Cher says goodbye, Gothic; hello, Zen
CHER, a collector of fine English Gothic Revival antiques, is on the phone, happily explaining why she’ll feel a little tug next week when the contents of her beachfront Malibu villa are auctioned off at the Beverly Hilton hotel.
“I love the look of Gothic furniture,” she says. “It’s not like I hate it and want to get rid of it. I am going to miss it, I think. But I thought, oh my God, I will do a whole new thing and just start over.”
Cher, who also sings and acts, is shedding identities again, something she does about once a decade. Before her neo-Gothic moment in Malibu, there was the extravagant Egyptian mansion in Benedict Canyon, with the push-button retractable glass roof. Now, after more than a decade of living with the drama and power of furnishings created or inspired by Augustus Welby Pugin, the father of the Gothic Revival that swept across England in the 19th century, the East beckons.
“I have this fabulous plan,” she says. “It’s Tibetan, Moroccan, Indian Zen. It sounds horrible, but it’s unbelievably beautiful, and I decided, that’s what I’m gonna do at the beach.”
In the meantime, there is all that stuff to shed. And so, the venerable Sotheby’s has joined forces with celebrity specialist Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions to put on a Cher sale that is similar to recent household and memorabilia auctions of other celebrities -- Johnny and June Carter Cash, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- with one major difference. Cher is still very much alive and kicking, while the others are ... not.
“YOU have no idea how involved she was,” Julien says. “I have never seen a sale like this.” Cher helped design the catalog and insisted that all the jewelry -- including minor baubles and costume pieces -- be photographed as if they were expensive gems. Unlike so many of her drug-addled rock-and-roll contemporaries, this 60-year-old pop queen’s memory is razor sharp. “She remembers everything,” he adds, “where she bought it, why she liked it. She has such wits about her.” Then, chuckling, “Either she took safe drugs or she didn’t take them at all.”
For the person who feels guilty about forays into the celebrity-drenched worlds of US Weekly or In Style, there is something deliciously satisfying about perusing the fat, glossy publication, “Property From the Collection of Cher.” This is a vicarious, 340-page stroll through the life and times of a woman who does not have many equals in popular culture. “Darren Julien wanted a microcosm of everything that I am,” says Cher, “and you’ve got that in the book.”
In and out of the public eye for much of the last 40 years, Cher has an Oscar, a Grammy, an Emmy and three Golden Globes, not to mention a penchant for outrageous public fashion displays and facial reinvention that never fails to astonish.
Here, among the historically meaningful Gothic Revival paintings, bed frames and side tables -- many collected from auction houses in England -- are photographs of her (often with her then-husband Sonny Bono) wearing florid Bob Mackie gowns. They sit alongside mannequins showing the gowns as they are now. Everything pictured is up for grabs.
As the auctioneers have said, there is something for everyone. With nearly 800 lots, the sale is an entirely Hollywood combo of high and low.
Lot 396, for instance, is an important circa 1840 arched Pugin gilt and polychrome decorated frame holding a painting of St. Filomena, valued at $5,000 to $7,000. Next to it is a note that Cher wrote to herself on the English auction catalog when she made the successful bid: “I will own this.”
“When you write things down, it means you have an intention to have it,” she explains. “It’s a note to the universe that says, ‘This is what my feelings are.’ ”
By contrast, Lot 45 is Cher’s circa 1960 biology workbook from Montclair College Preparatory School “with occasional ink-and-pencil notation inside in Cher’s hand” ($300 to $500). There’s also plenty of inexpensive jewelry, a testament to the entertainer’s own high-low style. “I am the same as I have ever been,” she says. “I go from one extreme to the other. I am either in a gown or sweatpants. And I still like costume jewelry. You can have fabulous zircon earrings, or whatever that fake diamond is called. Style has nothing to do with money.”
Still, even a relatively modest object -- be it a piece of jewelry or a 1975 reprint of a 1915 book on Gothic architecture in France, England and Italy -- may command a good price simply because it has been owned by Herself. (After all, in 2004, a plastic bag of Katharine Hepburn’s hair curlers made out of rolled newspaper commanded $3,300.)
You say you can’t afford a 19th century Pugin brass bed with delicate-looking vines and the family crest of Lady Scarisbrick with an estimated auction value of $20,000 to $30,000? (Cher got into a bidding war with Andrew Lloyd Webber over it.) Then how about a turquoise beaded necklace made by Cher herself (Lot 538; $200 to $300) or a needlepoint pillow with this classy message: “Q: Name two things that will survive a nuclear war A: Cockroaches and Cher”(Lot 783; $200 to $300).
THE estimated prices are probably low, the auctioneers acknowledged. They guessed that the sale will fetch at least $1.4 million, and Cher has designated that an unspecified amount will go to her foundation, which funds such charities as Habitat for Humanity, the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and Children’s Craniofacial Assn. All proceeds from the sale of her 2003 Hummer H2 will go to Operation Helmet, which pays for protective helmet inserts for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Somebody will get an incredible bargain, because there are so many things to choose from,” says Bob Mackie, who has had perhaps one of the most fruitful collaborations between designer and diva in entertainment history. He seemed a bit wistful about seeing so many of the gowns he made for her go on the auction block. But, he said, an auction is better than how she treated her many costumes when they first began collaborating on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” in 1971. “In the beginning, she wasn’t even keeping them,” he says. “She would put them out in garage sales or give them to the maid. We finally said, don’t do that. Someday they’ll be worth a lot and they’ll be collector pieces.”
“You have no idea how many things I’ve kept,” says Cher, who admits that, as a size 8 these days, she no longer even fits into the sizes 0, 2 and 4 gowns Mackie made her back in the 1970s. “Some things I would never give away.” (She’ll never part with the red, white and blue outfit that she was wearing in 1965 when she and Sonny got thrown out of the London Hilton, a press stunt that was smashingly successful and got them in all the papers, launching their career. “My mother saved that,” she says. “I forgot that I had it!”)
As for the auction’s Gothic furniture, paintings and decorative objects, says Jason Preston, the Sotheby’s specialist who cataloged them, “Cher really had an overall good collecting bug. She kept meticulous records every time she shopped an auction catalog, and that was very helpful to me.”
Once Cher became captivated by Pugin, who is most famous for helping redesign the Houses of Parliament, she began collecting at auctions and antiques stores, working with her lifelong friend and interior designer Ron Wilson. “For my whole life, I’ve been on the road and I loved going into old junk stores and antique stores and down alleyways,” she says. “It’s a great way to meet people. They pull you into a dark room and they bring out these amazing things.”
Pugin (pronounced pyoo-gin), a convert to Catholicism, died at age 40 in 1852. He believed in the power of ecclesiastical architecture, says Preston, “even in a domestic setting. You get high arched and pointed windows and door surrounds, dentilated moldings and cornices, and a bit of austerity in the overall furnishings.”
The greatest collection of Puginalia, he says, is at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “But Cher’s,” he says, “I would rank as truly incredible because there aren’t that many of his things on the open market.”
For Cher fans or collectors who want to see the auction items in person, all lots will be on display free in the Beverly Hilton’s ballroom Friday through Monday. The auction, for registered bidders, will take place Tuesday and Wednesday.
Rush Jenkins of WRJ Associates is designing the auction space at the Beverly Hilton. The hotel gave him 36 hours to put it together before Friday’s opening, since the ballroom is in constant use. He has attempted to duplicate the layout of her villa in various room settings and will place them among videos of her performances, mannequins in the Mackie gowns and blown-up photographs of her home. People will be able to try out her deeply upholstered tufted sofas and chairs for themselves. “This way,” he says, “you’ll get the flavor of her life.”
As for Cher, after spending three-and-a-half years on her Farewell Tour, which ended last year, she’s working on a new album, and possibly a movie that she hopes to direct. Of course, she’ll also be devoting herself to her next home-decorating project for a while: “I actually bought the most beautiful wall from India,” she said, “with hand-carved arches, and I’m making a closet out of it, putting mirrors behind the arches. And I bought a beautiful statue of the goddess Quan Yin and she’s beautiful, about 4 feet high, like an old Roman statue only in wood ... “
That auction should be good.
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See Cher’s stuff, live
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You don’t just hold a garage sale on PCH when you decide to refurnish your 16,000-square-foot Malibu Italian Renaissance mansion. At least not when you’re Cher. You call the auctioneers, in this case, Sotheby’s and Julien’s Auctions, which have teamed up for next week’s sale, “Property from the Collection of Cher.” What the diva doesn’t want anymore can be viewed this weekend at a free exhibition in advance of the auction.
Exhibition: Open to the public in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel, 9876 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday.
Catalogs: Can be viewed online and purchased at www.sothebys.com or by calling (888) 752-0002. Cost is $55, plus shipping and handling. A special hardcover edition, autographed by Cher, is available for $260.
Auction: Tuesday and Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel. Bidders are required to register, either on site, by visiting www.juliensauctions.com or by calling (310) 836-1818.
Bidding: Can be done in person, by Internet or telephone, or by filling out an absentee bid form, available at www.sothebys.com. In addition to the hammer price, bidders will be required to pay an additional “buyer’s premium” of 20% up to the first $200,000, then 12% after that.
-- Robin Abcarian
