On the latest episode of Los Angeles’ podcast The Originals, host Andrew Goldman’s longtime obsession, Cybill Shepherd, serves as a guide through her own storied past.
Obsession is a word that comes naturally with Shepherd, and not only because of her big-screen debut as Jacy Farrow, the Texas beauty so careless of boys’ feelings in The Last Picture Show. Not for nothing, as Goldman points out, was she cast as the woman who drives Travis Bickle off the rails in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
As you’ll hear below, Shepherd in The Last Picture Show didn’t only drive boys like young Andrew Goldman crazy, but also co-star Jeff Bridges, whose advances she rejected after a ladybug discovered during a make-out session with Bridges was interpreted as an omen not to sleep with him, leading to her subsequent affair started with the married director of the film, Peter Bogdanovich, whose wife was the film’s production designer.
Here’s the hook. Two decades ago, Shepherd published what Goldman regards as quite likely one of the dirtiest memoirs ever penned by a Hollywood celebrity, Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think. But she has seldom if ever dignified so many questions about the prurient curiosity those remembrances of hers aroused — nor spoken at such length on a topic Goldman delicately introduces as the “trickiness” of her reputation in Hollywood.
Goldman’s interviewing skills were definitely put to the test; for as Shepherd herself admits, a long career in Hollywood after a tough childhood in Memphis has made her a near-pathological deflector of probing interview questions. Here are a few highlights from the interview.
On what saved her from sleeping with her Last Picture Show co-star Jeff Bridges:
“I wouldn’t call it dating. I think we were lying in the tall Texas grass making out one afternoon and a bug crawled in my ear and I jumped up screaming, ‘Get it out! Get it out!’ There’s a bug in my ear, get it out!’”
On the advice her agent gave her for how to make a good impression at a meeting with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese for a major role in Taxi Driver:
“Sue Mengers said, ‘When you go to meet them, just shut up and don’t talk and you’ll probably get the part.’ … I got the part by shutting up.”
On rampant reports from the set of Moonlighting that she and Bruce Willis did not get along:
“He came to my house with a bottle of Jack Daniels and we were in a Lazy-Boy chair leaning back and I think he said, ‘Look, we can’t do this. We may be working together for a very long time.’”
The time she insulted Dustin Hoffman by making a joke about his height:
“We’re going to Sue Mengers’ and we’re having dinner. All six chairs have handles on either side, and Dustin was to my left and he was holding himself up like he was trying to be taller. And I’m a smart ass and I’ll be the first one to admit it, and I said ‘Would you like me to get some telephone books for you to sit on?’”
On her guilt at the mental illness suffered by her older sister Gladys:
“[A psychiatrist] said to me that a lot of the reason why my sister was suffering from mental illness was because of my beauty. … Terribly guilty, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
For more, tune in to The Originals on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
