That’s the amazing Cher opening up in ELLE’s December issue out now. In light of her new Broadway musical, the cultural force sat down to discuss love, loss, failure, and success beyond imagination.
QUOTES
On her first interaction with ex Warren Beatty: “One night, while passing Schwab’s Drugstore, she [Cher] was run down by a white Lincoln convertible. ‘Are you nuts?’ she remembers saying to the guy. ‘Then I looked at his face, and I thought, My God, it’s Warren Beatty.’ Spoiler alert: Cher and Beatty started dating. ‘But you can’t call it a relationship,’ Cher tells me. ‘It was very Warren.’ Cher didn’t get home until well after curfew that night. As punishment, she was barred from seeing Beatty the following night. Beatty called Holt and negotiated Cher’s release.”
On meeting her future singing partner Sonny Bono: “I swear, it was like the Maria and Tony scene. Everyone just disappeared. He was the most unusual person I’d ever seen. He had longish hair, and he had the most beautiful suit on, and beautiful long fingers, and Beatle boots, but they were Cuban heels.”
On her catapult into fame: “They didn’t resonate at first. ‘Kids liked it, but adults just hated us,’ Cher says. ‘I mean, really hated us. Fistfights hate.’ When “I Got You Babe” came out, in 1965, they went to London. ‘It sounds so dumb, but everything happened so fast,’ Cher says. ‘I didn’t even know where I was. One day we were poor. Two days, three days later, we were famous.’”
Meryl Streep on Cher’s performance in Moonstruck: “Moonstruck was when she showed how completely effortless her fully rounded talent was—funny, heartbreaking, inimitable—no one else could’ve done it that way. She owned that part. She jumped out of the screen. It was like we’d been waiting for her, and round the corner she came: ‘Yeah, and I can do this, too!’””
On how acting on instinct has influenced so many pivotal moments throughout her career: “It doesn’t always. Look, I’ve had huge failures in my life. Huge dips and ‘Oh, you’re over. You’re over.’ This one guy once said, ‘You’re over,’ every year for I don’t know how many years. And I just said to him, ‘You know what? I will be here when you’re not doing what you do anymore.’ I had no idea if I was right or wrong. I was just tired of hearing him say it.”
Pictured:
Cher, t-shirt and skirt by Patti Cappalli for Addenda, boots by Herbert Levine, New York, August 20, 1969
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a25222980/cher-december-2018/