Flower

Flower is her name. She got it while growing up in San Diego (her real name is Cheryl Flor, and ftor is flower in Spanish) and it's stuck since, serving her well through several incarnations--housewife, model, disco queen and international singing star, roughly in that order.

She seems to blush a bit at the idea of being called an international singing star, despite four albums and numerous world tours. If Flower wants fan adulation, she gets on a plane and flies from Los Angeles to Mexico, where she's a genuine star. But chances are good that no one will recognize her on her way to the airport.

If Flower's voice isn't familiar to Americans, her face may be a bit more. When she and her former husband, disc jockey Bobby Ocean (yes, at that time, she was known as Flower Ocean--"It was perfect for Haight-Ashbury," she says, laughing), moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, she felt she'd had enough of being a housewife and wanted to do some modeling. She got what she wanted--a career--but lost a husband in the process. Not long after she and Ocean had split, a friend set her up on a blind date with David Chackler, a music-industry mogul who'd discovered and promoted Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham and the group Queen. Despite Chackler's early contention that "any model named Flower living in Los Angeles has got to be a wacko," the two met, fell in love and got married.

But things took an unexpected turn when a photographer who was looking for a girl to pose for an album cover and a promotional calendar spotted Flower's picture in Chackler's office and hired her. The album was No Second Chance, by the English group Charlie, and the cover and the calendar were sexy enough to create a stir.

"It really made a lot of noise in the music industry," recalls Flower. "The record company sent me on the road to promote the album, and that made news in itself."

In fact, Flower got so much press that another record company figured it could capitalize on it by releasing an album featuring Flower as a singer, even though her only singing experience had been in a San Diego coffeehouse years before. "I took over her career and did my John Derek routine," jokes David They agreed that since Flower Chackler didn't have a euphonious ring to it and since Cheryl Chackler was almost as bad, both artist and album would be known simply as Flower.

Although the album didn't make any gigantic waves, appearing only briefly on the charts, one cut, a lone disco tune called Give the Little Girl d Chance, began to find favor on the burgeoning disco scene. "It just so happened that the timing was right," says David. Flower's name started appearing in a few disco polls and Playboy included her in its Disco Queens pictorial in April 1979. Flower took the cue, and Heat, her next album, was all disco. Still, success was elusive--at least in the U.S. But in Mexico, Heat seemed to have a life of its own, and the Chacklers decided that if Flower couldn't be a star in the States, they'd settle for the rest of the world. At first, they concentrated their efforts on Mexico, releasing a more poporiented album with a Mexican company. Their work paid off there and, eventually, in other countries.

Both David and Flower are hoping that her latest album, Here Inside, which features Andy Gibb doing background vocals on the title cut, will change things and that the presence of the youngest Gibb will persuade U. S. radio stations and record buyers to take note. If they don't, Flower claims, she won't be disappointed. "It doesn't hurt my feelings that I'm not a star here," she says, "because when I'm in those other places, I get all the gratification I need."