Authors: Mark Bego
The single was released, and “I Got You Babe” raced up the charts, hitting Number 1 in America. It eventually sold four million copies. In 1965, after trying to have a hit by Bonnie Jo Mason, Cherilyn, Don Christy, and Caesar & Cleo, Cherilyn Sarkisian and Salvatore Bono finally found overnight fame as Sonny & Cher. Their journey as pop stars had officially begun.
Around this same time, Sonny and Cher had decided that they needed a whole new “look” all their own, and Cher began designing her own bizarre-looking bell-bottom pants, and Sonny came up with this crazy idea of taking animal skins and making fur vests with them.
With regard to his own unique look, Bono was to recall,
The “caveman” look came from Phil [Spector]! Phil had long hair before the Beatles and anybody—he was the first hippie that I had ever met. Phil was this real unique dresser. He had vests and he’d have this and that—Phil liked to be different than anybody. Then our clique—[Jack] Nitzsche, Nino Tempo, and me—all of us started dressing individually. We all personally had little contests to see who could come up with their own little clothes (32).
Out of their outlandish costume competition, “the Sonny Bono look” was born, and it is still one of the most indelible fashion images of the mid-1960s rock and roll era.
Due to the tremendous success of “I Got You Babe,” Sonny & Cher were seen on all the hottest pop music television programs, sporting clothes and a fashion sense that were uniquely their own. No one had ever seen outfits quite like theirs. Between his fur vests and her unique one-of-a-kind bell-bottom pants, they created an instant fashion trend. Sonny & Cher were “Bohemians,” nonconformists, and hippies, long before the term “hippie” was ever coined to describe the counterestablishment style that characterized the latter half of the 1960s. It was Cher who single-handedly popularized the whole fashion of wearing bell-bottoms, a fashion trend that lasted well into the 1970s.
Explains Cher of the evolution of their wardrobe, “We had these two friends, Bridget and Colleen. They were my girlfriends and they were real space cadets. I mean they were terrific, but they were really spacey chicks—and Bridget was into making clothes. We’d pool our money, I’d design things, and they’d make them. We were crazy dressers” (18).
According to her,
When I met Bridget, she had on these grommeted and laced up suede bell-bottoms, and I just said, well, that’s what I want! I’d sent away to England for some pantsuits from the back of a magazine and the first thing I got was a tobacco-colored small-waled corduroy suit, double-breasted with stovepipe pants—real hip-huggers with big, wide belt loops, and a poor-boy shirt, the first one I’d ever seen. I got all of it from England and it was really cool, but when I saw the bell-bottoms I thought that was for me. They were nice, but then we developed something we called “elephant bells.” I don’t remember how many inches across they were, something like twenty-five or thirty inches [diameter at the widest point of the hem]. They were really ridiculous, because when you walked they just flapped back and forth. My mother [has] saved some of those for me (39).
Due to the success of their hit record, Sonny & Cher began appearing on a host of nationally broadcast American television shows like
Shindig, Hullaballoo, The Lloyd Thaxton Show
, and the most important record-launching program of them all, Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
. Even on
Shindig
, recalls Cher, they looked strange next to all of the groups in beaded dresses and suits. “We weren’t really accepted there,” she says, “because of the way we looked. It’s weird, you know, people forget that
the early sixties were still suffering from a bad case of Doris Day and Rock Hudson.” Says Cher, “We were thrown out of every fucking place you can imagine. People were constantly trying to punch Sonny out because of the way he looked” (6).
While Sonny & Cher began producing a string of hits like “Just You,” “But You’re Mine,” “What Now My Love,” and “Little Man,” Cher was simultaneously signed to a solo recording contract on Imperial Records. It wasn’t long before her Sonny-produced hits like “All I Really Want to Do,” “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” and “Where Do You Go” were also huge successes on the record charts. Since Sonny produced the “Sonny & Cher” records and the “Cher” records, owned publishing rights on all of his compositions, and was getting a percentage of the profits as a producer on the recordings, the couple was suddenly making a lot of money, in fact much more than most of their contemporaries on the pop charts.
In 1965, when Imperial Records sent out the official first “biography” to press members, the media got to know Cher La Piere. Describing her background, the bio explained,
Cher, who has just turned 19, had seemed more destined for an acting career than one in music. Her mother has been acting in Hollywood for a number of years and started Cher off on a dramatic career a few years ago by engaging one of Hollywood’s leading acting teachers, Jeff Corey, to tutor Cher. Aside from her two and one half years of study with Jeff, Cher also kept busy with dancing lessons. It has only been in the last year, working diligently with Sonny, that Cher has come into her own as a vocalist (40).
In an effort to tone down the impact of Sonny & Cher’s outrageous outfits and unconventional appearance, it was decided that they be represented to the press and to the public as a wild-looking but very stable married couple. The only minor detail out of kilter was the fact that Sonny and Cher were not really married at all. In fact, they had been lying to the press whenever the question came up in conversation, claiming—falsely—that they had eloped in 1964.
To make it seem real in their own minds, Sonny and Cher had decided that they would perform their own ceremony and exchange vows. There was an old Indian trading shop near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and Cher found a pair of cheap gold-plated rings in a basket there. For an extra twenty-five cents, names could be added to them. They splurged
and bought the rings. The ceremony they performed was done in the bathroom of their apartment.
Remembers Brian Stone,
We knew they were just living together, and they felt there was no reason to get married. But in mid-1965, when they became pop stars and the hottest young couple in America, role models for young marrieds around the world, we knew that they had to get married—legally. Sonny wanted nothing to do with it. He knew it would be impossible for them to walk into a Justice of the Peace and get married in secret. And if they were spotted going into a chapel, it would be like announcing that they’d been lying all along. So we came up with a scheme to go to Mexico and pay some registry official to backdate a marriage certificate for them for $7,500. But Sonny said, “You aren’t going to waste my money on that.” Sonny and Cher just never wanted to bother with marriage, even though they kept telling people they’d been married in September 1964. We had to remind them that, if they were going to claim they were married, they couldn’t say it happened until at least October 1964—when Sonny’s divorce from his former wife, Donna, took effect (41).
Brian claims that once things got started for Sonny & Cher, their success just snowballed. However, Cher hated getting on stage in front of an audience. Says Stone, “Sonny could just take a swig of bourbon before a show, but Cher hated performing in front of an audience. Sonny or Charlie or myself would coax her, but once we got her to the dressing room, it was O.K. Then Sonny would help her with her make-up and hair, and she’d be ready to go” (41).
In the summer of 1965, as “I Got You Babe” was logging two weeks at Number 1 on the American music charts, when the duo arrived in New York City for personal appearances and publicity, they were refused admittance to the Americana Hotel in Manhattan, because of their unconventional appearance. This ended up giving them even more publicity.
In August of 1965, ATCO Records released the duo’s debut album,
Look at Us
. On the cover is Sonny with his now-famous bobcat vest and Cher with her flat, chest-length hair, cut into bangs at eyebrow level. Photographed between two tree trunks, in an instant frozen in time, Sonny & Cher gave the public its first image of themselves. The album features their first hit single, the impassioned “I Got You Babe.” Exploring the subject of love, unrequited love, or devoted love, Sonny & Cher covered several hits of the day, including “Unchained Melody,” “500
Miles,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” and even Phil Spector’s “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love.” Sonny also used the album to showcase four of his own compositions, including “Just You,” “It’s Gonna Rain,” “Sing
C’est La Vie
,” and of course “I Got You Babe.”
For the sake of typeface and font trivia, on all of these first album releases, Cher spelled her name with an accent above the “e,” appearing in print as Chér. The accent mark gave her name an exotic and classy European look. However, by the mid-1970s she began dropping the accent mark, which was usually neglected by media typesetters anyway. Viva la Chér!
On August 31, 1965, Sonny & Cher flew to London for the first time, and the British Isles have never been the same. Since “the British invasion” of musical acts was taking place in the United States in 1965, Sonny & Cher and their managers decided that they would use reverse psychology and head from America to England. Well, they were noticed in London, in such a big way that they were refused admittance to the Hilton Hotel when they went to register for their room. Sonny was wearing a “cavalier” or “pirate” shirt with puffy sleeves gathered at the wrist, a pair of striped pants, his Fred Flintstone–like bobcat vest, and a pair of calf-high, fur-covered boots. Cher was clad in a Union Jack–designed red, white, and blue top and pants, and on her feet she wore red leather Capezio shoes with thread-spool heels.
When Sonny and Cher strode into the lobby of the London Hilton at nine o’clock in the morning, two photographers popped up and began flashing shot after shot of the hit-making American singing duo. They were promptly escorted out of the front door and told not to return. When the newspaper, the
Daily Telegraph
, came out that afternoon, there was Sonny & Cher on the cover, being thrown out of the Hilton. Before the day was over, they were instantly famous from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. Four days later they were invited to appear on the hit ITV show
Ready, Steady, Go!
, which immediately propelled “I Got You Babe” into the stratosphere.
Remembers Cher of the fashion sensation they created in London,
No one knew who we were, but by the first night, our picture was on the cover of every newspaper because we’d been thrown out of the Hilton [hotel] for the way we looked. I had on one of my pride-and-joy outfits. It was red, white and blue striped bell-bottoms with an industrial zipper with a big ring on it. And a top with big bell sleeves and a pair of red shoes. And Sonny had a pair of striped pants and his dress Eskimo boots, real beautiful, and he had on his bobcat vest and a big shirt. The people in England loved it. They didn’t even think we were American. You know, American rock & roll at that time was zilch. Everything was the Beatles, and Dave Clark, and the Stones (18).
Being tossed out of the Hilton Hotel was such a big publicity push for Sonny & Cher that Bono later immortalized the incident in the song “See See Rider,” which Cher recorded on her 1965 solo debut album,
All I Really Want to Do
. In the lyrics of the song she sings, “I’m going to the Hilton, and I know I won’t get in.” They may not have let them in, but thanks to the Hilton incident, everyone in England instantly knew who they were.
While they were in London, Sonny & Cher performed at the 100 Club on Oxford Street and appeared in every magazine and newspaper in town, and their single “I Got You Babe” began a two-week run at the top of the British music charts. Their stay in London caused a huge splash of media attention, and overnight success. In a week they had gone from total unknowns to instant celebrities who were hanging out with the “who’s who” of mid-1960s London.
According to Charlie Greene,
When we went to England with them, Sonny got upset with John Lennon. We were in a London club when Lennon sent his bodyguard over to ask Cher to join him. We all went over. Paul McCartney was there with a beautiful model. Sonny wanted to talk business, but Lennon and Cher were talking to each other, and Sonny didn’t like it. You could see he was annoyed. There were other times on that concert tour of England when Sonny got angry because Cher was flirting with Roger Daltry, and she had an eye for Rod Stewart. Sonny wouldn’t be a tourist with Cher, but she did have her sister Georganne along for the trip. Sonny preferred for Cher to stay at home at night and read magazines and watch TV (41).
One of the things that Sonny and Cher enjoyed the most about their trip to London was the trendy shopping. They shopped at the chic store Anello and David, where the Beatles were known to buy their distinctive-looking boots. And they shopped at Granny Takes a Trip, where Sonny stocked up on fashionable Carnaby Street–style shirts and pants, and Cher purchased her first-ever fur coat—a double-breasted rabbit pelt garment.
Greene also revealed of Sonny during this era,
He liked to see other women. When we stayed at hotels, Sonny would take an extra suite, and when Cher was asleep, he’d go there and call out for hookers. Sonny would show them a big wad of bills, maybe $20,000, and he’d peel off $500 and give it to them. He would just talk to them—about himself. But he did have some unusual hobbies. He had a telescope and would peer into windows with it. The funny part was that although Sonny was so interested in women, we were always denying rumors he was gay. He had long hair, and he wore those flowered pants, and people asked questions (41).
In September of 1965, Sonny & Cher’s debut album,
Look at Us
, was certified Gold by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) for over 500,000 copies sold. It peaked at Number 2, remaining in that position on the
Billboard
album charts for eight weeks.