F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American lives. Try telling that to actress Cybill Shepherd.
”`Memphis` is the beginning of my third act,” she proclaims, citing the made-for-cable drama showing this week on Turner Network Television. She adapted the story from a novel, ”September September,” by Shelby Foote, historian-commentator on the PBS series, ”The Civil War.” Shepherd also produced ”Memphis” and stars in it.
Shepherd, who seems to have been ”that face” on magazine covers and in hair-care ads forever, has proved her durability through periods of deep personal and professional disappointment.
Act 1 of Shepherd`s life began in 1968, when she left Memphis after high school graduation to pursue modeling in New York. By 1971, she was starring in director Peter Bogdanovich`s ”The Last Picture Show,” eventually living with him for several years.
By the late `70s, buffeted by abrasive reviews for most of her work, she was back in Memphis, putting her life back on track, and working on her first marriage to auto-parts salesman David Ford (they were married in 1978 and divorced in 1981), and motherhood.
Her return to Hollywood in the early 1980s, after a few years in regional theater and on tour developing her confidence and a knack for comedy, (”I finally wasn`t afraid to be myself”) marked the onset of Act 2.
It opened with a broad comic performance on an episode of ”Fantasy Island” and then a one-year series, ”The Yellow Rose.” By the mid-1980s, she was everybody`s funny, sexy and acerbic media darling as Maddie Hayes of TV`s ”Moonlighting.” That hit show folded in 1989, amid a media barrage of reports of disorder on the set, to put it mildly.
With the end of her second marriage to chiropractor Bruce Oppenheim (1987 to 1989), the father of her twin son and daughter, it was retrenching time again because, she observes, ”The bigger the success, the more limited you are in terms of what people think you can do.”
Now the curtain is rising on Act 3.
”There`s no such thing as an easy life,” says Shepherd, mother of three (Clementine, 12, and twins Ariel and Zachariah, 4), still turning heads as she turns 42 on Feb. 18.
”You look at Barbara Hutton,” Shepherd says. ”She had all the money in the world and had a miserable, terrible life. Life-just living life-is hard!
It`s also, fortunately, a lot of fun.”
Fun is characteristic of Shepherd. She can be flirtatious, even silly. It is evident in her occasionally devilish grin, and it can surface even in a passing conversation.
”I take my work very seriously-I try not to take myself too seriously,” she says. She can`t suppress a giggle as she adds, ”Or maybe it`s the other way around!”
An actress whose performances alternately have been hailed or panned, Shepherd is the pervasively sexy woman who has been the heartbreak kid where love and marriage are concerned.
Marriage is only one area in which she hasn`t always landed on her feet.
”Part of what I do is take risks,” she says. ”That`s kind of what keeps you awake. I`ve taken some risks when I`ve really hit the ground, OK?
”Goethe said, `Whatever you believe you can do, begin it-boldness has genius, power and magic in it.` So I`ve boldly begun things that I didn`t know how to do very well. For instance, comedy.”
For another, singing-something she has yet to succeed at fully, although she keeps trying. (Her fifth album, ”Somewhere Down the Road,” is in stores now.)
”By the time I`m 50, I may be a really wonderful singer. And if I didn`t keep failing, how would I ever get there?”
The constant in her life is Memphis. It has been her womb, her challenger, her comforter and, today, her place of pride. The project she has just brought to fruition-”Memphis”-mirrors her love-hate relationship with her home town.
The Foote novel adaptation is about the kidnapping of a wealthy black businessman`s grandson by three desperate people, who commit the crime on a September day in 1956, while the eyes of the region are on the impending civil rights crisis in Little Rock, Ark. Shepherd plays one of the kidnappers, a woman in her mid-30s who was abused as a child, and who experiences maternal feelings for the first time.
Shepherd is a product of that segregated South, within ”the divisiveness of racial hatred,” she says.
The daughter of a wholesale-appliance distributor, with humble family origins (”We come from chicken farmers, basically-not college-educated”), she knew blacks as domestics, as servants at the local country club, but never as peers.
”I don`t want to be specific because of the people in my family who are still alive,” she says, ”but basically, everybody I was around was racist. I remember feeling the sense of deep shame that makes you cringe inside when I was in the presence of it.
”I knew it was wrong, I was embarrassed by it, by the language that people used,” she recalls, but her lack of action against racism did not strike her until Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis in 1968.
”I remember being told-I was standing on the back porch of East High School, and I was looking downtown toward the Lorraine Motel (where King was shot), crying,” she says.
”I was struck at that time that I hadn`t done anything, but I didn`t know what to do. I will never forget that moment.”
In the 1970s, a decade that saw her hit the heights with ”The Last Picture Show” and ”Taxi Driver” and the depths with a disastrous movie musical, ”At Long Last Love,” she was back in Memphis, shopping unnoticed in local groceries.
No longer the rebel who fled her roots for New York and Hollywood, ”I could go back and embrace my family in a way because I found out who I was and was no longer threatened by who they were. I could stand to be around them-I very much wanted to.
”I was in my first apartment, in a converted cotton warehouse, and I lay in that bed, looking at the high ceiling, hearing the trains go by downtown, and reading the review of Foote`s book (`September September`). I was so surprised to see something written by someone who lived in Memphis about Memphis, and I thought, this`d be a great part for me. I suggested it to someone at Paramount, who said, `Oh, we can`t do this-it`s too
controversial.”`
Eventually, she read the whole book, and two years afterward, depressed by inactivity, she decided to turn ”September September” into a screenplay as an exercise. She optioned the book, then revised her script with a friend, novelist Larry McMurtry (”The Last Picture Show”), who received co-author credit.
Time and again during the 1980s she tried without success to spark Hollywood studio interest in the project. Finally, while shooting ”Which Way Home,” a 1991 TNT drama about an American Red Cross nurse in Vietnam, she sold Turner executives on her idea.
The project is a welcome opportunity. She says: ”Let`s see-in feature films there`s usually three good parts a year for women, and even those are peripheral; so shall we name the actresses who are going to get them first?
”Listen, I have a hit list of about four wonderful, talented actresses, and for me to get those parts in features, I`m going to have to knock `em off!”
Or go around them. She begins work this month on an ABC television movie, an original script about a strong, sexy and single private detective. It`s a movie-of-the-week, which she hopes can be turned into an ongoing series of three or four episodes a year. It is no coincidence that Shepherd is a big fan of the current heroines of mysteries written by women, chiefly Sue Grafton`s Kinsey Millhone series and Meg O`Brien`s Jessica James books.
The experiences of her youth have galvanized her politically. She has been working with Voters for Choice since 1984 and actively backed the campaigns of Rep. Barbara Boxer of California and Gov. Ann Richards of Texas. Last November, she was at Sony Studios at the Hollywood Hunger Banquet, helping raise $70,000 for worldwide famine relief.
But her principal non-professional activity since Clementine`s birth has been motherhood, and the responsibilities have intensified since the birth of the twins. (She shares custody of Ariel and Zack with their father.)
She tries to confine her work to the Los Angeles area, but if she must go on location away from her San Fernando Valley home, the children generally go along. (She passed up the Darryl Hannah role in ”At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” she says, because she wouldn`t have been able to transport her children to the set in the Brazilian wilds.)
Perhaps it is the fact that Clementine is approaching her teens (”mainly her interest lies in boys and music at the moment”), perhaps not. But without being asked, and acknowledging that she has been ”an instrument, one of those put up as an ideal to aspire to,” Shepherd sharply criticizes a culture that tells young girls ”that there`s only one way to look, and that the only real power they have is the power of beauty, the power of their sexuality.”
Still, she admits, there is that pervasive sexuality in her roles.
”It`s part of my persona, and I`m very grateful I have it.”
Will she remarry? That subject she won`t discuss, nor will she say whether she is in a relationship now.
”I`m single-I will say `Yes` to that.”
Last 4th of July, Shepherd returned to Memphis to participate in the dedication of the National Civil Rights Museum.
Her 84-year-old grandmother, her mother (her parents are divorced, and her father is in Georgia), her sister (a nurse) and her brother (a producer of television commercials and industrial films) all still live in Memphis, and Shepherd is building a house there so she can join them.
”It reminds me who I am,” she says. ”It`s the breeding ground of my creativity. It puts my feet firmly on the ground, in a way.”
She recalls a special moment that Independence Day.
”I was in the car briefly with my mother-we were by ourselves,” she says, ”and she said, `I just want you to know how really proud I am that you`re down here doing this.`
”We`ve all grown in my family. I`m really pretty proud.”
