Cher (22 page)

Manager/producer Loree Rodkin was with Cher and Gregg on one of their earliest dates, a dinner at the very “in” Chinese restaurant Mr. Chow. According to Rodkin, “Cher has this little-girl quality. Gregg passed out over a plate of Chinese food, and she said, ‘Oh Loree, isn’t this sweet, he’s so tired.’ And I said, ‘Cher, he’s a junkie’ ” (22). Cher had never been with a drug addict, so she was naive about all of the warning signs. She seemed to have simply chalked up the strange behavior to Gregg’s party-all-night lifestyle. Cher claimed that among Allman’s attributes was the fact that he always conducted himself like a perfect Southern gentleman. According to her, “One thing about him, he had beautiful manners. He never swore. Ever. He called me Miss Gutter Mouth” (61).

On June 30, 1975, five days after Sonny and Cher’s divorce became final, Cher married Gregg Allman. She was deeply in love with him, and she thought that she really knew him quite well. What she still didn’t realize, however, was the fact that he didn’t just dabble in drugs—he was a major-league heroin addict.

Nine days after their Las Vegas wedding, Cher filed for divorce from Allman. She remembers, “When I called him to tell him I was filing for divorce, he was so high he didn’t even understand me. He said, ‘O.K., I gotta go rehearse.’ Three days later, when he came down to Earth and understood, he immediately flew to Buffalo to a husband-wife psychiatric team that specialized in treating drug addicts.”

“In the midst of all this,” Cher explains,

I had to go to the hospital and have some polyps removed. When I got out of the hospital, Gregg’s doctor called me from Buffalo. He said that Gregg was really trying to help himself. The doctor told me that in all the years he’d been a doctor, he had never seen a man try as hard as Gregg was trying to beat drugs. “If you have no love for this man and want to dump him,” the doctor said, “that’s one thing. But if you love him, you should come. It could be a turning point for him.” I knew I should go, but in a crisis I reverted to type—I called Sonny and asked him if he could come over and discuss something important. He came right over. I told him the whole story, and he said, “Cher, if you love him, go to Buffalo, what have you got to lose? If the guy is really honest and wants to get free, maybe you can help him. If he doesn’t make it, you will have tried. If you don’t go, you’ll always wonder what would have happened if you had gone.” That was really terrific advice. Something else was terrific—that was the last time I needed Sonny (80).

Sonny in the meantime was dating a new girl, a model named Susie Coelho. Cher thought she was very nice, and it looked like Sonny and Cher had finally made peace with each other and their illustrious past. However, another person from the past reappeared in 1975—Cher’s problematic father. This time around he was suing her for $4 million for referring to him in the press as “a compulsive gambler and a heroin addict.” A cash settlement out of court cooled out Sarkisian once again. Cher claimed at the time, “Whatever he’s doing, it’s probably illegal” (82).

However, Cher’s heroin-addict blues were far from over. Allman may have temporarily cleaned up his act, but Cher was in for more heartaches from his addiction. “Marrying Gregory was one giant mistake,” Cher was later to admit. She remembers one occasion after Gregg had supposedly dried out.

There were some people over at the house in the den. I had this gorgeous coffee table, antique painted glass set in lovely old wood—and these people were doing lines of coke off my fucking coffee table! I was so pissed off! “Don’t you guys have any respect for anything? Get that stuff off my table and don’t do it in my house!” I will not deal with people on drugs, ’cause when they’re junkies, they’re not people anymore (19).

Although she had filed for divorce from Allman, she changed her mind, and thought that she could help dry him out.

In the interim, the Allman Brothers band broke up, and the band’s fans blamed Cher. According to her, “Well, I really had nothing to do with breaking up the band. I really had to do with straightening out Gregory and if that broke up the band, then I’m glad. I would do it again at a moment’s notice because I think that saving Gregory is much more important than saving the Allman Brothers” (83).

Meanwhile, back in television land, during its run in 1975, the
Cher
show certainly had its share of interesting cutting-edge guest stars, like David Bowie and sexy soul trio LaBelle. On November 8, 1975, David Bowie made his American network TV debut on her show, singing his latest hit, “Fame,” and dueting with Cher.

LaBelle had just scored a huge Number 1 hit with the song “Lady Marmalade.” One of the hottest songs from this era, it contained the French chorus lyrics, “
voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir
.” Most Americans had no clue that the phrase, interpreted into English, meant “do you want to sleep with me tonight?”

To top off the controversy, the trio of singers who made up LaBelle—Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash—were in their “silver phase.” Each of the ladies wore huge silver earrings, silver jewelry, and silver costumes that looked like something designed for a futuristic outer space film. Sarah’s trademark costume was perhaps the most controversial, as her top consisted of two sterling silver cups identical to the shape of her breasts, held in place in an invisible fashion. Cher knew instantly that she was going to have a ball matching their outrageous outfits and singing with the trio.

Sarah Dash recalls,

I met Cher at her show. We had a three or four day rehearsal, and Redd Foxx was on the show with us. He was doing the comedy part, and we were the music act. We clicked right away. She is such a gracious person, and very smart. In fact, when we met her, she and Sonny had just split, and she was working to pay him for her divorce. She wasn’t shy about saying anything about it, she was very candid. We were wild, and she was still having a great time, a real great time. In fact, when we went to California, I got bored and I shaved my eyebrows off. Everyone was saying, “Your skin looks so smooth—from the hairline to the chin.” And, nobody really realized what had happened. So, finally I said, “Cher, I shaved my eyebrows off.” She said, “
That’s
what I’ve been looking at. I didn’t know what was different, but I knew it was something!” Then, we were having discussions about shopping—who could out-shop who. I said to Cher, “I bet I can out-shop you.” And she said, “No you can’t!” We talked about how we went to the same stores at that time (84).

LaBelle not only sang their huge hit, “Lady Marmalade,” on the show, but they also had a duet with Cher. Both Cher and Bob Mackie had a great time coming up with the right silver-and-feathers costume for her to wear for her number with LaBelle. According to Sarah Dash, “Bob Mackie was there, and he examined our clothes. He looked at them and thought they were well-made. And, he didn’t do bad for her, with that ‘look.’ Because at that time, Cher sang with all of her music acts” (84).

However, for LaBelle to sing “Lady Marmalade” and wear their trademark silver costumes, they had to make some concessions for the network censors. “I remember too, that there was a censor there, because they wanted to spray my silver bra with some duller, and I went ballistic,” explained Sarah.

I said, “No, this is sterling silver, you can’t do that.” Then Cher said, “No! You’ve gotta show them.” Bob Mackie came out and pinned my cape to the top of my bra, so you could see it just barely so, but not expose the way I had it. Cher said, “No, you can’t do that, that’s her ‘look.’ ” That was great. I loved the way she stood up for it. And then they were wondering whether we could say “
Vous les vous coucher avec moi se soir
” on national TV, when no one knew what the French meant. But, the censors were there. It was funny—they were censoring everything. They made us say “
danse
” on her show “
Vous les vous DANSE avec moi
?” instead of “sleep.” Cher wasn’t too happy about that, but she was really gracious. So that was fun. She was really great to work with. And, after our number, she was so out of breath she was holding her chest. We thought that was so funny. When we were done, she said, “You wore me out” (84).

Dash was also impressed with the way Cher was raising her daughter. “Cher was so gracious, and Chastity at that time was maybe like six or seven years old,” Sarah explained.

And, what I loved about the way Cher raised her if you offered Chastity a piece of candy, Chastity would say, “Mom, is it O.K.?” And Cher would say, “Yes.” I thought that was so cool being in show business, and being so conscientious about how you raised your children. I just felt that Chastity was one of the more gracious entertainment children—show biz kids. And, she had such class at that age (84).

In addition to having different musical guests on her television show during this era, Cher remained friendly with several of her costars off the set as well—swapping shopping tips and manicurists. According to Sarah Dash,

She came backstage one time after one of our shows. She had these nail people come to me, and she was kinda upset that they had been overcharging the people she had been sending them to as clients. So, we both had the dark nails. I have a picture, in fact, of us sitting backstage with Cher. She and I both had the long, dark nails, because we were into the nails, because that was when the long manicured nails were beginning to happen, and dark was “it” (84).

Cher’s solo show continued at a clipping pace during the fall of 1975 and ran until January 4, 1976. Cher had invited Sonny to be a guest on several episodes of her
Cher
show, and they were getting along marvelously, both
on the set and off. And, more important, their old comic chemistry was working on camera. They decided that they were working so well together that they might as well regroup and do their old show again. Hence, February 1, 1976, marked the debut of the new version of
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, entitled
The Sonny & Cher Show
, as though the name change could possibly spare anyone any further confusion.

Cher said in a 1976
TV Guide
magazine cover story, “It was me, my idea. Doing a show alone was more than I could handle” (85). According to Sonny, in the same publication, he was flabbergasted by Cher’s offer, especially after their bitter divorce from each other. “I said, ‘As long as I know you, Cher, I will never cease to be amazed by you.’ Then I said, ‘Well, why not?’ Doing a show together made a lot of sense. . . . I knew the terrible demands on Cher. Now she’s back where she belongs” (85).

Speaking of confusion, here was Sonny Bono and his ex-wife Cher Sarkisian Bono Allman starring in a comedy program once a week as if their divorce and all the lawsuits had never happened. Then, to top it all off, Cher discovered that she was pregnant with Gregg’s baby. How would the American public deal with all this nonsense? Well, needless to say, had it been anyone other than Cher, she might have ended up tarred and feathered by an angry mob instead of bugle-beaded and feathered by Bob Mackie.

Not only had Cher appeared in a leaves-nothing-to-the-imagination outfit on the cover of
Time
magazine—March 17, 1975—but by now the real-life “Sonny & Cher & Gregg Show” was now a permanent running feature on the cover of all of the weekly tabloid newspapers. Twenty some years before, Ingrid Bergman had been run out of Hollywood on a rail for having a baby out of wedlock, and now here was Cher starring on American network television with ex-husband Sonny while pregnant by her drug-addict rock-star husband. This was definitely a “first”; Cher was undisputedly the high priestess of the 1970s “me” generation.

While all of this was happening in Cher’s career, Gregg Allman was busy screwing up not only his own life, but the lives of several people around him. Since Allman and his record label, Capricorn Records, were both from the state of Georgia, when Jimmy Carter was running for president of the United States, Allman enlisted lots of state supporters.

In fact, the night that Carter took office, Cher and Gregg Allman were among the new First Family’s first dinner guests in the White House. As Cher was to explain, “Gregory was from Georgia, and we supported him, so after the inauguration we were sort of just looking around the White House when ‘Miz’ Lillian [Carter’s mother] stuck her head out from around the corner and asked us to stay for dinner” (8). Not long after being publicly photographed cavorting around with Allman and Cher, President Carter found Gregg’s resurfacing drug dependencies an embarrassment. Especially when Allman was hauled into court to testify before a grand jury about his heroin and cocaine addiction.

Even as a teenager, Cher was destined to become someone special. As she has proclaimed: “This is my life—and I get to do everything I want to do. I don’t really care what anybody thinks.” (
AP/Wide World Photos
)