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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Cher liked the hard new way music was moving: "Jimi Hendrix playing his guitars with his teeth." In her autobiography, she insists: "Left to myself, I would have changed with the times, because the music really turned me on, but Son didn't like it -- and that was that."
So Bono and obedient wife bravely embarked on a terrible nightmare-stint of singing tepid standards to middle-aged drunks in carpet-walled hotel lounges while dressed in pastel formal wear. It was a slow, dark period of hot plates and humiliation. Nobody liked them, they didn't like themselves. But they had a nice baby; as-of-yet-non-lesbian Chastity was cute enough to keep them going.
Their lounge act was so depressing, people started heckling them. Then Cher started heckling back. Sonny, ever the proper conservative, reprimanded her; then she'd heckle Sonny. Cher had had enough. She would never suppress her snappy invective again. The heckling became the best part of the act and the audiences slowly returned.
Eventually, S&C's comedy shtick was so slick and relaxed, they were tapped to do a little TV, and finally, in 1971, "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour" hit the small screen. Its success was enormous. The show was the beginning of Cher's lifetime collaboration of love with absurd "fashion" designer Bob Mackie, who said of her, "No one else has Cher's ease. And no one else has those armpits. Cher has the most beautiful armpits in the world. As much as anything else, I designed for her armpits."
Cher's dusky beauty, exposed navel and saucy, outspoken personality were a liberating twist on the generally prim, blonde women of prime-time TV. This aided the popularity of her 1971 hit "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves." It was the best use she'd ever gotten out of her non-white looks, so she milked the gimmick for all it was worth, generating her second No.1 solo single, "Half-Breed" in 1973, and the 1974 hit, "Dark Lady."
Despite the fun they were having on the show, in February of 1974, Sonny and Cher were having serious problems offstage. Sonny had always had women on the side -- he was a bit of a fatherly control-freak -- and eventually things blew up. David Geffen, who Cher was beginning to hang around with, read Cher's contract and discovered that 95 percent of "Cher Enterprises" belonged to Sonny, and the other 5 percent belonged to their lawyer. Divorce was the only way out of the contract. Sonny, realizing the end was imminent, filed for legal separation; a week later, Cher filed for divorce.
It was then that Cher began learning to think for herself ("I couldn't find my ass with both hands"). "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour" ended its season prematurely. The tabloids went ape shit as Sonny and Cher started chucking bitchy verbal grenades at each other.
Cher had her own TV show, called "Cher," in 1975, and although it featured high-profile guests like Bette Midler and Elton John, it was fairly awful. Within three weeks, Cher was begging Sonny to come back; not to her, to "Cher." She had other problems in the man department. Three days after her divorce from Sonny was final, she naively married alcoholic dope fiend Greg Allman at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, and cried all the way home after the wedding. She knew it was a bad idea.
Ten days later, Cher filed for divorce. Meanwhile, Sonny's show was flopping on ABC, so he came back to Cher for her show's second season. Now their monologues were a little too real for prime-time; Cher was pregnant with estranged rebound-husband Gregg Allman's child, Sonny and Cher had their own failed marriage, and they openly joked about it all. It worked for a couple of weeks thanks to America's prurient curiosity, then "Cher" failed.
Elijah Blue Allman was born in July 1976, bringing with him a short, hapless reconciliation between Cher and Greg Allman. They released an album: "Allman and Woman: Two The Hard Way," featuring a jacket-photo of them looking sultry, serious and undressed. It was neither Allman rock nor Cher TV lounge-pop, and was rightfully shunned by both of their audiences. In 1977, they divorced, Cher unable to compete with alcohol and heroin for the rocker's affection.
A bummer period followed during which Cher was an unemployed 33-year-old single mom, with a laughable image that only drag queens could seriously appreciate. She started a rock band, Black Rose, with rocker/boyfriend Les Dudek, which critics chain-whipped into obscurity. She performed in casinos; she dated Kiss front man Gene Simmons, she sang a duet with Meat Loaf. Nothing worked.
What she really wanted to do was be a serious actress, so she went to New York to study with Lee Strasberg, founder of the Actors Studio. But she never got a chance to take classes -- Cher immediately landed a part in Robert Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," and did a pretty good job. She actually had a flair for drama, and went on a legit acting tangent that would resuscitate her whole persona in a brave new way, and give her the moxie she needed to sustain affairs with men decades her junior and get more plastic surgery.
In 1983, she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy for her performance as the lesbian roommate of Meryl Streep in "Silkwood," but she was dissatisfied with how big her nose looked on the screen, so she had some of it removed (at the time she was dating a very young Val Kilmer).
She won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 for her role as the biker-mom of a kid with severe craniofacial deformities in "Mask" (the role of her son was played by Eric Stoltz).
She was so pissed she didn't get nominated for an Oscar for that performance that she had Bob Mackie design her an especially eye-popping wing-ding of a gownless evening strap, resembling a cross between a Mexican ferris wheel and the garment of the Last of the Mohican Liberaces, as an "up yours" statement to an Academy that didn't feel she was a "serious actress." Nobody remembered that she presented the Best Supporting Actor award to poor Don Ameche (for "Cocoon"), but her terrifying outfit lives on in infamy.
