Producers: Raymond Katz, Sandy Gallin (Isis Productions, Inc.)
Director: Art Fisher (from The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Cher…Special)
Writers: Buz Kohan, Patricia Resnick, Arthur Sellers, Cher (Kohan, Resnick and Cher from Cher…Special)
Musical Director: Bill Conti
Choreographer: Joe Layton and Damito Jo Freeman
Cher’s Costumes: Bob Mackie
Costumes: Ret Turner
Makeup: Ben Nye, Jr. (sometimes listed as Ben Nye III)
Hair: Renata (formerly Renata Leuschner)
Other cast: Bill Selga (of “you can call me Johnson”) and Phil  Gerard, The Skater
Aired: NBC, 7 March 1979

Awards

  • 1979 Primetime Emmy Nominee for Outstanding Costume Design for a Limited Series or a Special for Bob Mackie and Ret Turner

Guest Stars

  • Andy Kaufman (he was huge at the time, which is hard to understand looking back; but my father said at the time that he was a genius)
  • Shelly Winters.

The “Special Guests” were:

  • Lucille Ball
  • Elliot Gould (also very big at the time)

I wonder if the two “special guests” were as competitive and crusty with each other in reality as their characters were in this special’s storyline, which may explain the special billing they received.

Notes:
This is the second Cher special to use ellipses in the title and it is also her final variety-format television special to date. The TV specials from here  on out will all be either concert specials or documentary tributes, one memorial for Sonny and another for and with her mother.

This is also the first Cher special I saw in real time. My mother alerted me to it earlier that week and I was allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV so as not to miss it. This was a always a big allowance in our house and one that usually only happened at Christmas when the Rankin/Bass animations aired.

Cher variety television has now appeared on all the three major U.S. networks, her variety series’ all on CBS, the 1978 special on ABC and this one on NBC.

Opening: “Aint Nobody’s Business” (Video) 
Blues standard, cover of Anna Meyers (1920)
This is a song Cher comes back to again and again. Lately she had been criticized for being nothing but a human clothes hanger.  This is most likely the f*#k-off song in response.

The opening is basically a costume parade of empowered women through time.  As much as is it about fashion, it’s also about Cher’s face and attitude during this performance, how she enacts all these women.

These are the eras depicted that I could tell:

Eve (with a costume of only hair and an apple)
The is a similar outfit to what Cher will wear on her Prisoner album cover released later in 1979.

Egyptian

​

Arabian

Medieval

Victorian

Restoration

Antebellum

The gay 1890s

Edwardian

Silent Movie Era

The 1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s rock-and-roll

1950s Big Band
(with Cher singing as a doo-wop singer)

1970s Disco

These next two costumes place Cher at the center point of 1970s fashion: her Time Magazine cover dress  and the Viking outfit from the cover of her newly released Take Me Home album, said to be the inspiration of her then-boyfriend, KISS bassist and tongue-waggler Gene Simons.

The historical fashion show would re-appear later in her Broadway show and using the same song in the same way  (note the lyric changes). This was the showstopping Bob Mackie number which used mostly new dresses inspired by past Cher outfits with some exceptions; you can see the Ringmaster, Half Breed and Take Me Home outfits in the parade.

These fashion spreads are reminiscent of the big color fashion show in the middle of the movie The Women  (1939), which incidentally was one of the movies Cher picked when she guest-hosted Turner Classic Movies.

And then there’s Cher’s famous post-plastic-surgery addition: “If I want to put my tits on my back…(it’s nobody’s business but my own!)”

Cher Meets the Magic Painter
This special’s conceit is that Cher is on her way to a party and has become lost in an office building,  literally  The Bradbury Building in Los Angeles. For some reason, the beauty of the building doesn’t translate in this special. Mr. Cher Scholar speculates this is because of the video formatting.

This special has a more shadowy feel than her previous specials. It’s also odd (and not in an awesome way like the 1978’s Cher…Special. ) It feels half-baked.

Cher wears a lime-green jacket and a purple skirt with a big, curly wig. Cher’s actual hair was very short around this time. She looks like she’s on her way to an office instead of a party.

Cher yells, “Hello, anybody here?” The building appears to be vacant. “You can never find a fairy godmother when you really need one,” she laments. She is talking to herself or to us, complaining about “the continuing perils of Cher” making costume changes and “singing her little heart out.”

Cher runs into Elliot Gould dressed as a painter. Often an uncanny sounding chorus can be heard in the background, which is supposed to make us feel like we’re in some kind of otherworldly realm.

Gould asks her if she’s brought the blue paint. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he accuses her of “blowing the blue.” He then asks her to hand him the orange or magenta.

It feels like Gould’s bits are trying to imitate the clever and absurdist wordplay of Willy Wonka but it just comes off more like an amateurish acting workshop skit.

Cher tells him she’s looking for a party and Gould sends her to a nearby door labeled “Food for Thought, Inc.” and he tells her to “give my regards to the hostess.”

Love and Pain (Video) 
This song is from Cher’s Take Me Home album released the previous January 25 on Casablanca Records. We can only assume this one one of Cher’s favorite songs on the album because it was not one of the singles released. The singles released were “Take Me Home” (January 29, 1979), “Wasn’t It Good” (May 14, 1979) and the country-tinged “It’s Too Late to Love Me Now” (May 21, 1979).

The album made it to #24 in Canada, #25 on the Billboard 200 and #32 on the R&B albums chart. The album was certified Gold with a carrot based on shipment figures, which according to Casablanca history, the company was fudging somehow.

The hostess turns out to be Cher dressed glamorously in a pink dress and headpiece. A ghostly Cher steps out of the glamourous one dressed in blue jeans, a white jacket and long straight hair.

Cher once stated that she never did become friends with the rich housewives of Beverly Hills or fit in with the Los Angeles party scene. This performance illustrates her discomfort with her party face. She sadly sings the song as her other self pretends to enjoy everything.  The man at the other end of the table comes over and proposes to her. By the end, sad-Cher resumes her role as the party hostess and no one is the wiser. Like many of the songs in the 1979 Prisoner album later this year, this is meant to express the Real Cher versus the Famous Cher.

Cher was somewhat known for being a party girl around the late 1970s. She was photographed at Studio 54 and various celebrity events and parties. She was also starting to have those roller skating parties.

But I think Cher is asserting here that she was a bit ill-suited to this lifestyle beyond a superficial level. A lot of this activity was probably Cher sewing her oats after leaving the strictness of life with Sonny and the dramas of life with Gregg. She was trying to find  out what was going on out there in the big, wide world.

A lot of drugs as it turns out.

Cher’s most famous party was the infamous Average White Band party where she saved the life of their overdosing bassist Alan Gorrie’s by “bringing him home and following the advice of her gynecologist (her personal physician was unavailable) . . . [she] induced vomiting, applied ice packs to his body and forcibly walked him around, preventing him from losing consciousness and lapsing into a coma.”

Gorrie did survive but their young drummer did not. Another article about that party.

This happens to be one of my favorite Cher songs from this album. I’m glad there’s a clip of Cher doing the song in her own way, but the drama of this performance wasn’t nearly as dramatic as my re-enactments when I was 9 or 10 in our street-lamp-lit living room. During one showstopping rendition, my oldest brother crawled around the piano, grabbed my leg and scared the bejesus out of me.

Yeesh. Boys.

The Painter and Cher Suffering
Cher finds Gould again. Mr. Cher Scholar noticed watching this that the Elliot Gould interstitials don’t have a laugh track like some of the skits do, which makes them seem all the more dead.

Cher tells Gould “That was the wrong party. It wasn’t any fun.” Gould tells her he thinks she’s the “type of person who loves suffering” and he sends her to another door where she can find sad stories. The door is labeled “Misery Loves Company.”

The Stories Store (Partial Video)
Shelly Winters, in full flightiness, runs a store selling the re-enactments of sad movie scenes. Suddenly a very needed laugh track! We can find the jokes now.

The skit is basically a collection of emotional movie scenes. There’s an Ali McGraw poster from Love Story on the wall. Cher says she’s looking for hot stories. They run lines from the following movies: Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, Bambi, The Wizard of Oz (Cher does the witch cackling about ruby slippers), Rocky, Winchester 73 and The Fly.

Cher coaches Shelly Winters on how to do a scene (which was probably meant to be as ironic as it seems).

This feels like Cher is doing some kind of generic audition here. Which may have been the point. Cher was trying to break into acting around this time. This feels like the most open of open-auditions from your own TV special. If so, it didn’t work. No one would take a chance on Cher until Robert Altman in the early 1980s.

By the end, Cher is unsatisfied by all the sad scenes and Winters starts lamenting about how she hasn’t sold any sad stories in a long time and her life is a mess. Cher is delighted with this sad story and she buys it. After Cher leaves, Winters sighs and says, “It beats heavy lifting.”

I think over the years I’ve had to watch this skit about 15 times to finally comes to understanding what it was really about. It’s very talky and doesn’t go anywhere (kind of like the whole special).

The Painter Finds Out Cher’s Name
Cher finds Gould again. She calls him a quirky godmother. They talk about how Cher doesn’t have a last name.

She just recently legally changed it from Cher Bono Allman to Cher. A nickname for herself back then was J.P.C.  or Just Plain Cher.

Gould does some nonsensical calculations and then sends her toward a door labelled “By the Numbers, Inc.”

Feel Like a Number” (Video)
Cover of Bob Seger (1978)
Cher appeared in black stretch pants and a sequined see-through top similar to this in her scandalous roller skating party photograph where the lights of the camera flashes exposed her boobs. This was Cher’s one famous public outfit malfunction.

In this segment the suspenders are white and she’s wearing a short, curly wig. Mr. Cher Scholar says she’s really rocking the Joyce DeWitt look. The stage is framed with huge file cabinets which, when opened, dancers pour out. She does some Cher-surfing.

Mr. Cher Scholar called the dance “a bit obvious” but I like it, especially the fake drivers license that comes up on the screen at the end. Her fake California license plate number is Ch83271 and it says she’s 5’7” and weights 107 pounds. (Is that mathematically possible?) It has her correct birthday.

Cher does the dance of many arms that shows up in other live dance show numbers, like in the Farewell Tour.

Aside from breaking into acting, Cher is also trying to transform herself from a pop singer to a rock singer. This is an early example of her slipping rock music into her shows. She’ll form the band Black Rose next year and aside from that venture she will be slipping more rock songs into her pop live shows and records.

The next album, Prisoner, will be half disco and half Toto-inspired soft-rock material and for 1982’s I Paralyze she will find another one (from The Babys). Her Vegas and Monte Carlo shows will have Eagles and Doobie Brothers songs. Finally she will sign a contract with Geffen Records in the mid-80s and be able to break onto MTV with her Bon Jovi-style rock.

Cher will do another Bob Seger song, “Fire Down Below” in her Heart of Stone tour.

She is clearly not a trained dancer but she seems joyous and dancing like she’s having a good time. Mr. Cher Scholar contends that she is so cute and likeable that we will watch her even bad specials like this because she always looks like she’s having fun. He equates watching Cher to watching The Rat Pack, whose material was not all that funny but it was always fun to watch people laughing and having fun.

My only critique of this performance is that it’s hard to impossible to imagine Cher ever being treated like just another number.

The Painter on Skates
Gould is on roller skates now. He tells Cher it’s story-time and he points her toward a door that leads to The Magic Shop.

The Red Shoes or The Red Skates (Video)
This might have been inspired by the new roller skating craze Cher allegedly started in the late 1970s with her occasional celebrity skating parties.

Cher enters a skate shop with a light blue skating jacket, shorts and knee-high stripped socks under blue boots. She looks cute. This is basically the retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen story, “The Red Shoes.”

She sees some magic skates and insists on having them, despite the warnings of the skate-maker. Putting them on turns her outfit into a blue skating dress with head wings.

Cher does some skating with a gang of skaters. The backdrop is black with lights. They use visual blur effects (think The Jacksons dancing on Midnight Special) to make the skating seem more interesting. There are group skate routines and pair skate routines. The skaters are good but roller skating isn’t as fun to watch as ice skating is.

This one is even more dull than the Stories skit. It’s over seven minutes and has no Cher song, only narration by Gould.

All the male skaters want to skate with her but she falls in love with a mustached, blonde skater.

The skate-maker becomes jealous and destroys all his competition and controls her skates for all of eternity. She has made the deal with the Devil and will never be able to take off the red skates.

Fun.

Cher would do a roller-skating song later in the year called “Hell on Wheels” for the Prisoner album (also in the Linda Blair teen-romance movie Roller Boogie). Cher had also done a roller-skating song in the past,  “Brand New Key” on the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in the early 1970s.

The Painter Eating
Gould sits at a small table with candles and he has an “out to lunch” sign hanging from his neck. He’s miming eating food. Cher joins him and they mime eating smoked salmon together.

It’s interesting to note that Elliot Gould was also in a movie with Sonny this same year, the star-packed war movie, Escape to Athena.

This skit is another tiresome beginner’s acting workshop bit. Cher tells him she’s “gotta get outa here.” Eliot warns her it’s a jungle out there.

More Than You Know (Video)
From the musical Great Day (1929)
This is another song Cher returns to over and over again. One of my favorites. Cher is tied up in a Seussian thneed-like leopard outfit on a red couch. The jungle is make of green paper and there’s a macaw offstage calling. Her makeup is subdued. Her long hair wig is tied to a tree.

In the middle, she pauses the song and a black leopard runs through the set. Cher said she was terrified at the moment but you can’t tell.

Cher has performed this song many times going back to:

Adam and The Snake (Video)
Andy Kaufman, doing his Taxi character Latka Gravas, is dressed inexplicably in long white underwear and leafy shorts and is dribbling a basket ball. He is playing a confused Adam.

Similar to the Adam and Eve subversion with Lily Tomlin and Cher on her solo show episode #6,  Adam is the one who has the encounter with the snake, played by Cher in an absolutely amazing outfit. The snakeskin knee-high boots alone. Cher wears her real hair in this skit too, short and slicked back.

Kaufman of course falls for Cher-as-the-snake and she tries to coach him  on how to flirt with Eve, what Eve wants, that he should take Eve slow dancing. Adam is not sure. Cher says Eve is a real nice girl and she can do things to make his figs fall off.

Offscreen we hear Eve who is actually Laverne. She comes onstage calling Adam sweet-cheeks. She promises to show Adam “things you thought were physically impossible.”

In a green screen special effect, there are two Cher’s now, the snake and Laverne. Adam insists he’s still afraid but he goes off with Eve/Laverne.

Cher in the Lobby
 Cher runs through the Bradbury Building lobby desperate to find an exit.

Take Me Home (Video)
From Cher’s Take Me Home album
In a white room full of male dancers in white suits, Cher dances around wearing a gold off-the-shoulder dress and shoulder fur and a short, crimped wig.  They dance on silver chairs and white blocks.

This is completely boring.

There are more interesting shots as Cher and the dancers dance down the hallways of the Bradbury Building and descend down the elevator

(Oh, I just now get it! She wants to go home! The theme of the show was based on the song…wait, what?)

At the end, Cher is back in secretarial garb dancing with Gould (or rather a dancer dressed like him).

Mr. Cher Scholar says for the eponymous number of a TV special intended to sell an album, this should have been a bigger number. I agree this time. The performance feels so much more dull than the album song itself which is a sexy little disco romp.

Lucille Ball as The Washer Woman
In what seems a bit of a rip-off of Carol Burnett, we get Lucille Ball’s version of a blacked-out toothed washerwoman. She’s grumpy and has a lot to do and she doesn’t want to be bothered with Cher’s questions about escaping the building.

She says Bippity Boppity Boo at one point (fairy-godmother-speak from Disney’s Cinderella). This lyric snippet incidentally also appeared in the Cher…Special 1978 in the Dolly Parton song-lyric skit.

Lucille Ball tells Cher she has quit law school and that Cher’s hands are clammy and that Cher can’t leave the building until midnight.

Gould comes out of the elevator and gets to bickering with Ball about magic powers. You can tell these two don’t like each other and you wonder if the bad will was entirely acting.

Because there hasn’t really been much good acting  up to this point. Why start now?

At one point Ball pretends to cut off a piece of Gould’s hair behind his back. It’s uncomfortable.

But we can’t hate at on Lucille Ball too much here because she was a friend of the Cher family. Cher’s mother Georgia appeared in I Love Lucy as a fashion model. Ball also helped Cher with much-needed encouragement before she left her marriage to Sonny. (Ball had some experience in this area.) So crucial was Ball’s role in Cher’s breakup with Sonny, she was included as a character in the Broadway musical to re-enact their pep-talk.

This special occurred late in Ball’s career and by this time she was seeming a bit crusty and bitter.

Cher picked one of Lucille Ball’s movies for her Turner Classic Movies co-hosting stint (The Big Street, 1942). Although I’ve always found Desi Arnaz to be very sexy, I was never a fan of I Love Lucy and my favorite movie role of Lucille Ball’s was her sassy, worldly-wise character in Stage Door.

In any case, Gould’s last advise for Cher is to click her heels three times. Cher tries this and it doesn’t work and Gould and Ball disappear.

Ok…so that was all a waste of time? Ugh.

Take Me Home, the Ballad Version (Audio Only)
Cher is sad and sitting on the steps of the building singing a ballad version of the “Take Me Home” which is quite lovely. Ferns sit on pedestals.

For some reason, this action works and the building door swing open. Cher is suddenly in jeans and a white shirt and coat and she runs out into the street.

She jumps into a jeep with Raymond J. Johnson Jr.  and they drive off with Johnson doing his “You can call me Johnson…” bit as the credits roll. Compared to almost every variety show and special’s big finale, this is a real down ending.

Highlights:
This special feels grim and lackluster (and for Cher to make something dull…is pretty amazing). But two of the Cher musical numbers are good, “Feel Like a Number” and “More Than You Know.” The ballad of “Take Me Home” is also very nice.

Like many things in 1979, this special has a visually dark and neon feel about it. The decade was coming to a close and music was changing. So was Cher. She’d resurface in the new 80s decade with a new look and a new sound and would never again make a variety show or variety special. This was the end of yet another Cher era.