Cher (31 page)

When it was originally released in 1980, the group’s self-titled album was a sales disaster. Since the cover didn’t have Cher’s photo or name on
it, many of her fans had no idea that she had a new album in the stores. Largely forgotten for two decades, in 1999 this eight-song LP was released as a compact disc entitled
Cher: Black Rose
by Spectrum Records in Germany. It remains a fascinating time capsule of an album in Cher’s highly varied recording career. At the time she longed to be taken seriously as a rock and roll songstress, and the group and the album
Black Rose
provides audible evidence of her 1980s musical evolution.

Black Rose
marked the fourth time she had teamed with her current lover to produce music. First there was Sonny & Cher, then Allman & Woman, then her duet with Gene Simmons on his solo album, and now she was the lead singer of Les Dudek’s band Black Rose.

According to Cher at the time, “Les is the person I’ve had more fun with than anybody I ever knew. He has a wonderful sense of humor. He’s really carefree and not very materialistic at all. We just have a good time doing nothing—riding motorcycles and doing nothing” (109).

By 1981, that’s precisely what Black Rose was doing, nothing. That was not the Cher that the public wanted to pay money to see. Black Rose promptly disbanded, and when Les Dudek wanted to get married to Cher, she got cold feet, and her fascination with their relationship fizzled. By June she was back on the concert road, earning money to pay for her Egyptian house, which had eaten up three times more money than it had initially been estimated to cost to construct.

Sighed a resigned Cher, “Las Vegas is my gig. That’s how I pay my rent and my kids’ school. It’s not my favorite thing to do. It’s like a play; there are lines, and it’s the same every night. It’s not like walking onstage with a band, where I can wear what I want and say what I want” (100). She decided that if she felt that way about it, she might as well be doing theater on the legitimate stage.

Before she moved on with her career, however, she tackled the press, and specifically questioned the rights of the press to print stories about “public figures” without specific consent. Cher sued two magazines for $30 million in damages and won her case. In subsequent appeals on the part of the publications, she lost half of the case, strengthening the rights of the press as defined under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

In April of 1980, Cher consented to grant an interview with freelance writer Fred Robbins, to appear in
Us
magazine. When the writer chose to concentrate his line of questioning on Cher’s personal life, instead of the group Black Rose, which is what she wanted to talk about, she complained
to
Us
. The magazine decided not to publish the story, and Robbins was paid a “kill” fee for nonpublication. This left Robbins free to sell his story to whomever he chose. He subsequently sold the interview to two magazines,
The Star
and
Forum
. Since there was no overlapping of the two publication’s audiences, both publications advertised their stories as being “exclusive” interviews. Cher based her $30-million suit on the fact that she would never grant interviews to either of those publications. Cher did not at any time contest the contents of either article as being either “libelous” or in any way “untrue.”

In the first round, a federal judge ruled in Cher’s favor, based solely on the exclusivity claims in the headlines that were used to advertise both magazines’ articles. She was to be awarded $750,000 in damages. In later appeals, the Supreme Court upheld the previous decision for
Forum
to pay $269,117 in damages for advertising their interview in a way that would suggest that Cher was a regular reader of the sexually based publication.
The Star
, however, won its appeal against the previous decision that they should pay Cher damages for advertising their “exclusive series,” because it was in fact a series that was exclusive to that publication.

According to Howard Squadron, attorney for
The Star
,

Some people in the entertainment world use publicity to build up a reputation and to make themselves a more valuable property. Then they want to protect their celebrity status, so they attempt to censor the press by getting it to publish only what they want. That’s what Cher wanted to do. In her early days she’d sought publicity—and she didn’t mind then if some of it was not always respectable, because at that stage she was hungry to build up her reputation as a celebrity. When she eventually became a celebrity, then she wanted to control the way she appeared in the press. In a sense she wanted to control the media (110).

The case
The Star
won was a victory for the press in general.

After a limited engagement in Central Park, during the summer of 1980, producer Joseph Papp opened his hit production of
The Pirates of Penzance
on Broadway. The show was a big hit, and it was especially notable because it starred popular singing star Linda Ronstadt as the heroine, Mabel. Linda’s performance did not have a lot of depth and fire, but the role of Mabel is that of a demure little lass, and all of a sudden Linda Ronstadt was a bankable Broadway star. This was all the encouragement that Cher needed. If Linda could make the transition from pop and rock records to Broadway, why couldn’t she?

For several years, Cher harbored ambitions of becoming an actress. However, no one could see beyond her TV series or her well-publicized role as a minimally talented but very famous celebrity. As she recalls,

Then the night before the show closed, I saw Linda Ronstadt do
The Pirates of Penzance
. She did it in Los Angeles for one night only. Watching her I thought, “If Linda can do this, what am I doing wasting my time? If the [movie] studio people won’t take me seriously, then I’ll go to New York and try my luck.” I’d always wanted to be an actress. Not many people were encouraging, but some were. Francis [Ford Coppola], who used to play poker with Sonny, saw my show in Las Vegas once and asked, “Why aren’t you doing movies?” But not many felt that way. Most took the view that if I hadn’t begun acting when I was at the peak of my popularity, around 1975, why start now? Nobody understood that I’d got to the point where I had to find out if I had any talent. For years, I’d been popular in America, not because of my talent, but because I was famous. I kept on doing club work, and I built this house, but always in the back of my mind was the knowledge that soon I’d have to find out if I could really do anything. And when I saw Linda Ronstadt, I made up my mind. I’d go to New York, and even if I failed there I wouldn’t care (52).

Cher decided to take the direct approach. If Joe Papp would take a gamble on Linda Ronstadt, why wouldn’t he at least give her a chance? They met in New York City, and he said to her, “How do I know you’re talented? There’s no way I can tell from all that junk you’ve been doing over the years” (111). However, he decided to give her a chance. He presented her with a script of the play
I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road
and told her to study and rehearse it, and to come back and audition for him.

I was terrified, so I spent a week rehearsing my audition with Lee Strasberg. When I finally did it, I think Joe Papp was impressed, but he had nothing for me. Then when we got back to his office, there was a message there that Robert Altman had called me. My mother knows Bob. She’d been trying to reach me in New York and called his number by mistake, and when Bob learned that I was planning to study acting, he got in touch (52).

“I needed a job in the worst way imaginable. I had been trying for eight years to get a job as an actress and received absolutely no encouragement,” she proclaimed (112). And then, as though she willed it to happen, here was Robert Altman calling her to announce that he was casting a new
show, which was to be his Broadway directing debut. The play was called
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, and there was a part in it that would be perfect for Cher.

Well, I read for him, and after a lot of discussion and a reading, he offered me a role in the play. But Ed Gracyzk [the playwright] wanted me thrown out right from the beginning, because I kept ad-libbing lines. He hated me at first. But I felt I had better things to say as my character. “You wrote this and took it as far as you could,” I told him, “but I think I can take it further.” Bob said, “Careful, you’ll make him angry.” Then, after the first run-through, Ed said, “Listen, you can say whatever you want to.” He turned out to be a terrific guy (52).

Cher, Sandy Dennis, and Karen Black were cast in the principal roles for
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
. According to Robert Altman, he cast the three actresses with the reasoning, “Just those names sound interesting together—it’s an interesting combination. I don’t pick one actress for one part and another for another part. I chose them all together. This is not The Cher Show’ ” (113). Even so, in the October 22, 1981, issue of the
New York Times
, there was a story about the upcoming play, and the headline read “Robert Altman to Direct Cher in Broadway Debut” (114). It was the inclusion of Cher in the cast that made this production so significant to the public. Regardless of what the critics were to think, or whether or not audiences were going to respond, Cher was in New York City working on her dramatic stage debut. She was about to fulfill one of her dreams. Whatever the consequences were going to be on opening night, Cher was about to become an actress now.

8

CHER: MOVIE STAR

In October 1981, Cher had just completed a six-month tour of the globe with her glitzy nightclub act when she packed her suitcases and moved to Manhattan. She came without Les Dudek, without her children—Chastity and Elijah Blue—and without her sequined Bob Mackie gowns. “I didn’t come here to get parts,” she explained in New York City.

I came to learn how to act. I’d wanted to do it for years. No, I didn’t have time—I was going to make time. Most people think I don’t know how to act. People think I’m such a frivolous person. You know, after I got the part, I called my agency and asked if they could tell me about the play. They didn’t know I already had the part; they said “Oh, you can’t get in to read for that.” That really pissed me off (113).

When Robert Altman first started to tell people that he was considering casting Cher, they thought he was nuts. “The producers said to me, ‘Oh my God, she’s too expensive for us, we’ll have to give her a limousine!’ I said, ‘No. If she’s going to be a New York actress, she has to learn how to ride a subway or take a taxi” (22). He was correct in following his instincts, and Cher threw herself right into the project.

By choosing this career path, Cher knew that she was turning her back on the huge salaries that headlining a Las Vegas act could bring her. While starring on Broadway in
Jimmy Dean
, she was paid $500 a week. However, she was living with her entire staff at the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West, at a price tag of $8,000 a month. And, never once did
she quit exercising her favorite lust: shopping. According to
Premiere
magazine, by the time the
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
adventure was over, Cher was another $180,000 in debt.

Rehearsals for
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
went into full swing right after Christmas. Cher was immediately impressed with director Robert Altman. He was already well known for such hit movies as
Nashville
and
M
A
S
H
, and for such non-hits as
Health, Popeye
, and A
Wedding
. Although his films weren’t always surefire smashes, they are all consistently fascinating, for innovative casting and outlandish plot twists filmed with a wonderfully voyeuristic tone. Altman was the first director to cast Lily Tomlin in a movie—
Nashville
, garnering her an Academy Award nomination. He was also daring enough to cast Elliot Gould against type as Philip Marlowe in
The Long Goodbye
. Sandy Dennis had first worked with Altman in 1969 in
That Cold Day in the Park
, and Karen Black was one of the stars of his 1975 film
Nashville
. Now here were Dennis, Black, and Cher, preparing to face the Broadway critics with Altman at the helm.