It would be nice to be able to say that Cybill Shepherd, the ex-model-turnedactress, is more than just another pretty face. But I’m not sure that she is more.

In Chicago, where she and Peter Bogdanovich were promoting their latest movie, At Long Last Love, she came across as a kind of lightheaded, somewhat shallow, but very friendly 24-year old.

Dressed in a long black dress with a deep slit up one side, she looked enormous. She is tall, but she’s filso a lot larger than you’d ekpect a fashion model to be. She answered the questions rather glibly, laughing occasionally and striking a pouty, pensive pose from time to time.

For example, right at the beginning of the conversation she asked, “Do you want to know what it was like to work with Burt Reynolds?”

The way she asked it made it seem like there was quite a detailed story to be told about her handsome co-star.

When she was encouraged to, by all means, tell what it was like to work with Burt Reynolds, she replied simply, “Terrific!” and started to laugh.

“That’s it—just one word?” she was asked.

“Well, you can use that quote as the grand finale to your story. What h super, socko ending!” And she continued to laugh.

On to heavier topics.

Cybill Shepherd was a highly successful model and cover girl a few years ago when writer-director-producer Peter Bogdanovich spotted her picture on the cover of Vogue Magazine while he was shopping in a Van Nuys supermarket.

He was immediately convinced that

she would be perfect for the part of Jacy in a film he was about to start shooting, The Last Picture Show. He contacted her and she agreed.

They’ve been together ever since— off-screen as well as professionally.

“When I first met Peter, he was eating peanuts and said he was on a diet. I thought that was kind of cute. But I was attracted to him because I thought he was certainly different than the majority of producers I’d met before.

“’For instance, I had only been in New York for three months when I had my first interview with a producer about a movie. I won’t mention any names, but he has cr very successful movie out now, both as the producer and the star. Anyhow, he just attacked me.

“It was right out of the old pages of the lecherous movie producer and everything. It was really horrible. I wasn’t too intpmted in doing movies after that because I thought the people in movies were real creeps.

“But Peter’s different. He didn’t act like any of the producers I’d met. He didn’t intimidate me. It was more a feeling of being able to share his vast knowledge of film-making.”

Though she wears very little makeup—just some blush-on and some individually-applied false eyelashes— she’s got the kind of statuesque beauty that people turn around to stare at.

She said, not boastfully, but rather factually, that rhost men seem ‘Terrified” of her.

“A lot of men are, for some reason. I mean, they don’t LISTEN to me. I’ll stand there talking to a man and I’ll realize that he’s just been staring at me and he hasn’t heard a single word I said. Peter’s never been like that.

“He treats me like a human being.T can relate to him.”

Cybill insists she prefers acting and singing to modeling. But she doesn’t put her former profession down like some models do by complaining how boring it is.

“You get paid quite a good salary for being bored. If you want to, you can use it as a great means to an end. It’s not bad business. It’s an honest business and you get paid a lot of money.

“If you’re professional and you do your job and you get along with people, you can make a very good living. I just couldn’t do it every single day, so I went back to college and did it parttime. Then Peter found me.”

Many of her reviews have not been especially favorable. Some critics, in fact, seem to be of the opinion that her acting ability is miniscule. But like Bogdanovich, many of whose attitudes and philosophies she seems to have adopted, she says that reviews mean nothing to her.

“I don’t usually even read them. They’re very boring.”

Besides her acting career, Cybill has embarked on a singing career as well. In At Long Last Love, she gets the opportunity to combine acting, singing, dancing and a sense of Comedy that she’s never displayed on screen before.

She hopes to eventually get a nightclub act together and she has had one album released — Cybill Does It... To Cole Porter.

“I think it sold a total of three albums altogether. But we had a problem. Paramount sold their record division a week after my album came out. When the news gets out that a record company has been sold, the distributors send all the records back to the factory.

“So here I was on the JohnnyCarson Show promoting my record, and I found out later that even if people saw me and wanted to buy it, it wasn’t available in any stores. Which wasn’t very encouraging.

“I’d like to do a country-western album. I love that kind of music. I’m from Memphis and my dad always used to listen to country music.

“But my friends and I couldn’t stand it. We were very snobbish and when you’re from the South and you admit you like country music, you get pegged as a hick or a hillbilly.

“It wasn’t until The Last Picture Show that I realized how much I appreciate country music. In the filrti we used all the original recordings of Hank Williams and Hank Snow. I love it!”

It Would appear that meeting Peter Bogdanovich was the greatest thing that could have happened to Cybill. They live in Bel Air with their two cats, Desdemona and Kitty, and Cybill is leading a very exciting life.

Aftejr doing-The Last Picture Show, The Heartbredk Kid, Daisy Miller, and At Long Last Love, does she have any, aspirations to do a really heavy drama, tic role?

“Hmmm,” she said thoughtfully. “You mean like an older lady or a nutty person?

“Let’s see...do I want to do a really heavy part?...Uh...no. It sounds like an awful lot of tfouble...And a lot of acting.”

FEMALE TROUBLE Directed by John Waters New Line Cinema

Can the Pink Flamingos guy/gal Divine make it on Main St.? With the opening of Female Trouble awhile ago in one of New York’s posh upper East Side theatres, the rest of America should be just about ready.

Opening night in New York: glitter1 folk, drag queens, would-be Cockettes somehow mixed well with die majority of the crowd, the Bloomingdale’s set in their Earth shoes, short styled hair, and belted coats. Divine, directpr John Waters, and co-stars Mink Stole and David Lochary sat in the first row and signed autographs. A boy on crutches asked Pivine to sign his cast, while a blond, curly-haired girl in culottes came up to; Divine, collapsed on her knees, and gazed upward at the bright bewigged, metallic fabric garbed star as if she were looking upon the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Divine kept her cool, even when a bohemian female dressed in ’50’s' beatnik asked if she could squeeze Divine’s tits.

“No you can’t,” snapped Divine.

“Just a little?” the woman persisted.

“Very well then,” Divine replied regally. A little later, however, a very tacky drag queen stuffed with foam rubber (obviously a rank parody of Divine, if that’s possible) smirkingly requested an autograph. Divine, without ever looking up, signed a picture, spat out an insult, and moved on.

The movie itself is an extension of Waters’ peculiar vision-of America, a wallowing in the glamor and criminal celebrities wrought by True Confessions, True Dectedive, or True. In Female Trouble, our heroine is molested in the pew of a.church by a rosary bearing lesbian; raped by a 15-foot lobster; mainlines eyeliner for a beauty rush and is raped by a 300 pound man played by herself out of drag. All in all, a worthy successor to The Diane Linklbtter Story, Multiple Maniacs, and Pink Flamingos. Grigoris Daskalogrigorakis

John Waters told us he was already at work on a new movie,, which he said was “about trashy poor people who win the million dollar Maryland lottery and become trashy rich people. They give up their snake ranch for a life of Mediterranean furniture.” Casting hasn’t been completed, but chances are we can count on Divine, Mink Stole, and the rest of Waters’ Baltimore-bred repertory company playing many of the roles.

Though he is perhaps the most accomplished filmmaker working in Baltimore, Female Trouble is the first Waters film to be released in his hometown. “That’s why we live here,” he explained. “They’ve got a Censor Board here, made up of people with literally fourth grade educations. They cut one second from Female Trouble, just to spite me. The scene where Divine comes home and finds her husband cheating on her. They said it was okay for her to sit on his face, but she wasn’t allowed to wiggle her ass. One of the people on the board asked ‘Why don’t you make something like Airport?’ ”

“What did you say to him?”

“I was speechless,” said the usually eloquent filmmaker. “What could I say? Not a damn thing.”