The Esquire Story That Drove David Geffen Crazy
This article originally appeared in the February 1975 issue of Esquire under the headline, "The Winning of Cher." It contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of homosexuality, gender, and class. It also refers to Cher's son, Chaz, as Chastity, which was his name at the time. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
The pain is unbearable. It jags down his hipbones to his groin. David Geffen thinks it might be the boots, the walking. Having lived so long in California with his legs dangling over the plump leathers of his Fames chair and his Rolls-Royce, he has forgotten how to walk.
The boots must come off immediately. He drops the F.A.O. Schwarz bag onto the sidewalk and removes the fifty-dollar stuffed dog he has bought for Chastity Bono. In the full noon surge of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street he pulls off one boot. This means he has to hop. Thirty-one years old, chairman of the board of Elektra/Asylum Records and boyfriend of Cher, he hops around on his short black sock. He pulls off the other boot. Of course, short black socks. Geffen is secure enough to wear what’s comfortable and if two inches of shank show when the leg is crossed, so what.
It’s like the Italian ices. A minute ago Geffen wanted to go into Tiffany’s with one of those Italian ices in the leaky white paper cups. What did he care. No belt in his belt loops. California millionaire. He had walked from the Pierre Hotel to A La Vieille Russie, Schwarz’s and Tiffany’s. And all along he was asking, “How much?” Six thousand dollars for the pavéed cross. “How much do pearls cost?” he asks in Tiffany’s. “I bought a bracelet like that for Cher,” he says at the major diamond counter up front. The saleswomen do not exert themselves. It’s not like when he is with Cher and they get all churned up and helpful. Alone, he looks . . . well, so unable to afford it. So insignificant and classless. The narrow little body, the Lenny Bruce face, the beard. So “Mr. Beige,” as Cher once described him. But here he is, one of Warner Communications’ largest stockholders, in New York to discuss the merger of his subsidiary company, Elektra/ Asylum, with Atlantic Records—a deal which will eventually fall through.
Nobody seems to notice the socks as he pads through Bonwit Teller and down Fifty-seventh Street to Florsheim, where he buys an inexpensive pair of chukka boots. Beige. He can already see the vigilantly chic Cher picking them up with her Hollywood-dynasty fingernails, holding them over the wastebasket—“Where did you get these?” The salesman acts as though it’s perfectly normal for a man to walk into a shoe store in his socks but he takes a long time on the phone with the gold credit card.
Geffen is indifferent to the small humiliations. He checks his shopping bag in an Art Deco store, ignores the clerk who follows him too closely, and walks right to a large red poppy Tiffany lamp that reminds him of Cher. “How much?” “It's not for sale,” says the woman. “Well if it were for sale, how much?” “I’m sorry sir. . . .” “If you had one like it, how much? . . . Is there anyone I could speak to?”
It has become unusual for David Geffen not to get what he wants. He says he always knew what he wanted. Now that he has gotten it, it isn’t enough. Not enough to back the Rolls out of the spot at Asylum that says “Reserved Parking: David Geffen Only” and drive down Sunset Strip past the Roxy Theatre, a club he co-founded; past the former Geffen-Roberts Management Company. Not enough to go into Tower Records and point among the albums—“That’s mine . . . that’s mine . . . that’s mine”—before entering the driveway of the $1,500,000 house to Cher, who is also his. Not enough to have his artists write songs about him. Right now there is Joni Mitchell’s Free Man in Paris, a perfect description of a world-weary David Geffen dealing in “dreamers and telephone screamers” and wondering what he does it for; and Jackson Browne is working on The Wizard of L.A. Two years ago Newsweek called him “Golden Boy,” and last year Time described “Geffen’s Golden Touch.” Recently a beautiful woman came up to him at Madison Square Garden and whispered, “David, I want to . . .” making a thrillingly explicit sexual offer. Not enough to have had his last birthday party given by Cher and Bob Dylan or to know that for the last five years he has never made less than $1,000,000. Tonight his best friends Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty are coming to dinner.
David Geffen thinks of his L.A. office as windowless. The Spanish arches filled with grainy gold Brooklyn-bathroom glass are not windows. It bothers him, so he is adding a second floor to the Asylum building. Above Geffen’s head is a Ben Shahn lithograph of two hands shaking in a deal. Before he formed Asylum in 1971 all Geffen’s business had been done by handshake and personal relationship. But now it’s very involved and corporate with Warner Communications stock analysts monitoring from New York. Now the dreamers don’t get quite as close and the telephone screamers don’t scream quite as loud.
Geffen has just gone through a very bad week in court with the Sonny and Cher divorce. He smokes constantly now; Cher has gained five pounds and has gotten pimples. Cher is very vain, Geffen explains; she won’t go out of the house with a pimple. His mother, who should be calmly ensconced in the Beverly Hills house he bought her when he forced her to quit the brassiere business in Brooklyn, sees David on the cover of the National Star and worries. It’s only because Cher wants to get back her own money that she’s asking $32,000-a-month alimony and paying all the bills at their house, though Sonny made it sound like Geffen was some sort of gigolo living off Cher.
Last week Sonny sued Geffen for $13,000,000 for interfering with his contractual relationship with his wife. He charged Cher with spending $6,000 a month on clothes, $600 on her fingernails, $900 on her psychiatrist. He said Chastity told him that “Geffen talks loud . . . he talks loud on the phone.” What grief, hundreds of thousands in legal fees; it’s cost Geffen $38,000 already just to have his lawyers sit in. And yet, all this has given David Geffen a real outside villain in the midst of his love. It has also given him a face—not that he wants it—to readers of the National Enquirer, Photo Screen, TV and Movie Screen, Movie Mirror, Rona Barrett's Gossip, Screen Stars, Movieland and TV Time, TV Radio Mirror, in which he appears looking menaced, escorting Cher in and out of various court houses. The scruffy “Rock Super Czar,” Cher's “record mogul.” No longer Mr. Beige.
Geffen starts returning some of the calls from his six-page call-back list. “Get me ______. Get me ______.” He calls out the names to his secretary. He usually has two “get me’s” working at once. As he connects, he tears a piece of paper from the list and rolls it into a cone. At the end of the day his wastebasket is full of these paper cones, the relics of all human contact. The list is filled with movie names—screenwriters wanting to send treatments, directors, producers, agents. Between the normal business calls are frantic divorce-bulletin calls that leave Geffen looking stricken, announcing things like, “Sonny’s at the house.” He viciously spindles the paper cone. Geffen’s concern in the divorce seems to be keeping Sonny away from Cher. Everyone wants Cher, says Geffen. He is handling her movie offers, her TV specials, booking her tour. His own men are vigorously promoting her M.C.A. record album.
“It’s not that I want to do it. I’m not looking to be a personal manager,” he says. “I gave that up a long time ago, but this is the woman I love. . . . It’s not a client. She needs help right now.”
“Six million gross on the Dylan tour,” he informs the man on the phone. “Souther-Hillman-Furay [a group Geffen formed] has sold a hundred and sixty thousand albums in fourteen days. Business is fantastic. We’ve done twenty million dollars to date. . . . Figures have doubled on the Joni Mitchell. . . . We just signed Tony Orlando and Dawn, a very, very inexpensive deal. . . . We have a Jackson Browne, a Linda Ronstadt, Traffic. . . . I’m signing John Fogerty of Creedence. ... A new Carly Simon, a new Judy Collins. . . . I have an Eagles but won’t put it out until 1975. . . . We can do forty, forty-two million, maybe forty-five. I think we’ll have a staggering net profit after taxes. . . . My little company had a higher net for the quarter than Atlantic.” And then he says he doesn’t want Elektra/Asylum’s figures commingled with Atlantic’s. “He can’t cope with all those people,” says Geffen, referring to a conflict with a business associate. “I’m the only one who can and I’m not willing to have these monumental fights every two days. Life’s too short.”
Life’s too short! Does anyone realize what it has taken for Geffen to get to this point? To say things like, “Sure, I wouldn’t mind signing Paul McCartney or Elton John, but I’m not very hungry.” (Even if he doesn’t quite mean this.) Too short! Geffen’s whole monomaniacal existence is loaded into that realization. The six years that have aged his first million, and the twenty-five years before it. The three-room apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn, where he slept in his parents’ bedroom until his older brother moved out of the living room. The sabra mother who ran Chic Corsetry by Geffen out of one of the rooms, who stopped giving him money when he was fourteen and told him to learn to love work or he’d turn out like his father. The father an “intellectual” who sat around reading while she worked. “The apartment was always filled with women with big tits,” says Geffen.
New Utrecht High in the mornings and an afternoon job as a mail clerk; summers in the Catskills. “I was the skinniest smallest busboy in the history of the Catskills.” he says. “I used to get big tips from people because they had rachmones for me. Do you know what I mean? Pity.” He lived on his “wits and instincts,” signed his own bad report cards, lied to get out of the Army. The movies he remembers are California movies of surfers and Gidgets and U.C.L.A. pom-pom girls.
He went to L.A. and kept returning there, sensing, perhaps, that he would go further in a place where the energy level was so low, where no one worked in that fevered New York way, where quick dark Jews could jump over the large surfer blonds, inflate their New York successes and get the best women. His brother, always a more directed type, was then in U.C.L.A. law school and while David was visiting him on campus a producer cast David as a high-school freshman for a movie called The Explosive Generation. Geffen saw the movie and had his nose fixed. He went back to Brooklyn College, transferred to the University of Texas, flunked out and returned to California where his brother was engaged to Phil Spector’s first wife’s sister. For months Geffen hung around Spector’s sessions; it was the first time he had seen power flexed by someone his own age and he was mesmerized: “Phil Spector was my idol. He was God.” Geffen did not pay much attention to Cher, who was one of Spector’s back-up singers, or to Sonny, who shook the maracas and did promotion.
Geffen was fired from two low-level CBS jobs, after which he says he woke up. His brother told him he was turning out just like their father; David was frightened. He lied to get his mail-room job at the William Morris Agency, telling them he was a U.C.L.A. theatre arts graduate. When he found out they checked, he went to the office early and sorted every piece of mail for four months looking for the U.C.L.A. letter. When it came he took it to a printer, had him forge the letterhead stationery and rewrote the letter. From the mail room he signed his first client. On his vacations he would get dressed up and fly out to the Coast at his own expense and sit in on the William Morris meetings. The agency actually fired him for being “too aggressive,” but after crying in a vice-president’s office he was re-hired. He went the rest of the way he had to go on the charm of a child, an unabashed belief in David Geffen, a golden ear and a genius for business.
American business is full of men like David Geffen, men with things to prove to the men who fired them, the girls who wouldn’t go out with them in high school, their mothers. They work harder perhaps, are luckier, more single-minded and prove what they have to. Sometimes, like Geffen, they have peculiar high metabolism, they talk faster, have faster fingers on push-button phones, don’t eat lunch, can’t take vacations. Around them things move so quickly that deals sometimes turn into double-deals. At some point they may find, like Geffen, that the only love they have is their business. They feel lopsided. They don’t know how to spend their money. They live in hotels or rented houses, have no possessions. When Geffen moved into Julie Andrews’ house, he moved with two suitcases. (“If you have the money you can always buy it,” his mother had said.) Then, if they are like Geffen, they “check out the best psychiatrist on the West Coast.” And after two years of daily analysis, some of the obsession passes. The doctor says take care of yourself (not just your artists); it’s then men like Geffen try to fall in love, usually with a woman who is hard to acquire. They get healthy impulses to chuck it all. After all, “life’s too short. . . .” And there is Cher.
He learns to spend; he acquires that wonderful phrase, “I’ll take one in every color.” Geffen and Cher and Diana Ross and her husband Robert Silberstein are in a shoe store. The floor is piled with bespoke shoes and Geffen is hopping about in that manic way of his, picking up this oxford and that boot, consulting Cher, sending the chauffeur around to get them pizzas and heroes. It’s a large production, finally he finds a boot—ninety-five dollars plus twenty for special order—and he says that phrase, “in every color,” all ten of them. He and Cher have one of their mock money quarrels. Geffen asks if she brought a check and she says no and why doesn’t he put everything on his card. But you can deduct it as costumes he says. Well you can call me Mrs. Bono, Cher says, and he pays for it all—$1,700.
Cher is really very good at this one-in-every-color thing. Very good, too, at helping David unravel. Backgammon, skiing at Aspen, parties at agent Sue Mengers’, dinners with Diana Vreeland. It’s not like Cher’s some ordinary girl. No, she’s Dark Lady Cher with the low vamp voice. The perfect California girl—the tan, the L.A. dead pan—only exotic. Somber sex. Elegant: photographed for Vogue, upside down, one hand resting on a breast. The second time he saw her, she was a star. He had his record company. It was Bette Midler’s show at the Troubadour and Geffen was with his girl friend Janet Margolin and Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records; Cher was with Sonny. They were already separated but Geffen didn’t know this; he promptly fell in love.
In September of 1973, the only date in his life that he remembers with any accuracy, Geffen, Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson of The Band went to see Neil Young’s show at Geffen’s club, the Roxy. A friend told him Cher was alone and wanted to join them. “Cher said, ‘Let’s get together for dinner,’ and we were never apart since,” says Geffen with a small preen in his voice. After the taping of the last Sonny and Cher show, David and Cher surfaced together at the Grammy Awards. That produced the famous butterfly-emergent picture of Cher, bare midriffed, in white with a butterfly over one ear and another in her cleavage, and a shaved-for-the-occasion Geffen, in his sharpie tux, on her arm. It was Cher who talked him into the Corniche Rolls with the wire wheels. Cher who threw out all his shirts and dressed him. And now because of Cher and their mutual psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Grotjahn, he can go into this boutique on the Strip and have the two $345 suede jackets fitted and ask if they have a third so he will have one in every possible color.
While Cher brought him to this California ostentation and flat-out American exuberance, Ahmet Ertegun influenced Geffen in another way. Ahmet was so composed in his power, so relaxed at handling the totally wrecked rock stars who’d come crashing off planes, fall into his arms, rip the shirt off his dignified back and expect to be taken home for dinner. Even now with Ahmet, at a time when they still expect to be cochairmen of the Atlantic/Asylum board, Geffen gets that Brooklyn-boy look on his face as though he is going to ask, “Is this an ashtray?” before dumping his cigarette. His whole New York world of the high-up Pierre suite and the chauffeured car that is waiting, motor running, for Mr. Geffen when he emerges from Ahmet’s town house at two A.M. is blown, and he is back to the time when he had gone to Ahmet in 1968.
It was the second or third time they’d met, and Geffen, then managing Laura Nyro and supporting them both, was broke and trying to sell Ahmet an artist. Ahmet asked what it would take to keep Geffen going for a year. Geffen said fifty thousand dollars, naming the figure he had been making when he ran the Ashley Famous music department, the figure that represented wealth to him when he was a busboy in the Catskills and being rich meant having a Cadillac and living on Ocean Parkway. “If you earned fifty thousand dollars a year, that was the most any man could possibly ask for, and that was my goal.” Ertegun took out his checkbook and wrote Geffen a personal check. He never allowed Geffen to pay it back. That was style. “He bought me for life,” Geffen says. “Every artist I ever came up with after that I gave to Ahmet. I signed Crosby Stills Nash and Young to Atlantic and he made a great deal of money, and so did I.” Even if Geffen’s loyalty won’t extend to letting his company’s figures be commingled with Atlantic’s, still he says, “I’m sort of Ahmet’s protégé.”
What are you doing now that you’re a big corporation, David?” the art director wants to know. Geffen shrugs.
He has returned to his old management office, Geffen-Roberts (now Lookout Management) on Sunset Strip next door to Phil Spector Productions. Between building the Ashley Famous music department to the second biggest in the agency business (this took a year) and turning Creative Management Agency into number one (this took another year), Geffen and his former secretary, Elliot Roberts, made Geffen-Roberts the largest music-management company in the world, netting $3,000,000 in a single year. Elliot Roberts was known as the nice guy. When Geffen sold Asylum to Warners, he gave his seventy-five percent interest in the company to Roberts. On one of the bulletin boards is the bumper sticker that Stephen Stills had printed up: WHO IS DAVID GEFFEN AND WHY IS HE SAYING THESE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME? Stills is the only artist Geffen started with that he ever dropped.
David Blue, one of Asylum’s artists, is playing pensive notes on a guitar. He has not made a record in eight months.
“Hey David can I get an advance on my next album?” Blue asks.
“I just gave you three thousand,” Geffen says.
Blue explains how that took care of his back rent and bills. Geffen says that Blue should get himself a producer. “I can work with _____,” says Blue, mentioning a name. “No, he’s unacceptable,” says Geffen. Blue looks miserable. What he seems to want is for David to take charge, to tell him he still believes in him and the next album will be a hit. One sign of approval. He doesn’t get it.
Geffen tries not to have these close, personal relationships with his artists anymore. He has, in fact, almost hated the record business since his split with Laura Nyro. Never was he so close to the whole artistic process. There he’d be with Laura on the balcony of her apartment on Central Park South and she would look at him and say, “You know, New York is a tender berry,” only, because of her New York accent, it would come out “tenda berry” and that would be the title of an album: New York Tendaberry. And right in front of David, Laura would drift in to her piano and write. She wrote three songs that night. It wasn’t the same after Laura. No more personal relationships.
“I’m a businessman,” Geffen says. Not an artist. No Phil Spector. Never produced a record. Never wrote a song. A businessman with a complicated reverence and scorn for his artists. They’d come to him, little babies in cracked shoes, ignorant of cash flows, down risks, cross-collateralized advances, full of songs of pain/love/loneliness/rejection. The kind of goose-pimply sentimental imagery Geffen prefers and has never betrayed in any significant way for hard or glitter rock. Songs about love as “a raging river” or as “a glass of wine balanced on the side rail of a ship” and birds that never touch the land but sleep on the wind. Those Jimmy Webb images stir things in Geffen, back in his office, tearing through the cellophane wrappers to play the albums he has put out. Sometimes he moves his tiny hips and sometimes he recites. “Arghhhh! That gets to me.” He clutches his chest, half keeling over from the beauty. “God, that kills me.”
But then their managers are on the phone, screaming, faces purpling with rage over insultingly small $300,000 advances. His artists start to hear the voices “of the sycophantic little morons”; they start to read their letters: “I was alone and I heard your record and it changed my whole life.” And they believe, and begin to require double hotel suites, curtained limousines for their coked-up retinues. Back when he was a manager, Geffen used to think of himself as “a dam against the river of shit pouring down on these people.” And he took a lot of it as he got rich. He lived with them (for two years he shared his house with Joni Mitchell), took their five A.B. phone calls, did their errands, handled their emotional crises, their nose wiping, all of it. He’s seen the worst of them, seen them wheedling money, seen one of them stuff $300,000 worth of cocaine up his nose in a year. He was arrested for carrying a briefcase of marijuana for one of his artists. There’s a rumor, which he denies, that Laura Nyro once walked him through Central Park on a leash. “He takes care of his artists like little chicklets,” Cher once said.
The one thing he would never do is tour with them. “I do not go on the road. I am not a sycophant,” he’d tell them. “I wouldn’t go on a whole tour if it was God himself coming down.” In fact this was Geffen’s genius. He would do everything that managers do except the things that got them in trouble with their artists—like managing their money, seeing to their rented limos, or their Hammond B-3’s. Geffen’s people never signed a management contract. Geffen would get his percentage only on the things he negotiated for his artists— a recording contract, a tour or an agency deal—and he would be paid directly by whoever paid the artist, so it was painless.
Artists! This is the only business where they are called “artists,” by the way. The biggest of them all, the one legend Geffen had to protect so the world wouldn’t see how totally uninformed he was, turned out to be so mean, so jealous, so cheap, ego-ridden and petty, such an ingrate. He’d call up demanding two cents more an album, tone down his dedication to Geffen on the album, until finally he’d revoke it altogether. All ungrateful. Geffen doesn’t get a Christmas card from one of them. No, since Laura, he hasn’t felt the same about his artists . . . sometimes he doesn’t like them as much as writers, movie people, Diana Vreeland.
God, what he’s done to woo them! Take Bob Dylan. His friend Robbie Robertson introduced them. Geffen made a point of calling Dylan every day, spending time with him and “building a relationship” (“that’s what I do for a living”), getting “his creative situation going again.” One day Geffen just kind of informally said, “Hey, we can do a tour and you’ll make bop bop bop.” And it’s the biggest concert tour in history. “He lacked confidence and I gave it to him,” says Geffen. “When David focuses his whole attention on you it’s like being licked by a cat,” says a friend. “For a while it feels good, but then you realize the tongue is ragged and scratchy.”
Sometimes they’ve come to him. Right now on Geffen’s desk is a hopelessly elaborate letter, all italic letters colored in about forty inks: “I am an artist (writer). The dream fulfilled says I am an Asylum artist . . . .” Jackson Browne wrote to Geffen including a tape and an eight-by-ten glossy, which Geffen threw out: “I thought, would Bob Dylan have sent an eight-by-ten glossy?” But his secretary rescued the tape and made Geffen listen to A Child in These Hills. Jackson came to the office and he looked like a child and was begging for help. Geffen couldn’t believe anyone who wrote such songs would not be known. “So I became Jackson’s sole support for several years,” he says. Sometimes you have to carry them a long time. “Of course I expected to make money with all these people and I did and they did too. . . .”
Laura Nyro was this kind of accident: a friend was playing her album for Geffen, who wasn’t really listening—he was going by his usual criterion, “She can’t be any good if I’ve never heard of her”—until the friend got a phone call, and Geffen heard He's a Runner and the song about the “street called buy and sell.” He took the album home. He listened ten times that night and flew to New York the next day to be her personal manager. “She was my most important client, my greatest artist and I loved her,” says Geffen. Laura dedicated albums to him and they were always together despite Laura’s mother who hated him and called him Svengali. “She was my first hurt and my only professional hurt.” When Geffen was starting Asylum, it was announced in the trade papers that she was signing with him, but then she signed with Columbia. He wouldn’t speak to her. Finally, he gave in, flew to New York where she left word that as long as he was there she would stay out of town. He returned to L.A. the same day and he cried on the plane. The lowest moment of his entire life, he says. No, no more personal relationships with artists.
“The reason I got in the fucking record business was because when you’re twenty-one or twenty-two you can’t sign Norman Jewison,” says Geffen. “The only people you’re able to get are rock people, but I have a background from three major agencies, in films and television, and I know these businesses inside and out; even though I say I know nothing about it, I know a lot about it. The record business is the only business where you can actually do something yourself.”
While he was running Geffen-Roberts he wanted to sign some acts with Atlantic. Ertegun told him to make the records himself and Atlantic would distribute them. Geffen called his company Asylum because “it was all craziness and refuge” for the white singer-songwriters and L.A. pop groups that formed the core of his label. Immediately he began to hang gold; in the first year Asylum made $3,500,000. In 1972, Warner Communications bought the company for $7,000,000 and signed David to a seven-year contract. “At the time I thought they were crazy,” he says, “but it was the best deal they ever made. It was a bad deal for me.” A year later Warners had Geffen take over the Elektra/Nonesuch label; he purged twenty-five of Elektra’s thirty-five artists and a large hunk of staff. Asylum became Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, then Atlantic/Asylum, now back to Elektra/Asylum.
Still it is not enough. Of course Cher and the divorce give him more to do; but, even before Geffen loses Bob Dylan, even before the merger fails, something rankles. He has the feeling that he is repeating, doing things he’s done before. Sometimes it seems as though he has signed everyone in the world. According to his Warners contract he is owned for five more years; he is working for people again. He is stuck in this windowless office at that state past the initial hunger before the next hunger can be fed. He wants to make movies; not one or two pictures and not as a producer “To me the producer of a movie is a peon”—but as the head of a studio. Of, say, Warner Bros. He knows he can do it. He is right here chafing in that pearly anergic center of the Hollywood oyster and he can’t make a move. It’s like the Tiffany lamp he wanted for Cher. Some things are temporarily impossible.
“Cher,” says Geffen, phoning her at her exercise class, “you got everything—twenty-five thousand dollars a month, custody. Sonny just gets weekends. And there’s injunctive relief—they can’t spend your money. Sonny went out today to book a Sonny and Cher show, do you believe that?”
He tells her of some deals he is setting up: $600,000 for four weeks in Vegas, a $1,000,000 tour, his work on the CBS special and the series. Apparently Cher, who was going to spend a year lallygagging around taking care of her child and her beauty, has decided to go back to work. Later he will call her again, at her massage: “Are you a happy lady today? You walked home with all the marbles.” Cher wants to know when Geffen is coming home. It is, after all, his vacation.
Eventually Geffen leaves the office. People stare into the Rolls to see who is driving. Oh, for his old anonymous Mercedes! Often on the way home he stops for junk food, driving the car up to some seedy food pit for a devil dog, a pizza. This particular day the hot dog from Pink’s makes him sick. Clutching his cramped stomach he heads back to Asylum to use his own bathroom; he can’t get sick in just any bathroom. He runs into the building.
Jackson Browne wanders out. He still needs a line for his song about Geffen, The Wizard of L.A., but he will think of one right now. He is very obliging. He turns his back, paces, taps his torn shoe and squats alongside the car: “I was living hand to mouth/ And getting by from day to day/ So I took my case To the Wizard of L.A./ He said, ‘Son I’m going to let you take your shot/ Take it from me and believe it or not It’s hard to be hot.’”
Geffen comes out of the office looking wan, but manages the short drive home. He presses the button on the plastic box in his car and the iron gates clank open. At the head of the driveway is the cupid-flanked former residence of Sonny and Cher which now has the lawyer’s Mercedes in the driveway. In June, Cher officially took possession of the house accompanied by Geffen, a security guard and the regular retinue of Hollywood-style servants, all of whom look like friends who have dropped in to use the pool. The house is rich and dark. Large furniture on ball-and-claw feet looms from the boiserie under elaborate moldings, cartouches and paintings of the draped-shepherds-relaxing-against-columns school. Relying heavily on Chinese Export, assorted Louis, and Brunschwig & Fils fabric, the house achieves a clobbering gloom. It’s hard to imagine Sonny and Cher, the old fringe flying and bell-bottoms flapping, moving through this house. Geffen has plans; he has already seen an architect about opening the house up, knocking through a wall of paneling and putting in a pyramid skylight.
“I’m five pounds overweight,” Cher calls out. The producer of Cher’s TV special, George Schlatter, looks nervous. Cher comes in really “done,” as they say in Hollywood, wearing custom jeans and about fourteen pounds of Indian jewelry, and plops into a Louis XIV chair. “Ali and Raquel are in my exercise class. Raquel’s more out of shape than I am,” she says. Cher is in kind of a divorced-out mood, what with Sonny’s interpretation of the judge’s ruling and David’s insisting to her lawyer Sandy Mendelson that there be no meeting with Sonny unless he is present. “You understand, Sandy?” Geffen says. “A real shtarker,” says Mendelson on his way out.
During dinner at Antonio’s, a still undiscovered Mexican restaurant, Cher plays poker face to Schlatter’s routines. Geffen is quiet. It’s one of those typical Hollywood evenings—thousands of giant squid are landing on the Los Angeles beaches, a swan at the Bel-Air hotel is attacked by a coyote and has to be carried off in a blanket, and various people are described as a lox, a chrysanthemum, a raft (Mark Spitz) and— Geffen’s favorite—twenty-watt bulbs.
“I think our show should be called [Pause] and Cher,” says Schlatter. He says he has heard that Sonny is using a Cher doll. They discuss how they will handle the Sonny issue on Cher’s show.
“Maybe you could walk out with a midget?” says Geffen.
“I’ve been doing that for twelve years,” says Cher. “Maybe a very tall man and I just look up and say, ‘You don’t know what a relief this is for the neck muscles.’”
Very delicately Schlatter says he thinks Cher’s image could be lightened a bit. There’s this idea he has for a great bubble-bath scene. Eventually Cher yawns. Immediately Geffen gets up to go.
The fingernail is the perfect lady-of-leisure nail. An inch long, it starts off baby pink at the base and finishes with silver-flecked silver on the square tip and in between is a ruler-straight scarlet slash. The fingernail is embedded in the scruff of David Geffen’s beard. It belongs to Cher.
Cher’s tongue is deep inside Geffen’s mouth. Her thick braids swing forward onto his neck. She straightens up and smooths her leotard into her famously flat midriff.
“Feel my ass,” she says to Geffen. “Hard as a rock.”
Joe De Carlo, who used to manage Sonny and Cher, laughs his tough-customer laugh. David is being rewarded for agreeing to buy Cher a condominium in Aspen. It was the only thing she hadn’t gotten from Sonny. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll buy you your condominium,” Geffen had said. “Will you? How sweet,” Cher had said. Now the conversation goes something like this: “Hey, honey, how ’bout my condo?” Geffen wants to know which one, wants to fly to Aspen. “After all, two hundred and twelve thousand dollars is a lot of money no matter how much you’ve got.”
“If it’s my money I want the cheap one; if it’s yours, the most expensive,” says Cher. Geffen says something about Cher’s not being able to afford it.
“I’ve got more money than you,” says Cher.
“No, you don’t,” says David.
“I’ve got nine hundred thousand dollars in the bank. You’ve only got three hundred thousand.”
“Seven hundred and eighty,” says Geffen.
Cher tries to start a story about when she and Sonny met the pope.
“What did you say? Thatsa niiiiiiiiiius, Pius,” says Geffen in a Jewish accent.
“Remember how you were dressed,” says Joe De Carlo. De Carlo says he is seeing a new Cher. One who speaks. One who doesn’t say “how high” when Sonny says jump. “Now you say, ‘Up your ass.’”
“Not ‘up your ass,’” says Cher demurely. But Cher seems to have taken on the created persona of the TV Cher—the talking back, the putdowns—while Geffen shuts up around her and makes the deals like Sonny used to, only Geffen consults her. It’s a glorious love surrounded by much tumult.
Cher and Joe bring out the backgammon board. Cher has painted one of Joe’s pinkie nails in three colors, an exact replica of hers. Chastity is playing upstairs among all the toys that show she is not a deprived little girl. The maid-with-no-uniform brings in little hunks of melon and prosciutto stabbed with toothpicks.
Geffen picks up a plate. When the divorce is over, he will marry Cher. When the second floor is finished at Asylum, his office will have windows. As soon as possible the house will lie pierced by the pyramid skylight. All he can do now is change the structures around his life. Hang a few jewels on Cher and wait out his contract. It is not enough. David Geffen picks up a toothpick and eats.
[Editor’s Note: Geffen’s homosexuality was not publicly known at the time of this article. The story, however, infuriated Geffen. Five years later, Robert Sam Anson profiled Geffen for Esquire.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” [Geffen told Anson], the Brooklyn-accented tone lower, though no less incredulous. “Do you know what your magazine did to me last time?” he demands. “Do you know?” You feign ignorance while perusing the research package the office has prepared for you. It doesn’t take long to find it. There, atop the pile of photocopies, it is: a cover story, no less, dated February 1975. THE WINNING OF CHER, the headline reads, adding in lowercase afterthought, “and some other major achievements of David Geffen.” One passage, circled in red, immediately catches the eye: “Cher’s tongue is deep inside Geffen’s mouth. Her thick braids swing forward onto his neck. She straightens up and smooths her leotard into her famously flat midriff. ‘Feel my ass,’ she says to Geffen. ‘Hard as a rock.’” “Well, uh,” you begin to fumble.
Geffen cuts in. “That article,” he is sputtering. “Reading that article was the worst single moment in my life. Do you know what I did after I read that article? Do you know? I threw up, that’s what I did. I threw up! And then do you know what I did? I left the country! I went to Brazil! Brazil! Do you know that? For six months! That article nearly caused a breakdown! Do you hear that? Breakdown! Now you want me to do it again! Do you think I’m crazy? Is that what you think? That I’m crazy?”
You can read the complete Anson piece at Esquire Classic.]
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