PATTY SHEPHERD MICCI is a liar. But don’t hold that against her. Hers was a commonplace prevarication, the kind of breakfast-nook embellishment most loving parents feed their children between spoonfuls of Apple Jacks. “When my daughter was young,” admits Patty, “I told her she could become anything she wanted — including president of the United States.”
Her daughter, the actress Cybill Shepherd, seemed to take this exhortation to heart. A Memphis belle out of charm school, Shepherd won a Model of the Year contest, became a star of the big and small screens, and is perhaps the only ardent feminist who testifies to having had congress with Elvis Presley. But having fulfilled her potential, she now seems ready to test her mother’s idle exaggeration. Two weeks ago, Gloria Allred, the feminist attorney and Shepherd’s friend, let it be known that the star of Moonlighting, Cybill, and The Last Picture Show was seriously considering running for president.
This, of course, has been the silliest political season, with a second-tier Republican ideologue threatening to hijack a non-ideological party, a former professional wrestler trying to stunt him in favor of a supermodel-dating real estate developer, and an underemployed megalomaniacal actor contemplating the role of spoiler (Warren Beatty, not Cybill Shepherd, though she, too, has a robust self-regard and too much time in between shoots).
Still, many media outlets delayed reporting Shepherd’s possible candidacy, thinking it a joke. It’s not, assures Allred (Shepherd declined to be interviewed, as she seeks quiet for deliberation). Allred admits the whole thing was her idea, one she sprang on Shepherd over Labor Day. Their first conversation led to another. Their second turned into a third. And now Allred and Shepherd are “continuing a dialogue,” as all good progressives do when poised to effect serious change.
Allred, who hosts a Los Angeles radio show, is a publicity tapeworm. She once waged a campaign against Madonna for her song “Papa Don’t Preach,” the saga of an expectant teenage mother who elects to keep her baby. This offended Allred’s pro-abortion sensibility since “it makes having a baby seem very heroic and romantic.” So Allred demanded that Madonna “produce another record supporting a woman’s right to choose abortion.”
It’s a rare bird that can make one root for Madonna. And Allred’s involvement has some Shepherd intimates questioning whether this exploratory phase is just a media ploy by Allred. But Allred insists this is about something more important than publicity. It is about “the issues.” And the primary issue is that “there was no pro-choice candidate” in this race, give or take a Bill Bradley or Al Gore. If you’re choosy about choice, Shepherd is about as pro-choice as they come. She was the traveling ambassador for Voters For Choice. She cut campaign ads attacking Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a pro-choice Republican who wasn’t pro-choice enough. And in 1989, while surveying the crowd at one of the many abortion marches she’s attended, Shepherd told People, “this is the happiest day of my life, except for the days my children were born.”
While Allred freely admits that if Shepherd were to run, abortion “would be her number one issue,” Shepherd is far from being a one-issue candidate. When I ask what other issues are dear to Shepherd, Allred says she’d be extremely vigilant in appointing Supreme Court justices who would protect Roe v. Wade. “Then, of course,” Allred continues, “there’s the issue of terrorism against the clinics.” Shepherd would also ensure there were enough abortion providers. “So she has many, many issues,” promises Allred.
When asked about issues that don’t involve extracting a fetus, Allred brings up women’s health. “Women’s issues don’t get the same kind of funding that male health issues do,” she says, and she’s right. Though prostate cancer and breast cancer kill the same number of people each year, breast cancer research receives six times the funding of prostate cancer research.
Skeptics might suggest that Shepherd is a tad shy of political experience to become the leader of the free world. It may, however, be worth highlighting, as does her older sister Gladys, that “Cybill did run for the student council in high school.” Shepherd lost. But as her mother Patty points out with no small amount of pride, “she was president of her sorority — Delta Alpha Delta.” Born to lead, Shepherd has a presidential contender’s most essential attribute: the ability to withstand a tremendous amount of abuse.
Not even Dan Quayle has taken as many media beatings as Shepherd over her three-decade career. Leaving Memphis with a body for sin and a head for Germaine Greer, she became a successful model. Then director Peter Bogdanovich spotted her on a magazine cover in a grocery checkout line. He cast her in The Last Picture Show, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1971. Bogdanovich wasted no time shucking his collaborator/wife in order to bed Shepherd, who scored one for home-wreckers by telling the press, “Oh, it’s sexier not to be married.”
For a feminist, Shepherd possessed something of a slutty streak. (Sister Gladys says when Cybill was a teenager, her dad nailed the bedroom window shut. Cybill said, “Daddy, what if there’s a fire?” recalls Gladys. “He said, ‘I’m more worried about the fire in you.'”) Still, Shepherd stayed with Bogdanovich for all of eight years. One of the smarmier characters in Hollywood’s reptile house, Bogdanovich was so infatuated with Shepherd he took every opportunity to inflict her on the public in third-rate vehicles. They embraced on the cover of People magazine with the tagline “Living Together is Sexy.” Bogdanovich put her in At Long Last Love, a musical with Burt Reynolds that Esquire magazine said “may be the worst movie musical of this — or any — decade.”
Bogdanovich also helped launch her singing career with an album appropriately titled Cybill Does It — To Cole Porter! One failed album of cabaret, jazz, and rhythm ‘n’ blues standards after another followed. Once she had exhausted the public’s tolerance, Shepherd went into a decade-long exile that saw her doing dinner theater and terminating a brief marriage to an auto-parts salesman. She was finally rescued in 1985, when she starred with newcomer Bruce Willis in the television series Moonlighting. Both did some of the best work of their careers, despite their battling egos. But around the time Shepherd became impregnated by her chiropractor, giving birth to twins (she married and quickly divorced him), the show started suffering and lost its creator, who found Shepherd nearly impossible to work with.
While Willis went on to eight-figure paydays, Shepherd was scrapping for distressed-mommy roles in movie-of-the-week dross — a sort of Lindsay Wagner for the ’90s. But Shepherd resuscitated herself again by executive producing and acting in the loosely autobiographical sitcom Cybill, about a struggling, twice-divorced actress growing long of tooth who favored yenta repartee and dowdy sponge-soled footwear (Cybill almost never wears heels). Despite initial critical acclaim, Cybill, like Moonlighting, managed to self-destruct. Shepherd, typically, took credit for creating Christine Baranski, her much funnier, Emmy-winning sidekick. Before the show was canceled in 1998, Shepherd’s Genghis Khan-management style was blamed for the departure of five producers and three writers in a two-month period.
With no series left to tie her down, now would be a good year for Shepherd to run for president. Her long-overdue autobiography, Cybill Disobedience, which could serve as her campaign manifesto, should appear next spring. (Comparing her book to John McCain’s new memoir, HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey says Cybill’s book is “short on policy statements, but the sex scenes are a lot better.” In one, she relates for the first time how a drugged-up Elvis passed out on top of her, in medias res.)
And Shepherd really does have an issue besides abortion — menopause. Always game to prattle on about her own hot flashes and sex after 40, Shepherd was ideally suited to become the spokeswoman for the “Say Yes to Midlife!” campaign. Who better than Shepherd, a drama queen by vocation and temperament, to elevate the prosaic to the mythic (“We’re dealing with the last frontier: We’re reinventing menopause and blowing all the myths to bits.”).
As for the yucky mechanics of campaigning — the glad-handing, the fund-raising, the coalition-building — Gloria Allred cautions, “This is all very preliminary.” Allred doesn’t even know whose banner her friend would run under. But if Shepherd, a Democrat, doesn’t feel ready to take on the vice president for her party’s nomination, there’s always a home away from home: the Reform party, where they don’t check your references and no experience is required. “We would welcome her if she adheres to Reform party principles,” says newly elected Reform party chair Jack Gargan, in what is becoming this season’s most common refrain. “Throw her in the mix,” he adds lustily. “She’s gotta be prettier than Lowell Weicker.”
Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
