Cybill Shepherd: Breaking the Ice
Braless and shoeless, Cybill Shepherd is lying on five paisley cushions she’s flung on the living-room floor of her house in the Encino hills. The thirty-six-year-old star of the hit television series Moonlighting has barely moved her five-foot nine-inch frame in an hour. She is wearing a sheer white cotton shirtwaist dress. “Interviews are like therapy,” she says, which perhaps explains her posture. “The only thing is, you don’t get the same kind of feedback. But it’s cheaper.” A week ago Shepherd visited her therapist after a year’s hiatus and resolved to start up again on a monthly basis. Now her hand goes to her brow, her eyes close hard, and when they open, she peers through her fingers, her gaze dulled. “There’s so much stress,” she says, “that, ah, I had an anxiety attack. About going back to work. I mean I was fine. But one day I woke up — I’d had this dream I was going back to work, and it was like … all the wrong —” and she stops short. “No, I don’t want to talk about it.” She’s cringing now. “Leave it at that.”
Shepherd’s dream occurred nearly two weeks before shooting was to begin on this fall’s premiere episode of Moonlighting, an ABC show entering its second full season. The brainchild of thirty-two-year-old producer Glenn Caron, Moonlighting has garnered critical raves and more Emmy nominations this year, including one for lead actress, than any other show. For the third-place network, the show’s ascendancy has meant a ratings jump and a bolstering of prestige and morale. For Shepherd, it’s a triumph that really can’t be measured in money or ratings points.
With her prime-time portrayal of the glamorous model turned private eye Maddie Hayes, Shepherd has finessed a show-business comeback worthy of a Frank Capra movie. If the renowned director were to mythologize the actress’s career, the story would begin with a brash Jean Arthur–type heroine. Overnight her beauty, brains and pluck — and her talented director-boyfriend — sweep her to movie stardom. But the dream sours. She’s cast out by sinister studio bosses and a cynical celebrity press. Seeking solace and self-knowledge, she returns to her hometown and her family to recover the values that nurtured her, marry a local boy and experience motherhood. In the last reel, she begins anew — at the bottom — singing to patients at a veterans’ hospital, perhaps, until a well-earned break lofts her into the stratosphere again. This time she’s made it on her own. Up music, credits.
Real life is rarely so tidy, as evinced by Shepherd’s pre-production jitters. But Shepherd, who once was characterized as “the most clobbered actress in Hollywood,” is undergoing a public resurgence she frankly admits is “enormous — a greater fame than I’ve ever experienced.” In an industry that had virtually blacklisted her, one is now hard-pressed to find a producer or director willing to give her anything but high marks for her talent and bankability. It’s as if a form of mass amnesia had overtaken studio executives. A little less than a decade ago, a Hollywood writer concluded Shepherd had come to be viewed in that town as “a no-talent dame with nice boobs and a toothpaste smile and all the star quality of a dead hamster.” These days she’s being hailed as the new Carole Lombard.
“I knew I had talent, but I just had to prove it to the world, I guess,” Shepherd says.
The actress’s slope-roofed, one-story house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, looking deceptively small. Twin stone lions at the top of the steps survey a manicured lawn. At the appointed hour, I rang the doorbell, which seemed to activate a lawn-sprinkling system as well as summon the housekeeper. We were alone in the house. She poured me root beer in Shepherd’s stainless-steel and Formica-laden kitchen. An acrylic plaque read, “No Smoking Under Penalty Of Death … Cybill Shepherd.” Viewed from the street, Shepherd’s house looks like the dwelling of a moderately successful plastic surgeon. Inside, the feeling is California transient. She has lived here with her seven-year-old daughter, Clementine, for six months. Hallway walls are covered in royal-blue velvet, a design conceit inherited from the previous owner, whose style Shepherd tags “expensive bad taste.” Futon couches and a coffee table barely fill up one large room; a glossy black piano, Wurlitzer jukebox and a glass-topped wicker dining table furnish another. Two volumes of Montaigne essays and the Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse coexist in a small bookcase. Shepherd’s 1985 Best Coiffured Woman award from Helene Curtis hangs on a nearby wall. A compact-disc collection holds titles by Mozart, Michael Jackson, Verdi and Kenny Loggins. Magazines to which C. Shepherd subscribes fill a commodious basket, among them The New Republic, Ms., The Spectator, Gourmet, Rolling Stone and a dog-eared, well-underlined Money stuffed with clippings from The Wall Street Journal about Ginnie Maes. Sliding glass doors lead to a generous L-shaped pool, a cabinlike sauna flanked by potted tomato plants and a deck extending over a steep slope. The drama of the view is the pollution, which hangs in a cocoa-hued cloud over the valley.
The actress appeared forty minutes later with the dark-haired, tanned Clementine and Clementine’s friend Megan in tow. She was singing, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-daaay,” in full voice and carrying pompons when she opened the door. She padded barefoot around her newly furnished Japanese dining room, inspecting its rice-paper walls and pausing to sit cross-legged on its tatami flooring. Satisfied, she walked to her living room and became supine.
In the late afternoon light, Shepherd looks younger than she does on Moonlighting, probably because the fuzzy “beauty shots” she’s framed in make her seem suspiciously older than she is. “I’m middle-aged,” she says, “and it’s fabulous. I’ve been acting since I was twenty. I’ve been acting sixteen years. It’s just getting fun now. I’m just starting to learn how to do it. I’m just sort of loosening up to do it. And I know enough about myself to enjoy life. And I do enjoy it. It’s so divine. I love it — being in the middle of my life.”
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