Last week Mr. Cher Scholar was out of the house for an evening which gave me a chance to catch up on my Cher-related documentaries, which included watching the final cut of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion (2024) and first-time watching Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story (2017) and Diane Warren: Relentless (2024).

I would have imagined these subjects to be as different as could be; but I was surprised by many interesting similarities (aside from Cher’s stage-stealing presence in each of them). All three of these people, (Bob Mackie, Diane Warren and Kevin Aucoin), knew from a very young age (like under 10 years old) exactly what they wanted to do with their lives vocationally and each one of them began working on their professional goals as teenagers, becoming known in each case as artists who started out very young. Aucoin and Mackie achieved success younger than Warren, but she made herself known to professionals in her field around the same age. They were all hustling early, with little interest for anything else.

Both the Mackie and Warren documentaries open with alternate takes of Cher’s “Turn Back Time.” (How could a documentarian resist using that song if Cher is involved, I guess). Mackie’s movie uses a slow rendition and Warren’s doc uses an acapella version.

Both Mackie and Aucoin practiced drawing pictures of celebrities when they were young boys. For Mackie it was old movie and musical stars and their outfits. Aucoin did faces and was obsessed with Barbra Streisand and he played Streisand and Cher records all the time, to the chagrin of the cis-gendered brother he shared a room with.

In all three cases, these artists are or were ubiquitous in their field: Diane Warren has written for more recording artists than any other songwriter, “all the real stars…the biggest stars wore Bob Mackie” and Kevyn Aucoin was the makeup artist most favored by the female models, musicians and actresses of his time.

Bob Mackie “made them look like the superstars they were.” Kevyn Aucoin’s presented them at their most beautiful. And Diane Warren gave them number one hits.

All three documentaries talk about matching or unveiling the unique characters of their clients: matching the right song to the right artist, designing a costume to “pick up on somebody’s essence” and designing makeup to accentuate a person’s unique beauty. In the Mackie documentary Law Roach says, “every superhero has his costume” and Mackie gave stars theirs. Diane Warren and Kevyn Aucoin likewise gave their artists extraordinary assists.

In Mackie and Warren’s case, they did not become divas in the way Kevyn Aucoin allegedly became. They also survived their fame and he did not. But they all suffered bullying and trauma for not conforming to social norms as kids. (Which was news to me watching all three docs.)

Paul Stanley is seen in Warren’s documentary stating that her genius is her lack of a fingerprint, meaning the university of her songs. Warren calls it a kind of openness. It’s hard to disagree with this in a business sense. (Her success speaks for itself.) But I would disagree in an aesthetic sense. Every great writer has a fingerprint, a unique vocabulary of words or styles. And I was comforted to learn Diane Warren was as eccentric as she is and not as “open” and unspecific as a person. The uniqueness is where the true gold lies and Warren seemed refreshingly unique under all those hits.

Cher’s presence in each of these documentaries is different and those differences were fascinating to compare.

Bob Mackie and Cher are almost synonymous. Aside from his ingenious work on The Carol Burnett Show, his career seemed to soar right along his glamourous make-overs of Cher in her 1970s variety shows and later live appearances and tours. His documentary dramatically recounts the dress she wore to the first Met Gala in 1974 and the effect it had on everybody attending. I never get tired of hearing Hal Rubenstein’s retelling of his Lillian Gish conversation that night, seeing Lillian Gish at the Meta Gala sitting all by herself, lit by only one candle. And when she sees Cher walk by she exclaims, “Oh my! Look at her.” Rubenstein adds, “so did everyone else in the room.” (The story has such undertones of changing Hollywood beauty standards and passing the torch.)

“Style is really confidence,” Rubenstein says and you would imagine Diane Warren and Kevyn Aucoin might agree. Cher is a predominant talking head in the Mackie documentary, as you would expect, talking about her first meeting with him, how he helped give her confidence with his designs and how much fun they had creating them.

Side note: I was lucky to be able to attend the premiere of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion at The Paley Center in 2023, where we spotted Diane Warren in the audience (and Mackie’s master seamstress, Elizabeth Aghayan, sitting in our row). And I don’t remember the Mackie documentary covering this, but Cher and Mackie seem to have the closest personal relationship of all his clients. I seem to remember a story about Cher helping Mackie financially at one point. In any case, it’s been a very bounteous friendship.

 

In the Kevyn Aucoin documentary, Larger Than Life (a reference to his size), Cher has a much smaller footprint, but then she seems to have worked with him for only a short amount of time. The documentary has them first working together from Cher’s“Dov’è L’amore” video (1999) to her “Song for the Lonely” video (2002) and he apparently died a few months after that.  Cher talks about the “Dov’è L’amore” video where Aucoin took hours upon hours to do the amazing eye makeup for Cher.

Cher says they hung out from time to time shopping for makeup together, even though, Cher quipping, nobody could have possibly had more makeup than the two of them already had. Cher’s admission in her 2024 memoirs that she did her own makeup for most of her career sheds new light on this affinity with Aucoin. It reminds me of her long-time relationship with interior designer Ron Wilson. They share with Cher a love of those particular art forms (the room and the face).

And although Cher isn’t seen much in the Aucoin documentary, her appearances are very significant to his story personally. First of all, as an early fan of Streisand and Cher, it’s interesting to note that it wasn’t Streisand who befriended him. And I’m no Streisand scholar but I don’t overhear many stories about Streisand befriending people who work for her. Maybe she does. But you hear about Cher’s friendships with  long-term  working partnerships pretty often. Maybe she’s just friendlier.  In this case it was Cher who first alerted Aucoin to the fact that his big health issue (he was suffering chronic pain and growing taller and larger into adulthood) was acromegaly. The documentary recounts that Cher told him this while they were working on a second video shoot, which was most likely the video for “The Music’s No Good Without You.”

Sidenote: As I was researching this, I read about the video on the song’s Wikipedia page: it “was filmed on October 7–8, 2001, on an elaborate sound stage with a ‘spaced out’ design at Nikken Building, in Irvine, California. The director commented, ‘Cher is about the only other person I know who knows anything about Gormenghast – and that was my model for this video’.” (I had no idea. And I’ve read those crazy Gormenghast novels. But even I didn’t make it through the series.)

Cher not only correctly guessed Aucoin’s condition but she found him the world’s leading expert on the disorder. Maybe she learned about it through her association with the movie Mask and her involvement with Children’s Craniofacial Association? In any case, the diagnosis did lead to surgery but unfortunately the drug addiction Aucoin used previously to manage the pain continued and his behavior deteriorated.

In the documentary, it was on a third, unmaimed Cher video, (Cher says it was on a rooftop in the Village and research shows it was for the “Song for the Lonely” video), where Aucoin failed to show up and Cher had to do her own makeup and then he did show up and there was an exchange with “Liz” (Cher’s publicist, Liz Rosenberg?) who told Aucoin not to take anything until after the shoot was over but two hours later Aucoin collapsed and paramedics had to be called. This hit the news and Aucoin’s career went into a tailspin as a result. In the documentary Aucoin’s husband Jeremy recalls the denial surrounding Aucoin’s condition and says, “but Cher wasn’t in denial.” Cher told Jeremy, ”He needs help.” And it sounds like his people did try to help but to no avail.

So not a lot of screentime for Cher in this documentary but pretty important bits.

 

Cher is again a bigger presence in the Diane Warren’s documentary. Cher has plenty to say about her friendship with Warren. They’re seen talking on the phone and Cher is the first talking head, producing adjectives for Warren such as nuts, cheap, unrelenting, optimistic, sweet, crazy and “she writes great songs.” I could see two Cher posters on Diane Warren walls as the camera weaves around her messy spaces. Unlike Mackie and Aucoin, who seem neat and organized, (for Aucoin at least while he was while sober), Warren’s brain space seems much more disheveled. Cher jokes that every time Warren calls her, it’s with the promise of “the best song she’s ever written.” I realized watching this documentary there were more Warren songs I liked than I remembered: “Rhythm of the Night” was a song I used to dance to in my basement as a tween and I wrote a poem once while “Unbreak My Heart” was on repeat play.

Warren and Cher both tell the “If I Could Turn Back Time” story with Warren’s horrible demo. They play the demo and am I crazy to say I like the demo better because it sounds grittier? They dramatically re-enact Cher saying over and over again that “she fucking hates” the song. (These two fucking potty mouths, am I right?) It wasn’t until Warren offered to “pay for the track” and Cher’s realization of Warren’s innate cheapness that made Cher change her mind. Cher says she recorded the song in 15 minutes and from the start of singing it she realized it was the perfect song for her. Warren was vindicated. Cher now calls it ”one of my favorite songs and one of my biggest hits.”

What is curious to me is why this Diane Warren’s documentary was produced by the Master Class people. Normally this is streaming service full of lectures about craft. This documentary was mostly about Warren’s personal life and professional accolades. It was, by Warren’s own admission, antithetical to discussing any kind of craft process at all. In fact, the only backstory we hear in any detail was for the origins of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (which interestingly could be traced back to a Barbra Streisand and James Brolin interview. The other backstory was for her very personal song written for Lady Gaga, “Til It Happens to You.” It would have been great to hear about the creative origins of other songs like “If I Could Turn Back Time” or “When I See You Smile” or my high-school’s perky graduation anthem, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

Regardless of whether her songs have personal origins or not, Warren maintains her songwriting is an ephemeral, almost magical process for her and she doesn’t like to talk about it. Which would seem to disqualify her from a Master Class type situation and It reminded me of seeing the poet Albert Goldbarth (one of my favorite poets) at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books one year and him saying he same nonsense about the writing poems, an attitude which would also have seemed to disqualify him from sitting on a panel about writing poems. It’s not that I don’t believe in magic and mystery. It’s just that I just don’t attribute that to the workings of the animal brain.

It’s not introspection that Warren fears, however.  I was happy to hear her say she believed starting therapy only helped her songwriting. Turns out she’s just superstitious. Fair enough.

I did appreciate Warren calling out the other unheralded songwriters who get marginalized for being women: Joni Mitchell, Laura Nero and Carole King. It was hard to watch all her Oscar close-calls. It was like watching a heroic outcast keep trying to win favor from the popular kids. But then maybe Warren’s situation had more to do with early childhood memories and drama than it did courting acceptance from her peers.

And although Bob Mackie’s scars are not dealt with head-on in his documentary, they are alluded to. And you can see they still take their toll. His childhood struggles and adult tragedies were the most poignant parts of his documentary. All of these three artists struggled to find support during their childhoods to some extent, finding one or two cheerleaders if they found any.

So it was great to see Cher as the one to give Diane Warren her honorary Oscar at the end of the Warren documentary. (And that looks like a  real, hardy hug Cher gets, by the way.)

 

The Diane Warren Songs Recorded by Cher:

  1. “Give Our Love a Fightin’ Chance” (with Desmond Child, 1987)
  2. “Perfection” (with Desmond Child, 1987)
  3. “Does Anybody Really Fall in Love Anymore?” (with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child, 1989)
  4. “Emotional Fire” (with Desmond Child and Michael Bolton, 1989)
  5. “If I Could Turn Back Time” (1989)
  6. “Just Like Jessie James” (with Desmond Child, 1989)
  7. “You Wouldn’t Know Love” (with Michael Bolton, 1989)
  8. “Love and Understanding” (1991)
  9. “When Lovers Become Strangers” (1991)
  10. “Takin’ Back My Heart” (1998)
  11. “Body to Body, Heart to Heart” (2001)
  12. “When You Walk Away” (2001) – my favorite of the Diane Warren/Cher songs.
  13. “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” (2010) – admittedly, a pretty perfect match for a song and Cher
  14. “Prayers for This World” (2017)

And Diane Warren’s one-time partner, Guy Roche, plays keyboards on Cher’s Heart of Stone album and plays synthesizers and produces with Warren on the Diane-Warren-penned songs for Cher’s Love Hurts album.

The Dresses of Cher & Bob Mackie

  1. “Cher’s 10 Best Looks of All Time, Hand-Picked by Bob Mackie” (Variety, 20 May 2021)
  2. “Designer Bob Mackie Didn’t Want Anyone to Know He ‘Had Anything to Do’ With Cher’s Iconic Bodysuit” (US Weekly, 26 January 2025)
  3. “Cher and Bob Mackie on Over 60 Years of Iconic Looks” (Harper’s Bazaar, 11 October 2024)

Kevyn Aucoin and Cher

  1. The Dov’è L’amore video
  2. Dov’è L’amore behind the scenes
  3. The Music’s No Good Without You video
  4. The Song for the Lonely video
  5. “Makeup Breakup” (New York Magazine) – More detail about the final interactions between Aucoin and Cher.
  6. At Aucoin’s Face Forward book launch party, you can see him with two titans of 1970s CBS television. Have you seen them together in one picture before?

In Other Cher friendliness…

“How Talking to Cher Helped Gregory Arlt’s Makeup Career“(Preen, 2017)