Authors: Mark Bego
By far the most surprising thing about Cher’s personal life—as the old century ended and the new one began—was the revelation that she had been without a boyfriend for over six years. Several magazines went so far as to proclaim that the once wild Cher was—unbelievably—“celibate.” “Well, it’s not true,” she explained of that rumor. “I don’t even know how that celibacy thing got started. I think I told the writer I hadn’t had a boyfriend in, oh, I don’t know, how many years. But I wouldn’t even think of being celibate. I would just think of it as not having a boyfriend. ‘Celibate’ sounds like you’re a nun” (191).
However, she was the first to admit of love,
[It’s] harder to find when you’re older. I live in Los Angeles, where newer is better and older is useless. But I guess if grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life. . . . I’m not the love-the-one-you’re-with type. [Being alone] is definitely a deficit, but I certainly don’t have the time or energy to share my privacy with some asshole I’m not crazy about. I’m just looking for someone with a great sense of humor who’s really creative, fun, sensitive and sweet (171).
Cher was quick to explain that there were certain advantages to being single for a change.
Well, the pros are, you don’t have to brush your teeth before you go to bed, and you don’t have to shave your legs for weeks at a time, and you can go home and veg out and have control of the clicker [television remote control]. And the cons are, there’s not someone who tells you how adorable you are and rubs your head and goes into a crowded press conference and stands at the back and winks at you so that you think, “I can get through this” (214).
Still, those around her were starting to get a little bit concerned. Her own sister, Georganne, claimed, “Cher hasn’t been out enough in recent years. You don’t meet people in your living room. You have to go out, and she’s been a bit reclusive” (171).
One of the dichotomies that exist with Cher is the perception of wild flamboyant Cher, which is her public image, and of the behind-closed-doors Cher, the laid-back private person. The “public” Cher seems like a difficult character for any man to just ask out on a casual date.
According to Bob Esty,
Cher’s not at all wild. Although she dresses wildly, she’s very conservative in how she lives her life. She loves to dress up and go out. And I’m sure she has a great sex life when she wants to. I got to know her mother a little bit, she’s fabulous. And Georganne, her sister, is beautiful and wonderful. And I think Cher always felt like the odd one, and separated from everyone else in the world. She’s a loner woman. And when you’re a huge celebrity and that, I’m sure it can get very lonely. She’s basically shy, and thinking all of the time (101).
Says Esty of Cher’s solo status, “I just wish Cher, one day would meet someone, like a Sonny, but who would give her the other side too, the security and the love. Kind of a ‘Mr. Right.’ Because—as we all know—it’s lonely at the top” (101).
In the late 1990s, Cher had begun constructing a massive new house in Malibu, set on a cliff that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. She began making plans to move in, with ample space for friends to stay as well. Although it was nearly completed by the year 2000, she continued to make modifications to it and to the grounds well into 2001. The house itself is a brown structure, and everything in it is either painted, carpeted, or upholstered in shades of brown and beige. For a woman who is so colorful and flamboyant in her lifestyle and dress, one would expect flame red or brilliant orange—but brown? According to her it was a warm and calming color to live amidst.
In November of 2000, gossip columnists were reporting that Cher’s bouts of loneliness were being combated by her moving a new roommate into her massive Malibu manse: Rob Camilletti.
Star
magazine, and other publications, were claiming that Rob’s acting career never became what he had hoped, and that he was working as a bartender at a Los Angeles bar called the Sunset Room. It was also reported that in 1999, “when Rob wanted a hair transplant, generous Cher picked up the $20,000 tab” (229).
In an article in the
Star
, entitled “Lonely Cher Butters Up Bagel Boy” (November 28, 2000), one unidentified source was quoted as saying, “She’s been waiting for Rob to grow up a little before starting over with him” (229). Whether or not Rob’s taking up residence in Cher’s huge brown and beige
casa
was a platonic, or a romantic, arrangement wasn’t explained by Cher at the time. Obviously, the Cher and Rob saga is far from finished.
Among her closest relationships now are those she shares with her children. Chastity has moved up to San Francisco, with her current girlfriend, Laura Lamastro. She is, however, a frequent visitor at her mother’s Malibu home. Her son, Elijah, moved out for a while, seeking his own independence. But, as Cher explains, “He did leave for, like six months but then he came back and now everyone says, ‘He’s never moving out.’ I wouldn’t mind if he got married and brought his wife home to live” (192).
Like Chastity before him, Elijah has his own rock band. The band is called Deadsy. According to him, he isn’t seeking the kind of widespread and massive success that his mother has. “I used to get swarmed at the airport, and it was annoying,” he claims. “I’m not into my Mom’s whole fame thing. I don’t ever want to be, like, crazy famous. I want my band to be ridiculously big, but I don’t want to be an icon” (192).
Cher says of her son, “He’s a really smart, really talented, really strange person. He marches to his own drummer more than any person I’ve ever met—except maybe Sonny” (144). According to Chastity, “She’s had to be a lot stricter with him” (171).
Not long after Sonny Bono’s death in 1998, Chastity became embroiled in the whole controversy regarding the very controversial
Ellen
TV show. As a consultant on the show, she found herself in a position to deliver her opinions to the press, as she saw fit. When the once light and amusing television series took a different path in its 1997–98 broadcast season, Chastity found it to be a bit too militantly gay, and a lot less entertaining.
Ultimately, she ended up aggravating the show’s star, Ellen DeGeneres. Explaining her stance at the time, Chastity said, “Well, I don’t want to say ‘less gay.’ I want to say, ‘Just go a little slower.’ I don’t think her character should have been not gay. She came out as a gay woman, and she should have absolutely been gay. But there are ways to have deferent subplots, ways to do it” (193).
Instead of finding support for her opinions, she ended up being misinterpreted. Although she was astonished by the criticism that she personally took, she was able to see the whole issue in perspective. “Look at my Mom’s career,” Chastity explained.
She made the decision to do
Moonstruck
, and she won the Academy Award. Then she made the decision to sell hair care products because it was really good money, and it turned out to be a really bad decision. But she’s still the same person who won the Academy Award for
Moonstruck
. People can just turn on you so quickly. . . . It hurt my feelings that people were so quick to judge. [Openly gay comedian] Lea DeLaria really went after me. [She said], that I had the I.Q. of a sea sponge, and “Chastity Bono can bite my ass,” which is probably the most repulsive thought I can think of. There’s no danger of that happening. And then, of course, there was Ellen. I called her and explained what happened, and I tried to reassure her how much loyalty I had to her show. She listened, but as soon as she starting doing press [interviews], I was the enemy. That was really hard, because I still have so much admiration for what she did. It’s hard to have one of your heroes turn on you in such a harsh way. In June [1998] I saw the documentary,
The Real Ellen Story
, and once again she was talking in a negative manner about me. I put a call in to her and talked to her assistant and said, “Let’s just sit down and talk about this. I’ll buy you a beer, and let’s sit down and get past this.” I wasn’t her enemy; I was an ally of the show. She just couldn’t see that. She’s not at that point. I don’t know if she will ever be (193).
However, growing up as Cher’s daughter, she was used to living in a show business fish bowl. She had been doing it for her entire life, so this was hardly something new. “People assume it must be difficult,” Chastity claimed, “but I don’t have anything to contrast it to, it’s all I know. To me, it’s complete normalcy. Would it have been nice to have her around more when I was growing up? Absolutely. But she had a lot of responsibility and was supporting many, many people. She did the best she could” (191).
Although it doesn’t look like it is going to happen anytime soon, Chastity claims of Cher, “She’d love to be a grandmother. She loves playing
with her assistant’s nephew and going off to the toy store for friends’ kids. But she’s never pressured me, and I don’t feel ready to make that kind of commitment” (171).
Cher mania continued throughout the year 2000, with a highly publicized television appearance on
Will & Grace
, the announcement of a new twenty-first-century Cher doll, Cher’s very personal new album which was made available only on the Internet, two significant new compilation albums in the stores, and talk of a new movie role for television.
In August 2000 the show business trade papers,
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
, announced that talks were underway for Cher’s next screen role. This time around it was to be a glitzy, big-budget, made-for-TV production of the Tony award–winning Broadway musical
Mame
. It would feature Cher as the titled star of the production: the outlandish “Auntie” Mame Dennis. Goodness knows that she has behaved like Auntie Mame all of her life. This seemed like a perfect role for her. If the project unfolds as originally discussed, Barbra Streisand would produce the film for ABC-TV. According to
Daily Variety
at that time, “Streisand has officially advised the network she’ll only be involved in the project as producer. Hopes were high for Streisand’s involvement, but she has decided it was not to be. . . . They’ll move to casting a big star for the musical—Cher is on the short list” (230).
In November of 2000, Cher chose to make her follow-up album to the hugely successful
Believe
, a deeply personal one. It was an album that she had originally recorded in the early 1990s, but it was rejected for release by her current label, Warner Brothers Records. She decided to entitle it
Not.Com.mercial
, because that was exactly what it was—out of tune with what was currently going on the music scene. However, she was very “cutting edge” in the fact that she chose to sell to her fans exclusively via her own website:
www.cher.com
.
The most ironic aspect of the
Not.Com.mercial
album’s Internet-only sales method is the fact that Cher herself claims that she is beyond “computer illiterate.” According to her, she has no clue what to do with a computer after switching on the power button! “I’m not very Web savvy because I’m dyslexic, so I can’t make heads or tails of it,” she explains. “I can’t type. I have a hard time seeing letters. If they make the software where you can talk into it, I would love that” (231).
Cher herself wrote eight of the
Not.Com.mercial
album’s ten songs. In the spring of 1994, she was invited by Miles Copeland to participate in a “writer’s retreat” near Bordeaux, France. Recalls Cher, “Even before I
left my house [for France], there was magic. The week before my trip I would wake up in the middle of the night and write, and write, and write” (232). She flew to Paris, rented a car, drove down through the French countryside for two hours, and arrived at the castle where this creative retreat was to take place. There she joined several other singer/songwriters including Brenda Russell, Patty Smyth, country star Ty Herndon, and Pat McDonald.
When she came back to the United States, Cher was so excited about the new material she had written that she teamed up with Bruce Roberts to produce the tracks for what she intended to be her next album release. When Warner Brothers Records passed on releasing it, Cher simply put it on the shelf for six years, until she was in a position to release the album herself. She explained. “It’s totally uncommercial. It’s a part of my personality that never really gets exercised. I just wrote everything the way I felt it. Like my song about Kurt Cobain. One morning I woke up and heard Courtney Love reading his [suicide] letter on the radio. And so the next morning, at 5:00 a.m., I just wrote this song all in one sitting. Then I put it to music” (144).
Although some Cher followers might be surprised to find that she could write songs, many of her fans will recall that she penned the tune “My Song (Too Far Gone)” from her
Take Me Home
album in the 1970s. “I write all the time,” Cher explains. “I wrote one of the verses in ‘Believe,’ I rewrite things in my movies all the time because I have a pattern of speaking that people don’t get exactly.” Why has it taken so long for her to do some concentrated writing? According to her, “Because I’m a little flighty” (231).
Since Cher had just released
Believe
, the most successful album of her entire four-decade career and a completely in-character Cher-goes-disco release, one would think that she might want to stay in the dance music genre for her follow-up project. Never one to follow the obvious path, Cher preferred to simply release
Not.Com.mercial
on her own, and let the chips fall where they might.
With regard to not wanting to be pigeonholed into one particular genre of music, she explained, “Artists have more than one side, and sometimes people get locked into one thing, and there’s no place for anything else, because [radio stations and MTV] are so regulated. . . . That’s a brilliant thing that the Web can do: It’s a place for things that have no place” (231).