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Gossip: An Oral History

Daniel Groves | Essays

Cybill Shepherd: “From the start, I let it be known that I wanted an ensemble cast, that everybody’s part should be great. I meant me too.”

Yulia Ustinova: “The problem of the early Sibyl’s historicity is insoluble.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Looking up into the vaulted ceiling . . . I was overwhelmed by the power of those frescoes . . . but my eyes drifted to the image of a half-clothed female.”

David Letterman: “It looks like you in a towel . . .”

Sophia Papaioannou: “. . . legend and history . . . blend into a continuum inaccessible to such values as truth and objectivity.”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘Excuse me,’ I asked the guide, ‘who’s that big ol’ muscular woman reading a scroll?’ ‘That is the Delphic Sibyl,’ he answered.”

Ted Gachot: “. . . the character . . . fits into this continuum . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . a name I’d hated and heard mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the spelling tweaked).”

Linda Rosenkrantz & Pamela Redmond Sataran: “The ancient Greeks used this as a genetic word to represent prophetesses—women who relayed the messages of the gods. It now has a rather . . . unfashionable image, despite the blonde gloss of the uniquely spelled Cybill Shepherd.”

Cybill Shepherd: “People . . . acted as if my brain was blonde and watched rather than listened when I spoke, as if wondering where the ventriloquist’s hand went.”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . trance behavior is considered . . . a kind of language.”

Geoffrey Ashe: “. . . the Sibyls seem to have gone into frenzies and poured out wild verbiage . . . too vague to be interesting . . . Heraclitus speaks of one . . . as having a ‘raving mouth, uttering things without smiles or grace.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . with ‘Recital’ Performance . . .”

A.M. Juster and Robert Maltby: “The Sibyl had
given . . . oracles about the foundation of Rome . . . when the site of the future city was home to simple shepherds.”

Hal Erickson: “La Romana (Woman of Rome) is a worthwhile early . . . vehicle . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “And there were lots of us. In Roman mythology, the guide informed me, Cybele was . . . called the Great Mother of the Gods . . . a temple in her honor was erected on the site now occupied by the Vatican . . . Sibyls were named for her, and their oracles . . . guided imperial policy . . .”

Walter Stephens: “The Sybils . . . according to certain fathers of the Church . . . were divinely inspired to predict the coming of Christ and describe his true divinity.”

Peter Conrad: “Byzantine lore changed Sheba’s name to Sibyl, making her a sibylline prophetess . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the roles are mutable . . . I don’t think you can play one without ending up playing them all.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “First . . . meditation (including the accumulation of seemingly haphazard notes. . .) . . .”

Brian W. Breed: “The Sibyl’s . . . procedure . . . is to leave her prophecy written on leaves to be read in her absence . . . confined to text, the Sibyl’s prophecies are liable to become disrupted and disordered.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I got involved in the editing . . . I like it when I hear this process called ‘montage.’ It seems to convey . . . that the whole will add up to . . . more than the sum of its parts.”

Carolyn Alessio: “The book brims with inconsistencies . . . perhaps the more apt title would have alluded to Sybil, the film about a schizophrenic with manifold personalities . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’m used to that actually—I’ve been mistaken for other people for a mighty long time.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil, the blockbuster book . . . about the woman with sixteen personalities . . . was moving off the shelves as briskly as the Bible . . . it had sold over six million copies . . . worldwide. A television adaptation was . . . seen . . . by a fifth of the American population . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’d probably be depressed if . . . no one recognized me.”

Debbie Nathan: “The book is still in print and the TV drama has become a classic. Both versions were instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple personality disorder, or MPD . . . Sybil also created a new way for millions of people . . . to think about their memories, their families, and their capabilities . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . our sibling relationships were defined . . . by our mutual needs to survive and to contain the secrets of our fragmented lives.”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . Sybil was typeset and bound, with a shiny cover featuring an image of a young woman’s face in jigsaw puzzle pieces.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “. . .writing, and rewriting, on special index cards . . .”

Hugh Kenner: “The Sibyl. . . answered questions by flinging from her cave handfuls of leaves bearing letters which the postulant was required to arrange in a suitable order.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I . . . plucked the petals off one by one, making a little pile of vanquished foliage.”

Brian W. Breed: “A fragmented and hence meaningless text . . . confronts the Sibyl’s visitors after they have entered and . . . let in the wind that throws the prophecy into confusion. . . .”

Hugh Kenner: “. . . the wind commonly blew half of them away.”

Oscar Wilde: “I myself used to receive many bouquets at one time.”

Brian W. Breed: “The Sibyl can always be counted on to deliver a prophecy whose meaning is subject to interpretation (and misunderstanding).”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . a slow pan . . . the only sound. . . blowing wind.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “. . . a blast of inspiration sweeps a card onto the floor . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “Why . . .when Sybil was first published, had so many millions . . . fervidly embraced as truth a story whose mythic qualities should have immediately made us skeptical? How had we been so naïve?”

Ahban Azer: “. . . in love with myths, he and Cybill were attracted to each other for all the wrong reasons.”

Cybill Shepherd: “His luminous olive skin glowed with what I later learned was bronzing makeup.”

Peggy Lipton: “Like millions of others . . . I had idolized him . . . he didn’t even seem real.”

Cybill Shepherd: “If ever there was music announcing the arrival of a god, this was it. A noisy procession of motorcycles swept onto the stage before Elvis appeared in a

jeweled cape and jumpsuit. . .”

Peggy Lipton: “. . . girdle to bring in his waist. His blue eyes . . . lined in kohl and mascara . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’d always admired his voice, but now. . .”

Peggy Lipton: “His voice affected me right away . . . a thick . . . drawl . . . a built-in echo. He talked the way he sang. I heard his words as if he were in the middle of a song.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . as if he were singing directly to me . . .”

Peggy Lipton: “An Elvis song, for God’s sake.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . without thinking, I rose to my feet just like the rest of the audience . . .”

Peggy Lipton: “I had no choice. Think about it.”

Debbie Nathan: “Scholars . . . pointed out that everyone is prone to ‘dissociate’ . . . Think of what happens while watching a really good movie. You are aware of nothing

around you, least of all the people in the theater.”

Miss Lollobrigida: “No I . . . I have to be with so many people. But I feel sometimes more alone in a lot of people then when I’m completely alone.”

Mr. Graves: “Yes, yes.”

Ken Kennamer: “‘He’s got everything. He’s Marlon Brando with a voice . . .’ That was one of the thousands of teen-agers . . . close to the platform where Presley was . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘It’s for you,’” she said, handing me the receiver . . . ‘Some weirdo pretending to be Elvis Presley.’”

Donna Jo Napoli: “Character systems often change into another type . . . called a syllabary, in which each symbol represents a syllable of sound rather than a whole word.”

Bill Jensen: “Kaufman, wide-eyed . . . with a high-pitched . . . vague accent, began doing terrible imitations . . . he was going to do ‘de Elbis Presley’ . . . ‘My jaw dropped. This was no impression, this was Elvis.’”

Debbie Nathan: “Some commentators . . . argue about whether MPD was real or a hoax . . . more useful . . . was to recognize that the feeling of being inhabited by other selves has very deep roots in our culture and history.”

Bill Jensen: “Elvis himself said his favorite Elvis impersonator was Kaufman. But he was more than Elvis.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Word that Elvis had entered the building . . . filtered into the lobby like a game of whispering down the lane . . . everybody in the row to my
right . . . moved one seat over.”

Peggy Lipton: “’Elvis would like to talk to you,’ Joe
said . . . I finally picked up.”

Debbie Nathan: “Searching for a sense of integration, women took up multiple personality disorder as a metaphor, thanks entirely to Sybil.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “Sybil’s personality, she said, had a rainbow edge as if a little out of focus. She said that had I known Sybil better I would have . . . understood how Sybil-like was the aura of minor events which, in spells, had suffused her . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “The house was luxurious in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic glow.”

Peggy Lipton: “. . . there he was, sitting . . . in full white regalia . . . sunglasses, rings, and rows of gold chains . . . Elvis looked like an action figure of himself.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Sometimes the photographs looked like another person altogether.”

Debbie Nathan: “Cavett noted how bizarre the concept of multiple personality was and asked if anyone had suggested the story was a hoax.”

Orson Welles: “In F for Fake I said I was a charlatan and didn’t mean it . . . I was a magician and called it a charlatan, which isn’t the same thing . . .”

Adam Cohen: “. . . an autographed photo of Priscilla Presley was clearly inauthentic, since the photo was actually of Cheryl Ladd.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum: “As perverse as it sounds . . . It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles most calls to mind . . . Vladimir Nabokov’s . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘They’re all phonies,’ I said. ‘They’re all horrible.’”

Miss Lollobrigida: “You mean that actresses, even when they are playing parts, they are themselves anyway?”

Cybill Shepherd: “It’s okay for Robert Mitchum to get up early . . . and look like Robert Mitchum, but . . . not okay for me to wake up and look . . . like Robert Mitchum.”

Mr. Graves: “. . . Tell me, Gina, how many real people do you know, present company excepted? How
many . . . absolutely real?”

Nick Squires: “The Italian film star claims that her ex-boyfriend . . . staged a secret ceremony in which he ‘married’ an impostor pretending to be her . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘Name, please,’ said the woman, consulting her master list . . . ‘Cary Grant,’ he said. The woman glanced up over half-glasses. ‘You don’t look like Cary Grant . . .’ ‘I know,’ he said apologetically, ‘no one does.’”

Miss Lollobrigida: “Very, very few.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . my agent . . . got a call from a young
director named Martin Scorsese . . . ‘I need a Cybill Shepherd
type,’ he said. ‘How about the real thing?’ she asked.”

Peggy Lipton: “. . . how could I possibly have anything in common with Elvis . . . ?”

Cybill Shepherd: “Peggy Lipton was the first person that people’d mistake me for . . . then . . . Cheryl
Tiegs . . . then . . . Cheryl Ladd.”

Andrew J. Rausch: “. . . they envisioned someone who looked like Cybill Shepherd, only with less baggage . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . Diana Vreeland . . . editor of Vogue . . . handed me a bikini . . . and told me to change in a closet. My ass hung out . . . which did not go unobserved . . .”

Andrew J. Rausch: “Scorsese agreed to audition
her . . . he liked what he saw.”

Cybill Shepherd: “But . . . they weren’t much interested in what I had to say.”

Andrew J. Rausch: “When she first read the script,
she . . . threw it across the room . . .”

Brian W. Breed: “. . . seekers of knowledge who enter the Sibyl’s chamber and find only the disordered fragments of . . .text that she has left behind are
frustrated . . .”

Vladimir Nabokov: “This box contains index
cards . . . notes I made at various times . . . and discarded when writing Pale Fire . . . a little batch of rejects . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . my character . . . was such a cipher . . . I couldn’t imagine breathing any life into her. My anxiety was palpable . . .”

Hugh Kenner: “She is the prophetic power, no longer consulted by heroes but tormented by curious boys . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . for once I was chattering away rather than deferring to the conversation of others . . . Brando . . . looked at me . . . ‘If this girl doesn’t shut up,’ he said to no one in particular . . .’”

Brian W. Breed: “. . . they despise the seat of the
Sibyl . . .”

Adam Woog: “. . . his idol . . . was sitting behind him. Elvis was too shy to introduce himself, so Sheperd told him to push his chair back . . . he’d bump into Brando.”

Church of England: “. . . all sins, I say, against God and all men heaped together, nameth he, that nameth rebellion.”

Matt Robinson: “Studio 54 . . . I met Cybill Shepherd there . . . with the . . . ‘underground’—Andy Warhol and all that group . . . down in the secret areas. . .”

Vladimir Nabokov: “I’ll read a few . . . ‘I,’ says Death, ‘am even in Arcadia’—legend on a shepherd’s tomb.’”

Peggy Lipton: “He disappeared into the bathroom for hours . . .”

Joyce Duncan: “Namath used the club as his own private retreat, hanging out with celebrities like Elvis Presley. . .”

Roland Gregory Austin: “Such compression of space makes it more plausible that the Sibyl should have a double office.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Having all the pleasure points . . . attended to simultaneously . . . made me feel adored, emancipated, and more relaxed . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . the woman who became Sybil fell in with a psychiatrist and a journalist, and the three saw their project . . . burst upon the world with perfect timing. They were a blessed sisterhood . . .”

David Letterman: “We’ve had all of the great quarterbacks . . . then the night you were on, and Joe, and myself . . . pretty good luck . . . three of us at once . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I was a little excited.”

Jason Hartley: “Brando is the third of the Three Fat Men of Advancement, along with Elvis and Orson Welles.”

Dave Gelly: “The original Brothers were . . . Zoot Sims, Stan Getz . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . I found the records of their enterprise . . . They named it Sybil Incorporated . . . the contract they signed designated a three-way split of all profits and spin-offs from their book, including Sybil movies, Sybil board games, Sybil tee shirts, Sybil dolls, and a Sybil musical.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’d given my name and much of my identity to the series . . .”

Dave Gelly: “Nobody Else But Me . . . recorded in a single day . . . is a beautiful piece . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the character was set to die . . . I declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat . . . my acting career was stalled . . .”

Whitney Balliett: “Getz became a romantic, an idol, a kind of . . . Elvis Presley.”

Cybill Shepherd: “With great qualms, I . . . invade another medium . . . record an album of standards . . .”

Sophia Papaioannou: “Here the Sibyl declares that when her corporeal life span reaches an end she will survive in her voice.”

Dave Gelly: “. . . on Cybill Shepherd’s Mad About the Boy, he sounds as though he is thinking about something else . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . when I declined, he snarled, ‘It’s your fault if I go back to being a junkie . . .’ ignoring me for the rest of the session.”

Peggy Lipton: “For that moment, Elvis had made an effort to communicate . . .”

Dave Gelly: “As Zoot Sims . . . famously declared: ‘Stan Getz? A nice bunch of guys.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘Well, that’s it for us,’ he said. Those were his last words to me.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil was a hit, wrote the . . . Post
. . . because her multiple personality disorder mirrored ‘the contemporary stereotypes that people . . . apply to themselves . . . as disparate assemblages of roles, without any reigning self.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “With the barest trace of good night, Elvis pulled away and proceeded right through a stop sign . . .”

Charles S. Peirce: “If we suppose ourselves to know no more of man than what is contained in the definition Man is the rational animal. . . we might divide man into man-risable and man non-risable . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the officer signaled . . . Elvis flashed his Special Deputy badge from the Memphis Sheriff’s Department.”

Mark Kriegel: “. . . that night, he presented the Oscar for Best Costume Design with Cybill Shepherd. ‘For those of you who don’t have a program,’ he said, ‘my name is Joe Namath.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . everybody in Hollywood knows the maxim: no names on location . . .”

Mark Kriegel: “‘He’s great,’ gushed . . . Warhol, ‘He’s the biggest star here.’ Although Namath flubbed a line, calling his co-presenter ‘Cheryl,’ nothing could diminish his fabulousness.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . whole chapters of my life . . . can be written with the postscript, ‘And the part went to . . .’”

Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel: “. . . in Hollywood, the Nabokovs attended a dinner party . . . and Gina Lollobrigida . . .”

Deborah Luepnitz: “. . . Cybill Shepherd, and Carlos Santana . . . have mentioned publicly their experience with talking therapy.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . I didn’t learn . . . chattering mindlessly on Dick Cavett’s show . . .”

Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel: “‘She speaks excellent French,’ says Nabokov. ‘It wasn’t that good,’ interrupts Mrs. Nabokov.”

Debbie Nathan: “The telemovie became so iconic that Scholastic, a company that produces educational magazines . . . developed a ‘Sybil’ lesson plan for. . . high schools.”

Anke Holdenried: “. . . the advent of scholasticism, did not diminish the . . . theological role of the Sibyl. . . her testimony was now adduced in the context of increasingly complex issues . . . ”

John Stevens: “The oldest surviving collection. . . of sacred and secular songs . . . contains pieces as diverse as a lament for Charlemagne . . . Sibylline verses . . . ”

Debbie Nathan: “Teenagers were instructed to ‘Write a discussion in dialogue form between two or more sides of your personality. Name them as Sybil named her Selves. Try to indicate why you are more “together” than Sybil.’”

Julia Kristeva: “We might say . . . the image of the Sibyl is that of the infinitization of discourse, the figuralization of the word . . . liberated from its dependence on the symbol . . . enjoying the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign. Belonging to this and not the other world, the Sibyl speaks all languages . . . reunites improbable elements both in and through the word.”

David Letterman: “. . . I don’t even know what it means, do you exactly?”

Cybill Shepherd: “Yeah . . . I know what it means . . .”

Douglas Harper: “sibling . . . ‘brother or sister,’ . . . modern revival (in anthropology) of Old English sibling . . . from sibb ‘kinship, relationship; love, friendship, peace, happiness,’ from Proto Germanic *sibja ‘blood relation. . .’ properly ‘one’s own’ (cf. Old Saxon sibba, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch sibbe, Old High German sippa, German Sippe, Gothic sibja ‘kin, kindred’), from PIE s(w)e-bh(o) (cf. Old Church Slavonic sobistvo, Russian sob ‘character, individuality’), an enlargement of the root *swe ‘self’ (see ‘idiom’). Related to the second element in ‘gossip.’”

T. S. Eliot: “. . . the mutual implication of its several purposes gives us a feeling of an identity of the word. . . similar to the feeling I have professed to have of identity among the several uses of the word runcible.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became . . . a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.”

Miss Lollobrigida: “I think is all so complicated, the English writing, because the. . . language is so rich.”

Mr. Graves: “Impossibly rich. You’ve got to live with English . . . read and read . . . consult dictionaries which give the history of words . . . I’m just beginning to know a little . . . ”

Brian W. Breed: “. . .The story of the Sibyl’s cave describes the predicament of . . . any reader.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I could see a maintenance man on scaffolding near the roof. . . spray painting over my name. But the twenty-foot-high Cybill . . . was impossible to completely eradicate . . . ”

Carolyn Alessio: “Throughout, Shepherd pointedly mentions that reading has shaped her life . . . ”

Lucy Maddox: “. . . Shade reads . . . section by section to his wife, Sybil . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad exposed . . . unexplored and unowned areas of my psyche.”

Hannah Sullivan: “. . . Eliot originally chose the famous passage from Conrad’s novel . . . ending ‘The horror! The horror!’ . . . In the epigraph from the Satyricon, the character . . . reports in Greek the words spoken to the Sibyl hanging in a cage. . . ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’—and her reply—‘I want to die.’”

Brent Marchant: “. . . a brash, inventive young filmmaker named Orson Welles attempted to make a movie version . . . perceived logistical problems killed the project in preproduction.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . I had died before—cacophonous, public, psychically bloody deaths. . . at the box office and at the hands of critics—but this demise was singularly painful.”

Gene M. Moore: “Welles’ plan was to keep the camera ‘constantly in the place of the hero, showing us things as they appear to him, without ever being allowed to see him except when he looks at himself in a mirror.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . .to devour the classics, to live inside them: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I learned the tragic bargains people make for eternal youth

and beauty.”

Rick Reilly: “They probably said the same thing to Cheryl Tiegs that they did to Joe Namath . . .”

Miss Lollobrigida: “So what about me?”

Mr. Graves: “Well, don’t try, my dear.”

Kerry Powell: “. . . Wilde departs from the usual script . . . in making Dorian prefer Sybil the actress to the ‘real’ Sybil who loves him.’”

Geoffrey Ashe: “Sibyl is sometimes spelled Sybil, but less correctly.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “Joseph Conrad . . . Oscar Wilde . . . are essentially writers for very young people . . . I differ from Joseph Conradically.”

Emily Smith: “. . . Welles flew to Paris to discuss the project personally with the Russian author.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Orson . . . had given me the novella . . . ‘Henry James wrote this for you,’ he said . . . ”

Henry James: “I have seen no other foreigners of distinction except Charles Peirce.”

Stephen C. Meyer: “So subsumed is Gina Lollobrigida’s character . . . in this foreign identity that she is never given a proper name: she remains ‘the Queen of Sheba’ . . . throughout the film.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘What are all those?’ I asked, looking at the slabs of marble, the various tints and typefaces.

‘Those are your choices,’ he said cheerfully.”

Charles S. Peirce: “. . . the connotation of man would be less than that of either man-risable or man non-risable . . . conversely man-risable and man non-risable would have a less extension than man.”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘You know,’ said Orson, looking up at the inspirational images, ‘there was a time when God was a woman.’”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . the last alter to yield was ‘The Blonde.’”

Anonymous: “Welles. . .was also reportedly quoted as saying that he thought Fellini’s Satyricon was ‘frightened in the crib by Vogue magazine.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “I know how pretentious and melodramatic this sounds, but . . . There seemed to be a personal message in the chapel for me . . . ”

Carlos Santana: “You can become . . . famous like Joe Namath . . . Elvis . . . if you are not into spiritual principles, you become a caricature of yourself real quick.”

Hugh Kenner: “. . . Fame is a speaking, hence a breath . . .”

Dave Gelly: . . . “the version of ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing’ with which the Shrine concert ends . . . is more like a celebration.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the existence of a female deity before the time of Christ symbolized the limitless power and potential achievement of women . . . I believe in both, and the Sibyls were a little calling card from the divine.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “This of course might have been mistaken for the work of the wind, and Sybil hated the wind.”

Tom Robbins: “Lipton’s memoir, Breathing Out, was published . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I told him I knew about Cybele from the Sistine Chapel . . . he suggested I read The Greek Myths by Robert Graves . . . Reading that book cover to cover intensified my spiritual quest to learn more about the so-called Great Goddess.”

Debbie Nathan: “A . . . Times reviewer wrote that the book made him ‘uncomfortable from beginning to end,’ giving him feelings of ‘nagging embarrassment

and ultimately of anger . . .’”

Mr. Graves: “I must tell you, Gina . . . I was bouleverse . . . that you agreed to be my interlocutrix, I think the word is . . . I get an understanding of what different actresses represent . . . I don’t want to . . . mention names . . . ”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘How do you spell your name?’ the mortician kept asking, eventually recognizing this as a photo op and requesting that I pose in front of a display

of headstones.”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . christened . . . Sybil because it sounded more mythic yet more American, and more saleable.”

Mr. Graves: “. . . from the start I’ve been conscious that you are communicating something quite different—call it the goodness and truth of woman.”

Miss Lollobrigida: “I’ve received a really beautiful compliment.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . a pithy present: a shiny steel heart-shaped dog tag on a chain that said: My Name is Cybill, I Belong to No One.”

Samuel Johnson: “Vane, n.s. . . . a plate hung on a pin to turn with the wind.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the album was released by a small company . . . bankrupt a few years later. The company’s lawyer . . . changed the name . . . to Cybill Getz Better . . .”

British Broadcasting Corporation: “. . . he dropped the decibel level and surrounded himself with . . . acoustic musicians in tune with his . . . individual world.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I was born a Christian, sang in the

choir, then I lost touch. . .”

Oscar Wilde: “As for Sibyl, I do not know at present whether her attachment is serious or not.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I just started talking to Jesus . . . started to feel really good, and . . . got the offer to do this film.”

DeSales Harrison: “The self as sibyl is a self of gradients, of inclinations . . . constituted in lack . . .”

David Letterman: “. . . somebody from a different life comes back . . .one of those things . . . ?”

Cybill Shepherd: “Well, yes . . . but that’s sort of incidental.”

T. S. Eliot: “Now to come back . . . to the word runcible . . . a nonsense word, but I think we can learn something about ‘sense words’ from examining nonsense words.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I remained ‘Girl Shepherd’ for several days while my family debated . . . finally . . . combining the names of my grandfather (Cy) and father (Bill).”

Variety: “Orson Welles’ unfinished final film The Other Side of the Wind may be . . . a theatrical release next year.”

Hugh Kenner: “(The two volumes of The Greek Myths overwhelm with some 2,000 source notes, many of them relevant.)”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the different characters’ stories intersect and merge—but it was the script . . . ”