Cher (35 page)

On the subject of meeting Cher, Rusty said, “My first impulse was to hug her, and I did. We rapped like two old friends—about the movie, the script, my life. We rapped about Cher’s life, about mothers raising kids.
Personality-wise, Cher has an element of danger. You never know what she’s going to say or do next. We share that element of danger” (128).

The film, which costarred Sam Elliott as one of Rusty’s biker boyfriends and Eric Stoltz as Rocky Dennis, was shot around Los Angeles on a nine-week schedule. According to Cher, Rusty was often on the set as an unofficial creative consultant.

She was never somber, absolutely never wistful about what we were doing. She feels Rocky is still around, and he had such a power and energy. She once told me she thought Rocky was in fact here on location with us, that he was cracking up at all the fuss over him. Everyone actually did have this feeling—and it really takes a lot for me to feel something strongly—that there was a higher presence around, an extra something that moved us (127).

The supporting cast for the film included screenplay writer Anna Hamilton Phelan as the “puppy lady,” Estelle Getty of TV’s
Golden Girls
as Rusty’s mother, and Cher’s ex-boyfriend Les Dudek as a biker named Bone.

In the past, Cher’s costar Sam Elliott had mainly been known for his roles in several successful Old West TV movies and miniseries (
The Sacketts
1979,
Shadow Riders
1982), but was ready at this point to break into a high-profile legitimate film career. “I had never heard of him,” said Cher, “but he was fabulous and I said to him, ‘Sam, how come I haven’t had the chance to see how fabulous you are?’ And he said to me, ‘How come it took you so long?’ ” (3).

According to Cher, her working relationship with director Peter Bogdanovich was quite easy, at least during the initial filming process.

I don’t really like being directed that much. I like having a certain amount of freedom with which to work. Peter tells you exactly what to do and you listen to it and then you do what you want to do. And I figured out how to work with him—he gives you line readings and then you go and do it the way you want to. And if it’s as good as or better than what he expected, he’ll let you do it your own way (3).

It wasn’t long before her I’ll-do-as-I-damned-well-please attitude got to Peter, and battle lines were drawn. Looking back on her experience of filming
Mask
, Cher was to state of her least favorite directors, “Peter Bogdanovich was my worst. At the time, I was so unsure of myself, and
he wasn’t very nice. One day he said, ‘Just remember, this movie isn’t about the woman, it’s about a boy. I can cut you out [of the film].’ I thought, ‘I’m going to take that information and just stash it, and get real, real tough.’ And I did” (61).

While she was filming
Mask
, Cher had an affair with actor Val Kilmer, for a mere matter of weeks. It was an unconventional affair, to say the least. “We went to a play, and then he never went home. We stayed together for a month, and we didn’t even kiss. My daughter said, ‘Mother, you’re the weirdest woman in the world. I thought the first night you spent together you’d gone all the way” (22).

During their brief affair, Cher was able to take some of her real-life emotions and channel them into her screen portrayal of Rusty Dennis. At the time she had been living with Kilmer, and one day he walked out on her. “That was very painful, and it took me a long time to get over it, but it helped my acting a lot. I was also being beaten up [verbally] daily by Peter [Bogdanovich]. That helped too,” Cher claimed (22).

However, it was during the postproduction phase of the film’s creation that the real problems between Peter and Cher began to arise. First of all, real-life Rocky Dennis’s favorite music was Bruce Springsteen’s. Bogdanovich wanted to use Springsteen music in the film, but when a satisfactory financial agreement couldn’t be reached between Universal Pictures and CBS Records, Universal opted to use the songs of Bob Seger instead. As it turned out, the music in the film was actually used as incidental music, and the replacement of Springsteen tunes with those of Seger was immaterial to the viewer—yet carried the same feeling. Second was the fact that Universal cut two scenes, totaling eight minutes of screen time. Bogdanovich threw a fit and waged a much-publicized war against his own film, and he urged Cher to do the same. Cher had worked very hard on the film, and she not only refused to put up with Peter’s tantrum-like demands, she also came out and gave the film full press support by granting interviews in the film’s favor.

“I’m not surprised Peter would serve his own interest before serving the picture’s,” proclaimed Cher, upon its release. “He’s asked me not to do anything and to boycott everything. I said, ‘You should get down on your knees and thank your lucky stars that I’m doing this, because one of us has to. This is a good movie’ ” (128).

Bogdanovich then dragged Rusty Dennis into the middle of it. She ended up speaking in favor of Peter, but she also underscored her comments by praising Cher. “They’ve cut two very important scenes—one’s
a song-and-dance scene that shows how me and Rocky used to clown around. Another scene, at a biker funeral, showed how he felt about death. To him, death was a form of freedom. The movie should be uplifting, but by taking those scenes out it’s a little downbeat,” said Rusty, who added, “The movie’s good, no doubt about it. I think [Cher’s] great in the movie, and deserves everything she can get out of it—an Oscar, whatever” (128).

Regarding Bogdanovich’s complaints about Universal’s editing, Cher explained,

The one scene he keeps talking about is my scene; if I can live without, he should be able to live without it, but he was just amazed that studio people were screwing with his work. Basically, what I said was, “You know, you screwed with my work; now they’re screwing with my work. . . . I don’t really give a damn!” It’s like being a slave and having someone sell you. When you’re a slave, one master’s as good as the next. He screwed up my work as far as I’m concerned, so for them to screw it up a little bit more . . . who cares? They really didn’t hurt it as much as Peter hurt it in the beginning (130).

She further claimed at the time, “In the film, you hand in your work and then it becomes something totally different. You do the work on the thing and you have your scene, then they cut it, or change it, or take it out. OR they can redo the whole movie so it doesn’t have anything to do with what you thought it was about” (130).

Cher admittedly put a lot of herself into her screen performance in
Mask
. In fact, one of her most memorable lines in the whole movie is “You must be confusing me with someone who gives a shit” (22). She said, “I was so close to Eric’s Rocky character that on the last day of shooting, I was in tears, because I was never going to see Rocky again. Sometimes, just when I think I’m strong, I can get very emotional” (115).

When
Mask
was released in 1985, it became a big critical success. Jack Mathews of
USA Today
glowed, “Cher takes a career role and gives a career performance” (131). Rex Reed of the
New York Post
raved, “Cher doesn’t call attention to her virtuosity, her no-fuss acting style matches Rusty’s passionate lifestyle. The portrait she paints is of a woman who thinks of herself as one of the boys, but has a strong maternal instinct in spite of herself. . . . a Cher-delight” (132). And Kathleen Carroll of the
New York Daily News
exclaimed, “In Rusty, Cher has found a part that suits her as well as a black leather miniskirt. . . . Cher often stops to gaze at the camera with one of those mysteriously enticing Mona Lisa half-smiles, but she
definitely puts her heart into this performance and the emotion shows through. And this is what makes
Mask
so appealing” (133).

In its first week of limited release in four theaters,
Mask
grossed $185,000. In May 1985, at the Cannes Film Festival, the film and Cher’s performance continued to gain critical momentum. But also at the festival, the verbal mudslinging match between Bogdanovich and Cher continued. According to Cher, “When a director says his movie is not as good as it should have been, people may not be as interested in seeing it” (134). By that point, however, the film had already made over $37 million in ticket sales, so no one took any of Bogdanovich’s gripes about the Springsteen songs or the missing eight minutes seriously.

“When I finally saw the film,” Cher was to recall, “I cried all the way through it. By the very end I was sobbing and I knew no experience would ever be so special as that had been” (115).

On May 20, 1985, Cher won the “Best Actress” Award at Cannes for her portrayal as Rusty Dennis. She shared the honors with Argentine actress Norma Aleandro, who won for her role in
The Official Story
. Since May 20, 1985, was also Cher’s thirty-ninth birthday, she thanked the assemblage for providing her “with the best birthday present of my life” (13).

“It is no secret that we didn’t get on,” Cher told the press of her relationship with her director. “Bogdanovich was so inconsistent. When he had his ideas and I had mine, I just went my own way. I won’t work with him again” (13). Said Peter Bogdanovich in retaliation, “The main reason was that she didn’t trust me; she doesn’t trust men” (135).

Speaking of men, meanwhile there was a new man in Cher’s personal life. He was Josh Donen, who is the son of director Stanley Donen (
Singin’ in the Rain
1952). She had been dating Val Kilmer up until 1984, and Josh was Val’s agent. For a time, Cher and Eric Stoltz went out, and
People
magazine reported that the only reason Cher didn’t film
Grandview, U.S.A
. was the fact that Stoltz wasn’t cast opposite her. They instead made
Mask
together.

According to Cher, when she first met Donen, she found him to be “rude, but so funny that no one got his jokes. I couldn’t understand why everyone liked him.” She later changed her mind. “I won’t mind having a child with Josh because he’s young and he has never been married,” said Cher of Donen at that time. “I’ve been married twice before and I if I never did it again it would be fine. The reason people get married is because the stigma is too much and they don’t want their children to be
bastards. Joshua wants to get married and I feel it’s an awful lot of pressure” (127).

One of the reasons Cher arrived at this revolutionary way of thinking is that several Hollywood actresses, including Jessica Lange and Nastassia Kinski, recently had babies out of wedlock. Her opinion has obviously also been colored by the fact that her last marriage produced her son, whom she raised entirely on her own. In the mid-1980s, Cher said of Gregg Allman’s role as father, “[Elijah] never sees his father. His father and I broke up when he was less than a year old. His father has never given him money for support. So it’s like I had him, and that was it.” She dismissed the whole institution of marriage by professing, “I haven’t talked to Gregory in years. I couldn’t care less if I never speak to him again in my life” (37).

After devoting the last couple of years to being taken seriously as a legitimate actress, in 1985 Cher began to pull out all the stops, dressing as bizarrely as possible. She began her foray into the world of unpredictable looks by cutting her black hair short and spiky and bleaching a skunk-like blonde streak across the top of it. Cher said, “I think my hair is fun and exciting and a little bit different. I know people who’d take to it immediately, because it’s a bit foreign, but what people think about you isn’t important. What’s important is how you feel about yourself” (21).

Her daughter, who was sixteen at the time, couldn’t believe what her mother had done. “Mom you can’t!” was Chastity’s immediate reaction. “You have to think about your career as an actress and what’s best for your life. What will people think?” (21). This was the exact same situation that Rusty Dennis and her son Rocky found themselves in, in the film
Mask
. The mother seems to be the wild radical, and the child is the responsible, rational one. Amusing how art imitates life, and life imitates art.

On August 16, 1985, THE major event of the entire month seemed to be the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn. Cher had gotten friendly with several of the young actors and actresses in Hollywood and, at the time, listed Sean as one of her closest friends. Cher was one of the select set of guests invited to witness the overpublicized event. Accompanied by her then “fiancé” Joshua Donen, Cher wore a tasteful black pantsuit, and a bright purple punk wig à la
Private Dancer
Tina Turner.

The non-royal wedding of the decade took place on the Pacific Ocean, at Point Dumme, and was marked by press helicopters buzzing the site for photographs. When it came time for Madonna to cut her five-tiered hazelnut wedding cake, she turned to Cher and asked, “Hey, you’ve done
this before. Do you just cut one piece or do you have to slice up the whole thing?” Cher reportedly turned to Madonna and gave her a look that seemed to say, “As if I know?” (136).

Speaking later of abstaining from substance consumption, Cher was to say of the wedding, “I don’t smoke, and while I can’t say I don’t drink, if someone said alcohol was gone from this earth, fine with me. I think the last time I had a drink was at Madonna and Sean’s wedding. You needed it that day” (115).

While on the subject of weddings, it was clear that Josh Donen wanted to marry Cher, but Cher wasn’t at all ready for the headaches. Her disastrous marriage to Allman really took the wind out of her sails on the topic of matrimony.

I’m happy not being married. Marriage is more responsibility that I usually like to have. I’m really happy with him [Josh] not being married, and I don’t want to ruin anything. I don’t know if we’ll get married. Maybe we will. We talk about it. Kind of like, “Do you want to go to the movies?” You talk about it until you either decide to or you breakup. I know I have a great time with Josh, and I enjoy being with him. He has more of all the things that I like so far, than anyone else I’ve gone with. So that makes me feel good about him (4).