Cybill’s Moonlight Serenade : Persistence Helps Shepherd Face Criticism With a Song

Cybill Shepherd, sitting down in her airy, light-filled living room, wiggles into position to tame the micro-skirt and cleavage-baring blouse she has donned for a photo session.

“Maybe I should put shorts on?” she says after a moment.

But that moment passes, and Shepherd, still blessed with radiant good looks and a picture-perfect figure that made her one of the most photographed models of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, declares: “I’ll just have to keep my legs crossed.” Shepherd has a lot more than good looks going for her these days. Her new sitcom is a hit, she’s now pitching Mercedes-Benzes as well as shampoo in TV commercials, and she’s got a brand-new mansion in the hills above Encino.

CBS-TV’s “Cybill” is the tale of a struggling actress in her 40s, living in the hills above the San Fernando Valley, who has two ex-husbands and two children, and the show’s real-life parallels are apparent in every direction. Shepherd, 45, who also has two ex-husbands, also lives in the Valley with her three children.

“Cybill” is her third shot at high-visibility acting success--after Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film, “The Last Picture Show,” and the mid-’80s ABC series “Moonlighting” with Bruce Willis. She identifies her current achievement with “Cybill” as “a miraculous third act in an acting career,” and continues, with a characteristically broad laugh, “Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said there were no second acts.”

But Shepherd has had far less luck with a form of expression that has been at least as important to her as modeling and acting: cabaret singing. Tonight at the Hollywood Roosevelt Cinegrill, she will make one of her rare appearances in a nightclub setting--her first since a run at Manhattan’s Rainbow and Stars last summer--accompanied only by pianist Robert Martin and prerecorded instrumental tracks.

She is doing so in the face of years of criticism of her performances as a singer. Commentary such as “out of tune,” “overbearing” and “untalented” has not been uncommon, and she was soundly castigated for her vocals in the Bogdanovich musical “At Long Last Love.”

“ ‘Brutal’ is actually the best way to describe what they said,” notes Shepherd, whose humor-tinged, fast-talking style on “Cybill” appears to be a projection of real life. “And I’ve read most of it. Because I find that you can’t just read the good reviews. And if something is so personally hateful to me, it’s important that I know about it because people will tell me about it, and they’ll say, ‘It’s horrible, you don’t want to read it.’ And then, for me it’s, ‘Wow, how horrible is it?’ So I read it, and it’s usually not all that bad--but sometimes it’s even more horrible than they said it was.”

Shepherd has tried to take a grin-and-bear-it attitude toward the judgmental observations.

“What can I say? There’s been a tremendous resistance to me as a singer. And I’ve been singing for so long. I did ‘At Long Last Love’ when I was 24 years old. It was a wonderful opportunity, but in some ways I was too young to do a major musical film like that. And don’t forget, we sang live in that film, not to playback. Peter reinvented a system that hadn’t been used since the ‘30s.

“Then, when I started to do cabaret at Reno Sweeny’s in Greenwich Village 15 years ago, I found that people were not listening to me, they were watching me. I’ve spent a lifetime, because of the way I look--which I’m not complaining about and I wouldn’t have it any other way--of people not listening so much as watching me.”

Despite the criticism, Shepherd comes across on her recordings, most of which are scarce enough to have become virtual collector’s items, as an appealing singer with an animated, well-schooled voice.

Her most recent outing, “Somewhere Down the Road” for Gold Castle in 1990, was never released, trapped by the company’s demise. Sadly, it contains some of her finest work, including a stirring duet with Peabo Bryson on the title number.

Shepherd now feels she’s a better singer than ever.

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“Those reviews had one benefit,” she says. “They gave me some perspective. Sure they were vicious and horrible, at times, and they hurt. But you can’t be an actor if you’re invulnerable to pain. And they taught me that even if I fell on my face, I could get up and start again.

“If you want to be good at something, you have to keep doing it a long time. I’ve had a tremendous amount of discouragement in my singing career, but I kept doing it, and I kept doing it long enough that now I’m good at it.”

Still it’s hard not to wonder why she would bother to make herself a potential critical target once again.

“I love to sing,” she says with a shrug. “I’m a songbird. I need to sing. That’s one reason why. But it’s also because singing for a cabaret audience is the one place where I can be totally myself. . . . I choose the songs, and I can do whatever I want to do.”

Then she lowers her voice and adds, “Look, it’s so easy to be in my position and live in an ivory tower and not have any audience connection. . . . I essentially do this to get back to live audiences, to give something back to the people who have helped me to get to where I am now.”

Perhaps equally significant, the refusal to allow the negative commentary to dissuade her from working at cabaret singing clearly seems to symbolize for Shepherd the spirit of persistence that has made it possible for her to be a show business survivor.

“The biggest problem I’ve had to face has been discouragement. . . . But I’ve worked hard to not let the naysayers stop me. And I’ve been lucky to have some people around me--good, good friends--who were en-couragers , not dis-couragers .

“To me, when I see people who do brave things, it’s not because they’re not afraid. There’s nothing more exciting and terrifying than taking a risk. But you have to have the attitude of ‘I’m going to get that gold ring for myself.’ ”

“So,” Shepherd says, “I’ll always do cabaret. I may be sitting on stage in a chair like that grand dame of cabaret, Mabel Mercer, when I’m 60. But I’ll be out there.”

* Cybill Shepherd at the Cinegrill in the Radisson Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd. (213) 466-7000. Tonight through Saturday. Shows at 8 and 10 p.m. $20 admission with two-drink minimum.