Authors: Mark Bego
Cher may have been hopelessly in love with Allman, but her daughter, Chastity—who was only seven years old at the time—could see right through him. “Gregg was a complete fuck-up,” recalled Chastity, years later.
He was the kind of guy who would say, “Oh, we’re gonna do this great thing,” and then not show up. . . . My worst memory of Gregg is when he picked me up from school one day. I guess he was drunk, and he couldn’t find his way back to Malibu. We got lost, and finally this guy said, “I’m going that way, follow me.” We followed him, and we ended up at this bar where Gregg got more drunk and picked up girls. We ended up getting home at around 11:00 or 12:00 at night. My mother was totally freaked because we were supposed to be back by 4:00. He was a big disappointment for a kid, because he would just let you down every time (64).
Following all of this activity, the public was getting weary of the whole triangle of Cher-and-Sonny-and-Gregg. Cher was running out of the will to keep this bizarre juggling act together. She had to be lovely and charming on network TV while she was busy monitoring Gregg’s substance abuse at home. “Our whole world was shot to ratshit. I ought to write a soap opera,” she complained at the time (88). She certainly was qualified for that task. In the mid-1970s, only TV’s
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
had more plot twists.
While
The Sonny & Cher Show
was still running, Cher remained candid about Sonny. In February of 1977 she was quoted in a
Long Island
magazine interview discussing Bono’s “male chauvinism.” When asked if he had changed since their divorce, Cher explained,
He’s changed outwardly in a lot of ways. He was such a pig before. “Male chauvinist” hardly describes it at all. Now I think he’s gotten a lot more open to just seeing people as people, not men as intelligent, and women as unintelligent, but just being open to accept people as they come. . . . When I left him I didn’t know shit. I mean, I didn’t know anything. All my opinions were Sonny’s, all my ideas had so much of his influence. I mean, I could have lived and died and never lived (83).
The Sonny & Cher Show
ran out of steam on March 18, 1977, when the last original episode was broadcast. The show continued in reruns until August 29, 1977. During this period, Cher released two solo albums for Warner Brothers Records that were serious sales “bombs.”
I’d Rather Believe in You
(1976) was produced by Steve Barri and Michael Omartian. On it she tried an assortment of pop ballads and some interesting cover tunes. The best cuts on the album included Barry Manilow’s “Early Morning Strangers,” Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper’s “Knock on Wood,” and a cover of the early 1970s hit “It’s a Cryin’ Shame.” The one single released from the album was Cher’s version of the song “Long Distance Love Affair.”
Not even the striking black-and-white photo by Norman Seeff of Cher in skin-tight blue jeans, with her long dark hair alluringly blowing in the breeze of a wind machine, could seduce record buyers.
I’d Rather Believe in You
remains a little-known gem amidst Cher’s growing catalog of recordings. It never made the charts.
Her 1977 follow-up album,
Cherished
, wisely reunited her with the man who was responsible for her biggest hits, Snuff Garrett. The album included some great new material, most notably Peter Allen’s “She Loves to Hear the Music.” And John Durrill, who given her “Dark Lady,” “Dixie Girl,” “Carousel Man,” and “I Saw a Man and He Danced with His Wife” in the past, contributed three songs to this album: “Thunderstorm,” “Dixie,” and “Love the Devil Out of Ya.” Al Capps, who gave her “Half Breed,” contributed another Native American–themed song for this LP, “War Paint and Soft Feathers,” which was one of the album’s singles. The other one, which was out of Cher’s story/song mold, was the sea-faring song “Pirate.” Even a reunion with Garrett, Durrill, and Capps didn’t work for her. Although they did their best to copy the formula that had worked so well at Kapp/MCA at the beginning of the decade, the public wasn’t buying.
During the summer of 1977, gossip columnists were reporting that both Gregg Allman and Cher Sarkisian La Piere Bono Allman were hospitalized on the East Coast. Gregg was in a Connecticut rehabilitation clinic, Silver Hill Hospital, and Cher had checked herself into New York City’s Doctors Hospital. According to the September 2, 1977, issue of the
New York Post
, “That heavily bandaged figure leaving Doctor’s Hospital on the Upper East Side this morning was Cher. She has just spent two weeks having breasts, chin and cheeks lifted. Cher headed out to West Hampton, where she’ll recuperate for the next month” (89).
People
magazine
referred to the work she had done as being “on-the-sly” (90). But with Cher, few things remained a secret for long.
Cher came up with a great idea that was going to help her disintegrating marriage and revitalize her record career all in one fell swoop. She and Gregg were going to record an album together. To top it all off, the names “Gregg” and “Cher” were not to appear on the cover, or for that matter, anywhere on the album sleeve. Instead, the LP was released as
Two the Hard Way
by “Allman & Woman.” Even Warner Brothers Records was embarrassed, but obligingly released it without any fanfare. Everyone argued with Cher over her decision to even get involved in the project. She remembers, “My publicist said I couldn’t possibly make a record without my name on it, so I fired the publicist” (91).
Theoretically,
Two the Hard Way
could have reached two diverse audiences, Gregg’s rock fans, who had never bought a Cher album, and Cher’s cult, who would never think of purchasing a Gregg Allman record. Unfortunately, no one wanted to have anything to do with the album, and it never made the record charts. Oddly enough, one of the songs that Cher and Gregg chose to perform on the album was the Smokey Robinson & the Miracles song “You Really Got a Hold on Me.” Sonny & Cher had recorded the exact same song on their first album together. The first line of the song is “I don’t like you, but I love you.” Odd that she would record that song with both men she obviously loved, but eventually professed not to like.
Reportedly, Cher and Gregg spent $100,000 of their own money to promote the album on their own, since Warner Brothers refused to spend a cent on it. The pair went off on a European promotional tour to launch
Two the Hard Way
, but the album, the marriage, and their whole union ultimately proved to be one huge mistake heaped upon another.
On November 6, 1977, the controversial duo of Allman & Woman left America for Europe, where they planned to do a twenty-nine-day concert tour to break in their act. Allman remembers that the audiences who came to see them were quite bizarre to say the least. Cher’s crowd wanted to see the sequined television star, and Gregg’s audience came to hear some beer-drinking, drug-influenced rock and roll. According to Gregg, “She had the people in the upper-age bracket, who came wearing corsages, with eight-to-eleven-year-old children. Then there were the Allman Brothers people, the backpackers. Her audience would never think of yelling out to people on-stage. But mine was always giving a lot of hell, calling out songs. It got to her” (91).
That’s not all that got to her. Although he had just “dried out” from
drug use for Cher, along the European trip, Gregg began to drink. “I just slipped once,” he claimed, but at this point, “once” was the straw that broke the camel’s back (91). On December 3, Cher pulled plug on the tour, told Gregg goodbye, and flew home.
When Gregg came back to the house that he and Cher shared, he found an armed guard waiting at the gate to greet him.
I came back home, got out of the limousine, and there was this guy with two .357 Magnums on his side. I jumped out of the car real quick and I said, “Hey, is somebody bothering our babies, somebody break in or something?” He said, “No.” And I said, “ ‘Why the hell are you here? Push the button on the gate and let me in.” He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” I asked him “Why not?” and he said, “I’m here to keep you out.” And I said, “Well, what about if I just jump over this goddamn gate and strangle your ass?” He said, “Well, Mr. Allman, I’ll have to shoot you.” What could I do, you know? The secretary came out and gave me a key to my Corvette. I took two cents out of my pocket, flipped them to her, got in the car, and just blazed out of there. They told me my clothes were at the Holiday Inn, which is the grimiest place in the world (81).
And so ended the Gregg and Cher show.
People couldn’t understand why Cher ever married Allman. “I just didn’t know then about drug personalities. He’d say, ‘I’m going to get a pack of cigarettes,’ and I’d see him four days later,” she commented. “There were a couple of times when he was straight, and then he was lovely” (62). For that matter, her public couldn’t figure out why she left Sonny in the first place. “People ask me if I left Sonny for another man,” she said. “I tell them, ‘No. I left him for a woman—ME’ ” (17). She later described her relationship with Allman in this fashion: “Being married to Gregg was like going to Disneyland on acid. You knew you had a good time, but you just couldn’t remember what you did” (92).
In the middle of all this activity, the year 1977 had also seen the debut of the Sonny & Cher dolls. Barbie dolls had been a hit since the 1960s, but Barbie never had a wardrobe like Cher, so the Mego Corporation, a toy manufacturer, jumped at the opportunity when Cher gave her approval. According to Frederick Pierce, head of the doll division of Mego, “We wanted to give Cher [the doll] a friend, so we thought we should make an Elton John doll. So we thought about a Gregg Allman doll—but kids don’t even know who he was. They don’t even know that Cher and Sonny aren’t still married” (93). Hence the Sonny & Cher dolls
debuted in toy stores across the country, complete with Bob Mackie–designed wardrobes.
The Cher Doll had a wardrobe right out of
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, complete with Cher’s “Half Breed” spangled loin-cloth and sequins costume (“Indian Squaw”), the feathered number she wore on the cover of
Time
magazine (“La Plume”), and a “Dark Lady” outfit (“Fortune Teller”). The Sonny Doll had his own varied wardrobe as well: trench coat and suit (“Private Eye”), silver
lamé
(“Space Prince”), and “Dark Lady”–inspired (“Gypsy King”). It was probably a good thing they didn’t create a Gregg Allman doll, or it would have had to include drug paraphernalia. And if they had gone through with an Elton John doll, it would just want to borrow all of the Cher Doll’s flashiest outfits!
In addition to the fashion figure doll, Mego also created a “Cher Makeup Center” for little girls, complete with a one-third life-size plastic bust of Cher, ready for budding Max Factors. The cover of the box for the Cher Makeup Center boasted that it included “Cher’s vinyl signature bag, compact with four makeup colors and lip brush, eyeliner, adhesive, powder puff and sponge, six rollers, two barrettes, hairbrush and comb, bobby pins, two braided ribbons, and two elastic hair ties.” As 1978 dawned, it was time for the pop diva to take inventory. In the past year Cher had left prime-time television, recorded two dismal albums, lifted her bust and her cheeks, dropped her second husband, and become a doll. It was now time for her to move on to greener pastures.
On April 3, 1978, ABC-TV broadcast Cher’s new one-hour special, appropriately titled
Cher . . . Special
. Her guests this time around were Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart. In one of the skits, Cher performed all of the roles in her version of
West Side Story
.
I remember my mother bringing the album of
West Side Story
to me after a trip to New York. I decided when I was grown up, I’d play every part. So in the musical number using a medley from the Broadway musical, I sing all the roles Tony, Maria, Anita, and Bernardo. I’m even all the Jets in the “Prologue” and “Jet Song.” We’ll do several songs, including “Maria,” “Tonight,” “I Have a Love,” and “Somewhere” (94).
In another segment, Cher and Dolly were seen discussing each other’s lives and careers. When the subject of Cher’s divorce came up, Cher sang “I’m Back in the Saddle Again.” Dolly promptly warned her, “Toot Toot Tootsie Don’t Cry.”
Cher clearly wasn’t sitting at home crying. She had had it with her
boyfriends, and now she was busy hanging out with the girls. One of her closest friends at the time was Diana Ross. “If I ever needed Diana, I could call her anytime,” proclaimed Cher, who also admitted,
My best friend now is Kate Jackson. We met about three months ago [January 1978] on a cerebral palsy telethon and hit it off right away. We discovered we’re very much alike. Since I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, we started going to movies together, played racquetball, and palled around. It’s fine. Nobody bothers us because we both have to be up early, we can adjust our hours. It was nice for me, because I didn’t have any real friends and I didn’t want to be going out just to go out. I didn’t want to be hung up on going out with guys, but then I don’t particularly like sitting home, so it was nice the two of us could go anyplace together and nobody would hassle us. I like Kate—she’s really special (94).
Cher was now looking for new horizons for her career, and for her personal life. In 1978 she was toying with the idea of developing her own movie project. According to her at the time, “Kate Jackson and I have written a project. Chastity, Kate, and I had been spending the weekend at Jane Fonda’s and we were coming back in my Jeep when I had the idea of an updated
Route 66
—two women driving around and getting into different situations” (95).
Several new situations loomed in Cher’s future, including a new boyfriend, a hot new record deal, and a Broadway show. According to Cher, she was bored with her life, and she was really looking for a change. When she cut off her famous waist-length hair, which had long been the trademark of Cher of 1970s television, her fans were in shock. However, unlike Samson, when Cher had her luxurious locks shorn off, she emerged even stronger than before!