Cher (14 page)

Although Sonny & Cher had been quite successful over the past six years in show business, they were not the most sophisticated nor the sleekest performers in the world, so CBS hired a crew to clean up and glamorize everything about the duo. A battery of hair, makeup, and wardrobe people descended on Sonny & Cher and proceeded to add the kind of polish necessary to turn the 1960s swinging hippies–married couple into a glamorous and dazzling pair. Both Sonny and Cher avidly ate up the advice that was given them, and the transformation from the nonconformist duo that starred in
Good Times
to the sexy and appealing pair who hosted
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
was quite dramatic.

Three key people were hired by CBS to immediately recreate Cher by utilizing her natural beauty and accentuating her features, figure, and beautiful long black hair. Bob Mackie was brought in to design a new wardrobe for her, and so began a whole new era of costume glamour unlike anything the world of television had ever witnessed before. Minnie Smith, manicurist to the stars, was enlisted to turn Cher’s hands into sculptured works or art, via porcelain “wrapped” fingernails and exotic multicolored, hand-painted polish. Celebrity skin care and makeup specialist Daniel Eastman was hired to clear up Cher’s troubled complexion and create a whole new makeup to transform Cher into a gorgeous television star. Up until that point, Cher had always applied all of her makeup herself and had no idea what was cosmetically possible.

According to Eastman, when Cher came to CBS and began filming her first episodes of
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, she was trying to conceal blemished skin by wearing white base under her makeup. Once she got under the hot lights of the television studio, the covering makeup turned translucent, and the white base undercoat that showed through accentuated her uneven complexion. Eastman stopped the on-camera action, and redid her makeup before they continued filming.

There were three of us basically who were responsible for changing her fur-vest and bangs image into that vamp character you saw on television. It was myself, and Bob Mackie, and Minnie Smith who did her outrageous porcelain fingernails. You can put the most glamorous, most revealing costumes on her. You can put makeup on her and make her look glorious and beautiful, but she couldn’t walk across the stage in high heels! It was interesting that someone had to show her how to walk in high heels! She was not accustomed to them. Here she was, looking like a duck waddling back and forth. It was so funny, we were all laughing and encouraging her (56).

According to Eastman, “When I helped her with her skin care and her makeup in the early days of
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, I found her to be the most open, outspoken, high-camp, and vampy lady I have ever met. And she says whatever’s on her mind. She’s one of those ‘givers’ in life, whereas a lot of people in this business are ‘takers’ ” (56).

One of Eastman’s real challenges came when he set out to end Cher’s erupting skin problems.

She has a chronic problem. I think it was a combination of stress, nerves, and her eating habits. I had to go behind her like a little “reminder” to encourage her to drink plenty of fresh water every day, and to eat natural snacks, as opposed to the hamburgers and French fries and pizza that she likes so much. The heavy TV makeup certainly compounded the problem, because she would be in makeup sometimes for hours on end in the studio. It took a lot of effort from a lot of professional people to package her and give her that “look” that she took and adapted so well, and even expounded upon in later years (56).

At the same time, Eastman observed, “Sonny was the aggressive moving force. He was like a father figure, and he would constantly look over her and make sure she was doing what she was supposed to be doing” (56).

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
was created and filmed at the CBS-owned “Television City” near Farmers’ Market on Fairfax, in Hollywood. Several of other CBS prime-time productions were produced in that same building. During this same era, Bart Andrews was one of the staff writers on
The Carol Burnett Show
in the Television City complex. He recalls that when Sonny and Cher arrived at CBS in 1971, everyone was watching them avidly, trying to figure out what on earth they were going to do on network television. Andrews shared an office with another writer on the second floor at the Television City complex.

Next door to, and adjoining our office was this new team that CBS had hired to headline a variety show. A girl in fur jackets and a guy with bangs came in. They had a couple of hit records, but no one could ever remember what they were. They just didn’t seem to fit in at CBS, and summer replacement shows are usually done very quickly.

They arrived, and a way was made for them for an office, and they moved in and got themselves together. . . . Not a day would go by without giant fights breaking out between the two of them . . . marital arguments in the office, always behind closed doors. But they never worried if anybody could hear them. There was always some tumult, and he [Sonny] always came out the winner. He was very, very domineering. Even beyond fighting with her, he was domineering in terms of telling her what to do (57).

Andrews also observed with utter amazement the transformation that took place during the six weeks that Sonny & Cher were at CBS.

In the course of that summer, Cher blossomed before your eyes, into somebody with a great deal of self-confidence. It was amazing to see. She was a shy person when she arrived. She was just not sure of herself. But by the end of the summer, she was like a different person. The show had done well, and that always helps somebody’s ego and feeling of worth. They arrived this crazy-looking couple with those stupid outfits on, and they left in a short time like different people. Their whole lives had turned around based on that one summer show (57).

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
—the summer replacement series—had its debut on Sunday, August 1, 1971, and it was an immediate hit. The pair sang and danced, bantered back and forth like they did in their nightclub act, performed in comedy skits, and played host to Jimmy Durante. Somehow it all worked. According to the
New York Post
, “Quite the most delightful new program on the summer screen is the Sonny & Cher comedy-song hour. After seven profitable years on the record market, the vocal duo might just make it on TV” (58). Indeed, they did. The summer replacement show was so good, fresh, and entertaining that CBS brought back
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
as a midseason prime-time replacement, beginning on Monday, December 27, 1971, at 10:00 p.m.

The show’s producers were Allan Blye and Chris Bearde, and all of the writers had previously worked together on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
two years before. Tommy Smothers once commented that he turned on the TV in the early 1970s, and there was the show he had once done with his brother, but now it starred Sonny & Cher! Among the writers on the show was an aspiring comedian and actor who would later make his mark in the movies and on TV. His name was Steve Martin.

The hour-long show was a mixture of musical numbers and comedy skits. Many of the most successful skits were repeated throughout the run of the show. Among the most popular ones were “Sonny’s Pizza Parlor,” in which Cher played the sexy waitress, Rosa. There was Laverne, the tacky, raspy-voiced laundromat denizen, whom Cher portrayed with comic flair. And there was a musical comedy segment called “Vamps,” in which Sonny and Cher would introduce several seductive female characters—all played by Cher—and salute them in song. Each show would begin and end with their now-famous husband and wife dialogues, in which Cher would routinely berate Sonny for his height, his big nose, and his sexual ineptness. And then, there was Cher’s elaborate wardrobe of sequined and/or beaded gowns, all designed by Bob Mackie.

Although the couple’s reputation and career were mainly based on their 1960s rock and roll image,
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
featured guests who were incredibly middle-of-the-road. Their very conservative list of guests included Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Kate Smith, Jerry Lewis, Dinah Shore, Jim Nabors, Danny Thomas, George Burns, William Conrad, and Phyllis Diller. Not exactly a youth-oriented list by any means! Looking at a roster of their guest stars, it is obvious that CBS-TV also insisted that many television stars of its other series (
M
A
S
H, All in the Family, The Carol Burnett Show
) be frequently featured. From those three shows alone came McLean Stevenson, Jean Stapleton, Carroll O’Connor, Carol Burnett, and Lyle Waggoner. Even CBS-TV canine star Lassie was one of their guest stars. Any celebrities who were truly contemporary came in the form of musical guests like the Supremes, Rita Coolidge, the Temptations, the Jackson Five, Marilyn McCoo & Billy Davis Jr., and Tina Turner.

Meanwhile, there was also the issue of getting their recording career back on track. Johnny Musso was the head of Atlantic Records’ West Coast office while Sonny & Cher were stars on the label. According to him, “Everybody thought their career was over, musically. They were playing the circuit of Fairmont Hotels across the country and had a bunch of club dates, but Sonny was so upset with ATCO that he wouldn’t record for them” (55).

When Musso was an offered a job heading the Kapp Records division of Decca Records, he decided that he wanted the duo on his label.

I offered to bring Sonny & Cher to Kapp with me. They were going to sign for no advance—Sonny just wanted to have a record out. Then RCA offered them $50,000, which I matched. That’s when everybody at Decca thought I was really nuts—Sonny & Cher hadn’t had a hit in years. People saw their house in Bel Air with the elevator and the Rolls Royce parked in the driveway and thought they were successful, even though their refrigerator didn’t have any food in it. Later, Sonny and I would laugh about that (55).

Since Sonny was responsible for creating the Sonny & Cher act to begin with, and was famous for writing, producing, and orchestrating their initial success on the record charts, it seemed like a natural choice to have him resume doing exactly that at Kapp Records. Sonny felt that it would be very cutting edge to have Cher’s first solo single on Kapp be something poignant and very topical, so he wrote a song for her called “Classified 1A.” The song was about a soldier being killed in Vietnam, with Cher singing from the point of view of the soldier bleeding to death. The song was maudlin, dreary, depressing, and absolutely uncommercial. Released as Cher’s first Kapp single on March 24, 1971, it went beyond being a “bomb”: radio station programmers literally refused to play it, and it died a quicker death than the soldier depicted within it. In England, the other side of the single, a tepid Sonny-composed ballad called “Put It on Me,” was earmarked as the “A” side. Unfortunately, it was also a musical chart failure.