You know how many of us, when dripping wet, look like drowned rats? I know I do. Well, on June 6, 1967, the day before I embarked on a summer in Europe, I spent the entire day with Cybill Shepherd. (Yes, THAT Cybill Shepherd.) Cybill is from Memphis but was visiting mutual friends of our families in my hometown, Lewisburg. We spent part of the afternoon swimming. A member of the swim team at East High School in Memphis, Cybill would do these absolutely perfect dives, swim the length of the pool underwater, coming up at pool's edge, long blonde hair gleamingly wet, looking for all the world like some sea goddess. We were 16 then. And while "youth itself is beauty", Cybill was perfect.

At this point in her life, her only claim to national fame was that she had won Miss Congeniality in the Miss Teenage America pageant. Had this turned her head? Not in the least. She was as down to earth a girl as you'd ever want to meet. The next year--1968--her entrance onto the national stage got a major boost: she won Model of the Year in New York City and appeared on the cover of Glamour magazine, the first of what would become a record number of covers on Glamour.

But that first cover was all it took. Her picture was spotted by film-critic-turned-Hollywood-director Peter Bogdanovich who cast her as "Jacy Farrow" in his THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, what Newsweek's Jack Kroll would call in the opening line of his review "a masterpiece." In it, Cybill had a quick nude scene: while standing on the diving board in a bathing suit, she quickly takes it off and dives in. (A perfect dive, of course.) She comes up out of the water--again a sea goddess. This time for the whole world to see. For me, of course, it was a case of art imitating life....

In his Oscar-winning screenplay for 1950's ALL ABOUT EVE, in the movie's opening sequence writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz has the narrator say of Eve in voice-over:

"Eve. Eve, the Golden Girl. The cover girl, the girl next door, the girl on the moon...Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes--she's been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and when and where, what she wears and when and where, whom she knows and where she was and when and where she's going...."

At the ripe age of 18, this was the world Cybill stepped into. You couldn't walk through a grocery or drug store without seeing her face staring back at you from a magazine cover. You couldn't turn on "The Tonight Show" without seeing Johnny Carson dazzled by her blonde good looks. Cybill was the healthy, athletic beauty who replaced the likes of reed-thin model Twiggy and preceeded the anorexic, coked-up-looking models like Kate Moss and the clones that followed. The powers that be in the fashion industry and on Madison Avenue should be crucified for glorifying models who look like concentration camp survivors. Had they continued to "glamour"-ize the likes of Cybill our young women today would be a lot healthier.

In the early 70s, Cybill went on to do several films for Bogdanovich, with whom she was now living in Hollywood, but none as successful as PICTURE SHOW. Despite critics scathingly panning her work in Bogdanovich's period-piece, DAISY MILLER, and his musical, AT LONG LAST LOVE, she remained a fashion icon. And in 1976, she got good notices for her performance in Martin Scorcese's TAXI DRIVER.

But in 1978--at the ripe, old age of 28--unhappy with where her career was "not" going, she went home to Memphis, became pregnant and had her first child, daughter Clementine. Her marriage ended in divorce several years later. A second marriage produced twins and ended in divorce after three years.

But Cybill bounced back with the TV sitcom "Moonlighting," a huge hit for Cybill and the up-and-coming Bruce Willis. In the mid-90s Cybill showed her business chops when she executive-produced the TV sitcom, "Cybill", based loosely on her two marriages. It was a huge hit for Cybill and for CBS.

Fast-forward from when we swam in 1967 to 1991. I was in Memphis, having been invited by my alma mater to participate in the annual Rhodes Forum. My college put me up at the Peabody Hotel for the long weekend. Cybill was living in a Peabody penthouse while her Japanese-style home was under construction in Memphis on property that borders the Mississippi River.

On side-by-side treadmills, we exercised---and we talked: Cybill has remained a fighter; with such an up-and-down career, she's had to. In hearing her story, it was fairly heart-breaking to see what Hollywood fame, the bust-up of her eight-year, on again-off again relationship with Bogdanovich, the failure of two marriages, life in the goldfish bowl of media coverage, and being a target of fevered entertainment reporters working overtime can do to the human spirit.

She is a survivor. Over the years, she evolved into an out-spoken voice for civil rights. At 58, ingenue movie roles haven't come her way in decades. She now does television, having starred in two television movies portraying Martha Stewart. Personally, I think her life itself has the makings of a movie. She survived the beauty pageant circuit of the Sixties; she rose and fell and rose again in Hollywood; her personal life hasn't been "happily ever after."

In many ways, she is Everywoman.

But I will always remember Cybill as "the golden girl" of my generation, the dazzling-even-when-drenched sea goddess, the once-upon-a-time, quintessential, All-American girl-next-door.

---Hoyt Harris, KATC-TV

Check out my blog:

http://hoytharris.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-dads-memoir-steep-climb-is-published.html

http://hoytharris.blogspot.com/2010/03/under-construction-being-there-at-being.html

http://hoytharris.blogspot.com/2010/03/our-round-trip-doggie-day-to-dallas.html

http://hoytharris.blogspot.com/2010/03/may-1963redstone-arsenalhuntsville-al.html

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