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.