Cybill Disobedience by Cybill Shepherd; Aimee Lee Ball

Author:Cybill Shepherd; Aimee Lee Ball
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: , Autobiography, Undefined, Shepherd, Entertainment & Performing Arts, United States, Actors, Entertainment & Performing Arts - Actors & Actresses, American actors, Biography & Autobiography, Cybill, Rich & Famous, 1950-, Biography, Women
ISBN: 9780061030147
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-04-11T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

“I NEED A CYBILL SHEPHERD TYPE”

AN OLD HOLLYWOOD JOKE (OFTEN REPEATED WITH THE substitution of different names) lists the five stages of an actor’s career. First: Who is Dustin Hoffman? Second: Get me Dustin Hoffman. Third: Get me a Dustin Hoffman type. Fourth: Get me a young Dustin Hoffman. Fifth: Who is Dustin Hoffman?

In 1975, when I was twenty-five years old, my agent, Sue Mengers, got a call from a young director named Martin Scorsese who was casting a movie called Taxi Driver.

“I need a Cybill Shepherd type,” he said.

“How about the real thing?” she asked.

I had to beg Sue to be truthful with me when we first worked together, and after that she was unfailingly, unflinchingly honest. “Just suck up to Marty,” she instructed when Scorsese agreed to see me (invoking memories of Moma’s suggestion to “love up on Da-Dee’s neck”). “Be a nice, sweet, innocent girl. Smile and look pretty. Don’t talk a lot, don’t make jokes, and don’t tell him he needs to sit on a phone book.”

When I read the script that was sent over by messenger to my hotel in New York, I threw it across the room, trying to hit the wastebasket. The violence was so relentless, and my character, a political drone named Betsy, was such a cipher, that I couldn’t imagine breathing any life into her. My anxiety was palpable—what’s a Cybill Shepherd type anyway? With my little pilot light of insecurity fanned by a few years’ worth of scathing reviews, I thought: Maybe I’m not even good enough to play my own type. But I admired all of Scorsese’s films-Mean Streets was a searing portrait of small-time hoods in Little Italy, and the evocative Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore had resulted in an Academy Award for Ellen Burstyy mother in The Last Picture Show.

In person, Scorsese was energetic to the point of manic--he talked as if his life depended on maintaining a certain velocity. One of the people he talked about was the talented young actress he was hoping to cast in the role of the child prostitute Iris.

“This girl Jodie Foster is so young, I don’t know if her mother will let her do it,” he said. “You know the nature of the material. But she’s so good. And she looks just like you when you were fourteen.”

Concomitant to the talks about Taxi Driver, Peter was planning our next project, entitled Nickelodeon, which would reunite him with Ryan O’Neal. Their friendship was improbable--Ryan was an enthusiastic participant in the recreational drug scene of Hollywood, while Peter rarely considered fogging his brain with even a cocktail. Ryan often greeted Peter by kissing him on the lips and grabbing him by the balls, and he never considered their camaraderie an impediment to chasing me--on the contrary, he had a reputation for pursuing the girlfriends of all his friends. He pinned me against a wall at one of Sue Mengers’s parties, ran his fingers through my hair, and whispered, “Let’s fuck.” I giggled and slugged him in the solar plexus.

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