The news that John Peters canceled the deal with Harper Collins for his memoir, Studio Head, was received with chagrin in this household as now I'll never be absolutely certain whether or not I slept with the former hairdresser/movie mogul. It's not critical except that I'm considering, instead of the traditional tombstone notation, "Loving wife and mother," listing former lovers, hoping a publisher will assume responsibility for the cost of perpetual care.
The proposal promised to reveal intimacies with Barbra Streisand, Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone and Pamela Anderson. There was no mention of me. He may have held back, wanting the big surprise to be that he'd bedded a woman who'd been on staff of "Growing Pains." Photos from that period suggest I spent little time in hair salons, but I was a Hollywood script writer while he was powerful and did take meetings with volatile producers so it's not impossible that we connected. I probably wouldn't deem myself worthy of inclusion except that I was mentioned briefly in You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, the memoir by Julia Phillips, so it may be that I was more of a player than I thought, and readers of a tell-all book by Jon Peters could be left asking, "What? No Sybil?"
Peter Guber, who'd been Jon's partner, Barbara Walters, Warren Beatty and Streisand have disputed aspects of his anecdotes. Given that his recollections are being challenged, it's fallen to me to clarify what, if anything, we had. What may have happened is that we spent at least one night together and I was there when he got the two calls he claims to have received from women friends confiding, or perhaps boasting, that they'd just done the president. It was most likely during the Reagan administration as, if memory serves me, one of the callers sounded remarkably like Nancy while the other may have been Queen Elizabeth. Or could it have been Jon Stewart I slept with?
I didn't take notes and it's all, naturally, a bit muddy, but if Harper Collins or any other publisher wants to throw $700,000 in my direction, I'm willing to go into hypnosis to see if I can recall old lovers and pen a memoir, "Delusional Freelance Writer."