RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Cher, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, and Dionne Warwick —Stewart Cook—CBS/Getty Images; Jason Kempin—Getty Images; Kevin Mazur—BSB/Getty Images; Frank Hoensch—Redferns/Getty Images
On May 20, Cher turned 80 years old. Beyond a celebration of one spectacular career, her birthday is an occasion to consider what it means for a woman to maintain long-term relevance . It opens a larger question about endurance, public scrutiny, and what it takes to live a long, authentic life.
Cher, Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand, and Dionne Warwick, all now in their 80s, were criticized for qualities that made them distinctive: being too country, too Jewish, too outspoken, too ambitious, too artificial, too stubborn. Rather than soften those edges, they built careers around them. The traits that once made them targets of ridicule eventually became their signatures.
In a culture that prizes constant reinvention, these octogenarian pop divas suggest another path: longevity through self-definition. They evolved, certainly, but without surrendering the core identities that made them recognizable in the first place. A life well-lived, they remind us, is not the life that pleased the most people, made the fewest demands, or aged into quiet respectability. A good life is one lived on its own terms, refusing every invitation to become smaller, softer, or less fully oneself.
Cher in 1972 and 1988 —Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Bob Riha Jr.—Getty Images
Cher has spent more than six decades in the public eye, moving through music, television, film, fashion, tabloid culture, political commentary, heartbreak, reinvention, ridicule, camp, glamour, and triumph. She’s won a Grammy , an Emmy , an Academy Award , three Golden Globes , and is the only artist to have a number one single on a Billboard chart in seven consecutive decades .
She has been labeled too artificial, too outrageous, too sexual, too blunt, and too much. In the 1970s, her collaboration with Bob Mackie produced dresses that seemed designed to violate every rule of respectable female presentation: sheer, beaded, feathered, midriff-baring, unapologetically theatrical . In 1975, she appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in what was referred to as designer Bob Mackie’s “naked dress,” and in 1986, after being passed over for an Oscar nomination for the movie Mask despite winning Best Actress at Cannes , she arrived at the Academy Awards in a black Mackie ensemble with a towering feathered headdress, a bare midriff, and enough defiance to overwhelm the room.
The criticism intensified when Cher refused to separate glamour from sexuality as she aged. In 1989, the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time,” filmed aboard the USS Missouri, placed her in a sheer black bodysuit, fishnets, leather jacket, and little else, performing for a cheering crowd of sailors. MTV initially banned the video and later aired it only after 9 p.m. The Navy, which had expected something more conservative, was reportedly embarrassed by the result. What the controversy revealed was not merely discomfort with a costume, but discomfort with a woman in her forties presenting herself as erotic, funny, commanding, and entirely in control of the spectacle.
Through all of it, she never seemed remotely interested in becoming more palatable. At one point in the late 1980s, her body was so scrutinized that there was a debate as to whether or not she had several ribs removed . ( She didn’t .) Cher has acknowledged some cosmetic surgery , denied the more lurid inventions, refused the premise that her body required public adjudication, and defiantly stated , “If I want to put my tits on my back, it is nobody’s business but my own .”
Cher’s dexterity shows up beyond how she survived being mocked for excess. It is revealed by how she transformed excess into architecture. Her costumes, wigs, cosmetic surgery, her public romances, the one-name fame: they constitute the visual and emotional vocabulary she has deftly controlled. Spectacle has never been a mask Cher has hid behind; it is the medium through which she insists on being seen.
This refusal has become Cher’s version of authorship. She has never disappeared into the trope expected of aging women. Instead, she made “too much” the unmistakable, driving force of her power.
Dolly Parton in 1970 and 1976 —Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Andrew Putler—Redferns/Getty Images
Dolly Parton, also 80, spent years being deemed too country, too buxom, too rhinestoned, too blonde, too much of an exaggeration to be taken seriously. Late-night hosts and interviewers repeatedly treated her body as public property and her appearance as a punchline. Johnny Carson joked about her breasts on The Tonight Show ; countless others followed the same overly trodden path.
Parton’s genius was that rather than avoiding the joke, she took control of it. She understood, earlier than almost anyone, that being underestimated could become its own form of power.
Long before she was appreciated as a national treasure, Parton knew who was really in control of the performance. When she joked that, “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap,” she playfully named the labor, money, intelligence, and craft inside the caricature. Her blonde hair, acrylic nails, high heels, rhinestones, waist-cinching silhouettes, and curves were not accidents of taste. They were the materials of a persona she built deliberately, then protected ferociously.
Parton turned exaggeration into authorship through repetition and scale. On album covers like Jolene , she presented mountain-girl glamour as a code. In the film 9 to 5 , she transformed the image of the underestimated secretary into a working woman with wit, strategy, and rage. At Dollywood , which opened under her name in 1986 near the Tennessee mountains where she was raised, she converted her story into infrastructure: a theme park, a regional employer, a monument to Appalachian storytelling, craft, music, and belonging. What m...
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