Cher could survive the end, but lately, she's not so sure
LAS VEGAS: What sentient being doesn’t know the six-decade story of her career? What’s left to tell? From “I Got You, Babe” and the Bob Mackie gowns so provocatively sewn to the divorce, then the other divorce, then the Oscar-winning movie career (“Snap out of it!”), she is always rising up from a recent trip down. The nadir of hair-product infomercials vs. the thrill of the dance-floor comeback. It should be a required part of the SAT: Write 150 words about the life of Cher. Use examples.
The curtain drops, the audience screams, the beat kicks in and the diva descends on a tiny platform strung from the rafters of the Park MGM theatre on a recent Wednesday night. She’s dressed in a golden glamazon bustier, with a massive wig of bright orange ringlets cascading from her shiny crown. She belts out lyrics about the glory of living in a woman’s world.
It is possible to be both in awe of Cher and a little worried for the woman who, at 72, qualifies for the senior discount and yet traverses the stage in dangerously high platform sandals while dancers writhe and kick around her.
One number ends, and she turns away from the spotlight into the darkness backstage, where “I’m completely blind and somebody’s gotta get me.” Five of her most trusted friends and employees reach out to undress and redress her. She describes the show’s constant hair-to-heels costume changes as an out-of-body experience: the lifting, the snapping, the pinching, the laughter. They push her back out into that intense light, and who is she now?
She is 1960s Cher, the original recipe, barely 20 years old in Cleopatra eyeliner, tossing her long, shiny, raven hair, wearing bell-bottoms and love beads.
Something very odd begins to happen here, loosening one’s general understanding of the time-space continuum. There is no 21st century. There is only this sort of present-tense past that we all live in, full of remakes and revivals and constant nostalgia. Cher will guide you.
She starts singing “The Beat Goes On,” followed by “I Got You, Babe,” accompanied by that sort of Dylan-derivative twang of her late ex-husband, Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono, whose image is beamed 20 feet tall. It’s the black-and-white footage of a much younger Sonny singing and grinning: the man she still loves.
Sonny and Cher’s split in 1974 all but stopped America in its tracks, leading to the swift cancellation of their top-rated CBS variety show and leaving children everywhere to wonder if their own parents might also divorce. (Answer: Yes, probably.)
She says she never would have left him, except that her friend David Geffen had read the contracts that she had signed but hadn’t taken time to scrutinise. She learned that Sonny owned 95 per cent of her and everything she did. “Make me a partner and not an employee, and I’ll stay,” she begged him. He wouldn’t. Today she’s a fierce advocate for a woman’s right to equal pay.
The Sonny and Cher story looks different in all this hindsight. The power imbalance is as galling as the chrysalis butterfly narrative that follows it is inspiring. It’s been another 20 years since Sonny died in that skiing accident.
Some nights, Cher says, “I actually look up at his face (during the show) and wonder, ‘What are you thinking? I bet you’re really happy up there.’ “
Under the influence of this eerie duet, thoughts easily drift to the meaning of forever, eternity, persistence.
Now it’s Thursday, her night off, and it’s somehow 2018 again.
When she’s in Vegas on these brief engagements, she stays in a secured, private villa that is apart from but within a casino complex, a hidden lap of luxury exclusive to the highest rollers the Chinese business executives, the Russian oligarchs - and our dear, sweet Cher. She’s wearing a comfy black hoodie and matching pants tucked into furry black Malibu boots, curling herself into a sofa next to the fireplace, sipping from a huge tumbler of soda and ice, the dark tendrils of her hair spilled just so across her shoulders. It’s very involved being Cher, just like you’ve always imagined it would be. “I just want to be famous and not have to do anything more,” she says.
So then stop, everyone says. You’ve earned it. You’re there. Even Barbra Streisand thinks Cher works too hard. Cher doesn’t buy it, reminding you that she was dropped twice from her old record labels. She’ll gladly take the constant motion, the incessant demands, the touring hither and yon and the 3.5 million Twitter followers all needing to know how their queen feels right this moment.
She tweets fast and sometimes furious and only occasionally regrets one. The brevity and playfulness of Twitter appeal to her; she instinctively took to the hieroglyphic language of emoji, which may, she says, have something to do with her dyslexia. “People like it, and some people make fun of me and they’ re right-I’ m so grandma challenged when I’m doing it ,” she says. “Sometimes I do one that makes me laugh so hard and no one gets it but me.”
She tweets about her mood or her latest record (a surprisingly delightful array of Abba covers, triggered by her cameo turn in last summer’s silly “Mamma Mia” sequel), or, mostly, the sustained animus she directs at her sworn enemy, the current president of the United States.
She’s not just another Hollywood liberal trolling the right. Cher has done her homework, reading deeply on the history of fascism and nationalism. She takes in several newspapers and breaking-news alerts a day, tweeting out links with fresh outrage. She’s been known to call in to MSNBC and fret about an irreparable erosion of American values. There’s a line everyone knows, traceable to no one (Cher can’t remember when she first heard it, but it begins showing up in news archives in the mid-1990s), that after a nuclear war, the only living things left will be . . .
“Cockroaches and Cher,” she replies. “I don’t know who said it, but I find it amusing.” — Washington Post