HAVE YOU EVER STOPPED TO THINK ABOUT CHER?
You are aware of her, of course, the way you are aware of the
sun, with its blinding light, its rising and setting. But have you ever
considered the totality of Cher — not just the celestial body herself,
and not just the epic arc she has travelled, but the sheer range of
stellar explosions she has undergone?
Let’s review. She became famous as half of Sonny and Cher in
1965, at the age of 19. They sold millions of records, morphed into
a lounge act, then drew more than 30 million viewers a week on
their hit show, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Cher launched
a solo career on the side, releasing three number-one singles:
“Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”, “Half Breed” and “Dark Lady”. After
divorcing Sonny in 1975, she starred in her own damn TV show,
thank you very much, which was called — what else? — Cher.
Many more Chers followed. There was Disco Cher, Punk
Cher and Rock’n’Roll Cher. In the ’80s there was Best Actress
Cher, who starred with Meryl Streep in Silkwood, Jack Nicholson
in The Witches Of Eastwick and Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck.
She ended the decade with one of her biggest hits, “If I Could Turn
Back Time”, giving the world Battleship-Thong Cher. She’s long
been a fashion icon. Cher was the first megastar to wear a “naked
dress”, decades before J.Lo, Rihanna and Kim Kardashian did.
In fact, we’re currently in the early stages of a new version
of Cher. Did you notice how her mid-2018 Mamma Mia! Here
We Go Again cameo segued into a surprise ABBA tribute
album? Those amuse-bouches have recently culminated in her
new musical, The Cher Show.
It’s only when I set foot in her presidential suite at the Sunset
Marquis one balmy night and begin climbing
a spiral staircase, that it hits me: Wait, Cher is
also an actual human?
But there she is, standing at the top, wearing
a black blouse, black pants and black boots,
with an unearthly glow emanating from her
porcelain face and platinum bob. She’s been
interviewed all day, by many different people.
I gather that most, if not all, were men, because
as I enter her line of sight and extend my hand to
shake hers, Cher beams a cheeky smile and
exclaims, “A woman!”
Talking to Cher, she’s exactly who you
expect her to be, and also the opposite. She’s
the same woman who called David Letterman an asshole on the
air and, more recently, offered this critique of political lobbyist
Paul Manafort on Twitter: “FYI... Manafort... [gangster] John Gotti
called... he wants his look back!!” When I ask if she’s ever met
Donald Trump, she says she doesn’t think so, then adds: “I do
remember seeing him once in a place I used to go to and thinking,
‘God, what an idiot.’ And all he was doing was walking around.”
About the genesis of the musical, she explains that a producer
first approached her with the idea more than a decade ago, “but
then that script was terrible”. It has taken years to develop the
show, and she is still working with its writers to get the script right.
“I’m fussy ‘cause it’s my story,” she says. “I want it to be honest and
right and funny and sad, like my life.”
While you might guess a personality as strong as Cher would
suck the oxygen out of any room, her physical presence — we are
now sitting alone on a leather couch next to a grand piano — is
quiet, still, calm, even delicate. The word vulnerable also comes to
mind, yet doesn’t feel quite right, since it’s so often taken to mean
“weak”. It’s rather that Cher is open and listening, and thus
exposed. If in her work she is on output, in person she is on input.
Powerful but not overpowering.
Nicolas Cage gets at this quality when I ask him to describe
her acting talent. “Cher is a person with a huge heart, and that
really comes through not only in her music but as a screen
performer. She has an extraordinary blend of strength and
vulnerability on-camera,” he says. Micaela Diamond, the 19-year-
old actor who plays a young Cher in the new musical, used this
quality in her interpretation of the star. “I just tried to find her
superpowers. My favourite is her combination of power and
vulnerability. To be so vulnerable and yet have the most power in
the room, that’s a hard place to stand in. She was born with that.”
There is a unique irresistibility to Cher; she is both otherworldly
and relatable. “My earliest impressions of her were when I was
a freshman in high school, and ‘I Got You Babe’ was number
one,” remembers Meryl Streep. “I knew she was also high-school
age, but she had such a deep, velvet, mature voice. I sounded like
Tweety bird at that age. And her hair was like a dark curtain that
swung and shone, and she had one crooked tooth that made her
even more perfect.”
In an alternate universe, the world doesn’t
meet Cher at all. Her mother, Georgia Holt,
was a 19-year-old aspiring actress. Her father,
John Sarkisian, was a young truck driver. The
two met at a dance in LA and married soon
after. By the time Holt realised she was
pregnant, she’d left Sarkisian. Holt’s mother
gave her daughter a choice: go back to your
husband, or abort the pregnancy. Holt chose
the latter but then couldn’t go through with it.
Cherilyn Sarkisian was born in El Centro,
a border town in the Imperial Valley. “My
father’s father had a refrigerated-truck business,
and they were just driving through,” says Cher. Sarkisian was
a ne’er-do-well with a gambling and heroin habit, and Holt
divorced him a year after Cher’s birth. Though Cher had a series
of stepfathers — Holt was married eight times, to six different men
— she mostly watched her mother survive alone. Cher spent some
of her childhood in an orphanage in Pennsylvania, most of it in Los
Angeles, and very little of it with Sarkisian.
Cher grew up poor in close proximity to Hollywood, and her
mother socialised with an illustrious group, including comedian
Lenny Bruce and actor Robert Mitchum. Cher vowed to become >“I’m fussy
‘cause it’s my
story. I want
it to be
honest, funny
and sad,
like my life”