Cher (40 page)

Throughout all of this increased activity, her strongest relationships in the mid-1980s were with her children, Chastity and Elijah. Teenage Chastity, for a time, lived in New York city with Lee Strasberg’s widow, Anna, and attended the High School of Performing Arts, of
Fame
notoriety. On the subject of motherhood, circa the mid-1980s, Cher claimed,

Maybe I could have done a better job. I get frightened, then I’m around them and I see they’re really good kids. I see edges in their personalities I hope will round off, aspects they’ll grow through. I’m not so bowled over by my love for them that I don’t see their strong and weak points. But I feel they both have an innate strength that will pull them through—I see Chastity’s toughness coming from me, and Elijah’s vulnerable, poetic spirit from Gregory. He was the gentler, nicer parent than me—when he was straight (127).

Elijah, at the time, had only seen his father on three occasions. One day he argued to Cher, “Mother, he’s not too busy to pick up the telephone!” when she tried to make excuses for Gregg Allman. “That really blew me away that he could say that!” she replied in awe (120).

Cher simply shrugged her shoulders over the question of what kind of mother she has been. “I’m convinced they’re going to write
Mommie Dearest
books one day,” she says. “But it’s like this: I did the best I could” (36). Sometimes Cher was clearly the mother, and Chastity was clearly the daughter. However, there were also times that that the roles reversed, and Cher at the age of forty seemed more like the child, and Chastity at fifteen acted more like the parent.

“Sometimes Chas drives me crazy too,” Cher said at the time.

She wanted combat boots last year! But people have to have their own expression. I’m living proof. Actually, my daughter is so traditional, it’s frightening that she can be my daughter. I think it’s a backlash. I told her one day, as I was looking in the mirror—“Chas, I’d like to get a Mohawk. I’d really like to get a Mohawk. I’m going to get a Mohawk. I’ve made my decision.” She threw herself against the bathroom door and hollered, “You’ve got to think of your work. It would be limiting—you’re an actress now.” Then she stared at me and said, “Wait a minute, you should be throwing yourself at the bathroom door, and I should be wanting a Mohawk” (115).

With regard to her relationships with the men in her life, Cher was to claim, “Men are luxuries, not necessities. I’m happier with a man, but I don’t fold up and die if I don’t have one around.” Of her many publicized affairs, she quickly retorts, “People thought I was sleeping with the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir” (67).

In addition to being linked with all of the men she had dated, there were also persistent rumors that Cher was gay. In the mid-1980s she flatly denied the inference. “I have my share of problems, but lesbianism isn’t one,” she explained.

Sometimes I read stories about me and they make me upset. One really upset me. It said that I was having an affair with some chick. . . . I find women attractive, but I haven’t seen any women I’d really like to make it with. I have a real strong thing toward men. My best friends are women, but I can have a good relationship with a woman without going to bed with them (18).

The rumors most likely stemmed from the “masculine” way she carried herself. Although she wore very glamorous clothes, she was not very “girlie” in her mannerisms or her speech. She said at the time, “I can be very independent if it’s necessary and most of the time I am. But I would much rather be taken care of. . . . it’s weird. My behavior is very ‘masculine,’ because I do exactly what I want. I don’t give a shit who knows it or who cares. As long as I’m happy doing it, everybody can kiss my ass, you know. . . . I don’t answer to anyone but myself” (6).

While she didn’t feel that she had to explain herself, Cher was highly displeased with the person that the press perceived her to be in the mid-1980s. According to her, “God, I am so sick of ‘finding a new life.’ It seems like every time someone writes about me, it’s me with a NEW life. Every time I get a new boyfriend, I get a ‘new’ life” (130).

Whenever the subject of her fascination with younger men came up, she became very defensive. “Listen, the fact is that older men never asked me out,” she said. “Also, I’m happier with younger men; they are definitely more fun. On my birthday, every man I’ve ever been with—except for my two husbands—calls me or sends me presents or flowers. I’ve had good relationships with all of them” (115).

Meanwhile, by the end of August 1986, while Cher was still working
on
The Witches of Eastwick
, Sean Penn and Madonna were working on a workshop production of a play called
Goose and Tom Tom
, by David Rabe, at Lincoln Center. Cher was invited to the Labor Day weekend closing night performance. She didn’t have anyone to go with, and that young man she had seen at Heartbreak on her birthday in May came to mind. According to Cher, “I just thought, ‘I’m going to ask that guy to go with me.’ I told Debbie [Paull] to call him up and tell him that it’s not a date, that I just wanted him to go with me to see a play” (115).

After inviting Robert to go with her, Cher had run into Melanie Griffith, who was also in town. The two of them ended up attending the play with Camilletti. After the play was over, the three of them went to the closing night party, and then Cher and Robert went back to her suite at Morgan’s Hotel, where she was still staying at the time.

Since he was only twenty-two when they met, Cher kept telling herself that he was just a nice guy she could hang out with whenever she was in Manhattan. That night at Morgan’s, the two of them ended up talking until 3:30 in the morning. At that point, he leapt up and suddenly announced, “I gotta catch a train to Queens” (115). The reason he had to make his hasty exit was that he had to leave Manhattan to open the bagel shop.

The following day, Cher was due to leave for California, but by the time she got up, she decided to postpone her trip one more day. That evening she and Melanie Griffith had dinner and then met Robert and a friend of his, named Steve, at Heartbreak. From there, the foursome moved on to the China Club. While at the China Club, Cher suddenly felt awkward, and thought to herself that she really shouldn’t get involved with someone who was so much younger than she was.

When she suddenly announced to him that she had to go back to her hotel to pack for the next day’s flight, he asked if he could come with her. She had offered to let him read the script to
Moonstruck
, which she was going to come back to New York to begin filming, right after she was finished with
The Witches of Eastwick
. So, she agreed. Back at the hotel, they went up to her room, and she gave him the script she had promised him. However, when she went to shake his hand “goodbye,” he informed her that this was not the way he wanted the evening to end. Well, one thing led to another, and he ended up spending the night with her.

She indeed left the next day for California as planned. After five days of thinking about Robert, she telephoned him from the West Coast. What developed was a long-distance telephone relationship. At the time,
she was filming interiors for
The Witches of Eastwick
in California. Then she flew back to New York City, and purchased the apartment in Greenwich Village.

With work on
Witches
wrapped, Cher moved back to New York City and took possession of the loft space she had purchased, and the relationship with Robert escalated from there. When she was shooting
Moonstruck
, she would film all day, come home, shower, get in bed, sleep for a while, and wait for Robert to come home. At this point he had quit the bagel shop and was now working as a doorman. Later, he was employed as a bartender. However, the die had been cast, and he was forever to be known in the press as Cher’s “bagel boy.”

As usual, Cher could care less what the media thought of her latest
amour
. “We struck up a phone relationship, I guess,” Cher was to explain amid her relationship with Robert.

You know, he was making bagels at the time. And I thought, “What will my friends say if I go out with him?” But the more I got to know Robert, the less I cared what anybody thought. He may have talked like one of the
Lords of Flatbush
, but he had so many great qualities, I couldn’t believe it. Then I met his parents and I understood what a good family he came from. His father, Frank, is really funny; I mean, he doesn’t want his wife to play the lottery, because she might win and ruin everything, when they’re so happy with their lives already. It’s one great Italian family, and that’s why Robert is so good, so moral. I met him in May [1986], and I didn’t fall in love until, well, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas (115).

Although he was nearly half her age, Cher had an instant bond with Robert.

I feel safe with him, real comfortable. He’s really protective of me. He tells the truth, his morals are impeccable, and he has a great heart. I think I trust him more than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t know if we’ll stay together—it’s not a goal. Robert’s not the best relationship I’ve ever had, but this one is the biggest Band-Aid. It’s liniment, lotion, incredibly healing. I love his simplicity—he makes me feel peaceful (22).

Robert once told Cher that he was “just a mook from Queens” (25). After that, her pet name for him was always “Mookie.” They didn’t read the same books, and he hadn’t been to the kind of places she had been to, or experienced the kind of life she had led. She was a hugely successful
media star in a publicly quiet phase of her career, and he was just a nice young man starting his adult life. Yet, somehow they found enough common ground between them to truly enjoy each other’s company. They would walk around the Village together, go out to triple-feature movie marathons, or go out to eat at funky little restaurants. In New York City, it is easy to have total anonymity, and the two of them enjoyed each other’s company.

At the end of 1986, as Cher’s relationship with Robert was just getting underway, she was looking forward to a calendar year in which she was going to have three major motion pictures released, and she was already making plans for her return to the recording studio. Cher had been in the business long enough to know what happens when you are riding the wave of a huge success—you have no privacy, and the press hounds you every step you make.

Cher told Robert that he should enjoy their time together, because, if any of her forthcoming 1987 projects suddenly took off in a big way, they were going to have absolutely no solitude whatsoever. She had an idea that these three films were going to have a profound effect on her career, but she had no idea just how successful she was about to become. Yet she sensed that she was standing on the threshold of one of the most rewarding periods of her life, and what a wild ride it was going to be.

12

I FOUND SOMEONE

From 1987 to 1988, Cher found herself in exactly the position she had for so long desired. She had become acknowledged as one of the most “bankable” actresses in films, alongside such contemporaries as Jessica Lange, Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathleen Turner, Sissy Spacek, Barbra Streisand, and Sally Field.

Yet to the public it seemed that she had disappeared altogether. She hadn’t been seen very much in the public eye since the 1985 release of
Mask
, with the exception of occasional TV appearances. She had spent the past year filming almost nonstop, preparing her unprecedented cinematic triple whammy of
The Witches of Eastwick, Suspect
, and
Moonstruck
. This trio of films presented three distinctively different screen roles for Cher: the vengeful sculptress in
Witches
, the determined but torn lawyer in
Suspect
, and the pragmatic spinster in
Moonstruck
. Not only were movie audiences treated to Cher’s acting versatility, but they also got a glimpse of her new nose.

“I had made it smaller after
Mask
,” she was to reveal. “It’s basically my same nose, just a little smaller version.” According to her, she didn’t mind her nose when she was a television star on the small screen in the 1970s. However, seeing herself blown up on the movie screen was another story. “I kind of liked it,” she said of her own nose. “I thought it was interesting. But you blow it up to be three feet [tall], and it started to be a little bit of a problem” (157). It didn’t seem to be a problem for anyone else,
but Cher was amid her lifelong quest for perfection, and her forays in plastic surgery and other appearance-altering procedures were just part of it.

On April 3, 1987, Cher was one of the stars of an hour-long television special called
Superstars and Their Moms
. Not only did Cher appear on camera with her mother, but Georgia Holt was the co-executive producer of the show. Among the other stars who appeared with their mothers were Bill Cosby, Cybill Shepherd, Whitney Houston, Tom Selleck, and sisters Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen. The show was hosted by Carol Burnett and her daughter, Carrie Hamilton.