Cher (17 page)

Exactly at this time, Kapp Records was no more, as it was absorbed into MCA Records. Sonny seized this opportunity to get Snuff Garrett out of the way and begin producing Cher and Sonny & Cher records by himself.

Reluctantly, MCA gave Sonny the chance to be in control of his and Cher’s recording career again. He wanted to produce on his own, but MCA wasn’t about to go for that. Sonny was allowed to produce the next Cher album, and the next Sonny & Cher album was to be produced by and/or with his friend Denis Pregnolato. Unfortunately, the resulting albums were complete disasters.

The biggest musical nightmare that Sonny orchestrated was the title cut to the worst Sonny & Cher album,
Mama Was a Rock & Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All Her Songs
. It was another autobiographical Sonny
Bono composition about his life with Cher. This time around, in the context of the song he bitterly made fun of the title of Cher’s previous album,
Foxy Lady
, lyrically claiming she was “vamping” everyone in town and had effectively “messed up the world” of Sonny & Cher. This was clearly a “fuck you” note from Sonny to Cher. The highly unmelodic song was an expensive vanity project that was doomed from the start. According to assistant recording engineer Barry Rudolph,

We had 52 musicians crammed into every nook and cranny of Larrabee Studios. There were four or five guitar players, a full brass section, two or three percussionists—maybe 25 people in one room, with Cher in a vocal booth. Across the hall, we had four or five Hawaiians playing six-foot sticks. In another room, we had a harp player. In the control room, we had six background singers, live. Paul Beaver was playing the Moog synthesizer. Everything was written out by Michael Rubini, but Sonny kept adding things. It took all those musicians ten minutes to file out of the studio for what was supposed to be a ten-minute break (55).

The song was an overproduced debacle that ran over nine minutes in length. When it was cut down to a single running three minutes and forty-one seconds, it made it onto the music charts and stalled at Number 77. The Sonny & Cher album
Mama Was a Rock & Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All Her Songs
only made it to Number 132 on the charts, as compared with its predecessor, the duo’s
All I Ever Need Is You
, which made it to Number 14 with Snuff Garrett producing.

The strongest songs on the album were the duo’s cover versions of Albert Hammond’s “It Never Rains in Southern California,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Listen to the Music,” Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” and Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.” The most significant song on the album was written by Bob Stone, who had given Cher “Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves.” It was a song called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” It was about the breakup of a marriage, with Sonny singing about his wife walking out on him. Never was there a more prophetic or autobiographical song about the Sonny & Cher saga. In time it would become crystal clear just how true it was to be.

After Cher recorded two of the most successful albums of her career—
Cher
and
Foxy Lady
—at Sonny’s insistence he was allowed to produce her next album,
Bittersweet White Light
. Tackling eleven “standards” like the ones she was occasionally singing on the television series, Cher warbled her way through “The Man That Got Away,” “Am I Blue,”
“How Long Has This Been Going On,” “More Than You Know,” a sort-of schmaltzy Al Jolson medley, and several other songs from 1918 to 1953. Instead of being a beautiful masterpiece, the resulting album was heavily overproduced. On some of the songs—especially “By Myself”—Cher’s singing style is so completely over-the-top that it devours the subtle ballads. This point was to be further driven home two albums later when she recorded a subtle and stunning version of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do,” and beautifully nailed the song.

Bittersweet White Light
was a complete “bomb” that self-destructed after reaching Number 160 on the
Billboard
album chart when it was released in 1973. A single of “Am I Blue” was released, but it went nowhere. Bette Midler had just recorded a superior version on her
Divine Miss M
album the previous year. Cher’s first MCA album and Sonny & Cher’s first MCA album were both huge sales disappointments. An edict came down from the top brass at MCA: Sonny Bono was out as Cher’s producer, and Snuff Garrett was reinstated.

Now that Sonny & Cher were huge television stars, their previous record companies jumped at the opportunity to capitalize upon all the publicity that they were generating and all of the current exposure on the radio airwaves that they were receiving. In 1972, United Artists Records, which now had control of Cher’s Imperial Records material from the 1960s, released two separate two-record sets
Cher/Superpak
and
Cher/Superpak Volume II
. Each contained twenty-four Cher solos, taking the best of her first five solo albums for Imperial, from 1965’s
All I Really Want to Do
to 1968’s
Backstage
. In February of 1972,
Cher/Superpak
reached Number 92 on
Billboard
’s album chart in America. The following year, ATCO Records got into the act, releasing the 1973 two-record album set
The Two of Us
, featuring twenty-four of the best cuts from the duo’s first three albums for that label, from “I Got You Babe” to “The Beat Goes On.”

Cher and Sonny & Cher were big news again. Record shops were filled with their releases. By 1973 there were thirteen different Cher albums and ten different Sonny & Cher albums. They were on the covers of magazines, they were appearing in concert year-round, and they were on television screens every week. Not only had they revived their careers to the point of their popularity in the 1960s, they had surpassed it in every way.

In spite of some temporary slippage on the charts with the two Snuff Garrett-less albums, Sonny & Cher’s career was going fantastically in
1973. They were in their third season on television, and
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
was still rated in the Top 10. As long as Garrett was producing them, their records were selling, and they were in demand on the nightclub and concert circuit. They had even incorporated their adorable little daughter, Chastity, into their weekly variety show, and they appeared to be America’s ideal hip and happy couple. Unfortunately, that was not the case after the cameras stopped rolling. Unbeknownst to Sonny, their marriage was eroding amid all of the high-profile activity.

One of the lyric lines to the song “Mama Was a Rock & Roll Singer Papa Used to Write All Her Songs” found Sonny accusing his “foxy lady” of “going and messing up the world.” This
truly
applied to Sonny Bono’s ability to pick and produce hits, circa 1972–73. It also applied to Cher’s personal frustrations with her new life at the top. It wasn’t all a bed of roses—by a long shot. Although no one knew it at the time, the LP was to be the final Sonny & Cher studio album ever to be recorded.

According to Cher,

The first year we were doing our CBS show, I had had fourteen days off out of 365. The second year, between the show and personal appearances, I didn’t have even one day off. I developed all sorts of ailments: stomach trouble, skin rashes—from nerves. I told Sonny I just couldn’t take it anymore. He told me that I could—I just had to try, that’s all. He was right. I did try, I did make it. I was able to keep up with the work schedules, just like he said—but I was miserable (60).

She further explained, “Even though Sonny always gave me the spotlight on-stage, he had this macho thing about keeping me in the background off-stage. A real pain in the ass. The whole time I was married to Sonny, we hardly ever went anywhere, and I never really knew that many people. I was really isolated” (6).

Her mother, Georgia Holt, recalls,

I was thrilled by their success. I continued to worry about Cher. Then gradually Sonny came between us. He thought I was too influential in Cher’s life. When Chastity was born, I became the happiest grandmother in the United States. When Sonny and Cher were working, Chastity spent a lot of time with me, and I loved every moment of it. She is a sweet, beautiful girl. Sometimes I let Cher know I thought she was working too hard. She was always getting sick and winding up in the hospital. She goes beyond her endurance and doesn’t get enough rest. Once she went onstage with a 102 degree fever! I was the last one to know that Sonny and Cher weren’t getting along. They kept all their unhappiness from me (11).

According to Cher, her life with Sonny had been going downhill for a long time.

After the baby was born, things started to get different, but not so that he [Sonny] even noticed. I started feeling more like a woman. I carried over half the load, but I knew I never would have been out there if it weren’t for him. Otherwise, I might as well have been in a closet someplace in east Guam. But as I started feeling more mature, I got more pissed off about things I wanted that weren’t exactly outrageous and he just laid a definite “no” on them. One of the things I originally found so attractive about Sonny was that he really believed women should be taken care of. Eventually, it got to the point of driving me crazy (18).

Although they had continued to tape their weekly show together, things around the set of
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
were getting too bizarre to handle. The pressure of breaking up with your spouse, and having to work with him week after week, all the while pretending that nothing was wrong, finally proved too much for Cher. According to her, “I remember one night singing ‘I Got You Babe’ at the end, thinking ‘I can’t wait until I’m off the show so I can go see my boyfriend at the beach” (61).

Cher felt she was chained to a never-ending treadmill. Remembering the nonstop pace that she was traveling at in 1972 and 1973, Cher said,

I was growing up and he wasn’t catching up. Plus, from the time we began the show until I left him, it was constant work. I went to the hospital two or three times a year—I have anemia and lose weight very easily. And we had a schedule that would break a three hundred pound truck driver. We’d do the show, then weekends and holidays we’d do one-nighters and interviews and picture sessions (18).

She finally reached the end of her rope.

If you watched
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
, you assumed I was this wisecracking girl who ran our lives off-stage, ’cause Sonny seemed so meek and easygoing. Hah! In real life he was this Sicilian dictator husband—I could say nothing! We were in the Nielsen [TV ratings] Top Ten, we had all this money, everybody told me how lucky and happy I was—when actually I weighed 93 pounds. I was constantly sick, could not eat, could not sleep (19).

I shopped all the time, because that was the only way I could get out of the house alone without being supervised. Just shopped my ass off. Then I took up needlepoint—my God, I needlepointed everything. I could have made a needlepoint stove! I was so unhappy. Everyone was having a great time but me. I’d be put in bed after the show, take off my lashes, and just go to sleep. And they’d stay up. And I just thought, Goddamn, I’m 26 [years old], these ten years have gone by so quickly. I just wanted to be a human being, to go and do things (18).

Cher finally reached an impasse one night after a show in Las Vegas in late 1972.

Two decades later Sonny Bono was to claim in his autobiography that their breakup was entirely Cher’s doing. According to him, on November 15, 1972, Sonny & Cher were booked to perform two shows at the Flamingo Hotel. They performed their first show to a packed house. In between shows, Cher went back to the couple’s suite, while Sonny, Denis Pregnolato, and their guitarist Bill Hamm went over to the Hilton to watch Tina Turner’s show. They returned to the Flamingo in time for Sonny & Cher’s second sold-out show of the night, which received three standing ovations.

After the show, Sonny and Cher rode the elevator up to their suite, making only small talk along the way. When they got to their suite, Sonny threw his jacket on the bed and began unbuckling his belt. Cher shot him a look that he claimed “was completely foreign to the repertoire I knew so well from ten years of being with her” (35). She then told him that she wanted him to leave the room.

When he asked why, she told him that Bill Hamm was on his way up. Assuming that it was to go over some music with her, he was shocked when she told him that she was in love with Hamm and wanted to sleep with him, and that he would be arriving at the door any second now. When Hamm arrived suddenly, the three of them were frozen in time for several wordless seconds. Sonny recalled looking over at the fully stocked bar of the suite and considering smashing one liquor bottle over Hamm’s head and the other one over Cher’s. Instead, he left the suite and wordlessly shut the door behind him.

He went downstairs into the casino, and began playing blackjack.
When Hamm’s girlfriend tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he had seen Bill, he poured out the whole story to her. As insane as it seems, he asked if they could go up to her room to discuss the situation. As a matter of just retribution, Sonny and Hamm’s girlfriend had sex in her suite, and he spent the night. Around five in the morning, Sonny recalled that Hamm returned to his room, and Sonny left. No fight. No argument. Sonny just said “See ya later” as he left Hamm’s room (35).

All day Sunday, Sonny argued with Cher, trying to salvage their marriage. She simply told him that it was too late. They had two shows booked for that night, and before the show, Sonny, Cher, and Bill Hamm met in the dressing room to talk it all out. When Sonny told Denis what was going on, both shows were canceled that night, and Denis made plane reservations for Cher and Bill to fly to San Francisco.