I ask her if it’s the old fear of being broke that drives her to keep working, when most people her age would be resting on their laurels. She responds immediately: “I was driving today from the studio, and I looked up at this apartment building. It was kind of shabby. They had this lamppost with four lights hanging off of it, and I thought, They are really trying hard to make that unattractive two-foot part of the balcony special. I looked up at it, and for this awful chill of a moment I thought, God, I don’t ever want to go back to this. Because when you’re little and you live in some awful place, first of all, it’s crummy, and second of all, you’re ashamed. I remember being really ashamed of my clothes. I was so hard on my shoes. My mom would say, ‘Jesus Christ, Cher, we can’t afford shoes. Stop this!’ I remember going to school with rubber bands around my shoes to keep my soles on. But it wasn’t always like that. We ate a can of stew or a can of beans one week, but then sometimes we lived in Beverly Hills. It was a very strange life.”
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She dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and started taking acting lessons. At 16 she moved out of the house, but not before starting an affair with the heartthrob Warren Beatty, who was then 25. Soon after that, she met Sonny Bono, a songwriter and protégé of the producer Phil Spector, at a coffee shop in 1963. (Cher sang background vocals on several of Spector’s biggest hits, including the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”) “I had such a hero worship of Sonny, long after we were together. I just thought he was great.” There was an 11-year age difference, but they lived together almost immediately and were rarely ever apart.
Sonny and Cher catapulted to fame in 1965 with their hit single “I Got You Babe.” They charted 11 Billboard Top 40 hits between 1965 and 1972, including six Top 10 hits. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was one of television’s most popular shows from 1971 to 1974, landing Cher—alone—on the cover of Time in 1975.
Although the couple was wildly successful, they lived pretty traditionally. Working long days on the set, never into drugs, Cher would go home almost every night and cook dinner with her husband. “I think I went out two times alone the entire time I was married to Sonny.”
The couple spent a lot of time with an older Hollywood crowd that included Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, and Henry Fonda. According to Cher, “I knew Lucy since I was little. I was crazy about her. My mom was an extra on her show. One time, we were at this party, and Johnny Carson got really pissed off at me, because it was the second inauguration of Nixon. I thought Nixon was a big idiot, and Lucy thought he was a big idiot, and she was making jokes, and I was hysterically laughing. Carson got furious and said that I should get out of the room because I was being disrespectful. He would have never said boo to Lucy—she would have chewed him up and spit him out.”
Sonny’s domineering control of Cher strained their life together. He had married a teenager, but soon she became a woman and a mother. Although he created most of their material, Cher was the superstar, the one everyone wanted to see. She says, “He told me when we were together, ‘One day you are going to leave me. You are going to go on and do great things.’ He wrote me this poem, and I wish to God that I had kept it. He said, ‘You are a butterfly, meant to be seen by all, not to be kept by one.’ I wouldn’t have left him if he hadn’t had such a tight grip—such a tight grip.”
At the start of their big success, Sonny created Cher Enterprises, of which he owned 95 percent and their lawyer owned 5 percent. “Sonny did a couple of things . . . treating me more like the golden goose than like his wife,” Cher says. By 1974 the marriage was beyond repair. That’s when Cher learned that she owned nothing and was prohibited from working on her own in music, television, or film.
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Enter 30-year-old music mogul David Geffen, who not only became her romantic partner but also became involved in extricating her from a crippling financial contract. Today, Geffen sums it up this way: “When they broke up, she was deeply in debt and under contract to him. It was a terrible situation. It was certainly specific to their relationship. It’s hard to talk about this, because of the fact that Sonny’s dead. Let’s just say she survived all that.”
“David’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever known,” Cher tells me. “I lived with him for two years, and just on a daily basis we had a wonderful time. I loved him. I didn’t know anything. I went from one kind of take-charge man to another. David helped me so much. I had no money and no way to live. If it wasn’t for David, I don’t know where I would have been. I would have been in the street.”
She continues, “I did modeling, because that was the only thing that I could do to keep myself going.” In front of the cameras of Richard Avedon and other major photographers, Cher posed for a series of what would become iconic images. Still, she was frustrated. “My friends were Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Anjelica, Goldie . . . all these women and men who were working at their prime. And I couldn’t take a job. I couldn’t do anything.”
Eventually, Cher became untangled from Sonny and their contractual arrangement, and as the 70s drew to a close, she returned to recording, brushing the charts with the disco hit “Take Me Home.” She also set about re-inventing herself. She attracted the attention of filmmaker Robert Altman, who cast her in a stage play he was directing, Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Her performance impressed director Mike Nichols so much that he cast her in Silkwood as Meryl Streep’s lesbian roommate, a role that earned Cher her first Academy Award nomination.
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We hung out and drank plum wine—eww—after work. Cher was really fun,” says Streep. “I was smitten by her openness, both as an actress and as a person. It’s incredibly disarming—you’re a little worried for her, like: Are you sure you want to be telling me all this? Her lack of inhibition is part of what endeared her to the national audience on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour—that’s where I first saw her. Most people on TV had a little TV veneer back then, a performing gloss, but her gloss was not only her beauty but how easily she wore it and dismissed it, like ‘No big deal.’ For a showgirl, there’s not a phony bone in her body. What you see is what you get, and when she dresses up and gets gorgeous, you get a whole lot.”
The two women are still close. “She’s so good,” says Cher, “and she makes me laugh hysterically. We are opposites: she takes everything so easily, and I’m so stressed about everything.” She gloats, “I was responsible for Mamie [Gummer, the actress, the second of Streep’s four children]! I take full credit. We were in Texas doing Silkwood, and Don [Gummer] was there with Henry [their son]. Meryl said, ‘We need some time alone. Take Henry—it’s Halloween. Please, just take him.’ So I took Henry, and she got pregnant with Mamie.”
Once Cher’s career in film was launched, she ruled the 80s as serious actress, sex symbol, and MTV rock diva. The 90s brought more film roles, and Cher continued to evolve as an artist. As for Sonny, who had re-created himself so many times, his last metamorphosis was as a Republican congressman. In 1998, while skiing in Lake Tahoe, he was fatally injured. He was 62. Cher delivered the eulogy at his televised memorial service.
“I forgive him, I think,” she says. “He hurt me in so many ways, but there was something. He was so much more than a husband—a terrible husband, but a great mentor, a great teacher. There was a bond between us that could not be broken. If he had agreed to just disband Cher Enterprises and start all over again, I would have never ever left. Just split it down the middle, 50–50.” I ask her if she thought he had regretted not doing so. She replies, “I’m sure he must have.”
Although Cher never remarried after her divorce from Gregg Allman, she has been far from celibate. She was the original cougar, long before Demi Moore and Susan Sarandon made it fashionable. A confessed serial monogamist, Cher dated a number of men who were signif
icantly younger—Tom Cruise, rock guitarist Richie Sambora, and Robert Camilletti, a bartender-actor whom the tabloids named “the Bagel Boy” (because he had worked for a time in a bagel shop) and who was with her for three years. When I ask her if she still talks to any of them, she says, “Old boyfriends make good friends. Robert comes to Christmas dinner. He now flies G Vs—he is a huge pilot. He flies for all the biggest names in this town. He flew me to Jamaica.”
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Three weeks after talking to Cher in Malibu, I arrive at an LAX hangar to fly to Las Vegas on the private G V provided for her by Caesars Palace. Her posse includes Jen, her personal assistant for 17 years; Deb, her other assistant, who has been with her for 34 years; and Lindsay Scott, her manager. One row of seats is taken up by a spectacular Mackie costume: an enormous sunburst of golden quills over a full-length cloak. Soon Cher boards the plane, wearing sunglasses, her signature cowboy hat, a black zip-up sweatshirt, and sandals. I notice that she has bubble-gum-pink polish on her toes. She sits right in front of me, says hello, and gets a Dr Pepper.
I comment on how great her feet look. She says, “My grandmother had the most beautiful feet. When she was dying—my sister got there first, of course, because I’m always late—I opened the door and heard her laughing and joking. She’s dying, she’s 96 years old, and she pulls a manicured foot out from under the covers with a decal on it!” I ask if they were close, and she replies, “Yes. She was just a mean bitch most of the time, but I was her favorite because I was the one who could act like an adult.”
Genetics have always favored Cher, who is part Armenian and part Cherokee. Her mother is still great-looking and a size 8, and Cher’s body has remained impressively unchanged throughout her career. She has openly admitted to having had work done on her nose, mouth, and breasts, but, as she was once quoted as saying, “If I want to put my tits on my back, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”
Seeing her in daylight with very little makeup on, I’m amazed at how normal she looks. It’s only when she’s fully decked out in wigs and costumes that she becomes The Legend. She says, “I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs at my family, ‘Work out! Work out! Old age is coming!’ At some point you will need the strength. Who would have ever thought you would get this old?”
We talk about aging. She has always been candid about her unhappiness with getting older, feeling that she peaked at 40, and 24 years later she’s still not happy. “I think Meryl is doing it great. The stupid bitch is doing it better than all of us!” she says, smiling. “But I don’t like it. It’s getting in my way. I have a job to do, and it’s making my job harder.”
We land in Vegas about 5:40 P.M., and two hours later Cher is descending in a gilded cage above the sold-out crowd of 4,300. Wearing a gold gown and a headpiece that must weigh 10 pounds, she waves as the lights swoop over her adoring fans. It’s a tight, 90-minute show, as per Vegas rules: these people need to get back to the slot machines. During the performance, she makes 13 costume changes. She has four wardrobe attendants and gets out of each costume and into another in less than two minutes. Bob Mackie, her longtime fashion collaborator, who has been called the Sultan of Sequins, designed all the costumes, including several vintage numbers she brings out. One major crowd-pleaser is a floor-length Indian feathered headdress, with which she wears nothing but a buckskin flap and a halter to sing “Half Breed” in a montage of her greatest hits.
“She’s a chameleon, but you never lose her,” says Mackie. “You put a blond wig on her and you still see Cher. Forty years ago everyone thought, Oh, she’s so strange, so weird, so big and gawky. Well, I saw a beautiful little girl and thought, I can work with that. That became part of the attraction of the television show: How naked was she going to be?” I ask him if he has ever told her she’s going too far. “Oh, I’ve said it many times. But, you know, the lady gets what the lady wants.”
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There are 18 dancers in the Vegas show, including several aerialists. Cher confesses to longing for the giant crowds you get when you’re touring. “I really miss the arenas. I won’t do what I did last time [a grueling 325-performance tour that went from 2002 to 2005, from which she is rumored to have grossed $200 million]. There’s an energy for me that is different than Vegas. On the road, it’s like people are already having a party, and I just happen to arrive late.”
Her stamina is something to behold. “It’s not an easy job,” she says. “You just have to make it look easy. But also, it’s just a job. I’m not doing anything that’s monumental. I know what I do is kind of a tonic for people. I’m either dying in my house or onstage.”
One thing continues to bug her. “Sonny and I still aren’t in the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame, and it just seems kind of rude, because we were a huge part of a certain kind of music, and we lasted for a very long time. . . . I have so much of everything that I want that those things don’t usually bother me. It bothers me a little bit more because Sonny was a good writer, and we started something that no one else was doing. We were weird hippies before there was a name for it, when the Beatles were wearing sweet little haircuts and round-collared suits. The Rolling Stones were the only ones who understood us. People hated us here; we had to go to Europe to become famous. We influenced a generation, and it’s like: What more do you want? Actors don’t take me that seriously, either. So I always thought, I’m not an actor; I’m not a singer; I’m somewhere in between. And I’ve always felt like an outsider, so it doesn’t bother me anymore. I like that status, truthfully.”
At this point in her life Cher’s sense of irony is well established. She is content to be the punch line of the joke, as long as she has the last laugh. At one point in the Vegas show, she asks the crowd, “Does this headdress make my ass look fat?” Then she turns and walks offstage.
LENA WAITHE
READY FOR LENA
By Jacqueline Woodson | April 2018
In your life, if you’re lucky enough, you are born during a moment in time when the world is ready for the change you’re bringing. So all that’s left for you to do is your work. If you are a child named Lena Waithe, you find your passion on the television screen, or, as you call it, your Third Parent. Your mother, knowing that in front of the screen you’re safe from the streets of Chicago, allows you unlimited watching. The Cosby Show and A Different World bring you beautiful people, families you understand, and lots of laughter. And because when your grandmother watches with you she controls the remote, you watch old reruns of The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, and realize as you watch these people that this is what you have—words and characters and story. These are the tools these shows are giving you. So you lean into the screen. Already you know there isn’t a mirror the television is holding up to you; there isn’t a child like you on the screen. Not in the 1990s. Not yet. So you find your strength and a deep belief in yourself in the streets and family dinners of Chicago—a place you call home, a long way from your grandmother’s own Arkansas. You’re clear-eyed and queer from the womb, born as part of a larger narrative—that of the Great Migration. Already, there is resistance running through your veins. Already, at seven, you know your own dream. So you gather a posse around you. And in your 20s, you move to California, thirsty, eager, ready. Slowly, the bigger world begins to see you. We see you, Lena Waithe. We see you.
If you haven’t heard of Lena Waithe, check yourself for a pulse. She is disrupting the hell out of Hollywood. As the first black woman to nail an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, Lena—along with a crew of other black creatives—is sending a message to the world that Black Brilliance has arrived in Hollywood and has not come to play.
Lena and I sit down to dinner for the first time, at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Having spent the past week in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, both of us are beyond happy to be rid of our snow boots and winter coats. And
because I’ve arrived at the restaurant a few minutes before Lena, I’ve had time to do what many of us do when we walk into spaces like this—count the Blacks. Now that Lena has joined me, there are two of us.
In this moment the shine is on Lena. She is all dapper and grace as she enters. Broad-shouldered and fast-walking, she flashes a smile at our hostess and emphasizes her please-and-thank-yous with our waitress. When she sits down across from me, she immediately removes her cap, and I smile, having grown up watching the boys and men around me get chastised for not removing their hats fast enough, for attempting to wear hats at the table, for even considering walking into someone else’s home or a restaurant with their heads covered. Lena’s locks are well oiled and tightly twisted, draping down past her shoulders—a femme contrast to the shaved sides of her head.
I begin to see that this is who Lena is: a woman coming at the world from many different places, quick-moving and fast-talking yet soft-spoken and thoughtful, cursing a mile a minute while bringing a new vibrancy to language. Relaxed yet ready. On the butch side of queer but with delicate edges. Star power with kindness. And it’s working.
“Here’s the irony of it all,” she says after the conversation gets going. “I don’t need an Emmy to tell me to go to work. I’ve been working. I’ve been writing, I’ve been developing, I’ve been putting pieces together and I’m bullets, you know what I’m saying?”
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