Cher (21 page)

Newsweek
magazine’s review, however, was mixed when it pointed out, “Cher goes back to playing second banana to the show’s real star—a cool, hip, certifiably freaky costume designer named Bob Mackie. Television hasn’t shown so much glitter and flash since NBC did a special on Liberace’s closet.” The publication’s review also pointed out, “Her show-opening chats with the audience sorely miss the presence of Sonny as a foil. Either monologues are just not Cher’s métier, or she should sue her writers for nonsupport” (76).

The fact that her show was broadcast at 7:30 p.m., the traditional network “family hour,” opposite the long-running G-rated
The Wonderful World of Disney
, began to pose immediate problems with the show’s censors. First of all, Cher was not allowed to show her belly button under any circumstances. On
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, which was shown an hour later, she was allowed to be humorously suggestive. Cher recalled, “We had one scene where I was dressed up like Cleopatra and had on these two brass plates, and I walked up and said, ‘How do you like my gongs?’ I meant, it was no such thing as double entendre. I was just saying, ‘How do you like my tits?’ Everyone was hysterical” (33). Well, on the
Cher
show, the censors were not laughing at her antics. Cher found herself fighting with the network constantly.

One of the major conflicts came on the first regular episode of
Cher
. According to Cher at that time,

They [the censors] pulled Raquel Welch’s number. I’m really pissed off about that. Raquel and I were becoming really good friends. She is strange, but I like her. We did this number together. We came out in dresses and sang a song—no horrible gyrations, no anything. And she did a solo number, which was really nice. Well, first we got a call that they were cutting out the duet between the two of us because the program director said it was too suggestive. Then they said we could keep the duet, but her number had to go. Because she was singing a suggestive song, and she placed her hand—God forbid—on parts of her anatomy! The song was “Feel Like Making Love”—I mean, it was a hit song. George Schlatter, my producer, got back the duet but couldn’t save Raquel’s solo. When she found out about it, God, she just freaked, because she’d worked so hard on it. I don’t blame her; I would have been really pissed off, too. So she called the network and got some guy who didn’t even have the guts to tell her that it was their idea—he told her it was mine. Then she called me, and she was furious. She read me up one side and down another. And I said, “Raquel, I swear to God on my daughter’s life, I had nothing to do with it!”—and she hung up on me (18).

“Before,” explained Cher, “Sonny made the decisions. He sat in with the producers and writers. He decided what I would do and I went along with it. Now I decide” (75). Suddenly, Cher was in the hot seat. When things went right she got the credit, and—as with the Raquel Welch episode—when things went wrong, she got the blame.

The spotlight was firmly focused on Cher now, both on the network and in the limelight of her personal life as well. Although she had left Sonny, there was a third person to consider before the divorce of the decade got underway, their daughter. Sonny wanted to divide little Chastity’s time evenly between the two of them, but they soon found themselves in a heated battle over child custody.

Cher’s stance on the subject was

Chastity is probably the most loved and best behaved child in the world, and she’s very affectionate. She’s got drums and she’s got guitars—all that kind of stuff. She thinks it’s fun and she’s got a good sense of timing, good pitch and rhythm. Sonny would like to have her for half the time, but I think she’s too young. He’s a good father, but I don’t feel she should be split in half. He disagrees, and we’re going to have a big argument. But there are some things I just can’t be pushed into doing (34).

According to Sonny,

There was a while back when Cher and David Geffen were together that they tried to put that “weekends only” visitation nonsense on me. I would like to believe David was the one who was difficult about it. Those kinds of rigid rules can’t apply in our business. I was doing my TV show then and working on weekends. So I went to court and had my say and things loosened up considerably. When Geffen was gone, Cher couldn’t have been nicer. I see Chas often and keep her for several days at a time, and there is no longer any problem (77).

To further aggravate Cher, Sonny took a guest-starring role in a television show that was on ABC-TV at the exact time that her show was being broadcast on CBS. In this way, many of the real Sonny & Cher fans would be torn and might skip Cher’s weekly variety series just to see if Sonny could act without her. Cher was fuming. “He appeared as a guest star on
Six Million Dollar Man
earlier this season,” she complained. “The show is opposite me, and I’m quite sure he knew it would hurt me. That is perhaps the only reason he did it. At the time, I told myself I didn’t care what he did. And I didn’t give the slightest thought to his career, because I honestly didn’t care what happened to him” (78).

Sonny was aggravating Cher. The CBS censors were constantly on her tail, disapproving of this or that. David Geffen, whom she nicknamed “Mr. Beige,” kept bugging her to marry him. Raquel Welch was pissed off at her. And to top it all off, just as her solo television series was getting off the ground, Cher attended a party in Los Angeles and, with no conscious effort, found herself embroiled in a huge drug scandal that resulted in someone’s death. The cover of the
New York Daily News
from February 21, 1975, carried a photo of Cher and a huge headline that read “Hunted in Death of Rock Star . . . 2nd Drug Victim Saved by Cher.” It had all begun the previous fall.

Millionaire stockbroker Ken Moss threw an impromptu party in his Hollywood Hills mansion, following a performance by the Average White Band at the club the Troubadour. Cher had been in the audience that night and was invited over to the Moss mansion. When she got there, someone produced a bottle of white powder, which everyone thought was cocaine. It turned out to be a combination of morphine and heroin. Several people inhaled some of the powder, expecting a coke buzz, and instead of buzzing began passing out. The drummer for the Average White Band, Robbie McIntosh, was taken back to his room at the Howard Johnson motel in North Hollywood to sleep it off. He died nine hours later. Another member of the band, bass player Alan Gorrie, became ill, and Cher came to the rescue. She called her doctor, actually her gynecologist, who advised her to keep him conscious by walking him around, and to induce vomiting. She did as she was told, and she saved his life. Of course the newspaper headlines made a big scandal about the ordeal. Cher was not found doing anything illegal, it was just that she was
at the party, and once the grand jury hearing became public, it was her name that made the headlines. The
National Star
published a story in its October 13, 1974, issue entitled “Cher Saves Guest at Drug Death Party.” Somehow, no matter what she did, or where she went in the late 1970s, Cher was constantly making headlines.

Cher’s solo TV show was already getting to be a drag in early 1975. Everything had been so simple when Sonny had been there by her side; now the whole event was becoming a huge hassle. She came up with a solution. She wanted to ask Sonny to appear on her show semiregularly. “It was me. My idea,” explained Cher.

I made the decision after I’d done four
Cher
shows. Nothing to do with the ratings. Doing a show alone was more than I could handle. I had to be into everything, from helping on scripts to picking the music. And they had me doing a monologue. That’s not like me, to be out there alone making the jokes. I have fun working. Well, I wasn’t having any fun (79).

Anyone who knows me knows I’m great at shooting off my mouth, and I impulsively announced that I wanted to have Sonny on one of my shows this year. After I said it, we asked Sonny to be on one show, telling that top pay was $7,500. His agent replied that he would do six shows at $12,500 per show, but only after I settled his lawsuit against me. First, I told him our show’s budget couldn’t afford him. Then I got to the suit (80).

She could afford a $30,000 wardrobe budget, but she couldn’t afford an extra $5,000 for Sonny?

She explained, “I always [in the past] signed everything Sonny told me to sign,” not realizing the can of worms that she had inadvertently opened.

While I was married to him, Sonny had signed me to a contract with a company he set up called Cher Enterprises. I signed the contract, but I really didn’t know what I was signing—I always thought Sonny and I were partners. According to this contract, I was supposed to receive a salary from Cher Enterprises, but I never knew that because I never got a salary check. I don’t mean to imply that Sonny never gave me money—he gave me anything I wanted. I shopped like a madwoman. I had a charge card for everything. When I was bored or bugged, Sonny used to say, “Run along, Cher, and buy something.” I never wrote checks because I didn’t know how to write a check. Besides, my checks wouldn’t have been any good anyway—they all had to be countersigned by Sonny or the business manager (80).

According to Cher, “Sonny and our attorney seemed to own the company, and I was just an employee. It even said that I was allowed two weeks paid vacation! So they’re suing for $700,000 in gigs I didn’t perform. I’m suing for half the company” (10).

The whole mess was finally cleared up after several months of suits and countersuits. With David Geffen’s encouragement, on July 9, 1975, Cher marched into Santa Monica Superior Court and filed for divorce from Sonny. After they had ironed out all their financial difficulties, Sonny agreed to appear occasionally on the
Cher
show at a fixed rate of $7,500 per episode.

Since Cher was now free to marry “Mr. Beige,” Geffen persisted with his proposals. Cher was really enjoying her freedom from Sonny, and she turned down David’s proposal. “He reminded me too much of Sonny,” Cher later admitted. “He wanted to get married and I didn’t. He was ready and I wasn’t. I’d been and he hadn’t. It was a pay or play deal” (18).

Now, from a post-1990s perspective, it was perhaps for the best. Although David was to continue to be a strong Cher ally, especially in the mid-1980s, in 1992 he finally publicly “came out,” revealing that he was gay. Although she was still seeing David when she met her second husband, it too wasn’t a path that she had expected to walk down.

“It was a full moon,” said Cher, precluding the whole saga of how she got involved with rock star Gregg Allman. It happened during one night of club hopping in 1975, and she was in a strange mood.

I always get in trouble with a full moon. I met him at the Troubadour. He was playing with Etta James, and I was a fan of hers. I didn’t really know anything about the Allman Brothers. I was quickly educated, though. Anyway, we went—David Geffen, and me and my sister, a whole bunch of us. I’d been going with Dave, but by then he and I were kind of broken up. And this chick came up to me and said, “Gregg would like to meet you.” I said, “Fine.” He came up and grumbled a couple of unintelligible words. He talks way down in his throat, low, growly, and sexy (18).

Allman distinctly remembers his impression of Cher the first time he laid eyes on her. “I looked at Cher and she looked like an Egyptian idol. And she stuck out her hand and her fingernails were about three inches long. Boy, was I hot to trot! David Geffen was sitting next to her and I didn’t even see him. I didn’t see Tatum, I didn’t see Georganne, I didn’t see Paulette. I just saw her” (81).

That evening Cher excused herself from David Geffen and the rest of
her party under the guise of going to the ladies room. She was actually going backstage to see Gregg. When she returned to her table and all of her friends, she found Geffen in a snit. “What was that about?” he demanded to know.

Always painfully blunt about her business, Cher told him that she had gone to visit Allman. After the show was over, Cher, Geffen, Tatum O’Neal, and the rest of the party went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where David had taken up residence in Bungalow Twelve. When they arrived there Geffen went into a jealous tantrum over Cher’s blatant flirtation with Allman.

“If you see me walking down the street,” he yelled at her, “you better cross over to the other side. And I want all my presents back.”

“You know, you can have some, but there are certain ones I’m not giving back,” she snapped back.

“I’ll sue you,” he shouted threateningly.

“Go ahead,” Cher dared him (63). That was to be the last conversation they were to have for quite some time.

After meeting Cher at the Troubadour, Gregg called her and asked her out on a date. She accepted.

He took me to Dino’s, where it’s really dark, and [he] started to suck my fingers. I thought, “Wait a minute; back up.” I said, “Why are you doing this?” Next he asked me to go with him while he met some guy, but first he wanted to change his clothes, which he did every ten minutes. So we split, and a while later he started to kiss me. I just ran out the door. I told him not to bother to show me the way.

Next night, he called me and asked me out. I said, “I don’t like you and you don’t like me. I had a horrible time last night and why are you calling?” He said, “Maybe we could have a good time tonight.” So we went out. We danced and then, while we were driving down the street, he was telling me something I didn’t care about, so I said, “You know what? I hate fuckin’ small talk. You are boring the shit out of me and I’ve got nothing to say to you. I know that you must be interesting and I am, too, so what gives?” I said we should really talk. He started to laugh, and I mean very slowly, like two-months slowly. Pulling words out of Gregg Allman is like . . . forget it. Finally things started to get a little bit more mellow when he found out that I was a person—that a chick was not a dummy. For him up ’til then, they’d had only two uses: Make the bed, and make it
in
the bed. That’s it (18).