In the first volume of her memoir (which she hasn’t read), she explores her difficult childhood, her fraught marriage to Sonny Bono and how she found her voice.
Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”
Even in the annals of single-name celebrities – Sting, Madonna, Beyoncé, Zendaya – Cher is in the stratosphere of the 1%. She’s been a household name for six decades. She was 19 when she had her first No 1 single with Sonny Bono. She won an Oscar for Moonstruck, an Emmy for Cher: The Farewell Tour and a Grammy for Believe. Her face has appeared on screens of all sizes, and her music has been a soundtrack for multiple generations, whether via vinyl, 8-track, cassette tape, compact disc or Spotify.
But wrangling a definitive account of her life struck a nerve for Cher. There were dark corners to explore and 78 years of material to sift through. And – this might have been the hardest part – she had to make peace with the fact that her most personal stories will soon be in the hands of scores of readers.
“This book has exhausted me,” she said of the first volume of her two-part eponymous memoir, out now. “It took a lot out of me.”
Cher is a gutsy account of tenacity and perseverance: Cher’s childhood was unstable. Her marriage to Sonny Bono had devastating aftershocks. The book is also a cultural history packed with strong opinions, boldface names and head-spinning throwbacks: Cher’s first concert was Elvis. Her first movie was Dumbo. (She was so rapt, she wet her pants.) One of the first cars she drove was a ’57 Chevy stolen from her boyfriend.
On the page, Cher’s voice reverberates with the grit and depth that made her famous.
But a ghostwritten first draft didn’t have this effect, Cher said; it didn’t feel like “her”. It made her realise she needed to expand her project to a second volume. “Too much life,” she said. “Lived too long.”
After this epiphany, the bulk of the book came together in a feverish four months, thanks to two more ghostwriters and an editor who made a weeklong house call. It begins with Cher’s birth in 1946 – her legal name was Cheryl Sarkisian – and ends in the early 1980s when she’s chatting with Francis Ford Coppola about making the leap from singing to acting. (He asks, “So what are you waiting for?”)
She has yet to read the final version.
“People can say what they want,” Cher said. “It’s who I am. I am who I am. I can’t change it.”
Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, was a singer, actor and scrabbler from rural Arkansas who played bit parts in Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy (and lost a part in Asphalt Jungle to Marilyn Monroe). Her father, Johnnie Sarkisian, was a grifter and a heroin addict who mostly stayed out of the picture until he smelled money. They married when Holt was 19 and Sarkisian was 20; three months later, Holt was pregnant and her mother took her to get an abortion.
“It was her body, her life and her choice,” Cher writes of Holt’s decision not to go through with the procedure, which was illegal. “Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.”
When Cher was an infant, Sarkisian deposited her at a Catholic children’s home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before skipping town. Holt, then a waitress at an all-night diner, forked over US$4.50 a week for her daughter’s care, visiting weekly and reclaiming Cher as soon as she was able. The timeline is unclear – until the day she died, Holt cried when talking about this era – but Cher was able to walk by the time she left the orphanage.
Later, she lived with family friends while her mother established residence in Reno, Nevada, so she could get a quickie divorce.
“I didn’t know a lot of my history until I was grown up,” Cher said. She was in her 30s, playing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, when her grandmother came backstage and introduced her to one of the neighbours who’d taken her in. “I thought that they were babysitters. I had no idea I lived with them.”
These early abandonments set the tone for an itinerant, occasionally impoverished girlhood in and around Los Angeles, which was Holt’s mecca.
Holt’s role in her daughters’ lives was not unlike the one Cher played in the 1990 film Mermaids – the unpredictable single mother that a New York Times critic described as “beloved in fiction and hell-on-wheels in fact”. Cher and her younger sister, Georganne Bartylak, still argue about how many times Holt was married.
“I say six, which is a lot. She says eight,” Bartylak said. “You cannot count the fact that she married two men twice. That’s not fair!” Sarkisian was one of the two-timers (in every sense).
Cher writes about a few brushes with Hollywood royalty. As a child, she played with Liza Minnelli and Dean Martin’s daughters; at 15, she had a dalliance with Warren Beatty, who was 25. But she never knew how long she was going to live in one place. Her saddle shoes were held together with elastic bands and patched with cardboard. In grade school, she stole a horse and hopped a freight train in a single afternoon, somehow pulling off both capers.
“The kind of chaos I witnessed – it’s just too much,” Cher said. “Too much anger, too much fear, too much – –”
Before she had a chance to finish her sentence, her boyfriend Alexander Edwards’ 5-year-old son zipped into the room on a scooter, clutching a large pumpkin cookie.
“Enjoy it in good health,” Cher said.
Edwards is 38. At 9pm on a Tuesday, the couple had just come from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show, where Cher performed. She still wore a lace-up top, sparkly pants and patent leather boots with significant heels.
“When I was younger, boys my age did not like me,” Cher said. “And then when I got older, I didn’t like men my age.”
She was 16 when she first met Bono at a coffee shop. He was 27. She lied about her age, and the two became friends. Soon after, Cher’s living situation fell through and she didn’t want to move back in with her mother. Bono offered her a place to live in exchange for cooking and cleaning.
“In my mind, I was thinking, ‘Yeah, OK, this old line,’” Cher writes. “But I must have had a look on my face because he shook his head and laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,’ he said. With a grin he added, ‘And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.’”
Matching souvenir wedding rings came a few years later – as did parenthood and fame, I Got You Babe and The Sonny & Cher Show.
“It wasn’t a #MeToo moment because I lied to him,” Cher said, unfurling from a modified lotus position just long enough to remove her boots and two pairs of socks. But, she said, “I’m not forgiving him because there were some things he did that were ridiculous”.
Bono became Cher’s champion, persuading his boss, Phillip Spector, to let her sing with the Ronettes one day when Darlene Love’s car broke down. They started recording together, first as Caesar & Cleo, then as Sonny & Cher. There were tender moments (such as their impromptu wedding ceremony in a bathroom) and heady ones (a trip to London, where they learned that I Got You Babe had outpaced the Beatles’ Help on the British charts and sold 1 million copies in two weeks).
But fame changed Bono. The pair were new parents, busy with their show, when he became “my way or the highway,” Cher said.
Being a popular entertainer wasn’t enough; Bono wanted to be a mogul. He started smoking cigars. He established the Benevolent Army of El Primo, in which everyone in his orbit was issued a rank, including Cher, with Bono as boss. Cher wasn’t allowed to socialise with band members, or even go to a Tupperware party hosted by Brian Wilson’s wife. The couple stopped going to dinners, concerts and movies.
As Bono grew paranoid that Cher would leave him, his behaviour became even more erratic. He burned her tennis clothes in the backyard. He was unfaithful, then blamed Cher.
Bono also arranged their finances so that Cher was working for him – an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises. She wasn’t immediately aware of this; Bono was “like a parent,” to her, and their home represented stability, permanence, everything she’d missed in her tumultuous youth. She trusted him.
“He took all my money,” Cher said. “I just thought, We’re husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine. It didn’t occur to me that there was another way.”
Hard as it was to square this confession with the stage-dominating, boundary-pushing Cher of legend, there was grace in her honesty.
“To this day,” Cher said, “I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, during what day, did you go, ‘Yeah, you know what? I’m going to take her money.’”
Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998. But by then their marriage was long over.
“I woke up one morning – early, like 5 – and I just thought, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to leave him,” Cher said. “I started to put into place a plan that was so dangerous that I don’t know how I had the nerve to do it.”
She told Bono she wanted to sleep with their guitar player. And then, she did.
She rebuilt her career, exiling herself to the “elephant’s graveyard” of Las Vegas, where she put on two shows a night, seven days a week, for several months.
She dated David Geffen, who helped her sort out her finances – “I didn’t know how to make a cheque out. I didn’t have a banking account” – and had a brief marriage to Gregg Allman. But it’s clear from her memoir that her time with Bono was foundational.
These days, Cher enjoys her time with Edwards, whom she met two years ago after she complimented his diamond-studded teeth.
“I did everything I said I wasn’t going to do,” Cher said. For instance, “Don’t fall in love with a man who’s younger”.
She’s proud of her family, her charity work and her Oscar. She admitted that she doesn’t know her address or her phone number – “Look,” she said, smoothing her curtain of black hair, “People find me” – but remains focused on issues that matter to her: “Are you a good person? Are you a bad person?”
Cher is restrained and respectful on the subject of her children, Elijah Skye Blue Allman and Chaz Bono, who is transgender. In a note at the front of the book, she writes, “In this memoir, I refer to my son Chaz as Chas, the name he went by during the years covered in this book. Chaz has granted his blessing for this usage. In the next volume, at the appropriate point, I will refer to my son as Chaz.”
And of course, unlike many of her contemporaries, Cher remains committed to her career. She still works with her voice teacher, who is 96.
“You’re not really supposed to be able to sing at this age,” she said. “I’ve been singing my whole life. It will make me sad the day I can’t.”
Cher smiled benevolently at Edwards’ son, who was lifting the shade off a lamp. Then, she added, “I’ve been on the road my whole life. It’s either a day off or it’s a work day. What would I do if I wasn’t doing this?”
Carrie Thornton, Cher’s editor at Dey Street, said a two-volume approach wasn’t always the plan. But, during the writing process, it became apparent that Cher’s move from singing to acting made for a natural break. Plus, Thornton pointed out, a two-part memoir “feels like such a flex”. The second volume is planned for a year from now.
Recording the audiobook posed its own set of challenges. Cher is dyslexic, so narrating it herself was, she said, “like pulling teeth”. Eventually she collaborated with Stephanie J. Block, who won a Tony for her performance in The Cher Show.
Cher doesn’t plan to read reviews of her book – “I don’t like to have my feelings hurt” – but she is glad to have the written record. Even if mining her memories was painful, Cher said, “I knew that the complete truth was good”.
Her commitment to truth extends beyond her memoir. Bartylak, Cher’s sister, said, “Everyone knows Cher is honest – blatantly, brutally honest”.
She recalled the day when Cher moved in with Bono.
“I was only 11 and I was crying my eyes out because she was my only sister and we’d been through everything together,” Bartylak said. “I had a big stuffed pumpkin and on it, Cher wrote, ‘One day you will be proud of me.’”
Bartylak added, “I was already proud.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Elisabeth Egan
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher is on sale now