The Big Gamble Cher Made When Her Career Was At Its Lowest

Much like life itself, a career in entertainment can often be a series of peaks and valleys. And arguably no one knows that better than pop icon Cher. Over the course of her celebrated, decades-long career, there have been multiple points when the "Believe" hitmaker could have been considered washed up — but Cher always found a way to bounce back, largely thanks to her uncanny ability to consistently reinvent herself in stunning fashion. That said, it was during one particularly low point in her career that the singer took a gamble on an idea that was not yet tried and true: The Las Vegas residency.

These days, tons of big-name artists have had massive success with Las Vegas residency concerts, from Britney Spears to Katy Perry. What's more, the concept can be traced all the way back to the Vegas shows that the late, great Liberace played in the 1940s. Around the early 1980s, however, Sin City was in kind of a bad way owing to an economic recession and new competition in the form of New Jersey's similarly-themed Atlantic City. 

Not only that, but Vegas' music scene had become synonymous with aging musicians who were more or less over the hill by the time they arrived there. Simply put, hot young artists and their fans just weren't really buying what Sin City was selling. As such, a residency was largely seen as a last-ditch effort to hang on to some semblance of relevancy. At the time, though, Cher was in dire financial straits, and had few other options.

While appearing on "The Jennifer Hudson Show" in 2024, Cher confirmed that she knew all about the stigma surrounding the Las Vegas music scene in the early 1980s, but decided to do a residency anyway in order to provide for her two sons, Chaz Bono and Elijah Allman. "I lost all the money I had worked for at one point," the legendary performer admitted, adding, "I decided to go to Caesar's Palace, which was — you know, people didn't go there [...] people didn't go to Las Vegas. It really was the elephant's graveyard." Cher also noted that, around this time, there was a writer who frequently predicted the end of her career, quipping, "And I said, 'You know what, buddy? I'll be here when you're gone." 

Indeed, by 1989, the Grammy winner was back atop the mountain of pop with the release of her hit single "If I Could Turn Back Time." But how did things get so bad just a decade prior? For starters, Cher claimed that she made no money from her time performing with first husband Sonny Bono, thanks to some alleged shady management on his part. And, by the time Cher's marriage to Bono ended in the mid-1970s, he wasn't exactly in great financial shape, either. "Our career just went off a hill," Cher acknowledged on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in 2019, elaborating, "We had no money, we had no job and we owed the government $278,000." Thankfully, her trip to Sin City really paid off.