a star when she saw her first colour movie, at Grauman’s Chinese
Theatre. It was Dumbo. “I was in the movie, right along with those
elephants and crows,” she later wrote in a memoir. “That was my
first career ambition: to be a star in animated films.”
She was a precocious teenager. She got her driver’s licence
as soon as she turned 16 so she could cruise Sunset Boulevard in
her stepfather Gilbert’s Skylark. One night, while passing popular
hangout Schwab’s pharmacy, she was crashed into by a white
Lincoln convertible. “Are you nuts?” she remembers saying to the
guy. “Then I looked at his face, and I thought, my god, it’s Warren
Beatty.” Spoiler alert: Cher and Beatty started dating. “But you
can’t call it a relationship,” Cher tells me. “It was very Warren.”
Cher didn’t get home until well after curfew that night. As
punishment, she was barred from seeing Beatty the following
night. Beatty called Holt and negotiated Cher’s release.
This was right around the time that Cher met Sonny Bono. Their
first encounter was at Aldo’s Coffee Shop in Hollywood.
“Everyone just disappeared,” remembers Cher. “He was the most
unusual person I’d ever seen. He had longish hair, and he had the
most beautiful suit on, and beautiful long fingers, and Beatle boots,
but they were Cuban heels.” By then, Cher had dropped out of
high school — “I was dyslexic, so school for me was one big
nightmare” — and moved into an apartment with a few other
women. Sonny moved in next door. When Cher lost her
apartment, she moved in with Sonny.
Sonny was working for Phil Spector, and soon Cher was
singing backup in Spector’s arrangements, including the Righteous
Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and the Ronettes’ “Be
My Baby”. Sonny was gunning to produce
Cher as a solo act, but Cher didn’t want to
be onstage alone. So they began recording
and performing together, first as Caesar and
Cleo, then as Sonny and Cher.
Sonny once described them as “the first
unisex couple”, which pretty well captures
their sound and look. Cher says none of it
was calculated. “When we first started out,
I wore a dress and he wore a suit, and then
they lost our luggage at Cow Palace, and
we had to go in our day clothes. That was
who we were. Sonny wore that bobcat
[vest], and I wore huge bell-bottoms,” says
Cher. “We didn’t think, ‘Oh, we’re breaking
some taboo’ or ‘We’re avant-garde’ or any
of that. We just loved the way we looked.”
They didn’t resonate at first. “Kids liked it,
but adults just hated us,” says Cher. “I mean,
really hated us. Fistfights hate.” When “I Got
You Babe” came out, in 1965, they went to
London. “It sounds so dumb, but everything
happened so fast,” says Cher. “I didn’t even
know where I was. One day we were poor.
Two days, three days later, we were famous.” Meryl Streep
recalls, “It was the first time I had ever seen anybody wear
sheepskin inside out, with the scratchy stuff on your skin. I thought
that might be unpleasant. And how do you wash it?”
There was a run of hits, including “The Beat Goes On”. But as
the movements of the late ’60s picked up — free love, psychedelics
— Sonny and Cher, a straight-edge couple, lost their aura of cool.
By 1968, they were facing a backlash. “We broke big barriers,
but we didn’t do drugs,” says Cher. “And we didn’t change our
sound. That was really wrong.” They had their child, Chastity, in- Then they went on the road, performing in nightclubs — or,
as Cher has referred to them, “nightmarish clubs”. To entertain the
band during slow nights, they started talking. Without meaning to,
they had turned their banter into a comedy act.
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour premiered on CBS in 1971
and became an instant hit. Cher was an obvious star. “You couldn’t
watch her show and not recognise her natural talent as an actress,”
says Streep. “She made everybody else on TV look like they were
trying too hard, pushing. She was so immediate, free, and she was
canny about landing the jokes. Skilled, but it was invisible.”
The marital barbs may have been the biggest draw. They were
usually delivered, deadpan, by Cher, with Sonny providing the
set-up. Sonny: “What, you think you’re living with a dummy?”
Cher: “I never said this was living.” If that sounds tame by today’s
standards, consider this: when Rolling Stone
profiled Sonny and Cher in 1973, the writer
included this: “Many of my friends favour the
belief that after work, Sonny beats the shit out
of her with a tyre iron. They had asked me to
reaffirm this.”
There was another lure. Cher had brought
on Bob Mackie to design her costumes, as
many as 13 looks a week. “To be cute and
pretty back then, you had to have a turned-up
nose and lots of blonde hair,” says Mackie.
“But Cher is an amazing-looking girl. She can
look like anything. She loved getting dressed
up, and nothing intimidated her. By the end,
people were turning on the show just to see
what she was going to wear.” Colours were
bold, sequins were plentiful, coverage was
minimal. “Almost nothing he ever made me
did I hate,” says Cher. “The minute I started
getting beads, I didn’t care what happened.”
As the show took off, the marriage tanked.
Sonny had more than an eye for other
women. Cher began to chafe against the
constraints Sonny put on her. They separated
in 1974. Some time that year, Cher’s new
boyfriend, David Gefen, urged her to seek
information about her business arrangements
with Sonny. When she did, Cher learned that
CAPTIVATING
CHER FACTSSHE AND MERYL STREEP
saved a girl from being
mugged on the streets
of New York.ANDY WARHOL
once crashed a party
at her house. “Best
crasher I ever had,”
she says.SHE MAKES JARS
of chicken bolognese
for friends at Christmas,
with labels that read
“Diva Pasta”. That’s a list
we’d like to be on.