THE first time Cybill Shepherd appeared on a talk show was on “The Tonight Show” back in 1968. At the time she was a radiant 18-year-old from Memphis with a confrontational gaze who owned the title Model of the Year. “I could barely say a word,” she said. “All I could do was say ‘Yes’ and look terrified.”
Forty-one years later Ms. Shepherd now looks at the untold hours she has logged talking about herself on camera as not unlike time spent on a different kind of couch. “Before I ever did psychotherapy or analysis I did interviews and talk shows, which are a kind of therapy,” she said. “I mean, you’re talking about yourself, and it does bring about some possibilities of thinking about who you are and where you are in your life.”
Occasionally she would play with the format: On “Late Night With David Letterman,” she once strolled onstage wearing a bath towel. Sometimes the format would play with her, as when she was promoting her 1971 feature-film debut as the self-possessed small-town enchantress in “The Last Picture Show.”
“On all these talk shows I just seemed like I was a nattering airhead, just nattering on and blond,” said Ms. Shepherd, who also heard that her persona so irked the director Elaine May that it nearly cost her a key role in “The Heartbreak Kid.” “Looking back I can see why she didn’t want to cast me. But I’m different now. I finally have become just more of who I am.”
So who is Ms. Shepherd? At 59 she has become the actress who is up for almost anything. She has done guest spots on popular television shows like “Psych,” “Criminal Minds” and “Samantha Who?” On Showtime’s defunct lesbian drama, “The L Word,” she had a recurring role as a university vice chancellor who started out severe, then ran hilariously amok the minute she discovered her attraction to other women. And she has just signed to a recurring role on the new ABC series “Eastwick” (based on the movie and novel “The Witches of Eastwick”), in which she will play a former witch who has become a reclusive cat lady.
“Years ago one of my mentors, Orson Welles, told me, ‘A career is made not by what you do but by what you don’t do,’ ” she said. “But so much about these past few years has been about saying yes, and it’s really paid off.”
Lead roles are part of the mix. In “Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith,” which has its premiere on the Hallmark Channel next Saturday, Ms. Shepherd plays a middle-aged housewife, Alice Washington, who returns to Smith College to get her diploma, find herself and forget that her dweeby dentist husband has left her for a younger woman. “Mrs. Washington” is the kind of television movie for which you can predict most of the plot twists, including the dazzling makeover Ms. Shepherd’s dowdy character will receive. But no one can say that Ms. Shepherd doesn’t bring a certain been-there authority to the role.
Like Alice, she attended college when she was young but dropped out before graduating. Like Alice, she’s been married and divorced (Ms. Shepherd twice). Like Alice, Ms. Shepherd, who has three grown children, knows what it’s like to walk around a spacious house once noisy with offspring and wonder how to beat back the silence.
“I was in such denial at first. I said, ‘Empty nest? No problem. I just won’t go home,’ ” said Ms. Shepherd, whose tenure on “The L Word” required commuting between Los Angeles and Vancouver. “But when it did hit me, oh my God. It was just that howling-at-the-moon time. It’s still very, very important for me to go into their rooms at a certain time at night and close the shutters and turn on a night light.”
But on this afternoon Ms. Shepherd’s tall, floppy-haired son Zack, 21, was home, back for the summer. Stretched out on the living room sofa in Ms. Shepherd’s hilltop house with its expansive views of the San Fernando Valley, he read the newspaper and listened in as his barefoot mother, dressed in loose black pants and a billowy turquoise print blouse, told show business stories. At unpredictable moments she would slip into a honey-dipped Southern drawl. This, according to Jane Lynch, Ms. Shepherd’s good friend and her “L Word” co-star, was a sign that she was relaxed.
“The more comfortable she is, the more her Tennessee comes out,” explained Ms. Lynch, who portrayed Ms. Shepherd’s lawyer girlfriend on the series and recalled that the biggest hurdle when they filmed their love scene — Ms. Shepherd’s first with a woman — was Ms. Shepherd’s surplus of enthusiasm.
“She was very ‘I can do this! I can do this!’ She’d kiss me in the middle of a sentence,” Ms. Lynch said with a laugh. “I had to say to her, ‘Um, I kind of got to get the line out first.’ She kind of went into overkill.”
Young Hollywood could learn a thing or two about resiliency from Ms. Shepherd. Just as people began to know her name, she was labeled a home wrecker, as her on-set affair with Peter Bogdanovich, her director on “The Last Picture Show,” broke up his marriage. When he cast her at the center of two follow-up movies that flopped both critically and at the box office — an adaptation of Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and the musical “At Long Last Love” — people said her career was over. Then, a year later, she landed a role as a poised political aide in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Another lull followed, forcing her to take movie and television scraps, like a small part on “Fantasy Island.” In the mid-1980s, however, she emerged victorious as the fast-talking model turned private eye Maddie Hayes on the hit ABC series “Moonlighting.” Four years later the dream soured again, when “Moonlighting” ended amid reports of unmanageable backstage infighting between her and her co-star, Bruce Willis. She rebounded in the mid-1990s as the wisecracking actress at the center of the CBS sitcom “Cybill,” but now finds herself playing, for the most part, secondary roles.
The woman who survived such tumult seems philosophical about her place in Hollywood. “One of the things that really changed for me in my life is that I’ve learned how to be a guest star,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. I remember being the lead on a show and the guest stars having to be the last person shot.’ Do you understand what I’m saying? This has been a real learning curve, a growing-up process. But I’m happy to have a job.”
When she’s not working she studies with acting and vocal coaches. “It’s my continuing education, what I consider to be a kind of master class situation,” said Ms. Shepherd, who grew up singing in a church choir, started taking voice lessons at 16 and has recorded 11 albums.
In her mind age has presented her with opportunities that were once out of reach. “What I’m trying to say about being beautiful,” she said, “is that there’s an element of it that can cause you to be emotionally underdeveloped. People do things for you, doors will open because you’re beautiful. It was like I took off on this airplane in 1968 and just flew into world fame. There were a lot of times in between where I just didn’t get a chance to grow and learn.”
Da The New York Times, 26 Luglio 2009
