Chapter Eleven
THERE ARE TWO OR THREE DAYS OF MY LIFE I’D LIKE to rewind and say “I need another take.” One was the day that Christine Baranski walked off the set during the rehearsal for what would be the final episode of Cybill.
I recognized the first real death rattle of the show quite circuitously when I asked CBS for a raise. Word came back from the network: “We’re already paying through the nose for that show. She doesn’t get another penny.” The rumor was that C-W had made an extraordinary deal in which they didn’t pay any money on my show until it went into syndication, making Cybill disproportionately expensive for CBS. Two things are curious about this deal: it was made while Peter Torrici was president of CBS Television; he later left to join Carsey-Werner. And it was made at a time when C-W had enormous leverage, having developed a new show for Bill Cosby that had to have been a useful negotiating chip with any network and, in fact, landed on CBS. Toward the end of the 1998 season, Marcy Carsey had assured me that Cybill would be picked up. “CBS doesn’t have anything else this good,” she said, “but Carsey-Werner will have to eat dirt,” meaning the company would finally have to pay its share of the bills.
Marcy suggested that the CBS brass wasn’t really watching my show, and that the two of us might take some tapes to The Suit to show him how good it was. That never came to pass, although now I’m not sure it would have made much difference.
The Emmy Awards were on CBS that year, and the second highest rated Emmy broadcast of all time had been emceed by Jason Alexander and me three years before. My manager called The Suit and said, “Cybill would love to host again.”
“Bryant Gumbel is doing it,” he said.
Okay. Bryant Gumbel had a highly promoted magazine-format show premiering on CBS. But this was the first time since my show was on the air that my own network was airing the Emmys, and I wasn’t even asked to be a presenter.
“We’re not having stars from old CBS shows, only new CBS shows,” said The Network Representative.
The network had been screwing around with our time slot almost from the start, as networks are wont to do. Twice episodes of Cybill were pulled off the air to be supplanted by a new series starring Jean Smart of Designing Women, but both High Society and Style and Substance were dropped after one season. There followed pilots for Faith Ford (of Murphy Brown) and Judith Light (of Who’s the Boss?), neither of which captured the public imagination. But in 1998 there had been relentless preempting: In February Cybill was replaced by both the Nagano Olympics and a new Tom Selleck show called The Closer. (I read about this change in the Los Angeles Times and a few days later on a talk show, I “accidentally” misspoke and called it The Loser.) Three times my show was pulled during “sweeps,” those weeks in November, February, and May when the networks schedule their most aggressive programming in an attempt to generate high Nielsen ratings and demand the best rates from advertisers. It was hardly a demonstration of support.
When it seemed manifest destiny that the series was on its way out, Bob Myer came to me and said, “Could you ask Bruce Willis to come on? It might help.” I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, but Willis’ answer came back: too busy.
During the last hiatus week before the filming of what would be the final two episodes, Christine Baranski’s forty-eight-year-old brother dropped dead of a heart attack. She was on the East Coast when it happened, and we didn’t know if or when she was returning.
I had no intention of shutting down production. As John Wayne says in The Searchers, I knew as sure as the turning of the earth that this would be my last season, and for the sake of the fans I wanted to get in as many episodes as possible. It was not about money--I would have gotten paid anyway. Despite the stress and infighting, Cybill provided the best part, the most fun, and the biggest creative opportunity I’d ever had.
I called Marcy and I said. “I’ve got the best writing staff in the business. Let’s put them to work. They can have Maryann on the phone from out-of-town, and her part can be edited in later. We’ve done this many times before.”
‘’Do you think you can get a good show?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay,” she said.
I wanted to do a story line where my character was a talk-show host with a venomous cohost; a role I thought would be perfectly cast with Linda Wallem, not only a writer but a side-stitchingly funny comedienne. Cybill Sheridan was to lose her job when the talk show is canceled. Joking around with Bob Myer, I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have a network executive make a pass at me and cancel the talk show after I reject him?” Bob gave a cynical little laugh and said, “Yeah, right.” A few days later he relayed a message from CBS that they would never air such a show, and from now on, all plot outlines were to be submitted in advance.
“How did they find out?” I asked.
“I felt that I had to tell the network rep,” said Bob. Good ol’ “trust me” Bob.
The week before Easter, in order to avoid working on Good Friday (which would have been prohibitively expensive), we were planning to condense the usual five-day workload into four days. That Sunday I was awake all night with stomach pains, but I went to work on Monday morning and later phoned my doctor, who told me to come in right away for some tests. “You don’t understand,” I said, “this is probably the last episode I’ll ever do. I have to finish.” Then I took some Maalox. Every single person on the set was fried--the actors, the crew, the writing staff, all in the final stage of burnout--and I was pretty sure my symptoms were stress related.
The final episode called for the talk-show host to break down on camera and walk off the set, leaving my character alone to fill time. My idea was to have Maryann make a grand exit by calling her onstage, from where she was watching in the wings, and have her perform one of her ranting, raving monologues. I also thought that if my character needed to fill another five minutes, we could give Cybill and Maryann an opportunity to sing together one last time. Ever conscious of budget restrictions, I looked on my list of public domain songs and came up with “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” During rehearsal I asked Christine to sing it with me. She said, “No, you do it.” When I finished the song, I turned around to get Maryann’s reaction but Christine was gone. Everyone on the set was acting unnaturally calm, as if the elephant in the middle of the room had laid a giant turd. When we got ready to do a second run-through, Christine’s stand-in had taken her place.
“My, you look different today, Christine,” I said, trying to leaven the moment. Nobody laughed.
The stand-in was looking at her feet. (Clearly abashed, she said, “Christine just left.”) I was later told that she went to the warbe department with The Executioner, who told her, “Just pick out anything you want--it will make you feel better.”
Early in my career, I learned that an actor had better be able to stand and deliver when the director says, “Action.” The audience doesn’t know that you’re inhaling the rancid fumes from frying potatoes in a scorchingly hot Times Square coffee shop, or your leading man is pissed because you rejected his affections, or your costar has walked out in the middle of your song. Before I chose Christine to play Maryann Thorpe, I’d been warned: watch your back. And now there could be no lingering doubt about her feelings toward me.
The night of the final show I greeted the audience during the warm-up with palms upturned, as if I were holding my grandmother’s silver tea set, and offering them a gift. I knew it was good-bye. “This is a season of miracles,” I said to them, “whether it’s Jesus Christ dying on the cross and rising from the dead, or somebody passing over your house and not taking your firstborn. I’ve been in the business thirty years. When you get a pilot okayed to go on the air, it’s a miracle. When you get picked up for a season, it’s a miracle.
I really consider eighty-seven episodes a mighty miracle. So like the Lone Ranger said: ‘Hi ho, Silver, and away.”
That weekend was Good Friday, Passover, and Easter. On Monday my manager let me know about a call from The Executioner. “Carsey-Werner is exercising its right to final cut,” he informed her.
“Carsey-Werner has always had that right,” I said to Judy Hofflund, my manager, when she relayed this conversation. “Why is it being specified now?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Please find out,” I asked.
She reported back to me that The Executioner had initially replied, “We want to increase the odds that the show will be picked up for another season.” But when Judy persisted, he opened a window into the collective thinking: “In order to protect the rights and interests of Carsey-Werner, and those of Bob Myer and Christine Baranski, Cybill will no longer be involved in the final cut.”
Calls to The Executioner and Bob Myer went unreturned for twenty-four hours. When Bob finally called me back, he said angrily, “We have not collaborated in weeks.”
“I had no idea you felt this way,” I said. “I wish you had said something.”
“Oh, come on, Cybill,” he said, “you haven’t even made eye contact with me all week.”
He was right about that. I hadn’t trusted him for quite some time. “Is this about money?” I asked. “I’m willing to come down to the editing room right now.”
“No, it’s nothing to do with that,” he said. “I don’t want to work with you. I didn’t want to come in and do any more work on your show, I wanted to stay home with my kids for Passover, but they made me come in and do the final cut. So I told them, “The only way I will do this is if Cybill isn’t involved.”
So. Those were Bob Myer’s interests. Christine Baranski’s interests seemed to involve the increasingly plausible rumors that a series would be developed for her at CBS. Carsey-Werner’s interest was making sure the company did not have to “eat dirt” if the show was picked up.
The following Sunday morning I’d planned to hike up in the Santa Monica Mountains with a girlfriend. I put on shorts and a T-shirt, my hair was in a ponytail pulled through a cap, and I was just applying sunblock when I started to feel pain in my abdomen. I crawled into bed wearing everything but my shoes and told my friend I needed to rest. As the morning wore on, the pain intensified. Roark piled me into the car and drove at illegal speed to the emerge room. A battery of tests revealed a spiking white blood count and an obstruction in my small intestine. As I was prepped for surgery, the doctor said, “I’m afraid it’s not going to be a pretty scar,” and Roark started sobbing.
The doctor made a five-inch vertical incision below my belly button for exploratory surgery. As he passed the length of my intestines through his hands like a garden hose (a procedure called the delivery of the bowel), what turned out to be two twists, untwisted, but the tissue was swollen and bruised--as if I had been kicked in the gut by a horse. I knew the name of that horse. The crisis over, I was sewn back up and awakened woozy, with Demerol dripping into my veins, but otherwise remarkably among the quick.
Once the Demerol stopped dripping, I was dealing with the kind of pain and enervation familiar to anyone who has gone through major surgery. Riding home from the hospital, I was thinking: I know I can make it, but is it twenty or twenty-five steps up to my bedroom? When Ariel and Zack got back from their dad’s house, I heard Ariel squealing from the kitchen, “Mommy, Mommy, where did you get this adorable puppy!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. We didn’t have a puppy. I realized how wrong I was when a minute later Ariel came pounding up the steps hugging what looked like a fur covered black slug. Later I learned that Clementine’s crisis mode involved purchasing (for $1,200 on my credit card) a female pug dog so pitifully ugly that Clem figured no one else would buy her. Petunia, as she was christened, didn’t look like she could possibly survive a week, her legs seemingly too small and skinny to support her weight. “I can’t take care of a puppy,” I yelled. “I just got out of the hospital.” I refused to hold her and insisted Clementine return Petunia immediately. My initial assessment of Petunia turned out to be correct: she had less than one functioning kidney, and the store offered us a $400 credit if we brought her back. But by then, all of us had fallen in love and wouldn’t allow her return, envisioning a pug-size version of the glue factory.
About a week after I got home from the hospital, Roark called from the studio where he was working on the music for the last episode. “The show looks great,” he said, “but ‘Rockabye Your Baby’ was cut. And there’s a card at the end that says, “To be continued....”
By mid-May, I was officially notified that Cybill was not on the fall schedule. For months I had the feeling that somebody was stalking me from behind with a plastic bag that would be placed over my head. I finally felt the moment of suffocation.
The next day I called Marcy Carsey. “Now that the show isn’t picked up and nobody could possibly care one way or the other,” I said, “it would mean a lot to me if we could put my musical number back in the last episode.”
“I thought it was in,” she said. “We talked about doing it as a tag. But it doesn’t make sense because of the ‘To be continued’ card.”
“Can’t we take that off?” I asked. “There is no ‘To be continued....’”
“Let me look into it,” she said. A few days later she called back. “It doesn’t work,” she said. “Christine is just sitting there in the background.”
For eighty-seven episodes I always made sure that we had good “coverage” shots, so if an actor (including me) did something distracting or unhelpful to the scene, we could cut it out. I took particular care to do that on the last episode, since Christine had walked out during the rehearsal of my musical number. Out of four camera angles, there were two where she wasn’t seen. I’d like to think that if Marcy had actually seen the scene without Christine&rsuo;s scowling, she would have stood up for it. But she said, “No, I like it the way it is.”
And that’s how the series ended: “To be continued.” Maryann Thorpe had her last rant, but Cybill Sheridan did not have her last song. When I was feeling well enough, I called Marcy and asked to recut the film with the song for my own personal archives.
“I don’t see a problem with that,” she said agreeably, “especially if you’re paying for it.” And she suggested that she’d have The Executioner call me back.
“I don’t trust him,” I told her.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “He’s crazy about you.”
The Executioner’s voice was saccharine sweet. “Cybill darling,” he said, “I think I can do it for you cheap.”
“How cheap?” I asked.
“Not a penny more than twelve thousand dollars,” he said, “but it’s going to take a little while. The footage is buried in the salt mines of Utah.” Along with say, my career?
Paul Anderson, the show’s editor, had a different idea when he returned my call. “Is this piece of film for broadcasting?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “it’s just for me.”
“Then it won’t cost you anything,” he said. “I have the whole thing on computer disk.” On a Saturday morning, I pulled into the front gate of the studio. I could see a maintenance man on scaffolding near the roof of Stage 19, spray painting over my name. But the twenty-foot-high CYBILL was such an intense bright blue that it was impossible to completely eradicate it. It will be a ghostly presence until the building is restuccoed.
At its demise, Cybill was CBS’s highest-rated sitcom for women, number two for young adults, and we finished under budget. The people responsible for the death of a series doing that well should have their heads examined. After the show was canceled, Roseanne called me at home to commiserate. “I knew your days were numbered by the people they kept throwing at you,” she said. Roseanne had done a voice-over on my show, and I had always admired her strength.
“Everybody’s treating me like a monster,” I said, “but I didn’t do anything monstrous.”
“Well, I did,” Roseanne said. “I did everything they said I did, and I don’t regret any of it. I just wish I’d done more.”
Maybe I should have. If so, my show might still be on the air. Orson Welles once told me a story about William Randolph Hearst. One day when Hearst was getting on an elevator an associate rushed in to join him. “Bill,” he said, “so-and-so is saying terrible things about you.”
“That’s strange,” said Hearst, “I never did him a favor.”
All through these difficult times, I was writing grateful notes in my journal about the support of “Howard Roark.” We’d never taken vows about “in sickness and in health,” but the way he rallied his support when I ended up in the hospital actually made me feel more sure of him. We had separate bedrooms in my home, an arrangement that has worked for me ever since I lived with Peter Bogdanovich, but we could hardly have felt more of an erotic connection. Looking back, I see how desperately I was trying to prove my lifelong theory that justified being sexual: if someone makes me feel this good, it must be love. Only in my forties did I begin to see that sex was scariest when I was vulnerable, when I admitted loving someone and waited to see if he would stay and love me back.
When Roark and I went to therapy, I sometimes took a list of petty grievances, and he’d say, “Why do you have to bring up all these little things?” I thought that’s what therapy was for--to deal with ed.ttle things before they become big things. Five months after my health crisis, Howard said he had issues of his own and wanted to meet with the therapist in private. I paid for that too. Perhaps therapy taught him how to act loving when it wasn’t in his heart. His act ended on October 24, 1998. That Saturday, in the middle of our joint session, he said, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” I asked. I thought by “this,” he meant therapy.
“Go ahead and tell her, Howard, said the therapist knowingly.
“My feelings have changed,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What has happened?”
“It’s over between us,” he said. “You wouldn’t even read that book on objectivism that’s been sitting on your coffee table for months. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
I felt as if the familiar figure sitting across from me had suddenly sprouted fangs and turned into a werewolf. “All those declarations of love-- were they all lies?” I asked.
“No,” he said glumly.
“What did you ever love about me?” I asked.
There was a long pause, way too long. “Well, you’re a good person,” he said.
“Who’s going to tell my kids?” I asked.
“I will,” he said.
“When?” I asked.
“Now,” he said.
The therapist spoke up. “Cybill, I don’t want the kids blaming you for this. Would you like me to come home with you?” she asked.
“Yes.” I said.
We gathered around the dining room table with my three children. “This relationship between your mom and me isn’t going to work,” Roark said and started to sob. Whenever he cried in the past, I had thought: Great, he’s more open to his emotions than most men. But this time he just seemed to feel sorry for himself. We sat in stunned silence watching him. Clementine started to cry and said, “Except for my father, you’re the man I’ve known the longest.” Then she turned to me and said, “Men always leave.” Roark grabbed his jacket and ran out of the room. Crying myself, I apologized to my children for introducing this man into their life. Ten-year-old Zack asked the therapist, “Does this happen often in your work?”
Somehow the family migrated together outside into the sunshine. When I looked down at my feet, I was wearing socks but no shoes, something I had constantly chided my kids about. We forgot about Zack’s tennis lesson, scheduled on the court in our backyard, until we heard the bell at the gate. Zack let him in.
“How are you?” the pro asked.
“Fair to middling’,” I said cheerlessly. You can’t tell someone who’s come to give your child a tennis lesson that your life has fallen apart.
Afterward somebody said, “Let’s go see Howard’s room,” and we all crept down the hallway, opening the door as if peering over a precipice and looking at the chasm left by an explosion. There at the end of the bed, he had left behind a purple plastic yo-yo Ariel had given him for Christmas. And then I remembered that several days earlier, he had called my business manager and asked to be paid in full for his participation on the Cybill show CD, even though his work was not completed. I had sensed that he was low on funds and okayed the entire payment. I hadn’t sensed the real reason.
My mother had always defended her marriage to my father as perfect. I didn’t find out the truth about his infidelities until I went through the deepest kind of betrayal myself. And I began to wonder: was my life with Roark a model my parents had shown me, presenting to the children and to myself a fantasy good man? That’s what wives were supposed to do. Was I a care taking facitator, as my mother had been, or just simply fooled? I had told my children: he can’t show the affection he feels for you, can’t hug you or buy you presents, but he’s a good man. He’ll always be there. He’s solid as a rock. We’d been living with the delusion that this man was honest and loving and committed. Once the impostor left, we all seemed to relax, and my own mother-daughter war had ended. I no longer felt that I had to defend my self in her presence or dodge her zingers. What finally brought us together was that she had been left flat, and so had I.
Comedy writers talk about “schmuck bait”: it’s when a joke is set up to convince the audience that the actor is playing it straight so the punch line is an even bigger surprise. During my illness, Roark’s presence was schmuck bait. He gave me a few months to get better, but once I had physically recovered and he received his last paycheck he bolted. Had he stayed, I would have found out eventually that his love and support were just for show, but he made a preemptive strike. I thought I understood how relationships worked out--I had my list, didn’t I? But I was wrong. All I know is how not to do it.
“Howard Roark” lives with his mother now. I know this because he sold at least one story about our time together to a tabloid, trying to embarrass me with intimate revelations and falsely claiming I owe him money. In the therapist’s office, he declared that he was leaving because I hadn’t read a particular book. Nine months later there would be a more complete list of grievances in the paper, including the complaint that I was selfish in bed. When I saw his most recent narrative detailing my fantasy about sex with two women, I tried to warn my ex-husband, who was on vacation with Ariel and Zack, to stay away from newsstands and supermarket checkout lines. Who knew that a Pizza Hut in Kentucky would sell such periodicals? My twelve-year-old son called saying, “I’ve seen the article and it’s really gross.” Long pause. “Mom, a threesome?”
The possession of celebrity looks so desirable from the outside that observers tend to discount the attendant problems, but it’s hard to underestimate the celebrity’s life can become a marketable commodity. I’d made that bargain with the devil: if I can only become rich and famous for doing what I love to do, I’ll accept the trade--off, whatever it may be. I thought I’d be able to assimilate the invasion of privacy, the opportunism, the cruel gossip (which is never the truth: I’m both better and worse than what the public believes). It does pain me to know that so many people accept the National Enquirer as gospel, just as my grandmother did. (Moma would call my mother anytime there was a story about me, and no matter how outrageous the claims, she’d say, “I can’t believe Siboney would do that.” When told it was hooey, she’d say, “Oh, I don’t think they’d print it if it wasn’t true.”)
When someone leaves, his ghosts cling to every corner of the house. On the wall outside my bathroom, we had recently measured and marked in Sharpie black ink the heights of the whole family with me just above Roark at the top of the chart. Noticing this memento mori after he left, I grabbed a red Sharpie off the nightstand to scribble it out, which only made matters worse. When I went away for the holidays, I asked my assistant to hire the best painter in the state of California and erase every trace of Roark’s name.