Cher (32 page)

“I can’t say if I would’ve done this play if Bob weren’t directing it,” said Cher amid rehearsals. “All I can say is ‘Thank God, it’s Bob!’ He accepts all of us—that’s what’s wonderful. ‘We’re O.K., he’s O.K.’ He’ll stop and listen to anything we have to say. At rehearsals I’m fine, because I’m crazy about everyone I’m working with. But I’m exhausted every night. Yesterday I did my speech twice, and I was a mess afterward. A fucking mess” (113).

According to Robert Altman,

I never had any qualms about her. She had a natural ability, the guts and the confidence. It gets around to her desire to do things. If Cher says she’s going to do something, she will do it. She had good instincts, and respect for her fellow actors. If I got her in a film tomorrow, I wouldn’t expect her to be one iota different. The only thing that would surprise me would be if she did something badly (22).

On Saturday, January 9, 1982, Cher was still in rehearsals. She was working extra hard on her part as Sissy, and she decided to pop three huge multiple vitamins to make sure that she would keep her energy level and health in high gear. She chewed up two of the three vitamins she intended to take, but they tasted so awful that she swallowed the third one. However, it lodged in her windpipe, and she found herself choking to death. “I’ve never been so scared in my life!” she proclaimed. “I couldn’t breathe. I tried eating a little piece of bread and taking a sip of water, but nothing
happened. I started walking toward Bob. I remember getting dizzy and dropping the glass of water from one hand and the bread from the other.” She mouthed the words “Help me,” and Altman came to her rescue, applying the Heimlich maneuver. She coughed up the bread, and the pill moved in her throat, allowing her to breathe. “Alt saved my life, I could have died!” Cher later said (113). That night, however, she was definitely back among the living, boogying on the dance floor of Studio 54 with Liza Minnelli. That Cher, what a trooper!

Before the play opened, Robert Altman explained its extraordinary set. Like the unique casting of the play, the set was something that he had conceived. It was constructed so that two time zones existed. The past was happening upstage; the present was happening downstage. Said Altman, “We’re going to have a lot of things going on simultaneously. We’re going to really screw the audience up. It’s split screen, double images. It allows you to show stream of consciousness and coincidence. It’s fluid” (113).

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
opened at the Martin Beck Theater on February 18, 1982. Cher remembers that night quite distinctly as the only night during the play’s run that she was frightened.

I felt I should be scared, but somehow I knew it would all be all right. People have said “If you fall on your face on Broadway everyone in the world will know it.” I guess I was too dumb to know how terrible it would be if I were terrible. I was scared
only
on opening night, because everyone else was scared. But it went fine. But one night after we’d been doing the play for about six weeks, I looked across the stage and thought, “What am I doing here on stage with Sandy Dennis?” Then I thought, “Cher, if it’s taken you this long to think that, then you’d better just keep going, because it’s a bit late to be nervous” (52).

Cher knew full well that she could have announced to the world that she was all set to become a stage actress, and that no one may have ever given her the chance to prove herself. For that reason, she admitted that she was eternally grateful to the director who gambled on her ability. “So far as I’m concerned, Bob Altman was twenty-five feet high,” she claimed. “He took a chance on me without knowing if I could do it or not. Even when I said afterward, “You took such a gamble on me,’ his reply was, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I knew as soon as you walked in that you could do it’ ” (52).

The cast not only featured the fun character actress Sudie Bond (
Swing Shift
1984), but also costarred a then-unknown actress named Kathy Bates. Kathy would go on to become an Academy Award–winning actress for her portrayal of the villainess in Stephen King’s
Misery
(1990), and she played unsinkable millionairess Molly Brown in
Titanic
(1998).

The play represented a huge cut in pay for Cher, but she was getting to do exactly what she wanted to do, starring on Broadway. “I got five hundred dollars a week,” she recalled. “I was so dumb on the first preview night that while all the other actresses were having diarrhea and vomiting, I was only worrying about getting my make-up on too early, because I didn’t want to be bored waiting around too long. Did I have a lot to learn” (115). For Cher, it was the best on-the-job training she could ever have received as an actress.

“I remember when she left Hollywood for New York,” recalls Sally Kirkland. “Turning her back on her music career was another big move for Cher. The buzz around Hollywood was that she was selling all her property because she was going broke. She was working for Equity scale, and she gave up her glamorous life” (70).

Of this whole new experience of performing in a play, Cher claimed,

I don’t really know what I’m doing most of the time onstage, and if I stop to think about it, I won’t know what I’m doing at all. When we started, everyone was talking about “preparation,” and I didn’t know what that was. What I do is sort of turn my mind to “pretend.” I thought I’d hate having to be the same character every night, but then I found it was natural. There was a lot of freedom in it (116).

One of the things that thrilled her the most was how she was welcomed to town by several of the local Manhattan stars. In March of 1982 she reported, “I really enjoy not having to sing. I mean, I love to sing—I began as a background singer, you know—but having to sing for money takes the fun out of it. Carly Simon had a breakfast for me last Sunday—the sweetest thing anyone’s done for me—and then for two hours we all sat around and sang. It was wonderful” (116).

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
was not an incredible smash hit during its run on Broadway, but it was one of the most intriguing and daringly different plays on Broadway that season. Not only did audiences flock to see it because Cher was in it, but the staging and the acting were riveting. Especially fascinating was the use of a
split stage to denote the passage of time in two different time frames, September 20, 1955, and September 20, 1975. All the action took place at the luncheon counter of a tired-looking Woolworth’s dime store, complete with one of those gurgling Orange Crush soda fountain machines. Behind it was an exact replica of the same set, with everything in reverse, as if the 1955 plot was taking place “through the looking glass” in an imaginary mirror behind the counter.

Cher was delicious as the counter girl of thirty-six who is unaware that life has been passing her by, all these twenty years she has held her job at Woolworth’s in this dusty small town. When she announces that the
Ice Capades
is coming to town to hold auditions, her character, Sissy, jumps with joy at the prospect of a professional ice-skating career materializing to take her away from her tiny Texas hometown. Sandy Dennis was in her element as the neurotic who still carries the torch for actor James Dean twenty years after his death. And Karen Black, as the mysterious Joanne, dazzled with her bizarrely affected mannerisms. The play was thoroughly fascinating and entertaining to watch. It was especially impressive to see Cher totally focused, live and in person, bringing the bubbly laughing-in-the-face-of-depression Sissy to life.

While the critics almost unanimously didn’t love the play, they all had favorable things to say about Cher. Frank Rich, drama critic for the
New York Times
, began his review with the statement, “Forget about whether or not Mayor Koch is going to run for governor. The
truly
momentous question of the month is ‘Can Cher act?’ ” He then went on to call Cher’s Broadway acting a “cheery, ingratiating, non-performance” (117). So much for the
Times
. Rex Reed, the acid-tongued critic for the
New York Daily News
, said in his inimitable fashion, “Cher finally made it to Broadway. What a pity that her first vehicle,
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, got totaled in a massive collision along the way.” He did, however, go on to state, “Cher, on the other hand, gives the play the kind of naturalism it requires. If she learns to project with the same kind of ease and grace, she will have a first-rate characterization to her credit” (118).

Although the audiences were consistently good, the play was not sold out every night. According to Cher,

Bob Altman put his own money into it to keep it open. I was the curiosity factor—they wanted to see if I could act. But I did bring people into the theater who’d never seen a play, people who didn’t even know the proper decorum for live theater. They’d yell out in the middle of a line—but I could tell they really enjoyed it. God, that made me happy! This gay club bought out the whole theater one night, and it was our
best
performance! They cheered, they stood to applaud, but they listened (19).

She was thrilled with the whole process of being part of a Broadway theatrical production. “I thought, ‘People getting paid for this kind of work, this is a cinch,” said Cher. “I didn’t like making the movie, but I loved doing the play. That was the most fun I ever had in my life” (119).

Cher claimed that doing the play in Manhattan made her change her mind about her famous wardrobe. “What I think affected my clothing is moving to New York and meeting a lot of actresses and actors who don’t really care too much about clothing and don’t make a big deal out of it—a group of people you don’t have to impress with your clothes.” She remembers one particular visit Geraldine Page paid her backstage when she was doing
Jimmy Dean
.

She came running in looking like a rich bag lady with all these bags, an old fur coat, her hair flying everywhere. She said, “Welcome to the street, kid!” I like the fact that in New York you can go around any kind of way and people accept you. I really enjoy being able to walk around looking like a bum. If I went into Beverly Hills looking anything but totally put together, everyone would say, “Poor Cher, something must be tragic in her private life. Did you see the way she looked?” (13).

The play only lasted for fifty-two performances, but it truly was the vehicle that made Cher into an actress. Altman was so pleased with the production that immediately following the closing of the show, the original cast reunited to capture the whole play on film. Although the movie version is clearly a filmed stage play with an expanded set, it is truly entertaining. It made Cher a bona fide dramatic movie actress, and represented another huge step for her ever-growing career.

According to Cher, during the filming of
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, she was uncertain of her vocal projection on camera. Stage acting is so much more broad and exaggerated, “I cried a lot while we were making the movie,” she later explained. “Bob took so little notice of me. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was sure the camera would pick that up in my eyes. But apparently I was all right. Afterward, Bob said, ‘I didn’t have to talk to you. You were doing just fine’ ” (52).

While involved with the play and the movie version of
Jimmy Dean
, Cher began dating several different men. In rapid succession she was seen around town with hockey star Ron Duguay, actor John Heard, and singer John Loeffler.

That was the first time I ever didn’t feel like having a boyfriend. I was pretty wild. Then one day, I just sat down and thought, “God, this is just stupid and I really hate this, and I want a boyfriend right now.” That was the morning of May twentieth [her birthday], because I’d just spent the night with this guy, and I was walking home from his apartment thinking, “This is ridiculous. This guy is crazy, and if I see him anymore, I’m crazy. The other two guys are O.K., but I don’t really care. What I’d like is a boyfriend.” That night I met Val Kilmer, and we were together for [one month]. My girlfriend fixed me up with him. We just met, and I said, “I don’t date guys who are eleven years old!” and I walked out (4).

However, she was thirty-six, and Val was twenty-two, not eleven.

During this same period, Cher was still infatuated with being taken seriously as a rock star. That year she appeared on the album of an established rocker. It was a special guest performance on the Meatloaf album
Dead Ringer
(1981). Cher appears as a special guest soloist on the song “Dead Ringer for Love.” In the raucous rock song, which was produced by Jim Steinman, Cher and Meatloaf trade fast-paced hard-rocking romantic come-ons to each other, and in the plot of this wild beer-hall brawl of a story/song, the two of them pick each other up at a bar amid several choruses glorifying “rock & roll and brew.” There was also a raucous video produced of this cut, which really brought the story visually to life. Released in England as a single, the song “Dead Ringer for Love” hit Number 5 on the U.K. charts in February of 1982.

One night, during the Broadway run of
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
, something miraculous happened. Even Cher was surprised. It had been eight years since Mike Nichols had flatly turned her down for the lead in his film
The Fortune
. Now, here he was, turning up backstage at the Martin Beck Theater after one of the performances, praising her acting ability and offering her a lead role in his upcoming film production,
Silkwood
.

Cher’s lust for taking career risks was about to pay off in a big way. According to her mother, doing the play on Broadway was Cher’s biggest gamble. “She was so scared she would fail that she got sick before performances,” Georgia Holt remembers. “But she always sticks her neck
out. Whenever she’s afraid, she goes ahead and does what’s frightening her” (21).