The Cher Episode

Published Aug 15, 2024, 9:00 AM

Cher is an icon, with hits spanning an unbelievable SEVEN decades. So kick back as we laud the singer/actress/legend. 

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.

Is that your auto tune?

Uh?

I told you turn that off?

It's stuck on on. It's stuck on.

Awesome, Yeah, it's And this wasn't even intentional, but here we are doing another biography of another gay icon.

Another Well, she's not gay, she's an icon of the gay community.

Chuck, Well, that's what I meant.

I know. Yeah, I'm just being contrarian already. Yeah, I know, I'm really feeling it. I'm full of pee and vinegar today.

Oh we say P and V at our house for our dog Gibson. He's full of P and V all the time.

That's awesome. How's he doing.

He's good. He's a lot to handle, but he's an awesome sweet boy.

He's got to be pretty big by now. His paws were huge as a puppy. He is.

He's pretty large. I mean he's a full, full, full grown.

Doggie like Clifford large.

No, no, no, he's not oversized, but he's a big boy.

Well, shout out to Gibson and shout out to Share. We're doing an entire episode on right now.

As you said, do you mean Sherilyn Sarkisian?

Yes, I do. I do. And when I saw that, I was like, I knew she was Armenian. I never thought about it up until this moment, but I just knew she was Armenian in heritage.

Yeah. Well, I mean I think one thing Share sort of played with over the years was some kind of ambiguous ethnicity.

That's one way you could put it.

Sure, But yeah, she's a Her father, John Paul Sarchizian, was Armenian. He was a horse breeder and a truck driver who had addiction troubles. So he got divorced from her mother before Chare was a year old, which would have been nineteen forty seven, because cher was born in El Central California in nineteen forty six.

That's right, you were studying me. Yeah, I read Chuck that her mother, Georgia, and her father, John Paul, got married two more times, so they were married a total of three times.

Yeah. And I think her mother, Georgia Holt, who was an actress, she was married like eight times.

Eight times from what I saw. Yeah, I think Georgie's mom had her when she was thirteen or something like that, and so they had a very share had a very interesting upbringing, and I had never seen it compared to Mermaids, but it really strikes me from some of the interviews and articles I've read about her that her upbringing was a lot like Winona Ryder's upbringing.

And Mates, which is a movie Share was in in case you're wondering, Well, right, I was even brought up.

But man, that movie is so good. I saw it for the first time, just like last year, and it is a really good movie.

Yeah. You know, Cher is one of my favorite actors. When I look through her filmography. Mm hmm, it's just like it's a murderer's row of great parts and great films.

Yeah, for sure, and we'll talk about those. Apparently, as it turns out, she wanted to be a performer from a very young age. I saw something like four, she saw Dumbo and was like, I'm going to be a performer like Dumbo. Yeah, and she actually kind of put her money where her mouth is at age eleven. I love precocious kids stories like this. She put on a production of Oklahoma and apparently could only get other girls to be in the show with her, so she just went ahead and played all the male parts herself.

I know. That's a great story. And just a few years after that, Warren Baty would be sleeping with her.

Yeah, like just a few years when she was like six and he was twenty five. Right, yeah, what is it with powerful men in that?

I mean, Warren Beatty had a long history of dating teenagers back when, you know, back when I'm not going to say it's like it was super cool to do that, but back when you could do that and get away with it without being you know.

Without having to kill al or something the guy who knows about it while he's in prison exactly.

They very famously, she was driving in Hollywood when she was sixteen. He almost hit her with the car and she got out and was like, are you crazy? And she was like, oh my god, you're Warren Batty and he was like, why don't you come back to my place and have dinner, And that's what happened. She came home at two in the morning. Her parents were not thrilled, but apparently Warren is very charming and called up Georgia Holt called up her mom and made his case, and she was like, okay, date my sixteen year old.

I know that was back then when you could just pick up the phone and be.

Like come on right exactly.

So Share dropped out of high school. Not a lot of great performing opportunities while you're in high school, So she dropped out and she tried to make it in the show in show business. Initially she wanted to be an actor, but she met another guy who would have a much bigger impact on her life than even Warren Batty, a guy named Salvatore Bono, better known as Sonny Bono. He was twelve years older than her, rather than just the traditional nine that Warren Batty had established, the traditional nine, and she was sixteen seventeen something like that when they met in Los Angeles, and both of them swear that their relationship was platonic at first. That she had moved into a group home with some other women, and apparently that housing opportunity fell through or ran out, and she met Sonny Bono and he's like, why don't you move in with me and clean my house? And that's supposedly how it was at and then of course it did not last very long, and they got married within two years, I think, although it wasn't legal for another seven for seven years, five years five is just as good an ustimate as seven.

Yeah, she was eighteen when they got sort of fake married in nineteen sixty four. They did have a ceremony, but it wasn't a legal wedding, and it became legal like you said, in nineteen sixty nine, and Sonny was working for music impresario Phil Spector at the time, who was like, Hey, this kid you got has got an outstanding voice. Also love Shehar's voice, by the way, and she started singing back up for Phil Spector on like some really big songs like You've Lost That Love and Feeling by the Righteous Brothers and Be My Baby by the Ronettes.

Yeah, so in two years she's met Warren Baby and dated him, met Sonny Bono, moved in with him, and is singing back up on Phil Spector songs by age seventeen. Have to start it happening for really quickly, And from that point on things started happening happening very quickly because Sonny Bono was making things happen, Like you said, he was working for Phil Spector, and so he was. I guess he and Phil were both like this, she needs like her own career. Apparently there's an anecdote where when she was singing back up on some of those songs, Phil Spector kept telling you to like, back up further and further away from the mic because she was overpowering the other backup singers. So it was very clear that she needed her own to go out on her own. Although apparently Phil Spector opposed it at first, Sonny Bono was like, no, we're gonna take this girl to really great places, and we're going to do it by giving her the pseudonym Bonnie Joe Mason.

Yeah, that's right. Her first single was released. It was called Ringo I Love You as Bonnie Joe Mason. Not a great song. And you know schera has a share has a low I guess is it an alto?

Yeah, it sounds like this. If I could turn back to her.

I meant to look up what her voice technically is, but maybe baritone, I don't know, but it's that lowe's She's got this great, fantastic, powerful low voice. And apparently there were some radio stations that thought it was a man singing and it was a love song DURINGO star, so they refused to play it in some markets, but she was like, you know, it's not a very good song, not a big deal. But very shortly thereafter, in nineteen sixty four, would sign with Imperial Records, which was part an imprint of Liberty Records, and had her first really big hit in sixty five with a cover of Bob Dylan's amazing song All I Really.

Want to Do is roller Skate in parentheses.

She did a great version too. I love the production style and the recording quality of those of like the mid sixties and earlier. It's really good.

Yeah, for sure. So she hit like number fifteen on the Billboard charts with that single, that cover of Dylan. That's pretty I mean, seriously, think about this. She just is like, I'm gonna go make it on my own, and then it just happened. I'm really impressed by how condensed like her first series of like big exposures were, you know. And so in addition to her performing or carrying out I guess her solo career, she also was performing with Sonny too, as they would become very famous together performing, but at first they went under the name Caesar and Cleo, apparently as an homage to Sonny's haircut at the time, which she said was somewhere between Caesar's and Napoleon's hair. I don't know what Napoleon's hair looked like. He had like that big old hat he liked to wear. Yeah, Cleo was a nod to her ambiguous ethnic looks. People said, like, you look like a more glamorous Cleopatra, So that's what they went with, and they scuttled that pretty quick.

Yeah, I mean she kind of played that up too. She had. That's when when she was wearing the dark mass scarra was sort of the cattails coming off the side and just super super cool, looking like very tan, and she had that beautiful long black hair like. I've been watching a lot of Share stuff and Sonny and Chair from that era today and I got a big old man crush on her all over again. That reminded me of when I had one on her when I was six years old.

That's cute. From watching the Sonny and Share show and all that.

Yeah, So, you know, they had some songs together that were not popular, like you talked about, but in sixty five they rebranded as themselves as Sonny and Chair with that huge, huge number one single I Got You Babe that the Rolling Stones, who are always champions of them yeah, said I take it over to England, the l'vievode there.

Yeah. Apparently in America they weren't getting much love. Share says that they were basically hippies before the word hippie was even around, and they dressed like hippies, they acted like hippies. In America wasn't ready for hippies yet, but England was like, hey, we're swinging over here, so come on over here. And yeah, that's just so bizarre that the Rolling Stones were the ones who like helped get Sonny and Share their big break, because you just do not. That's like Led Zeppelin helping out Donnie and Marie in my mind, I don't know what I mean, it's very similar to that.

Oh boy, I would argue Sonny and Share were two percent cooler. Oh yeah, Marie.

Definitely, but it's certainly in the same ballpark.

And totally it's funny. That single I Got You Babe, which is the song they're most known for as a duo still I think sold more than three million Copies was number one for three weeks, and the album was number two for eight weeks and probably would have hit number one had it not been for the fact that The Beatles Help was released at the same time and held down that number one spot.

Right, Yeah, if you're gonna be number two to anybody, that's a pretty pretty good album to be number two too at the time.

Yeah, for sure. But they had ten top forty singles and five of those were top tens.

Not too shabby, No, not at all. The other thing that they were very much known for was banter, comic banter in between. Apparently Sonny was the comedic writer between the two. But Cher said in her eulogy of Sonny Bono when he died of from a skiing accident in nineteen ninety eight that he, like people just kind of saw Sonny Bono, especially during their early careers, like the butt of the jokes. He's like the dip wat I guess is a technical way to put it, but that he knew that that's what made the most sense with their their duo. It made sense for her to be the sharper, more sardonic, smarter one and him to be the butt of the jokes, but she's like, the big joke was he was the one writing the joke, so he kind of had the last laugh in that sense.

Did you watch any of the the actual variety show Banter Today, Harry Yesterday?

You know? Weirdly, I just read a synopsis, a very detailed synopsis of one of their episodes on share scholar dot com.

Yeah, it's I encourage you to check it out and anyone out there who's like, what was their chemistry like, because it is it's really good stuff. I mean, I watched the second iteration of their show that was out later on, which we'll get to in a sec. But they're just so funny together and you could tell they're having a good time, and while it is scripted, it comes across as very natural and it feels like they're and they may have been improving some of it, but it was just they just had fantastic chemistry. And he would she would make short jokes because he was five to five and she was. She seemed giant compared to him, but she was only five seven, but I think they put her in heels and stuff like that, and he would make jokes about her prominent nose and but she usually got the best of him. But they were just it was a very cute pairing together. Yeah, you know, kind of a cute historic comedy pairing. Yeah.

All you had to do is put them on TV and let them do their thing and people would fall in love with them. That's what happened. They were guest stars on Kerl Burnett back in nineteen sixty seven. They guest hosted some MERV Griffin Show episodes, and just from that they introduced themselves to America, their TV chops, I guess, and they head of CBS Programming Fred Silverman, who would go on to executive produce Diagnosis Murder. He gave them their first show in August of nineteen seventy one. It was a summer replacement, and I feel like such a slack researcher that I didn't go see what that replaced.

Oh yeah, I didn't either.

But then when December came around and it was time for like, okay, what's the real deal shows, it got its own slot and it became like a really big hit. They were pulling in like thirty million viewers a week. I mean, this was I don't think there were thirty million people in America at the time.

Yeah, it was kind of the early heyday of the variety show, which if you're of a certain age you remember, but if you're not, you know, variety shows were these comedy half hours, usually an hour where they would they would come out and they would do like an opening monologue and joke around or probably open with a song which would lead into the monologue, and then it was you know, it was sketches, it was music. They would have musical and comedy guests. It was called the Sonny and Share Comedy Hour, and it was just there were a lot of these great shows back then, and I pined for those to come back, and I think they could if they did it right. Really yeah, I think if you had the right the right people, and especially like a couple like this is kind of a fun way to do it. H I think it could work.

I mean, they have some that are like skirting the genre for sure. Yeah, they're terrible, Like America's got talent and the voice and all that stuff.

That's that's not the same. It's not street see.

But some of those are like there's so many different acts or different types of acts, but it's close. It's just missing like the people who host the show, like having like a larger main role in it, you know what I mean?

Like I get that, like take away the competition aspect, get a couple of cutie pies like us to host it.

Sure, I mean, I guess my point is, be careful what you wish.

For right now, you're right, because what are the chances they would do it right?

Right?

Probably not good.

So, Sonny Bono is very very much tied to Share and vice versa in most people's mind and a lot of people's mind, especially older people. But there's another collaborator that a guy who wrote for The New Yorker. His name's Michael Shulman. He said that Bob Mackie, the very very famous fashion designer, was probably arguably surpassing Bono as her defining collaborator because one thing people know about Share is that she will wear any over the top outfit that Bob Mackie would make for her. And apparently they were very close collaborators. It wasn't like Bob Mackie would say, here, I designed this, put this on. She would go back and forth with them, kind of push him to go even further, and just just from the fact that she was willing to try on or where in public. Anything he came up with I think really inspired him too, So those two were as much a duo as Sonny and Share were.

Yeah, and to be clear, like this was started on that TV show. It wasn't just the sort of iconic things she would wear on the red carpet later like they've they've been together since the beginning basically.

Yeah. I think their TV show would have something like twenty different costume changes per episode, and Bob mackie was there designing everything. So yeah, they're they're very close, I think. Still, I'm pretty sure Bob macki is still around.

All right, Well, we're gonna go check and see if Bob macki is still with this and take a break and we'll come back with the with the breaking news right after this.

We los so much stuff from Josh and shuck stuff fui, all right, Chuck, so lay it on everybody. Is Bob Mackie, known as the Sultan of Sequins, still alive.

I'm glad to say, sir that he is. He's was born in nineteen forty, so Bob McKee is eighty four years young, very nice, still going.

Okay, so back to Sonny again. Sonny's spirit is out there, like, Okay, that's enough about Bob mckew. Let's get back to.

Me, right, Okay, So should I take over here?

Yeah?

Right? Well, they had their they're a very popular TV show. Romantically with their marriage things weren't as successful. Sonny started stepping out and then Cher started stepping out on their marriage. They had some financial issues, which we should be like, how in the world with these huge stars have money trouble. One of the reasons because Sonny was he controlled everything in their relationship when it came to the business, so he was controlling their money. One of the big things that happened was in sixty nine he financed a movie called Chastity, putting most of their money into it for share to you know, star in her first movie vehicle, and it was a big flop. It's one of the big rules of movie production is you never put your own money into your own movie. Just not smart to do. So. It was actually the same year that Chaz Bono was born, which is their son who very famously transitioned in two thousand and eight because Chas was assigned female at birth.

Right and That's another thing that Share would become very famous for is championing trans rights in large part because of her experience with Chas or So. And she's become a real as we'll see I think, as you mentioned at the outset of a gay icon, and also a huge she has a huge following in the trans community too.

Yeah. Absolutely so.

By nineteen seventy three, Sonny and Share show are still going on, still going pretty strong, and for all intents and purposes, Sonny is married to a former cigarette girl in a club called named Connie Foreman. But for the public's information, they were still together Sonny and Share where finally they're like, Okay, this isn't sustainable anymore. And they started to get divorced in nineteen seventy four. And you said that Sonny had total control over their finances, right, Yeah, he had even more control than she realized. Like I think she just thought like he handled that stuff. But as they were getting divorced, her own lawyer was like, you know, the company that was built on your talent, it's actually called Share Enterprises. You own zero percent of that. Sonny owns ninety five percent, and the lawyer that runs the thing owns the other five you own nothing. And she's like, oh my god, really that's crazy. And the lawyer's like, no, it gets even worse. You've been signing contracts that you haven't been reading, haven't you. And she's like, yeah, I guess this is a paraphrase, by the way, or an imagined conversation. And he said, you signed a contract that said that you would not work outside of Share enterprises, So you can't record music, you can't be in movies, you can't be on TV. And we don't know what's going to happen with this because this is essentially an ironclag contract.

Right, which, of course there is no such thing, thankfully, because so many entertainers signed bad contracts that they can in fact get out of. And that's what happened when Shares was like, wait a minute, saying that I can't do anything except for make entertainment for a company that I owned no part of, and he said yeah, and she was like, all right, well, let me ask my boyfriend this. Her boyfriend at the time was another music impresario, David Geffen, and he said, I'll get you out of that, don't worry about it. So he gets her out of that contract gets her a two and a half million dollar deal with Warner Brothers, which you know, it's a lot of money now, but obviously in nineteen the early nineteen seventies, it's a very big record contract. And that would be followed very shortly thereafter by the canceling of The Comedy Hour in nineteen seventy four. But Chaer was always she still liked Sonny. She wasn't like this guy took advantage of me. She was like, you know, I really love Sonny. I would have done another show if they would have split it fifty to fifty with me. He was a terrible husband, but a great mentor and a great teacher to me.

Right, anytime I hear about the Sonny Share show too, I'm reminded of that Simpson's little bit where they talk about a man who woke up from a coma after twenty years and he's being interviewed in his hospital bed and he goes, do Sonny and Share still have that stupid show? And Kim Brockman goes, no, she won an oscar and he's a congressman, and that guy goes good night, and like dies. Right, there's some like girls out of his mouth.

Yes, Sonny Bono would become a congressman.

Yeah, a Republican congressman. No, less was he Yeah, Oh.

I couldn't remember. So in nineteen seventy five, she got her own variety show, just called Share and it was sort of like the rest of them, It was not as popular. You know, they had a certain chemistry together that made them famous, and so they would bring back the show, this time not as the Comedy Hour but just the Sonny and Share Show. And that one didn't last super long either, because by nineteen seventy seven, and this was the version that I saw on TV when I was but six years old, they broke up professionally as well.

So that was it for her and Sonny Bono from that point on, aside from in the public's collective memory, right, Yeah, Like I said, she was still carrying out or performing like she had a solo career that she was also doing all this time while she was doing other stuff with Sonny, and it was very successful. Very early on. She had her seventh album was in nineteen seventy one.

She was.

Twenty four I think at the time, twenty five maybe, and she that was her seventh studio album. Initially it was entire it was titled Share with a little accent over the e, just to make it fancy. But instead they're like, no, no, we want to be way more offensive than that. Let's name it after the title track, Gypsy's tramps and thieves.

That's right, that's a word that is not used anymore, which we learned when we did that episode many many years ago. So we're all still learning, everybody. She also had a song on there that hasn't aged too well. It was called half Breed and it was about it was like from the perspective of a half Cherokee woman and chair or you know, a faux headdress and performed that way and claimed to be of Cherokee descent on her mother's side. And it seems like none of that is actually true. And I'm sure that stuff Share is not, like you know, puts at the top of her CV these days.

No, But interestingly, she still rocked a head dress in her Vegas residency in the twenty first century. When did she really Yeah, when she would do a medley of her hits for that song, she would wear a headdress still, so she's still doing half Breed, Yeah, all right, Yeah, so I read that somewhere. I didn't see it with mine own eyes or anything.

Well maybe that is at the top of her civ then.

So it was about this time. Can you imagine, that's the number one thing she lists out of her entire career. So about this time, early early seventies, she starts becoming known for like really wearing just totally revealing clothing, and she and Bob Mackie just put it into like overdrive and start taking off from there. And one of the outfits that she first got wide public notice for was her naked dress that she wore to the Met gal in nineteen seventy four, and Bob Mackie escorted her and it is a naked dress. It's an amazing, beautiful gown that seems totally see through but it's not. And it was a it was a big deal. It made a huge splash.

Yeah. And if you know, you can't go to the Met Gala these days and throw you can throw a rock and hit five naked dresses with that one throw. But that was I tried to find examples of anyone to pioneer that nude look in public before her share and I couldn't find any, so I know, Mackie and Chair kind of put that that well worn look on the map.

Yeah. Yeah, from what I saw, she was widely cited as the first one. She also wore it the next year on the cover of Time, and that just kind of sealed it as an iconic dress. But that was far from the last dress. As we'll see. We're gonna talk a little bit more about our dresses soon, but first, let's take a little side trip over to the Allman Brothers band literally and meet up. Yeah, and meet up with Greg Alman, one of the founders, and they got married apparently within a few days of Sonny and Shar's divorce being final. Cher I guess had met Greg Alman at some point and was like, let's go get married in Vegas, and I think nine days later they were married in Vegas.

Yeah, and they had a I mean, her relationship in marriage with Greg Alman is as famous as it was to Sonny Bono because of I mean, her marriage to Sonny was a little boring in comparison, I think, Yeah, and I think I think it was either share or maybe it was Greg. One of them described their marriage as being on LSD at Disneyland, so they had a lot of fun. But this was a bad time, I mean good time professionally for Greg Almon in the mid seventies, but he was really not doing too well with his consumption habits. He had heroin issues and cocaine issues and alcohol issues, and they had a volatile, I guess four or five year run getting back together, remarrying, stuff like that, reconciling. So it was sort of an up and down wild marriage, rock and roll marriage, which got a lot of press. But it also bore her other son, Elijah Blue Almond, who was born in nineteen seventy six.

Yeah, and I don't remember if I brought this up, and if so rare, but I ran across this somewhere and I remembered it when I was reading about Elijah Blue Almond. The balloon arch, which you might see at like a wedding or something like that, was invented for Elijah Blue Almond's third birthday by legendary balloon artist treb Heining. The new dress, isn't that amazing?

The balloon arch, the nude dress, what else? Auto tune as we'll see.

Yeah, I mean, she was a huge pioneer in a lot of well Share had a really large pop cultural impact, more than she gets credit for, for sure.

I think so. As I said that marriage was trouble. Greg Alman was not much of a father. Elijah Blue has had struggles in his life and his health, drug problems. I know he struggles with lyme disease and they're very sadly still have a troubled He and Chair have a troubled relationship. She I remember reading this last year. She tried to file or she filed to try and get a conservatorship over him just late last year but was denied it. And it's just I think anyone who as a fan of Shared is really behind her and hoping that she and her son can resolve this.

Yeah, apparently she went through a really rough patch with Chaz as well, but that's kind of been resolved over the years, she said in I think a twenty ten interview in Vanity Fair. Right. Yeah, so by this time, by nineteen seventy eight, she and Greg Alman are about to split up for good, and she decides to finally just change her legal name to Cher, which is an enormous reduction in the number of letters in her full name, because at the time her full legal name was Cherylyn Sarcasian La Pierre Bono Almon. And she's like, just call me Cher from now on, and that's what the law said. They stamped it and said, okay, we'll call you Share from now on.

Another thing that Share was very well known for was her myriad boyfriend She had over the years, many times, including up to two day dating men that were younger than her, sometimes much younger than her, but usually famous dudes, very high profile relationships. She dated Gene Simmons for a couple of years, the bass player from Kiss and more than bass player obviously. She dated Val Kilmer. She dated Tom Cruise. She dated Eric Stoltz, who played her son in the movie Mask, which is a little strange, but yeah, she loves loves men and loves dating men.

Yeah.

She believes in love.

Right, and she believes in life even afterward too. Yeah. A little side thing on Eric Stoltz that I found out recently. Apparently he was the original Marty McFly and back to the future. Did you know that?

You didn't know that?

I'll stop sharing this anecdote immediately, but.

No, I'm sorry. That was just one of those that I thought you would have known, Like you can see the like they shot some of the movie with him and you can see those scenes.

I did not know that part. I did know that they wanted Michael J. Fox originally, but Family Ties was like no, so they went with Eric Stoltson. Like this kid is playing this way too seriously. He would not goof it up at all. He's too serious of an actor. So they were like, all right, we're like a third of the way through shooting. We're just gonna bring in Michael J. Fox on nights and weekends, which is why a lot of the stuff that a lot of the scenes Michael J. Fox is in are at night. Said it.

No, yeah, you should check out some of the scenes. It's very brain breaking to be someone of our generation and see Eric Stolt's playing Martin mcflyin.

So what like that scenes that made it into the movie? You mean or the outtakes? No? No, no, okay, just.

I mean they had shot at third of the movie and that that exists online.

I see, I got you. I didn't know if they were like this this scene was actually too good. We're just gonna pretend like that's Michael J.

Fox, I gotcha, so like he's got his back turn to the camera.

You can still somehow see his freckle.

In the eighties is when Chaer finally broke out as an actor. This is something that or actually, should we take a break there?

Or no, yeah, we might as well.

All right, we'll leave a cliffhanger though, and when we come back, we'll learn to see if Share ever acted again. Right after this, we loss.

So much stuff from Josh and shook stuff. Fui.

All right, We've got to the bottom of that one too. Share did finally get into acting in a genuine way in the nineteen eighties. She was on Broadway and The I Guess In the same year. In nineteen eighty two, Robert Altman did a Broadway version of Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Jimmy Dean and a Movie. She was in the movie and won a Golden Globe for that part.

Even did you know that that play originally premiered at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta before Broadway. Amazing, So that was a big breakthrough for her, that movie in particular, but also Broadway. I mean, it's like a pretty big deal to go act on stage. There's a big difference between being in the hands of an editor and being like live on stage. So that was a pretty pretty big way to kind of debut as like a genuine actor. Because one thing, we should say, that Chastity movie that she first tried in nineteen sixty nine, that was a drama. It wasn't a comedy. It was like a straight up drama, and people were just like, no, we're not accepting this. So she kept at it. She was in Come Back to the Five and Don Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She I think the next year played the lesbian roommate of Meryl Streep, well, Meryl Streep's character in Silkwood, and she actually cites that as one of the one of the watershed moments that started to attract like a following for her from the gay community. That kind of eventually became, you know, her gay icon ship.

Right. Yeah, she won, by the way, a Golden She won the Golden Globe for that.

Okay, great, and then she starred in Mask very she I mean, she was amazing in Mask. That movie was so good, if I remember correct. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I just can't see that not being good, Like that part where he teaches his blind girlfriend, like what colors are her through touch? What was that? Laura dern Okay, so Chaer is like her Eric Stoltz's protective biker mom and just the whole movie is just so great. She does a really great job and she won the Best Actress Award at can for her role in Mask. So she was expecting to at least be nominated for an OSCAR for Best Actress. Nothing. It was a a straight up snub, like Hollywood was sending a message to her, like a nice tribe, but to stay out of the acting business. We've got this. We can't really take you seriously.

Yeah, it was a big thumb in the eye. So Bob Mackie designed her famous revenge gown gowned gown, which was this. It was the one where she had the big, huge plume of black feathers all over her head kind of like a headdress or I guess it was a head dress and just like you know, not a Native American kind of headdress. And it was it was basically like hey, everybody look at me.

Yeah, not Don Michi? Who would win?

Who won?

Don Amici? He won for Cocoon. She was presenting the Best Supporting Actor award.

Oh okay, I thought you met won her award. No, I think that was Geraldine Page maybe in What Well. I don't know if Share got nominated or would have been nominated. I guess she would have been nominated for Best Actress or would have been a Best Supporting for Masks.

I think best Actress that's what she won and.

Can okay, So, I think Geraldine Page won Best Actress in What. Can't remember the name of the movie.

What was it about? Can you give a brief synopsis?

No, I can't remember. But that was also the same year of The Color Purple. So I think there were three or four actresses nominated in both categories for that and Jessica Lang. Like you know, it's always tough to to say, like, well, this person deserved it more than that person, but hey, that's how the Oscars go. Seron should have been nominated at least, But she would win the next year for Moonstruck, which is one of my favorite movies.

I've never seen it.

Oh man, it's you'd love it.

Okay, I'll take your word for.

Vintage Nicholas Cage. Also, I wanted to mention too, in case anyone is curious, I did I got I rewatched Masked? Masked? What is wrong with me? I'm just saying everything slightly wrong.

Was it masked? James or Jim Carrey, James Carey?

That was the mask?

Okay, gotcha? So what's masked?

There is no such thing? Again, there probably is, But mask I rewatched a few years ago because that was a movie crush movie. It was Tig Nataro's pick.

Oh nice, don't. I don't blame Tig for that at all.

Yeah, so it's fun to go back and rewatch that because that was an HBO special for me. I watched it quite a few times back in the day.

So did it hold up?

Yeah? Really good? Good movie.

Great. So the eighties were like really kind of big for share. And remember she made her debut and was releasing hits and had a hit TV show in the early seventies, not even mid seventies. By the mid eighties and late eighties, it was like she had a brand new career. She'd win an oscar, she won a Best Actress at cann She was becoming an acclaimed actress. And then she starts releasing albums again, and two albums in two years or three years, nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty nine, and the nineteen eighty nine went Hard as Stone that went triple platinum, and the reason, one of the big reasons that went triple platinum was for her. If I could turn back.

Time song, Yeah, I've been singing that all day and I didn't even watch it, just from reading those words right and stuck in my head.

I've got the thing I've been doing the whole time with that, if I could turn back to it's I saw Jack do it on Will and Grace when she did a cameo on it, and he thought she she was like a drag queen, but it was the real share and he was telling her how to do it right, and she slaps him and says, snap out of it.

Why was he doing his voice like that?

Though he saw her and like they had like a turn back time off and he was correcting her because he thought he thought she was she was a sharre impersonator. It's a pretty great you haven't seen that scene? It's great? Yeah? You know what's Jack from Will and Grace?

Oh? Does Sean Hayes.

Right, best known for his role on SmartLess the podcast.

Yeah, the movie career would continue if I can turn Bactime was a huge hit. She put out Mermaids in nineteen ninety that had another hit song in it, the Shoop Shoop song It's in his Kiss. Sonny, like you said, would very tragically die in a skiing accident in ninety eight, But that was also the year of her biggest hit ever, the song that you joked about with the auto tune, which was Believe of the same album Believe, and it was a quadruple platinum number one hit. The album was quadruple platinum, and that song was number one for four weeks.

Yeah, not only that, we talked about this in the auto Tune episode. That was the first use of auto tune in that way. Up to that point, it had just been used to kind of just gently correct people's vocals. That's what it was originally created for. And her producer Mark Taylor was like, no, we're turning that thing up to eleven to see what happens. And so this is nineteen ninety eight, right. She had her first career in the seventies, second career in the eighties, she's kind of gone off and just been out of the limelight for a good decade and she has this idea to record this album and Warner Brothers in America was like, nah, we don't think so, We're not one hundred percent you're going to sell any copies. So, just like with the Rolling Stones bringing her to England and saying like hey, everybody, check these people out, and that helping her get her boost. She went to her British label, Warner Brothers UK, and they agreed to release it. So Warner Brothers America turned down that album and luckily the UK label agreed and it had not only just that huge impact on her career, but also the fact that used auto tune. It just took off from there.

Yeah, it was huge and you know, change music for a little while. It's I don't think it's a it's a thing that sort of rooted in time. Now. I think a lot of people were worried, like, oh no, this is going to change music forever, and it was just sort of a oh, what's the word I'm looking for, just a music trick that was fashionable for a little while.

I guess, yeah, a long while. I would say, I mean, this is like a good people still use that stuff, and not just in rap anymore. Right, And it's been a quarter century that people have been doing that.

Is it still a thing?

Yeah, yes, it is still a thing. It's becoming, like you said, less and less and less. I think everybody's like, we got to come up with something besides trap music now because it's just been done too long, too many times. But I saw an interview with Cher you said Jay Z once came up to her and thanked her. He said, a lot of my friends who don't have very good voices have career thanks to you in auto tune. So I think that's a reason why it's stuck around for a quarter century because it lets producers say like, hey, you're terrible at this, we can make that right, Just go out there and be the image that we want to see.

Yeah. Well, one word you've said a few times in describing that as decades, and I'm not talking about her perfume, but her perfume is named decades because the coolest fact about Share probably is that she's only solo artist in music history to have hits in seven different decades, which is just unbelievable. And it's something I mean that's why she called her perfume that because something she's really proud of is her staying power. I know she's been asked in interviews about like, you know who these days, is it Lady Gaga or who's the next share who's comparable to you? And she wasn't being like nobody, honey, But her response was just sort of like, well, you know, are all great, but like the thing I'm most proud of, and I'm of course paraphrasing, is the decades, seven decades of hits and like, you know, not saying there's no one comparable, but there's kind of no one comparable, and like kind of a call me in forty years kind of thing and let's see where they're at. And not again, she wasn't being a jerk. She's just being very matter of fact about what a big accomplishment that is for her. And I don't blame her.

For sure. She's still releasing albums. I mentioned a Vegas residency two thousand and eight to twenty eleven. She was working Caesar's Palace. She released album in twenty thirteen. It was a dance album. I think the whole thing was a dance album that kind of made it different from some of all the rest of her albums. She released a Christmas album last year.

I didn't know that. I got to hear that.

It's it's unlistenable at least the single is. It's bad man, DJ play a Christmas.

Song, it's not all.

Yeah, I don't like it. And I like Sharon, I like her work, but I'm not a fan of that song. And you like Christmas music, it does, yes, I think that's why I don't like that song. But yeah, yeah, it's it's it's odd. It's definitely worth listening to, but I don't think you're gonna make it through the whole thing.

Okay, through that whole song.

Yeah. I mean, if you were on ecstasy and acid and at a club, you'd probably be like, this is pretty good. But if you're just sitting there listening to it during a work day, yeah, I don't think you're gonna like it very much.

Yeah, while you're working at the Gap at the mall right, please cut not again. I worked at the Gap during Christmas. That's the only time I worked there was for like a month. But that Christmas mix got so into my brain, and the one that really stands out Wash Sanna's got a brand new bag. The James Taylor win.

James Taylor, James Brown.

Did I say, James Taylor, what is wrong with me? You know? James Taylor. Yeah, it's got to got a brand new bags. Oh man, I'm just off my game today. That's pretty funny, though I'm not gonna.

Be still charming as ever, though, I'll tell you.

That I appreciate it.

Like Warren Baty, you just need auto tune for your brain for this episode.

Yeah, that's exactly what I need. Share is but a Tony away from an egot. I I'm not sure if there are any plans to get her one. To me, they should have given her one just for the musical The Share Show, which was on Broadway and did win Tony's but like, just throw a Tony man, give her that egot.

Yeah. One of the things. So we talked about her being a gay icon. She did an interview with Pride soource dot com and they were asking her about you know how how that happened, and she was saying, like, you know, gay men are very loyal, and she said that come back to The five and dime when it premiered, like it had a big response initially and then it just dropped off. But yes, but the gay community had already discovered and loved Share and she said they just basically came out and supported the show and kept it going long enough to develop into larger and larger following, and that had it not been for the gay community, it would have just been it would have been canceled very quickly after debuting, and it didn't. And she's like, that's that's just the kind of support that not just she, but anybody that is an icon in the gay community can expect. Yeah, they're just very loyal and supportive, even if what you're doing is not that great. And I read that the Share show is essentially being supported by the gay community too, that it's not super good.

Yeah, I haven't heard that, And of course that's the full spectrum of the LGBTQ community. Because of her work with trans writes. You know, she even admits having a hard time when initially Chaz came out as gay and then later transitioned. But you know, they're a tight family and they worked through it, and she has been a supporter even though it she just had to wrap her head around it. I know that she got her first experience with the gay community when she was twelve. From this article I read, she said told a very cute story. She said, I came home from school one day there were these two guys in our living room talking to my mom and her best friend, and they were so happy and excited about everything they were talking about, so animated, and I thought, these guys are so much more fun than the regular men who come over to visit. I didn't know they were gay. I just thought these guys are great, and it all started from them.

I love that story. It's a great Anne.

Yeah, it's really good.

She also is a supporter of veterans. She's called into c SPAN at least two times to promote her help for I think with inserts into helmets for soldiers in the Iraq War, and she co founded a charity called Free the Wild that relocates captive zoo animals to like actual good habitats.

That's awesome.

Yeah, she's I mean, she's flirting with dollihood, not quite, but she's really close. I mean, she's like a good she's a cool person. Good person.

Yeah, I guess. Uh. Look for episodes on Barber Streiss In and Judy Garland. Yeah, in the next couple of years.

Were you go, we're going to become gay icons.

If we keep this up, that should round it out. Oh, I hope so.

Well. If you want to know more about share, just go watch some videos, listen to some songs, read some articles, go see a Broadway play about her, whatever you want to do. There's plenty to take in. And since I said that it's time for listener mail, I'm.

Going to call this freaking follow up. Hey, guys, back in the day, when there were payphones, the operator could actually give you back your dime and later a quorterer by a tone if something went wrong. One of the earliest hacks involved getting back your dime without an operator and usually many more dimes than just yours, by slowly controlling the return from dialing the number nine.

Wow man, kids, Back in the day.

As you return the dial, money would come out. Okay, So it was on a dial phone and depending on when the service, depending on when the service people had last collected from that phone. I'm not sure I read that right, but I think you get the picture. Yeah, you can get quite a lot of money this way. I refuse to answer how I know this, but a person could pay for train fare to the suburbs from Grand Central by going to several phone booths in a row. That is from Danielle last name redacted.

Nice. Thanks a lot, Danielle. It's a great anecdote. I love that one.

Chuck me too.

Well. If you want to be like Danielle and give us a great anecdote about something we talked about, you can guess we love that kind of stuff. You can put it in an email and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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