To celebrate the phenomenal Cher’s 80th birthday on 20 May 2026, we’re digging into our archives to share her gorgeous cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1975.
In this feature, journalist Robert Feldman queries whether Cher is a “flash in a pan”. However, Cher of course proved him and others who may have doubted her wrong.
She is one of the best-selling music artists in history, dubbed the “Goddess of Pop.” Cher is an Oscar winner and the only Academy Award-winning actor inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2026, Cher won the prestigious Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
She has continuously reinvented herself throughout her career and has remained relevant since she first came to fame in the 1960s.
Read on for that feature from our archives. Happy Birthday, Cher!
CHER: How the stunning superstar was created
7 May, 1979. Words by Robert Feldman in New York.
It took the break-up of her marriage and husband-and-wife show business partnership to set Cher Bono on the road to top stardom on her own. But it wasn’t easy, and some people are asking, “Can it last?”
To her husband, she was a beautiful, fragile child-bride – a doll whom he petted, isolated, and sternly guided in everything, including her style of dancing the fandango. But in Act 3 of their scenario, she rebels and leaves her mate to go out and face an uncertain Nielsen TV rating on her own.
Thus re-enacted, Ibsen comes to life in Hollywood. The principals – the celebrated couple of stage, screen and boudoir, Sonny and Cher Bono. Cher is Nora, the doll wife, and Sonny is Torvald, the kindly, tyrannical husband, in this fascinating updated version of The Doll’s House. It has a modernised twist at the end. The emancipated missus proves a smash solo act, beating the old super-male tyrant at his own game.
This script provides real vindication: the poor blighter is hanging on to the ropes by the end, his independent TV venture dead-on-arrival, while her show makes the top ten.
She’s on the cover of Time, looking about as seductive as you can get outside of Playboy magazine. He’s presumably wondering what hit him.
What a triumph for womankind, maybe. Next year’s audience ratings could tell another story. The overworked star could hit a breaking point. “I’m scared to death,” she admits to one and all. And, despite the spruiking and Press agency, many observers, while admiring her style of dress, or undress, judge her other talents as rather modest.
Her initial success (the show has been on in America for just three months) is certainly based largely on the gee-whiz baubles, bangles, and beads. How long can glitter sustain audiences and advertisers willing to pay $70.000 a minute? Is Cher alone a flash in the pan? Time (and Newsweek) will tell.
In her personal life these days, Cher seems to be “living the adolescence she never had.” (Sonny’s assessment.) Contrary to her sexy public image and her barrack-room vocabulary, she is highly selective and perhaps a bit prudish in her choice of men.
When Sonny backed his Rolls out of the garage of their $2 million Beverly Hills home, David Geffen, a record company executive, drove his Mercedes in. Geffen helped Cher recruit many of her show’s guest stars, including Elton John and Bette Midler. But David wanted marriage, and Cher sent him packing. For the past couple of months, it’s been a rock superstar, Greg Allman, of the Allman Brothers Band.
Cher, who has seen a lot for a woman of 28, is visiting a psychiatrist several times a week.
“Being raised tough hurts,” she says. “You don’t forget. You go through life looking for security. That’s what happened when I met Sonny. I was 16, and he was security.”
She was born Cherlynn Sarkisian and is of Armenian, French, and Cherokee Indian descent. Her mother, a part-time model, was married a total of eight times. She married the same man three times.
Cher was raised partly by her mother and the rest of the time in institutions. She was shy, and she believed herself ugly. At 15, she moved in with two girlfriends. Sonny was the boy next door, or rather, the man. He was nine years older and had already been married and divorced. He was also a father. But he was smart and smooth, a record promoter.
Cher flipped and moved in with him. He never laid a hand on her for months. Then he took her to the preacher, who married them. Cher was all of 17.
Throughout their nine-year marriage. Sonny did the Torvald bit, as the dominant, wise, stern father-husband-protector and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Unquestioningly, Cher went right to work beside her husband, at first singing background at recording sessions. Very soon, they clicked with their smash single. “Baby Don’t Go.” The dynamic duo were off and running.
After making a killing in records in the mid-1960s, they lost everything on two ill-advised films. But a triumphant comeback followed on TV with their Sonny and Cher show.
Despite the cutesy scripts in which he played the fool to Cher’s deadpan put-downs, behind the scenes, Sonny was the boss and the brain and Cher the follower.
Now the worm has turned. Cher is doing a lot of her own thinking, and she is gathering strength. She is still largely in the hands of men, however, mainly George Schlatter, the producer-director who was the genius behind Laugh-In. Most TV comedy shows are performed in front of a studio audience and taped from start to finish, minus breaks. But Cher isn’t ready for that, hasn’t the technique or the experience.
With infinite patience and an almost infinite budget. Schlatter puts Cher through the tricky routines, taping them endlessly in multiple “takes,” then laboriously splicing the good takes together. (Laugh-In is an example of the editor’s complex art in its finest flower.)
But Schlatter gives his star full credit. “Until Cher,” he says, “women have been the joke, not done the joke. They have been used as the butt of the joke, if you don’t mind a slip into chauvinism.”
So one afternoon at Television City, Hollywood, I watched the efforts of this 103-pound (46kg) woman in a feathery, translucent dress that was barely staying put, doing a slapstick routine with a baseball bat.
She had to successively smash a carpet, a rubber spider, a lock, an alarm clock, a bottle, a rockmelon, and a birthday cake. Now, whether the routine was going to be funny or not depended entirely on how the production team edits it.
For a comedienne whose previous expertise was in standing still before a microphone and delivering punch lines, the switch in style was not easy.
After a dozen takes, with the studio strewn with garbage and Cher’s expensive nails a pulp, she finally brought off the extended business.
“Print it,” said Schlatter, dubiously, probably thinking: “Lucille Ball would have done it better and cheaper.” But then Lucy couldn’t wear a see-through dress any more. Other men help build the legend, too.
Cher has one of the worst cases of facial acne ever diagnosed in an adult, and it is Dan Eastman’s job to fix her up. Eastman is a leading Hollywood cosmetician, and he spends more time with Cher than her boyfriend.
“I have to slap Cher’s hand when she starts to squeeze a pimple,” he says. Once she asked him. “If I’m ever in a position where I can’t afford you, what will I do?”
He gives her a deep-pore facial cleansing three or four times a week, for three hours each session. Before she goes on camera, he rebuilds her face with makeup.
“I’m on call.” Eastman says, “But she has to come here because I have so much apparatus.”
Another problem: body hair. Electrolysis is a technique for permanently removing unwanted hair. It involves repeated zapping of the follicles, and it hurts. Cher is single-mindedly purposeful, however, and suffers in silence. Dan has also zapped her hairline and eyebrows into more pleasing contours as well.
Perhaps the most important soldier in the technical army standing behind the star is her genius costumer, Bob Mackie. He cuts most of the garments in Cher’s doll’s closet wardrobe on the bias for super cling, because her fashions represent perhaps her biggest drawcard. Cher goes through 13 to 16 costumes per show, at a cost of about $1,500 each.
“You have just one shot on TV,” Mackie explains. “Fifty million people are watching, and the outfit better look good. TV is strange. It’s like an X-ray. You can tell, for example, if a lady is wearing a bust pad.”
But much of the art is built around what Cher isn’t wearing. Her navel is world-renowned, and some men count the ripples in her stomach muscles.
Cher’s fingernails, too, are part of the picture.
“I worked very hard to develop those nails,” Minnie Smith told a Village Voice reporter. Minnie has been Cher’s manicurist for 12 years.
“They’re porcelain, like false teeth,” she explained. “The real nail grows in undo them, and they stay just ages. No one can tell! They take on the shape of your own nail after a fortnight.”
Minnie, ever searching for novelty, put blunt ends instead of tapered ends on Cher’s nails. Each week on the tube, they are a different far-out colour.
“Richard Avedon, the photographer, fell in love with her hands,” Minnie said. “Every time Cher is photographed for Vogue, there’s a shot of a hand.”
Minnie is known as “the flying emery board” because she does nail rescue operations for prominent clients all over the world.
As for that slinky girlish figure, slender but solid, that sends men off into fantasies, Cher is indebted partly to heredity and partly to Ron Fletcher.
At Fletcher’s School of Body Contrology (sic) in Beverly Hills. Cher puts in hard hours every night. That is the price of being the season’s smash hit in her electronic “Doll’s House.”
All this costs money. For example, she is said to spend $6,000 for clothes every month, apart from her TV wardrobe; $900 for her psychiatrist. $600 for Minnie the Manicurist and so on.
If, or rather when, America’s fickle audience tires of her, and when the show’s backup team run out of gimmicks, Cher may fall off the mountain. But she won’t have to work as a waitress for a living.
Under an arrangement made last year, before his show went ignominiously down the drain. Sonny agreed to pay his former wife $32,000 a month in alimony and child support (for daughter Chastity).
In addition, there remains a large pile of moola tied up from the couple’s pre-divorce earnings. That’s $24 million, give or take a farthing, which even in the make-believe land of Southern California is something to believe in.
She’s suing him for the pot, and he is suing back. Sonny had better click fast in another line of work, or the future isn’t going to be funny for Sonny.
This article was edited from the original, which featured in the 7 May 1975 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe to the magazine here.
With thanks to Trove.
