuck never intended to film the show with an audience. From the beginning the plan was to play the finished episode in front of people for the laugh track. The studio audience, they argued, is not a real audience anyway;they’re just tourists herded onto the soundstage, and they’re weird because they know they’re being recorded. By not having a live audience, Jay and Chuck kept control out of the hands of the executives and actors. It’s true that just because an actor gets a laugh doesn’t mean it’s a good laugh. Christine got some of her biggest ones playing falling-down-dead drunk. We couldn’t use them because then her character would be a serious alcoholic and we’d have to take Maryann back to the Betty Ford Clinic, and that’s not so funny.
With a live audience, a show becomes more of an actor’s medium--you have the opportunity to say, “See, they didn’t laugh. Write me something else.” And the buses carry the studio audience away by eleven o’clock, making it imperative to finish by then. Without that limitation, we were at the mercy of Jay and Chuck, who could keep us as late as they liked, while we did take after take.
Even though our ratings were good, Carsey-Werner wanted us to have a live audience. As we approached the second season, they asked for a meeting to talk me into it. “Make sure you say no,” Jay instructed. But what the hell, I thought it’d be fun, more like theater. Jay was furious. “You’re real popular now,” he sniffed. “They call you the ‘good witch.’” And Marcy Carsey sent me a Barbie doll dressed as Glinda from The Wizard of Oz.
The first time we did the show before a live audience was the second season opener. One of the executives at CBS came to the filming I said my thoughts out loud to The Suit. “You’re an executive at CBS? You’re so attractive.” He smiled, pleased with the flirtation. That spring I got a call from an assistant to The Suit saying that he wanted to take me to dinner. I assumed it was a pleasant way to have an official meeting. I knew that he was married, and as far as I was concerned, so was I.
I was ten or fifteen minutes late arriving at Pinot, an Italian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and The Suit was already at a table having a cocktail. He stood to greet me, said something complimentary about my outfit, and commented on the fact that a driver had brought me.
About halfway through dinner, he asked, “So, are you involved with someone?”
“Yes,” I said, mentioning Roark. “We’re very committed, very much in love.”
We talked about children, his and mine. And then, quite out of the blue, he said, “My wife doesn’t really turn me on anymore.”
I know there was fish on my plate and a few mounds of vegetables because I looked down for a while, thinking, I’ve heard this before. Those were almost the exact words my dad said to me when he was getting ready to leave my mother. Wrenching myself back into the present, I looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Mmmmm,” he said, “I’ve had a number of affairs.”
“With whom?” I asked, and he mentioned one well-known actress. I was curious: how much would he spill?
Just as the check came and he was reaching for his credit card, he said, “Why don’t you tell your driver to go home?”
I was trying to handle the situation without bruising his ego. It was a bad idea for so many reasons. “You’re very attractive,” I said smiling “but this wouldn’t be a good thing. I don’t fool around, I’m happy where I am, and we have a really important business relationship here.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. As he handed the signed receipt to the waiter and rose to leave, he said, “Maybe you’re right. Suppose we broke up and I didn’t like you anymore?” That might not be good for your show. The network might have to cancel your show.”
I don’t know what emotion my face registered, but I recovered enough to exchange cordial good-byes. I sent The Suit a handwritten letter, thanking him for dinner and carefully wording a comment about valuing our business relationship. He sent me flowers. I thought we were okay.
But, as John Ford used to say, it was my turn in the barrel. My days at CBS were numbered.
I had not spoken to Bruce Willis since the last days of Moonlighting, except in passing at an awards show. Perhaps inspired by the rapprochement with Jay Daniel, another alumnus of the show, I had called him during the hiatus. Neither of us apologized for anything that had transpired between us, but I was empathetic about the difficulty of becoming famous, about how hard it is to have a private life and give your family a sense of normalcy. “Hey,” he said when we’d made amends, “if you like, I could come on your show and do a walk-on.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said “would you like to talk to the writers?”
“Nah,” he said, “just have them come up with something and send it to me.”
They wrote a perfect Bruce Willis cameo into the first episode of our second season. I had suggested that spirituality was a rich area to mine for comedy, and in “Cybill Discovers the Meaning of Life,” the writers created a character who was Cybill Sheridan’s “spirit guide.” It seemed ironically appropriate to have Bruce play the part, since goddess spiritually had become an indelible part of my life as a direct result of my angst during the Moonlighting years. I knew that some of my views met with glazed--over eyes and could only imagine what hits I took behind my back--I tended to say “Goddess bless” when anybody sneezed and was probably a little mischievous in directing such a blessing to the most recalcitrant souls. Some people on the show resented any suggestion that we explore these themes, protesting what they considered a soapbox. If the audience laughs, it’s not a soapbox.
In the second-season opener, my character is about to become a grandmother, and drags a reluctant Maryann into the Mojave to meditate.
Cybill: “The desert is a power place.”
Maryann: “Spago is a power place.”
Cybill: “People have been having profound experiences in the desert for thousands of years.”
Maryann: “Name three.”
Cybill: “Jesus, Moses and Bugsy Siegel.”
Cybill is chanting to Mother Earth; Maryann is distracted and bored.
Maryann: “You’re the one who’s all screwed up with this self indulgent, New Age yuppie crap--meditating, fasting, raising the cone of silence.”
Cybill: “It’s a cone of power.”
Maryann: “It’s a cone of crap.”
If I had wanted a soapbox, that line would have been cut. It was a way to poke fun at my own beliefs, and I thought it would be even more fun to have “David Addison” show up in the desert. But Bruce Willis’ agent said he didn’t have time. Read whatever you want into the fact that he did cameos on Ally McBeal and Mad About You (the latter was head-to-head with my show on Sunday nights for a while).
Second season, second episode: I was thrilled that Tony Bennett was signed as a guest star. I said to Chuck, “Hey, why don’t Tony and I sing a duet?”
“We can’t change the script,” he said. “Tony has already approved it.”
That was how I learned that a guest star had read the script before the star and executive producer, namely me. “How did that happen?” I asked Chuckn the s hemmed and hawed, deflecting blame, and said, “If you want him to sing, you’ll have to ask him yourself.” When Tony Bennett arrived to film his spot and came to my dressing room, he graciously agreed to sing two diets with me, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” as well as “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” the song that I performed over the opening credits every week. Afterward I gave Chuck an ultimatum: “Don’t ever send out a script that I haven’t approved to a guest star.” He rolled his eyes. He had done something inappropriate, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for it.
Perhaps my worst infraction was once asking to swap lines with Christine. In the opening scene of the “Zing!” episode, Cybill and Maryann are relaxing in chaise lounges under a ludicrous camouflage of hats, protective clothes, and sunglasses. Cybill was to say, “I miss the ozone layer,” and Maryann was to respond, “What a price to pay for decent hair spray.” Chuck interpreted my request as an attempt to steal Christine’s joke. Both of us got big laughs, but it was considered the final straw of my evil intent, and Chuck and I would never be the same.
Whenever I argued with Chuck about something that didn’t ring true for me, he inferred a hidden agenda. In the third episode of the season, called “Since I Lost My Baby,” Cybill goes shopping with her infant grandson, and Maryann absentmindedly leaves with the wrong baby, a girl. She discovers the mistake in the process of changing the baby’s diaper and says, “My God, that is the worst circumcision I’ve ever seen.” I hated that line. Referring to the female anatomy as if it is inherently defective because something has been cut off smacks of the most archaic Freudian penis envy. The joke was demeaning and gratuitously disrespectful to all women.
I knew that the line would get a big laugh, but again, audiences sometimes laugh for the wrong reason. Jay implied, none too subtly, that I was simply trying to sabotage a huge laugh for Christine. If they had given me the line, I would have refused to say it. But I was told: too bad, it’s staying in. Christine got a big laugh. Looking back, I realize it would not have been uncharacteristic of Maryann’s consciousness to say such a thing. The logical fix would have been to simply give Cybill Sheridan a follow-up line that reflected her feminist perspective. Who knows? My response could have been funny. I wish I had thought of that then.
From the beginning Marcy Carsey gave me enormous support. “I was on every show, in every single story session,” she defended me in a TV Guide interview. “Cybill is smart, she is supportive of Christine. Story meeting by story meeting, she said, “Can’t we do more for Christine here?” And by the fall of 1995, when virtually every decision with Chuck Lorre involved a fractious disagreement, Marcy was prepared to let him go. Since Chuck is Jewish, she respectfully waited to deliver the bad news until after Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, but he still demurred in the press that the timing of his dismissal was insensitive to his religious traditions, without mentioning that his replacement was Jewish too: a kindly-looking bearded fellow named Howard Gould, who’d done an excellent job as supervising producer on the show. When we were looking around to replace Chuck, I kept saying, “Howard can do it, Howard can do it, Howard can do it.” Jay Daniel and Carsey-Werner kept responding, “Howard can’t do it, Howard can’t do it, Howard can’t do it.” I won that round and Howard did it.
It was Dedee Pfeiffer who suggested hiring her friend Don Smith as our makeup man, and he soon became buddies with Christine as well, often driving her to and from work. He was let go after one season, but that didn’t stop Christine from bringing him realizer date to the Golden Globe awards, making an uncomfortable evening for me. (How would you like to have the man you just canned sitting across the dinner table?)
Every few months, there seemed to be a story in the tabloid press, always scurrilous and unattributed and usually about me. Christine was the target of one particularly obnoxious item, claiming that she was afraid to kiss a homosexual actor for fear of contracting AIDS (her children saw the paper in a store and brought it home, a virgin experience for her but one I’ve had over and over). It was obvious that someone close to the show was peddling “information.” Finally, a well-respected journalist I knew called me and said, “I thought you might want to know that the source of those stories about your show is Don Smith.”
When I shared the journalist’s information Christine looked stricken. “I’d heard that might be true,” she said quietly, “but I didn’t want to believe it.” It was the closest I ever felt to her. Dedee was equally dismayed but seemed to put his treachery behind her: When she and a new boyfriend became engaged she called my assistant and said, “Look, I really can’t invite Cybill to the wedding because Chuck Lorre and Don Smith are going to be there.”
Howard Gould and I worked like a finely calibrated piece of machinery for most of his first year, but there was something about the first hiatus that changed the dynamics just as it had with Chuck Lorre. In an episode called “Mourning Has Broken,” Maryann is convinced that the lawyer Cybill is dating murdered his wife. The two women sneak into his house, and the script called for us to blacken our faces. This came on the heels of a huge contretemps when Ted Danson was made up in vaudevillian blackface for the Friars Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, and the couple spent weeks in public relations purgatory, defending their odd sense of humor.
“We can’t do that,” I told Howard. “It’s demeaning to black people.”
“It’s just a little smudge,” he argued.
“You know what?” I said. “I am on the advisory board of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Let’s call the museum director and ask what she thinks.”
He exploded. “I lost family in the Holocaust,” he screamed, “and if anybody knows about discrimination, it’s me.”
“Why don’t we use panty hose pulled down over our faces?” I suggested. “That will look funnier anyway,” but he stormed out of the room. The panty hose were hilarious, with the feet dangling like tassels, but Howard never forgave me for my defiance. When he quit the show the next season, he had to be dragged from my trailer, practically foaming at the mouth and shouting, “I’m leaving, but I’m a better person than you are.”
‘Things became Byzantine when Peter Bogdanovich told me his daughters had heard a rumor that my show was too expensive and was about to be canceled. Part of the reason was Jay Daniel, who sometimes demanded extravagant sets and had an expensive predilection for myriad takes of every shot. There’s an adage in the business that film is cheap but time is money, which justifies doing it “one more time” to make sure you “get it” and don’t have to come back later. But that’s not true for a situation comedy with four 35-millimeter cameras moving in a complicated dance across the stage floor between the actors and the audience, each requiring a camera operator riding a dolly, a dolly grip to push, and a focus puller. Video is infinitely cheaper, but film is more aesthetic, more sharply defined, more flattering. We figured out that it cost about $1,000 per foot of film. For at least a year, Carsey-Werner had complained about going over budget and persistently urged that we fire Jay. I defended im but took a stand: “Three takes--that’s it. If the actors get the words right and don’t fall down, we have to move on.”
There was an entire building on the CBS Studio City lot in which every office was filled with people involved in the making of my show. Or so I thought. One day I went in the side door and was walking briskly down the hall, a little late for an editing meeting, when I heard my name called. It was an unpleasant voice from the past, but I didn’t identify it until I turned around. What the hell was Polly Platt doing there?
“Cybill,” she enthused, “guess what? I’m heading up the new feature film division for Carsey-Werner.”
Pause. “How wonderful,” I said, knowing that I was up shit’s creek without a paddle. Who’s the absolutely last person on God’s green earth I would want whispering in the ears of the people who sign my paychecks? It is unlikely that I’ll ever work in a Polly Platt production. The source of Peter’s rumor was apparent, and from then on I used a different entrance to the building, nowhere near her office. A short time later, Polly sent me a handwritten note on Carsey-Werner letterhead, with a little heart drawn next to my name, telling me that her elder daughter, Antonia, an aspiring actress, had submitted a reel of her work to Jay Daniel, who had promised to get her a small part on my show. “Could you help?” the note pleaded. “It would mean a great deal to her, and of course, to me.” The note was signed, “My very best to you Cybill.” I passed the note on to Jay.
When I finally insisted on being part of the show’s budget meeting, I discovered that Jay was blaming me for the high costs. In his considered opinion, Christine was a Xerox machine--she would say a line exactly the same way no matter how many times she did it. I was the exact opposite. I did it differently every time and took pride in surprising myself and the audience. Jay would say that I didn’t even warm up until the fourth take, and he considered himself the master hand, putting together the bits that he liked from each scene. I would often see his choices and remember another, better, funnier take (this was true for all the actors, not just myself). He seldom liked my most outrageous moments and felt that slapstick was appropriate only in isolated incidents, “I will not use your biggest, Lucy-esque takes,” he told me. “I will protect you from yourself.”
In the fall of 1996, for an episode called “Cybill and Maryann Go to Japan,” Jay went over budget creating an unnecessarily large and elaborate Japanese garden, but he said we couldn’t afford a pond that would have provided me with a hilarious Lucy-esque moment (my character, dressed in full geisha costume, would fall in) so I finally agreed that Jay should go. When he left, eight episodes into the season, we were over budget. By the end of that season, we were safely in the black.
Caryn Mandabach, the head of production at C-W, said that the only way the show would survive was to “poach” a great head writer named Bob Myer from his development deal at Tri-Star, who had refused to consider her offer until Jay was gone. And Bob did seem heaven-sent, literally the answer to my prayers, from our very first meeting. “I know that part of the problem has been a lack of communication,” he said. “But I promise I will be the first person you talk to in the morning and the last person you talk to at night. You will be kept so informed, you will get sick of the information and tell me you don’t need to hear any more.” Over time we even developed a private code. I hate it when someone says “Be good” as a parting salutation--I always want to say “What if I ain’t?” So Bob started signing all his notes to me with “Be bad,” “Be so bad,” or “Be ever bad>
IT WAS ALWAYS INTERESTING TRYING TO DECIPHER THE peculiar logic of Standards and Practices at CBS. In the episode “When You’re Hot You’re Hot” during our second season, Maryann is in denial about the approach of menopause, referring to the herbal potions that Cybill is trying for hot flashes as “bark juice” and “the fungus of many nations.”
Maryann: “Thank goodness this will never happen to me”
Cybill: “Probably not. They say alcohol pickles the uterus”
Maryann: “When you say you’re premenopausal does that mean your ‘friend’ has stopped visiting every month?”
Cybill: “My ‘Friend’ what are you, twelve?”
Maryann: “You know what I mean, Aunt Flo?”
Cybill: “Just sat it out—period, period, period”
In our fourth season, we did another menopause episode called “Some Like It Hot.” We were told not to refer to a woman’s biological cycles as anything other than her biological cycle, and were forbidden to say uterus, cervix, ovaries, menstruation, period, or flow. And why? Years earlier, Gloria Steinem had pointed out to me that the valentine heart was originally a symbol of female genitalia. When I repeated this to Bob Myer he was rightfully intrigued and said he’d like to build an episode around it, having fun with a different kind of “V” day. When CBS read the script, Standards and Practices forbade the use of the word vagina. I asked Bob to see if they’d agree to let is use labia. Remarkably, they said yes. We wondered if CBS knew what the word meant or thought no one else would. Although the episode got some of our biggest laughs and highest ratings, that’s when the network began to crack down on any element of the show regarding female anatomy or bodily functions. I had the distinct feeling that they thought we were trying to be lewd or shocking, but our insistence on using those words came from political awareness. Knowing the proper names as well as the slang for body parts is one way for women and children to protect themselves from sexual abuse, as well as open themselves to sexual pleasure. It’s astonishing that in daring to describe female anatomy accurately we were breaking new ground in television. At the time, I had no idea that Eve Ensler had won the 1997 Obie Award for her one-woman show called The Vagina Monologues. I didn’t know about her hilarious, eye-opening tour into the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman until I read an article in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times in 1999, a year after my Valentine’s Day episode was aired. I rejoiced at the public acknowledgment that her play was an important groundbreaking work, yet I was saddened that similar groundbreaking work on the Cybill show had gone unnoticed by the press. But, like menopause, the issue of a woman’s identity in regard to her genitals was still taboo in the media at the time we were dealing with it and reaching a huge prime-time audience.
It was Christine’s idea to do an episode about mammography, but the show became a source of contention for us. Last-minute changes were not her thing, and she perceived improvisation as ambush. But even flubs often prove to be the funniest moments. In the episode called “In Her Dreams,” Maryann goes for a worrisome mammogram. It was scripted that she would cry, but when we came to do the scene, I started to tear up too. Working up the emotion for the scene, I had been listening to “Come in from the Rain,” Melissa Manchester’s song about friendship (“Well, hello there, dear old friend of mine...”). I was imagining a breast cancer scare not for Cybill Sheridan’s best friend but for Cybill Shepherd’s best friend, and I started to feel the moment for real. I’ve been there, sitting on turquoise vinyl seats in hospital waiting rooms with loved ones, waiting for scary biopsy reports, and my friends never cry alone--we cry with and for each other. But when Christine saw the tears in my eyes, she went cold Before the second take, Bob Myer came to me and said, “You know Christine doesn’t like these surprises.” Then she had her manager call him. Christine, it seemed, felt quite strongly that we not use the first take when I had cried. In fact, she wanted to participate in the editing to ensure that the first take was not used. Bob denied her request, explaining that we used parts of every take, showing each actor to his or her best advantage.
Early in 1997, Bob came into my dressing room, practically chewing up the furniture and spitting it out with fury. “We’ve just gotten a call from the producer of 3rd Rock,” he said, who insists that he needs Christine next week.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Carsey-Werner wants her to do a cameo,” he said.
“Why didn’t we know about this earlier?” I asked.
“Didn’t they tell you?” he said. “Oh, those people don’t know how to talk to anybody. I’m going to call them and say they can’t have her now.”
“You do that,” I said, “and furthermore, we want a trade-off: let’s get one of their actors to come on Cybill.”
A few weeks after Christine did her cameo, Marcy and Caryn sent me a note: “If we would have had a brain in our heads, the right thing for us to do would have been to have told you directly about Christine’s appearance on 3rd Rock.... We value your work and your friendship more than you know and hope you can forgive us.” I also heard from a Carsey-Werner executive known privately as The Executioner because he was always mentioning his uncle Ivan. (If somebody was being rude to you, he would offer, “Uncle Ivan could bury his feet in cement.”) His note to me was contrite: “I’m sorry if I caused you any problems regarding Christine and 3rd Rock,” he wrote, signing off, “Your loyal production slave.”
One of my concerns with the direction of the show was that Maryann Thorpe had a new romantic interest, while Cybill Sheridan had zippo. Bob kept talking about the difficulty of finding the right actor to play opposite me, so I suggested that my character date lots of men--they might all turn out to be ax murderers, as they often do in real life, but the odyssey would be rich loam for comedy. For the third season closer, he came up with a story called “Let’s Stalk” that ends with Maryann fearing she has killed Dr. Dick, but in the first episode of the upcoming season she was to discover she hadn’t killed him. Dr. Dick would suddenly appear and be played by a recognizable guest star.
The opening and closing episodes are two of the most important of the year, because of the promotion and media attention, and it’s crucial to have a cliff-hanger that practically ensures the audience will watch to see the resolution when the new season begins. It was a bad idea to have two such crucial episodes dependent on the casting of a guest star, who might or might not materialize. There was always pressure from the network to have cameos, because such appearances generated good buzz, but I objected to the idea when it came to Dr. Dick. I thought he should be seen only in the imagination of the viewers, a device used successfully throughout television history, from the invisible Sam as the answering service for “Richard Diamond” (it was Mary Tyler Moore’s voice), to the off-camera Charlie of Charlie’s Angels (John Forsythe spoke his lines), to the ent Maris, sister-in-law of Frasier. CBS continued to push for John Lithgow to play the odious Dr. Dick, but he had already turned the role down, sending me flowers with a note that said, “Quite apart from feeling wildly overextended these days. I’m following a firm personal policy of concentrating all of my sitcom energies on 3rd Rock. If I did any other show, it would be yours, but for the moment, I’m doing none. If it’s any consolation, you’ll never see me turning up on Friends.”
Timothy Dalton and John Larroquette also declined the honor of playing Dr. Dick. Don Johnson didn’t even bother to respond. Just days before we were to begin shooting, I told Bob Myer, “Forget about getting somebody’s idea of a name. Just cast the best actor.”
“I want you to trust me on this,” Bob said. “We’ll just shoot the segments that don’t require Dr. Dick, and by the time we need him, we’ll have somebody great.”
Everyone knows the joke about the three biggest lies in Hollywood: “The check is in the mail,” “The Mercedes is paid for,” and “It’s only a cold sore.” And they’re all preceded by the words: “Trust me.” Dr. Dick was never cast, the story was rewritten, and we shot in bits and pieces for several months, never resolving the cliffhanger. Bob admitted that he had been badly mistaken in building the opening and closing episodes around uncertain casting and sent this note to the cast early in the new season:
Dear Everybody,
Because we waited until we found just the right casting for Dr. Dick to complete the filming of the episode that featured him (#401), we’ve had to make certain adjustments in the production schedule. If you remember, we preshot two scenes from episode #403 to make room for the two Dr. Dick scenes in #401 that we postponed. Therefore, the following pages represent the scenes from episode #403 that have not been shot, as well as the remainder of the scenes from episode #401 that have not been shot.
Confused? There’s more.
The pages that are included under separate cover contain material that needs to be shot, as well as the material that it relates to, which has been shot.
Still with me?
Robert Stack appears in one of the pickup scenes from #401 that formerly featured Dr. Dick. No, Robert Stack is not playing Dr. Dick. He is playing Robert Stack, a friend of both Maryann and Dr. Dick.
What’s more...
I ask nobody to actually understand this. Just remember, we’re having fun.
Trust me,
Bob
P.S. We never did find Dr. Dick, which turned out to be a good thing. Really.
Audiences have always enjoyed seeing me send up my image as a perfectly groomed mannequin. But the network wanted me to be more ladylike: no more burping or spitting olives back into the martini glass. The message, delivered by Bob Myer, was “Can’t Cybill leave the sloppy stuff to Drew Carey?” What were they afraid of? That my show might get ratings as high as his? My sloppy eating, talking with my mouth full, and scenes of occasional burping consistently garnered some of my strongest laughs from the studio audience and those episodes always generated the highest ratings.
That November we filmed an episode called “Grandbaby” in which my character becomes a grandmothor the second time and is saddened that her daughter’s family is moving away to Boston. I had the idea of using as a lullaby to my new granddaughter “Talk Memphis to Me,” a song Tom Adams and I had written about my missing Memphis. I wanted to expand the lullaby moment into a brief music video showing what my character hoped she’d get to do with her granddaughter in Memphis if ever given the chance to take her there. The video included shots of my granddaughter at different ages as we visited our favorite places there. It had already been well established that Cybill Sheridan was born and raised in Memphis like I was. Also, the singing of the song became a reconciliation between my character and her first husband, who was also the grandfather of the newborn girl. That impromptu duet, which reflected their history of singing together, was a creative and emotional resolution to their prior conflict in the episode.
At first, Carsey-Werner refused to finance the video and I agreed to pay for it myself, but once they saw the footage, they loved it so much I never had to pay. What they and the network wanted cut, however, was thirty-five seconds of a helicopter shot pulling back from a steamboat on the Mississippi River showing a crowd of black and white Memphians rocking out to the song. The studio and the network said that it took us too far out of the story, that nobody would understand who those extras were, even though no one had ever questioned the presence of the extras who sat in the trattoria scenes on the show every week.
This was the seventy-third episode of the show. It was the first and only time I would ever try to pull rank and go higher up to an executive at CBS. I placed a call to The Suit in hopes of getting a chance to explain why that thirty-five seconds of blacks and whites dancing together should stay in. After six hours of waiting with no word from the executive, I received a frantic message that Bob was on his way to the stage and I was not to speak with anyone about this until he had spoken to me. When he arrived there, he told me that it was no longer a creative decision. Standards and Practices, the watchdog department for the network objected to the use of all the Memphis footage, saying it was a conflict of interest (meaning it was blatantly advertising my CD, Talk Memphis to Me).
I asked Bob, “So you’re saying we have to cut the whole song?”
“No, no. Just any of the footage shot in Memphis.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical if their point is conflict of interest. Then they should insist the song be cut in its entirety.”
“Well, they’re not asking for that,” Bob replied.
That’s when I realized that it was not really about creative differences or conflict of interest. It was a conflict of power. Who was going to decide what stays in or what is cut out? It was not going to be Cybill Shepherd.
There is never a doubt in any sane person’s mind about who really has the power in the television business. It is and always has been the networks. But when an issue begins as a creative one, moves on to become a racist one, and finally ends up as a conflict of interest, it does not bode well for a star/producer or her show. I knew my days were numbered at CBS. I absolutely believe that if I had simply cut the thirty-five seconds that the studio and network representatives originally had requested, the issue of conflict of interest would never have come up and the lovely, moving footage of my character taking her granddaughter to the beautiful landmarks of her youth would have been included in the episode. When I asked Bob if he thought that was the case, he said most likely it was.
“Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” I began to hear a death knell in my heart for this show to which I had given so much. I knew starting in November 1997 (less than six months before cancellation) that it was only a matter of time. Two things came of this--a constant sense of dread and a constant sense of gratitude that I was getting to do the show at all.
When I returned from the Christmas break, my line producer, Henry Lange, told me he had gone into his office over the holidays to pick up messages and been surprised to see Bob Myer’s car on the lot. He was even more surprised when he went in to say hello and was told that Bob wasn’t in his Cybill office, that he was working on a new Carsey-Werner production starring Damon Wyans.
I was stunned. So much for my getting sick of all his information. “I heard there was a memo about it right before the hiatus,” Henry told me.
“Have you seen this memo?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “but I’ll see if I can get a copy.” Until Henry showed me the memo, dated the week before Christmas, I had no idea my head writer was undertaking a new assignment that would mean being gone more than half the time (while continuing to draw 100 percent of his salary). It was unsigned, and no one would ever admit having been the author. With tears streaming down my face, I confronted him, asking if he was deserting a sinking ship. He didn’t dispute the time allocation but pledged his continuing commitment to my show. The only difference, he said, was that he would take my notes from the Monday table reading of the script and give them to the writers, then go to the Wayans show leaving the writers to work out the material.
This was not a good idea. The people who created my dialogue, essentially translated my voice, needed to be hearing my notes directly from me. So I asked for several writers with whom I could communicate personally in Bob’s absence. He seemed to be okay with this and asked “Who would you like?” I chose Linda Wallem and Alan Ball, both of whom had been on the show the longest. Bob added two new writers, Kim Frieze and Alan Pourious, and the four choices felt like a good balance. The first story line they pitched involved having the gay waiter at the trattoria come out. I had pitched this story line months before to Bob and he had rejected it because he felt that gay characters coming out was happening so often on television that it was becoming a cliché. What I didn’t know was that Alan and Linda had pitched the same thing to Bob and had also been turned down. Bob bowed to the pressure of being outnumbered on this issue and we got our waiter coming-out episode after all. But when it came time to assemble the episode, it didn’t seem as good as the others. Editing had always been one of the things Bob did best. We had worked happily side by side for most of our collaboration. Perhaps in this instance he was biased by his original rejection of the material. I felt we needed the input of Alan and Linda who had actually written the episode, but Bob declared that it was unnecessary. I insisted.
I called Marcy Carsey and proposed that she keep Bob Myer on the new show full-time. We didn’t seem to need him anymore, and there was hostility all around for deserting us in the first place. I could justifiably never trust him again because he had broken a solemn promise that he would inform me about everything by not telling me he had begun working on another show.
For the past year or so Alicia Witt had been acting like a spoiled brat, so pouty and truculent that when she wanted time off to have a bump removed from her nose, Bob Myer said, “Get rid of her,” and some writers asked if they couldn’t write her out of the show. When Peter Krause was hired to play Rachel’s husband, he and Alicia became romantically involved and they barely spoke to me.
In April Carsey-Werner received a letter from Alicia’s representatives, detailing her “creative concerns” about “character development and participation” and calling me tyrannical, abusive and demeaning. But her fit of pique turned out to be fair warning for her demand that she have time off to make a film. When we granted her permission and worked around her absence, she wrote me a note, this time detailing my “generosity.” I found out later that she got a raise after complaining about me. I also found out, by reading it in the press, that Christine had asked for a secret meeting with The Suit and subsequently got a raise too.