She Always Had ‘Memphis’

In 1977, her life in shambles, Cybill Shepherd went home. To Memphis.

When she left, 18 and just out of high school, she was on the verge of becoming one of the hottest fashion models in the country, an all-American cover girl just waiting for Hollywood to make her a star.

By 1971, it had happened. She made an incandescent debut in “The Last Picture Show,” and embarked on a public romance with the director, Peter Bogdanovich. But only six years later it all come crashing down, the romance over, her career practically vaporized by a firestorm of savagely negative reviews after her performance in Bogdanovich’s botched musical-comedy “At Long Last Love.” Her burst of stardom was apparently over, as quickly as it had begun.

“I had gone through a period where everyone treated me like I was the greatest thing in the world,” Shepherd was saying, her soft Tennessee accent unable to cover the pain the memories still bring, “to this period where people were saying things like, ‘You can’t walk or talk, much less sing.’ ”

So she went to the place she knew best. To Memphis, where she married a car dealer, had a baby, tried to start over again. She sang occasionally in jazz clubs, acted in regional theaters. Hollywood, it seemed, wasn’t interested in her anymore.

“I didn’t have any offers and I was depressed,” she says candidly, “so I decided to sit down and write a screenplay. More than anything, it was an exercise to keep myself from going crazy.”

That “exercise,” begun in the winter of 1979 was an adaptation of Civil War historian Shelby Foote’s 1977 novel “September, September,” the story of three white trash drifters who kidnap the child of a prominent black family. Set in 1950s Memphis and told against the backdrop of the fledgling civil rights movement, it was, for Shepherd, a story that struck a personal chord.

“I am a product of the segregated South,” she says, “I come from the terrible scars and pain of racism.”

And now, nearly 13 years after she first wrote the screenplay, after a decade’s worth of rejections and rewrites, Shepherd’s movie about her hometown is finally a reality. Retitled “Memphis,” it premieres Monday on Turner Network Television.

“I was turned down by all the broadcast networks, the cable networks, every studio in town,” says Shepherd, who will turn 42 next month, retracing the litany of rejections her screenplay received before Turner agreed to make it in 1990. “I laugh about it now. But it was painful. It really was.”

Early in the process, Shepherd had shown her screenplay to old friend Larry McMurtry, the author of “The Last Picture Show” (and later, “Lonesome Dove”). McMurtry not only liked her screenplay, he agreed to work with her on rewrites. Life went on, “Moonlighting” reignited her career, she went through two divorces, had twins and moved into a luxurious home in Encino where the doorbell plays “The Tennessee Waltz.” But, even with McMurtry’s name on the script as co-writer, she still couldn’t find a buyer for “Memphis.”

“There were people who thought this film would destroy my career,” she says. “My agent at the time absolutely loathed it. But I made him send it out anyway.”

Shepherd said she believes part of the reason she had so much trouble getting “Memphis” made was that studios saw her as too glamorous to play the part of a racist kidnaper, an uneducated woman who grows attached to the black boy she and her partners are holding for ransom. But, more than that, she thinks Hollywood was reluctant to film the story for exactly the same reason she was so attracted to it.

“I’ve come to believe,” she says, almost whispering, “that it has something to do with my being from the South.”

For as long as she’s been fighting the assumption that because she’s beautiful she’s dumb, Shepherd has had to counter the notion that because she’s a white Southerner, she must also be racist.

When she was growing up in East Memphis, Shepherd admits, the civil rights movement had seemed part of another world, something distant. Race was a taboo subject, never discussed in her home. The only black people she knew, really knew, were the domestic servants who had worked in her home. But in 1968, that all changed.

“Martin Luther King was killed at the Lorraine Motel, not two miles from my high school, right before I was gonna graduate. And I was so horrified when it happened. Because it happened in my hometown.

“I never marched,” she says. “I remember watching the marches on TV and remember feeling that was the greatest thing in the world, yet at the same time here I was in East Memphis, in this little house in my segregated life, not doing anything.”

And that, more than anything, was kept Shepherd fighting for “Memphis” for all those years. It soon became more than an exercise. It was her way of making up for the marches she missed.

“There’s a lot of talk about guilt being totally useless, and to some extent it is,” she says. “But the guilt of racism and that kind of prejudice is different. From that guilt, one can be redeemed. You can come to see it as being wrong and then do something about it in your life.

“I think to a certain extent segregation stole, white people stole, the youth of black people in the South. That’s where the symbolism of the story comes in.”

Before “Memphis” airs on TNT, Shepherd wanted to show it in one special place. On Jan. 20, Martin Luther King Day, she screened it for a fund-raiser at the National Civil Rights Museum, which is in the Lorraine Motel.

“I got involved with the National Civil Rights Museum a few years ago,” Shepherd was saying. “Last July I stood next to Rosa Parks and sang, ‘We shall overcome,’ which was very moving for me. I’m very proud we have the Civil Rights Museum. It made me proud to be from Memphis.”

“Memphis” airs Monday at 5, 7 and 9.m. on TNT.