So I continue to think about Cher’s in-progress autobiography, in both its book and movie form.
Just to note: cherscholar.com does have a Cher biography reference page. There have been only a few good Cher books despite the span of seven decades. The best writers have been J. Randy Taraborrelli, Mark Bego and Josiah Howard, although there have been some really great fan-created books as well. Check out the full list: https://www.cherscholar.com/books-2/.
After we last left this topic, Cher scholar Toby recommended I watch the Bob Dylan biography I Am Not There. And I should have watched it sooner because I really loved Cate Blanchett in Manifesto (it was very literary). And experimental biography is what I most liked about Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life.
But I guess you can have too many experiments going on because then it’s hard to evaluate the results of any single one. It’s like the scientific maxim to keep your hypothesis simple. Maybe this is true of art as well.
And due to too many experiments working their way through I Am Not There, to coin a Gertrude Stein phrase, there becomes no there there. But they were all interesting experiments individually, so let’s discuss them one by one.
(Let me know if I’m missing any.)
Experiment 1:
Biopics of music artists often suffer from impersonations instead of interpretations. This was the great failure of the one biopic of Cher we have already seen, And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny & Cher Story. It would be difficult to put on the skin of any iconic performer, but nearly impossible for the inimitable ones.
Why not experiment with multiples? Christian Bale and Kate Blanchette were my favorite Bob Dylans in I’m Not There. The deployment of multiple Dylans seemed like a genius solution to the problem of finding one actor who can hit all the different eras. Cher has already borrowed on this idea with her Broadway show and three Chers co-habituating and communicating throughout the entire story, albeit those Chers without name-brand interpreters.
And collectively, maybe multiple actors gets to the same point that a really good deep-layer interpreter would get to anyway, something beyond the surface level of looks and mimicry, something that can live above and apart from the person described.
I think Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita is a good example of this. And as I’ve said, the Fanny Brice musicals. Another actor can come in and embody the spirit without our fretting about lookalike and soundalike-ness.
To me that all seems like a red-herring at the end of the day (or the end of the soul, as it were) and so it makes the idea of multiples a moot point. Yeah, we’re all comprised of separate people. But we’re all also one person too.
Experiment 2:
I love the idea of entangling the myth of a life with its facts, myths created by iconic images and I’m Not There did that really well. And like with multiple actorly embodiments, this experiment plays on the idea of there being no “I” there or “no there there” as Gertrude Stein would have it.
And I think this dilemma is baked into the whole Bob Dylan thing so this experiment was not only the most interesting to me but felt very pertinent to its subject.
I think the very same issues play similarly into the Cher story, (most ideas formed about Cher are based on a few iconic images), so this would be an interesting experiment to borrow from.
Experiment 3:
The different Bob Dylans were also embodying Dylan’s own iconic mentors in somewhat interesting mashups: Dylan with Woody Guthrie or Billy the Kid or Arthur Rimbaud and this was probably one of the least interesting experiments for me. How much of you is what you love and admire? Maybe that’s its own movie right there. Because this is one experiment that requires more finesse than there is time for as one experiment of many. It just came across as too surface-level for me. One of my favorite quotes is from Charles de Gualle, “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” It’s so complicated.
We all put on uniforms to walk through the world and we often borrow the clothes of those we admire. But what then? There’s a lot more to explore there.
Experiment 4:
Time shifts, which are interesting in any other postmodern depiction, but here they just felt too tangled up in all the other experiments, different times interspersed with different Dylans.
Experiment 5:
Let’s make it a musical, but just barely.
That all said I actually liked the movie. All the competing experiments just made the film extremely self-conscious as a biopic. That’s not a crime though. There were beautiful and interesting shots (which could save any flawed Cher biopic, by the way).
On a related note, I’m making my way ever-so-slowly through a bathroom stack of New Yorkers. My friend Kalisha recently gave me a more modern issue from July of 2023 because there was a short story in it that reminded her of Haruki Murakami, a writer we both like. In the same issue there was an essay by Parul Sehgal, “Tell No Tales,” about how storytelling has pervaded areas where it shouldn’t, like politics, office PowerPoints, religious screeds.
But also biographies. Sehgal says,
“The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, ‘You Could Make This Place Beautiful,’ notes wryly, ‘It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?’ She goes on, ‘At any given moment, I wonder: Is this the rising action? Has the climax already happened or are we not even there yet?’ It’s not just the unruliness of life that is ill-served by story and its corrective resolution.”
Cher only had one long-form interview last year while promoting her Christmas album on the 60-minute BBC special “Cher Meets Rylan.” It’s the last interview we have to talk about from that blitzkrieg of publicity and it’s relevant to our topic today because Cher had a few new biographical stories to tell in it.
Ryland calls Cher a s diva, icon, goddess, a pioneer in fashion. The fact that Rylan is so young he came to Cher from the song “Believe” sill seems incredible to me. Therefore the majority of the retrospective Cher reels were from the 1980s and beyond.
They talk about how much she loves London and how some of her outfits are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They talk about her Christmas album and Cher says that because the songs didn’t really go together, she worried people wouldn’t “get it.”
She tells a story about her mother Georgia getting up on the roof of her house and nailing her shingles back on as an example of how kick-ass she was. Cher also said Georgia was talented, hysterical and Cher said she died so she could be herself again.
They talk about the dyslexia, the Cher sayings (“If it doesn’t matter in five years,” borrowed from her mother, and “I am a rich man.”)
Cher has been wearing fingerless hand-gloves for all of these interviews for some reason.
She tells a new story about running away at nine-years old with her friend Anita, first on a horse and then on a train. This has to be in the biopic. And it’s eerily similar to Dylan’s young train mashup-moment in I’m Not There.
She talks about playing all the boy parts in a backyard-like production of Oklahoma when she was in grade school. She covers her jobs at Robinson’s department store and the candy store with the old ladies. She talks about meeting Sonny in the coffee shop below the popular radio station, Sonny’s smile and how he wanted to make her a singer but that she was just loose energy at the time, not focused and really shy.
She notes that Sonny & Cher had five songs in the top 40 at the same time, some songs which were prior-nonhits re-released when “I Got You Babe” became a summer phenomenon.
Steaming has confused statistics like these. My friend Christopher recently gave me a phone lecture on the way the charts worked before and after streaming and how Taylor Swift just scored 26 songs at once on the Top 100.
Cher talks about how she used to make clothes with her friends and how Sonny was so game to wear whatever she came up with. “We thought we were beautiful. People thought we were grungy.”
And then strangely, we skip to 1979 to talk about Studio 54. The new shocking story there is how Cher once took Al Pacino to Studio 54.
It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of Cher and Al Pacino on an outing together (just like it is for me to get my head around Sonny & Cher singing late 1970s rock ballads).
Al Pacino was working on a Broadway play. A quick scan of his Wikipedia page and knowing the span of Studio 54 was 1977-1986, the play was either “The Basic Training of Pavlo,” “Richard III” or “American Buffalo.”
Anyway, after Cher invited him, he brought the whole cast, Cher says, and everyone had a great time except for Al Pacino who looked uncomfortable the whole night. Oh dear. Not surprising but quite an embarrassing Cher-date-fail for Al Pacino.
Cher talks about her acting in “Jimmy Dean” and how the actresses were great. She talks about being pen pals with her idol Audrey Hepburn. She says she doesn’t work for the accolades, that “you do work for the work” and the awards are a bonus. She calls Meryl Streep Mary Louise.
She again says she was dropped from two record companies and that the song “Believe” took a lot of people because the verses were not good. Rylan reminds us that “Believe” is still the UK’s biggest selling single by a woman artist.
Cher talks about her former place in Wapping where she was living at the time of recording “Believe,” that it was an old rum warehouse. Ryland says the song was crucial for a gay boy to hear, how he believed “this is the world I’m gonna grow up in now.” (That was actually very moving.) He talks about the song’s impact on the music industry. Cher says AI pisses her off.
So the technology thing is complicated.
Cher talks about how for her 1970s-era variety shows, she would meet with Bob Mackie for three hours each Wednesday and how Mackie was making one amazing thing after another. She still goes out in jeans. She’s still a jeans person. But she also loves wigs.
She says she met Elton John the first time he came to America and she found him adorable. They were all friends: Elton, Diana Ross and Bette Midler and she tells of a time they all went shopping in New York.
She says she’s lived a thousand lives, (she calls herself “older than dirt”) and that this is a biography problem. Rylan asks her if she’s had a fav Chera. She says she’s been written off in so many eras and accused of reinventing herself. She says she wasn’t reinventing; she was just out of work.
