The Magical Misery Tour: Cher in Armenia

On a mild evening in late April, Cher sits in an ancient orange bus parked on the oily tarmac of Yerevan airport as workers unload the large stock of provisions she has brought with her on this first visit to her beleaguered ancestral sod. Carton after carton, filled with breads, fruits, vegetables, and soups, is carried off the plane; and because cracked water and sewage pipes have compromised the local water supply, there are hundreds of bottles of fresh spring water. The supplies are earmarked not for needy Armenians but for Cher, her 10-person entourage, and the roughly equivalent number of international journalists who have arrived with her. There are so many boxes that by the time they’ve all been carefully stowed away and the bus is heading into town, the sun has long gone down.

Like Iman in Somalia and Bianca in Bosnia, Cher has just touched down for a whirlwind misery tour in one of the more hard-pressed pockets of the world, believing that the six pages in People and the 11 minutes on 20/20 it will yield somehow represent a significant contribution toward revealing the hardship. But the problem here seems too big even for tabloid journalism to rectify. In the past five years, Armenia has suffered a severe earthquake, been financially cut loose by the deferred integration of the Soviet Union, and all but shut down by an embargo imposed by its Muslim neighbors. That action came in response to the country’s five-year war with Azerbaijan over the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

For the next 30 minutes the bus crawls past steel-drum fires and candlelit kiosks in this blacked-out city of more than a million and a quarter. Electric power is limited to two hours a day, and the country is just emerging from a winter without fuel in which the average temperature was 10 below zero.

The Hotel Armenia is also dark, and there’s no running water, heat, or working telephone. Armenian secret servicemen hustle us up a grand marble staircase to the fifth floor, where severe women in wool sweaters dole out room keys and candles. A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door and Cher’s manager, Bill Sammeth, guides me down a long corridor to a corner suite, where Cher sits on a couch behind a glass coffee table. With her dark clothes and famous black hair blending into the darkness, her palely made-up face seems to float in the candlelight. Cher insists she has no idea what’s compelled her to make the trip. She barely knows her Armenian father. “It’s hard to have an ongoing relationship with a drug addict,” she says, and has never thought of herself as Armenian. “I’m just kind of following something that’s bringing me here.”

From duets with Sonny to variety-show comedienne to dramatic actress - going up and collecting her Oscar for Moonstruck after standing on the same stage, only two years before, in her outrageous Academy-snubbing Bob Mackie ensemble - Cher has been winging it with uncanny success for almost 30 years. But lately, as she herself acknowledges, she’s been losing her touch. There have been too many hair-product infomercials, too much plastic surgery, and not enough of anything else. “I’m going through some sort of big life change,” says Cher, who has put everything she owns in Los Angeles on the market and bought a small house in Miami. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know if I’m going to make any more movies. I don’t know if I’m going to be in show business at all.”

The next morning Cher returns to the airport and poses for photographers among the high stacks of relief supplies being unloaded by forklift from the hold of a second DC-8 that the United Armenian Fund (UAF) has flown into the country the night before. Since the organization was founded, about a year after the 1988 earthquake in Leninakan killed some 100,000 and left another 500,000 homeless, the UAF has brought in 57 planeloads of supplies worth $50 million. Cher wears a huge black velvet cap, circa 1971 Sly and the Family Stone. Her black leather overalls, big fat black boots, and silver-and-diamond bracelet are by Chrome Hearts. The Sunday before she left Los Angeles, Chrome Hearts partner Richard Stark and his girlfriend and baby came over to Cher’s place to have pancakes and talk about what she might need for the trip. “I thought she’d want a full suit of armor,” says Stark, but instead she opted for the overalls, and Tuesday morning at 1:00 A.M., hours before her flight to London, Stark’s girlfriend dropped off the finished pants, which when they get to stores will cost about $5000, depending on how fancy you want the stitching. The converted Chippewa fireman’s boots with sterling-silver eyelets, zippers, and lace tips are $4250 at Maxfield in L.A., the bracelet, $3000. Perhaps misled by the airport photographs, wire services run reports that Cher has sponsored the trip and paid for the relief supplies, but in fact she’s made no contribution to the UAP, not even toward the extra $90,000 it cost to bring herself, her manager, her assistant, her ex-boyfriend, her bodyguard, and a woman who does her body waxing into the country. However, when asked if Cher paid for the boots, overalls, and bracelet, Stark says, “Hell, yes.”

On the first day, the bus stops at two orphanages; an orthopedic hospital, many of whose patients are children; and a condemned building turned over to refugees from the fighting in Karabakh. It’s hard to exaggerate the stir caused by the arrival of an international glamour puss in a Third World nation where people still talk excitedly about a concert given several years ago by the Armenian-descended guitarist of the group Deep Purple. At every stop Cher inspires an unsettling combination of false awe and false hope. At the hospital, the entire staff and many patients crowd the muddy courtyard to mutely welcome her, while those too infirm lean out of windows. When Cher goes inside and visits a roomful of teenagers, a boy removes his sweatpants to afford Cher and reporters a better view of his amputated leg, hospitably offering up his misfortune the way other hosts might share their bread. The saddest spectacle is that of the people who actually believe Cher might do something for them – like the desperate men and women who hang around the hotel lobby for hours with envelopes and flowers they hope to deliver directly into Cher’s hand. Unintentionally, Cher encourages these long-shot hopes by occasionally plucking one of these letters from the dustbin and interceding. During the trip, Cher finalized arrangements to bring to America for medical attention a three-year-old Armenian girl with palsy, whose parents had gotten a letter to her in Santa Monica. “If a letter finds me halfway round the world,” says Cher, “then something is meant to happen.” On May 8 Christina Agabekov arrived in L.A., where she began a regimen of physical therapy that, doctors believe, will enable her to walk for the first time, albeit with leg braces.

Not that Cher is utterly insensitive to the maudlin melodrama. One on one, she is often gracious and empathetic. “This is as awkward for us as it is for you,” she tells a boy at the hospital through an interpreter. She gives the boys Hot Wheels cars and the girls Barbie dolls she has solicited from Mattel. Yet at every stop the same strict protocol is observed. First, all the reporters empty out of the bus – the photographer from AP, the reporter from British morning television, the reporter from The Independent, a photographer and reporter from People, and the UAF’s own four-man crew filming a documentary on the singer-actress-humanitarian. When everyone is lined up and ready, Cher, looking frail and aggrieved, steps out and, surrounded by her people, is spirited inside. There’s also a caste system for reporters. When we all rush into the orphanage at our first stop, setting off peals of infants wailing, 20/20 producer Donald Thrasher, who with his crew has arrived in advance in a rented car, flails his arms and tells Sammeth, “This is just unacceptable.” Apparently, both 20/20 and People have been promised Cher’s trip as an exclusive and now find that they can’t aim their cameras at a single motherless child without seeing some other reporter in the viewfinder. The resourceful Sammeth assures Thrasher that from now on 20/20 and People will get their own setups at each stop, complete with their own exclusive orphans, refugees, and amputees.

That evening, a meeting has been arranged with American president Levon Ter-Petrossian, but after returning to the hotel for dinner, Cher decides at the very last minute that she isn’t up to it. “I didn’t mean to snub the president,” Cher will tell Armenian reporters the next day. “I just didn’t feel like seeing anyone.”

On the second day, Cher stays with the overalls and boots but replaces the cap with a blue-and-white-striped kerchief pulled tight over her hair and knotted behind, which, along with an oversize work shirt, gives her a feral-girl-running-wild-in-the-streets look, particularly during the morning’s first photo op as she gambols on a bullet-pocked statue of Lenin that has been knocked off its pedestal.

The bus heads out of town to Echmiadzin for a visit to the oldest ongoing Christian church in the world, built in the fourth century, where Cher misses a scheduled meeting with the country’s top cleric. “Cher doesn’t hold much with pomp and ceremony,” says assistant Paulette Betts, who introduces herself to reports as “Cher’s best friend for 21 years.” Shortly after the bus pulls out, Sammeth announces that there will be an extra stop, so that People photographer Taro Yamasaki can get an exclusive shot of Cher in a field whose trees have been cut to the nub by people trying to survive the winter. “Why can’t we do the one of me in a breadline?” asks Cher. “I thought that was a better shot.”

Among the crowd that gathers beside the farm on Yerevan Avenue is Hasmik Mketehyan, a reporter for the Armenian Press Agency, who scrounges a cigarette stub from the pocket of her denim coat and lights up as Cher moodily walks among the stumps and talks to writer Susan Cheever, who is there not only as a reporter for People but as Cher’s official biographer. Mketehyan, who waited for 40 minutes with the president the previous night before getting word that Cher was “under stress,” is sorry but not surprised that Cher’s trip is only two nights long. Recently, she says, a reporter from Reuters arrived for what was planned to be a lengthy stay, but didn’t last the week. “With no light, no heat, no TV, what journalist is going to spend a long time here?”

After Cher addresses a packed assembly hall at Yerevan State University, the Armenian ambassador to England boards the bus and beseeches Cher to make a courtesy call on the president before she leaves. Eventually, Cher relents, and on the way to the airport the bus makes a final stop at the presidential palace. On a settee at the end of a formal, flag-lined room, Cher, in leather, sits for pictures with the elegant Ter-Petrossian, a former academic who received 84 percent of the votes in the country’s first free presidential election, in 1991. Then, after a 10-minute private conversation, the two step out into a rotunda. “Cher told me about a book that she recently read, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which she hopes to turn into a movie,” says Ter-Petrossian, and then, turning to his guests, adds, “I hope that Armenia will give you a new charge into your artistic life.”

On the plane back to London, Cher, despite the lack of heat and water and not having bathed for three days, “except for specific areas with a washcloth,” is elated. “I thought it was great,” she says about the trip. “I thought every part of it was great. Even the bad stuff I thought was great. I love the fact that if you set your mind to something, there’s nothing you can’t do. It’s a big deal coming halfway round the world, getting everybody together and just going to Armenia. I love the fact that we were in Armenia.”