You’ll Never Guess Who Gene Simmons Dumped Cher For?
You almost definitely know Gene Simmons as the bassist and lead singer of KISS, the millions-selling band whose platform boots, face paint, and fire-breathing stage antics helped birth ’70s arena rock. You may even also be familiar with Simmons’ slightly less successful run as the star of reality TV shows like Gene Simmons Family Jewels and movies like 1984’s sci-fi thriller Runaway. But you may not be aware that, despite his many other time commitments, Simmons also found time to be a legendary ladies’ man of the ’70s, with a list of paramours that includes Married With Children‘s Katey Sagal, and Liv Ullman, the Norwegian actress known for her romantic relationship with and many film collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman.
But Simmons’ most notable romantic pairing might be his relationship with Cher … which ended when he dumped her for her best friend, Diana Ross.
Cher and Simmons met in 1978, at a fundraiser for then-California governor Jerry Brown. Cher’s son, Chaz Bono, was a huge Kiss fan, and begged his mom to get Simmons’ autograph. The two began to date seriously enough that they appeared together on a 1979 episode of The Mike Douglas Show, and an October 1979 issue of People Magazine bore the headline “Cher: She and Gene Simmons bare their life together and marriage thoughts for the first time.”
In the article, which details the pair’s daily phone calls and recently purchased shared homes, the then-twice divorced Cher refers to her relationship with Simmons as “the best relationship I’ve ever had with a human being,” while Simmons remarked that “I’m crazy about Cher, nuts about her. She’s my first love. Cher’s an untainted soul who has never done anything bad to anybody.”
While the pair were open about continuing to have intimate relationships with other people (hey, it was the ’70s!), Cher praises Simmons’ hands-on approach with her kids, and names him as one of the “three people” she had ever been comfortable with in her life, adding, “and I married two of them.”
MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW, Mike Douglas, Gene Simmons, Cher, 1961-1982, 1979 episode
But by 1980, an August People profile on Kiss revealed that Simmons had moved on to Diana Ross, and was living with the former Supreme and her daughters. “Ironically,” the article notes, “it was Cher who introduced Gene to her old pal, Diana, at Ross’ New York pad last summer.”
In a 2022 interview with Howie Mandel, Simmons laid out the tale of how he jumped from a relationship with one superstar diva to another: “It was Christmastime, and what do you get Cher for Christmas? So I asked her, ‘I don’t know what to get you, you’ve got everything.'” Since Simmons was returning to New York, Cher advised him to seek out her “best friend, Diana [Ross]” who could take him shopping in the city, and advise him on what the “I Got You Babe” singer might like to receive as a gift.
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Ross invited Simmons over, served him a slice of cake, and the two hit it off. They became friends, then racquetball partners. “We didn’t think much of it, and I’m not sure that either of us had any hidden agenda, but pretty quickly it became apparent something was happening,” Simmons wrote of Ross in his 2002 memoir, Kiss and Make-Up.
Cher realized something was up when she noticed that Simmons, on trips back to New York City, wasn’t staying at the Central Park-adjacent apartment he had purchased for the two of them; instead, he was staying with Ross.
Simmons noted that Cher and Ross are “both amazing women, not a bad thing you can say about either of them … wonderful mothers.” But while Simmons is still in touch with both of his exes, the same cannot be said of Cher and Ross. Though Cher initially tried to be supportive of Simmons’ relationship with Ross, accompanying her to watch a Kiss rehearsal in 1980, the two fell out, and never spoke again.
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In 1984, Simmons dropped Ross for his current wife, actress and former Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed, whom he met at the Playboy Mansion. Simmons quickly realized that Tweed’s sister was married to Ross’s brother, making this yet another extremely complex romantic entanglement. “If God and the fates have a sense of humor, that’s pretty bizarre,” Simmons told the Los Angeles Times of the connection in 2011.
Soon after the split with Simmons, Ross married Norwegian businessman Arne Naess Jr. in 1985, divorcing him in 2000. Cher went on to pair up with Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Richie Sambora, and others, though in a 2023 interview, she said that the two great loves of her life were ex-husband Gregg Allman and “Bagel Boy” Rob Camilletti. Simmons remains with Tweed, whom he married in 2011. And at the end of his 2022 interview with Howie Mandel, Simmons may have provided some insight into how his very complicated youthful dating life came to be: “I was an a**hole … arrogant and self-absorbed,” he recalled.
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