CompleteMartialArts.com - Cybill Disobedience : How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood, and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think
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List Price: $26.00
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Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 792.028092
EAN: 9780060193508
ISBN: 0060193506
Label: HarperCollins Publishers
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 294
Publication Date: 2000-04-04
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Release Date: 2000-04-04
Studio: HarperCollins Publishers
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Editorial Reviews:
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Few women in the past three decades have lit up the American imagination like Cybill Shepherd. From wholesome beauty queen to saucy cover girl, from heartbreaking movie star (The Last Picture Show) to one of television's most beloved comediennes (Moonlighting and Cybill), she has imbued each of her roles--right down to her current passions as devoted mother of three, champion of women's issues, and sultry cabaret singer--with an indomitable spirit that has made her, at fifty, a female icon to an entire generation. Now in her much-anticipated memoir, she tells her remarkable story with humor, pathos, and more highlights than her famously blond hair. Cybill has absorbed the lessons of Southern womanhood, including the whispered message about sex: Wait until you're married, then you won't enjoy it, and certainly never speak of it. She gleefully disobeyed these and other rules of decorum in a career laced with controversy, featuring unforgettable cameos by Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles, Robert De Niro, and Jeff Bridges. Whether stepping on Elvis's blue suede shoes or going toe-to-toe with Bruce Willis, Cybill has never held anything back, and it's all in Cybill Disobedience, including: the night a network executive tried to barter thirteen episodes for a horizontal tour of Cybill's bedroom why she'll never be invited back to Ryan O'Neal's beach house or Marlon Brando's island the time she greeted David Letterman in nothing but a towel the real reason two of television's most popular and acclaimed series, died premature deaths how she made Richard Nixon blush for the first and only time in his life From her Memphis roots to her insider's track in Hollywood, Cybill Shepherd is a woman who has weathered every onslaught and withstood every rebuke to emerge as a luminous model of endurance, courage, and an insatiable lust for life.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not too revealing
Comment: I love Cybill and her outspoken nature. But there's not a lot of introspection here, considering that it's a memoir. Too many chapters are devoted to early life, and not enough to Moonlighting. (Seems as though this may have been edited to death, at no fault to Cybill, but readers cannot be sure.) Also, the book is severely lacking in "dirt."
Perhaps this 2000 release was a bit premature. If you listened to her commentaries for the Moonlighting dvd release in 2005, it sounds as though some significant personal growth occurred in the interim.
I want a tome from Cybill, a complete autobiography. I want her complete honesty and nervy ways, her regrets, if any, her triumphs, her mature, honest perspectives on the Moonlighting turbulence. In the commentary, she admitted to Glen Gordon Caron, "What was my problem?" And they all have admitted to being too young, immature, and just plain inexperienced enough to enjoy the time together. No one doubts that the double standard existed back then, as it still does now, but...haven't her actions and outspokenness changed things? And if not, then she should shout it out loud.
Cybill is nervy enough to get real personal. And while I'm not looking for intimate details recounting sexcapades, again, how about some introspection regarding her major love affairs and marriages? What about her intimate thoughts on motherhood? Does she think things have really changed for women since the advent of feminism? Who were her feminist role models, then and now? How does she walk the difficult lines between being sexy, funny, gorgeous, intelligent and fierce?
Cybill is a woman who could still be quite relevant to this world. She'll never be tired, she'll never be over, I always want to hear her thoughts and opinions, whether I agree with them or not.
Here's hoping she reads this and comes out with something truly personal, honest, introspective and healing. All-encompassing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, but typical Hollywood self-centeredness
Comment: I think Cybil Shepherd is a talented actress; I enjoyed "Moonlighting" and "Cybil" a lot, and there are parts of this book that are entertaining. However, it's also a good example of the typical self-serving "it's about me" Hollywood mentality. She'd have been wiser to focus more on her career than her bedroom escapades. If nothing else, she should have considered the example she has set for her children. Does she really want her daughters to sleep around and cheat in order to find self worth and then write a tell-all book later? Does she want her son to be the same sort of self-absorbed, insensitive, arrogant man that she (by her own admission) always seems to end up with? Admittedly that may not be applicable at this point, her children are grown, but I think it's sad that an attractive woman would feel it necessary to be promiscuous or to consistently choose to be in unhealthy, one-sided relationships to establish her identity, and it's sadder still that she seems to not regret or have learned anything from it, and in fact brags about it in some places.
All in all it's well written, and I did enjoy the parts where she talks about what she learned about the movie industry from Peter Bogdonavich and the stories about Orson Welles. It would have been a better book if she'd stuck to that sort of information. I do agree with the idea that the movie industry (and business world in general) tends to be male-dominated, but it's hard for me not to believe that at least some of the difficulties she faced were the result of her own self-absorbed attitude. There is a price to pay for just doing whatever you want without considering the consequences.
An okay read if you like gossipy material.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Cybill Strikes Back!
Comment: I wanted to read this book mainly to see what Cybill would say about Bruce Willis and Moonlighting, one of my all-time favorite shows, and although I was left wanting more, she does give a few interesting tidbits about them. But even if she hadn't this would still be a page turner.
Most references to Cybill Shepherd by the media over the years have been negative. I just wanted to hear her side of her story for a change and I have no problem with this so-called 'B-list' actor making a few bucks in the process.
While I don't approve of or agree with everything Cybill says she's done or believes in, this little book is a small interesting slice of history and a record of how things work behind the scenes of the modeling and acting professions. The message I got is 'proceed with extreme caution - or better yet choose another career.'
Also, my belief that Hollywood culture is depraved in general remains unshaken after reading this. And you certainly can't blame it all on Cybill Shepherd.
Even so, I appreciate what I believe is Cybill's candor about herself, the people she's met and her experiences which is written with a witty humor and a verbal style I appreciate.
Customer Rating:
Summary: You Know...She May Be A B-List Celebrity But This Isn't That Bad A Book
Comment: I don't know what compelled me to check this out from the library since I didn't really know who Cybill Shepherd was, but she kept me reading with her honesty and `dang-it-it's-true' breed of self-flattery. In this autobiography, the star of the '80's TV hit Moonlighting (when she mentioned Moonlighting, I was finally like, "Oh, I know who she is...") candidly talks about the cut-throat world of Hollywood, tells about how Hef, of Playboy fame, stole images from her nude scene and improperly published them, talks about an affair with Elvis (who "charmed" her by telling her in one of his pill-popping hazes about the time a doctor gave him an injection directly into the pupil of his eye!!!!!) and throws caution to the wind and dodges claims of skankhood by talking about a seemingly unending series of affairs with scores of married and unmarried men, from her beauty queen teen years in Memphis, well into her fifties. Shepherd name-drops and that's the making of this book since it's most interesting when the focus is not on her. She tells about having Orson Welles as a long-term house guest, about how she introduced Elvis to certain amorous technique, tells of clashes with Bruce Willis, whose ego was a match for her own, and provides tell-all revelations about some of the biggest stars in the movie business during the 1970's. Shepherd is also doggedly committed to certain feminist causes and gives ink to her views on them. This book is definitely a celebrity stroking her ego, but it's not dull or preachy and since it can be read in about two hours, it's not a bad way to spend a free afternoon.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, and don't you forget it!
Comment: Truly the title sums up the whole of this autobiography. I wonder if Ms. Shepherd hadn't believed so deeply in her ephemeral outer beauty, maybe others wouldn't have assumed that that's all she had going for her.
Conspicuously absent from her story were her relationships with her siblings, which were touched on ever-so-briefly toward the end, tellingly admitting that they had a tenuous connection at best, their sibling bonds having been sacrificed at the alter of Shepherd's career.
Cybill Shepherd spent her life being promiscuous, including involvment with married men, and lays it all out for the record, no matter how it makes her look. It's amazing to me that she never came away from fling after short-term fling not feeling used or taken advantage of.
The comment that rings the loudest to me, out of everything she crammed furiously into this book, was the fact that she tried to make '5 minutes feel like 5 hours' with her kids, as if that were possible. Although she does go on to admit that it is simply not possible to do it all.
Contradictory to me is the fact that Ms. Shepherd found lurid tabloid stories to be embarassing and insulting to herself and her children, but she voluntarily lays bare all her personal laundry.
I picked up this book because I fondly remember Moonlighting as must-see TV of my teenage years, Maddie Hayes and David Addison being the best on-screen couple of my generation. Although that was just one small part of Cybill's story, I did find the Hollywood insider stuff a fun guilty pleasure.
One last criticism - the subtitle is far too long and completely unnecessary, bordering on downright silly.
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