Known for her powerful voice, stunning looks, and razor-sharp tongue, Cher has ruled the music world as the undisputed Goddess of Pop. From her humble beginnings in the 1960s as one half of the popular folk rock duo Sonny and Cher to her constantly evolving career as a solo artist, she paved the way for Madonna, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and countless other pop divas. An icon of feminine empowerment, Cher continues to carve out a unique niche in the notoriously male-dominated music business on her own terms through talent, hard work, and sheer force of will.
Cher says she feels like the world’s oldest teenager at 74. She’s somehow beaten the age barrier with a mixture of plastic surgery, to which she freely admits, and a flat refusal to accept the passing years.
The woman who exalts in the title Goddess Of Pop became the face of fashion house Marc Jacobs was back on cinema screens with documentary movie The Wrecking Crew.
“I never fear age,” she says. ”The only birthday I can remember was the night I turned 40. I actually had tears in my when they were bringing in my birthday cake, thinking, ‘My youth is over.’ “But the next day I got the part in the film The Witches Of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson and realized that things were not so bad. After that I stopped worrying and thinking about it.
“The only thing I have feared since was working with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in the film Tea With Mussolini. They were so good and so British and so intelligent. They frightened the life out of me! The one I got along with the easiest was Joan Plowright because she was the least frightening. Listening to them all, they have such sharp wit and that English way.”
Cher has been set a good example of how to stay youthful by her mother Georgia Holt, who is 94. She has been married seven times, twice to Cher’s father John Sarkisian. “It’s all in the genes,” says Cher. “My grandmother was only 14 when she had my mum, who in tum was only 19 when she had me. It was sending out a message, ‘Get on with life.’
“As a little girl I even knew my great-great grandmother on my father’s side. My mother was still going to the gym in her 80s. I have always worked out in the hope that I stay fit and youthful. The years go by so quickly, you just have to make the most of them.”
Cher celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release of her first big hit with her late ex-husband Sonny Bono, I Got You Babe.
Since then she has won an Oscar, three Golden Globes and has sold more than 100 million records. She is the only singer to have a No l record in the US during each of the last six decades.
“I left home at 16 to try to make it on my own and had my first child at 22,” she says. “My mum told me that I did not need to make a lot of money to be a success. She said, ‘You can live, have children, be confident, be gorgeous and sing for a living.’ I still have that spirit of the 1960s, which has kept me going.”
Despite her wild image Cher has kept a secret that she dare not have even whispered in the 1960s. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I don’t take drugs,” she says. She has even removed her tattoos by laser surgery. “I had my first tattoo at 27 and it was a statement but now it seems that just about everyone has a tattoo and it has become boring.”
It is Cher’s ability to move on, whether by change of hairstyle or music, that has been the key to her long-term success. She has also been willing to wear her heart on her sleeve. At one point shortly after the death in 1998 of her first husband and former singing partner Sonny Bono was killed in a skiing accident, she declared that the tragedy summed up her life.
She hated being the wrong side of 50, no one gave her good roles anymore and she had not enjoyed a hit in years. She even endured her longest spell of celibacy.
We met again around that point and she told me: “Whoever said they think it’s great being 50 is full of s•••. Yet it does not seem to affect the men. If I play a role opposite a younger man then that becomes the storyline. It just makes my working life more difficult.”
In Cher’s real life she has never found such difficulty in attracting younger men. There has been a roll call over the years, from which she has never been shy.
In her book The First Time she wrote that she first had sex at the age of 14 and her first one-night stand was with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Warren Beatty, when she was 16. “My first boyfriend was Milton Broadlight and he has beautiful with black hair and blue eyes,” she tells me. “I used to moon around even then, I was only nine or 10 at the time.
“When I was a teenager I was boy crazy. I always wanted to be out and had a crush on this boy and that. But throughout my life I have had the luxury of picking men I want to be with rather than having them take care of me.
“I like men for what they are and not whether they are a good provider or rich or a star. If and when I am with someone it is for no other reason than I like their company.
“I kind of fall into relationships. They might start as friendships then something happens. I have hardly ever had a date.”
She is equally forthright about her plastic surgery. “I have had my t•••, nose and teeth done but nothing else.”
Her statement is even backed by medical evidence from a Hariey Street specialist and lawyers Forbes and Roth in Los Angeles.
They declare that no surgery has been performed on Cher’s “cheeks, chin, ribs, navel, buttocks and thighs.” Her best attributes have nothing to do with surgery: glossy dark hair, clear brown eyes and young-looking olive skin.
As with virtually every major star there is always a price to pay for the mixture of self-obsession and blinkered ambition that is needed to bolster natural talent to get to the very top.
SHE was divorced from Sonny after 11 years. They had a daughter Chastity, 46, who underwent a sex change and is now known as Chaz. Her second marriage in 1975 to musician Gregg Allman lasted just four years.
Their son Elijah Blue admitted last year that he was a reformed heroin addict and that his famous mother felt ‘haunted’ by his troubled childhood.
“I realize that no one out there is waiting with bated breath for my next career move,” says Cher. “So it is just a matter of working my way towards it. Whenever I am not working I have mostly lived quietly.
“I even lived in London for about a year – in Wapping – and got along very well. I would go to the pub and no one much bothered me.”
She is now based in Malibu, California, at a house that she designed herself. A musical on her life is still under discussion.
But Cher’s 50s and 60s have been good for her. There have been more hits, both at the cinema and in the recording studio. Her song You Haven’t Heard The Last Of Me from the 2010 film Burlesque won a Golden Globe for best original song. And her 25th studio album Closer To The Truth just a few years ago became her biggest seller for more than 20 years.
Her movie The Wrecking Crew is about a group of older classically trained musicians who anonymously played on records for the biggest selling acts of the 1960s and early 1970s. They included The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, The Mamas & The Papas, John Denver, Glen Campbell and The Carpenters. And Cher of course. It has won much acclaim.
Phill Marder, editor of Goldmine, a magazine aimed at collectors of records, tapes and memorabilia, says: “In the 1960s Cher advanced female rebellion in the rock world and became the prototype of the female rock star.”
But her biographer Mark Bego is even more complimentary. “No one in the history of show business has had a career of the magnitude and scope of Cher’s.”
