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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Cher released the album "Cher" on Geffen Records in 1986, and had hits with songs written by rock-hair ballad men Michael Bolton and Jon Bon Jovi, respectively: "I Found Someone" and "We All Sleep Alone." Also, on her 40th birthday, she met and conquered swarthy 22 year-old commoner and Queens "bagel boy," Rob Camilletti. Some say that was perhaps the closest Cher ever came to True Love.
By 1987, you could barely go to the movies without seeing Cher: "Witches of Eastwick", "Suspect" and "Moonstruck" all came out, her role in the latter finally earning her the universally coveted Academy Award for Best Actress. Anybody who previously doubted Cher's acting abilities now knew where they could stick her Oscar.
After all that film credibility, she could afford to do more questionable music. In 1988, Cher released "Heart Of Stone." She had big hits with "If I Could Turn Back Time" and "Just Like Jesse James," the video of the former featuring Cher in a transparent body stocking dry-humping various armaments in front of a crowd of sailors. "Heart of Stone" sold millions of copies.
In 1987, Sonny and Cher reunited for one night on David Letterman, and performed an impromptu rendition of "I Got You Babe" which was surprisingly emotional; the audience cried, Sonny cried, Chastity cried. Cher held it together -- barely. It was a complicated moment.
Cher cranked out eight hit singles for the Geffen label from 1987 to 1992 and starred in another movie, 1990's "Mermaids." She toured like a fiend during that period and was getting sick all the time. She needed a break, so she made the colossally bad, but lucrative decision to star in a ubiquitous infomercial for a friend's line of hair-care products, and botched up all of her carefully assembled career credibility overnight. Letterman and "Saturday Night Live" mocked her. "There's nothing like an infomercial to slam-dunk your ass," she wrote later. "I had really fucked up!"
Nobody in Hollywood would even think about casting her in a film, ever again. So Cher, with little else to do, schtupped Richie Sambora for a while, and got some more of her trademark tattoos. When grilled about her increasingly controversial appearance, she remarked: "Am I obsessed with the way I look? Ooh ... Do you know what I'd like to say to that? I don't give a flying fuck."
A few years later, the infomercial travesty blew over, and she did cameos in the films "Ready to Wear" and "The Player" and even gave directing an arguably successful whirl in HBO's "If These Walls Could Talk."
When, at about the same time, Chastity Bono came out of the closet, Cher "went ballistic" for about a week, then invited Chas and girlfriend Heidi over for a visit. Things worked out, Cher eventually dubbing Chastity's girlfriend her "son-in-law."
Over the years, Cher had become a glutton for championing good charities like Childrens' Craniofacial Association and those benefitting AIDS research. Chastity's gay status now gave her mother an opportunity to get cozy with the cause: In open support of her daughter, Cher attended a Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays conference, and accepted the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Vanguard Award. "I feel like the gay poster girl," she said at the podium, before her gay fans. "Chastity, are you sufficiently proud of me now?"
Cher suffered her greatest loss when in 1998 Republican U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono was killed in a skiing accident. She took center stage at the funeral, delivering an emotionally reckless eulogy which some critics felt upstaged the grief of Sonny's wife, Mary. "After Son and I split up," Cher said at the ceremony, "I would always say that leaving him was the toughest thing I would ever have to face. But that turned out to be not exactly true. The toughest thing was him leaving me." In her autobiography, Cher writes that she placed her hand on Sonny's coffin, and thought to herself, "This is not goodbye."
Apparently it wasn't. Four months later, Cher told TV Guide that she was speaking to Bono beyond the grave, through a psychic. According to the National Enquirer, Sonny's disembodied voice told Cher "Don't worry about me, Babe. I'm fine. It's great here."
Cher would dig in her spiked heels and climb back on top of the world again that year, with the greasy teen-cum-gay dance anthem "Believe," which quickly became a monster hit in the U.K., displacing Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love for You" as the most successful single by a female artist -- ever. It was Cher's best selling album.
By 1999, "Believe," was ubiquitous in every gym and 7-11 in America and the universe, with a death-grip on the Top 40. Cher held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart once again, something she hadn't done since 1965, and received the dubious honor of singing at the 1999 Super Bowl. She also appeared in another fancy film, rebuilding her old classy "serious" actress edifice again: Zeffirelli's "Tea With Mussolini." It paired her with Unquestionably Great Women of the Serious Acting Profession, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
Next year she'll probably charter a shuttle and drive a chimp to Mars or something.
Nothing that Cher does matters anymore. She is locked forever in a Teflon celebrity that no further tastelessness or fuck-up can erode. She has gone the distance. She can wear whatever she wants, she can sing whatever she wants, as long as it has this year's popular minority dance beat.
I remember watching her on the 1999 Monaco Music Awards. Cher happily lip-synched her song, wearing some ersatz-teen skateboard outfit, then accepted happily the award, encouraging her fans to learn by her success by saying something about how she had always done exactly as she pleased, and how, in the end, she's always had the "last laugh."
