Cherthe unrivaled goddess of pop, is an icon that has spanned generations with her unmistakable voice and commanding presence. At 78 years old, the singer, actress and cultural symbol has decided to tell her story like never before in Cher: The Memoir, Part One.
In this first volume, recently published, the artist not only reviews the milestones of her life, but also delves into the darkest and most surprising corners of her past.
“Sometimes at the end of the day I was very tired.”revealed to Entertainment Weekly about the exhausting task of digging into his memories and those of his family.
“We did it for months, going back and forth. But sometimes I told myself: ‘Guys, I can’t go on with this. I will be very happy when this is over.’ Because sometimes, when we were in the bad part, the bad part weighed so much. Now it’s over and it’s no longer part of me.”
Cher’s memory has no mercy, neither with others nor with herself. From his childhood marked by poverty and chaos, to his rise to the top of stardom with Sonny Bono, the story has been described in reviews as “brutally honest.”
Reaching that frankness took work for the star born as Cherilyn Sarkisian in 1946. In the writing process, he created a first version that he ended up discarding.
“I wasn’t as forthcoming in the first version. Then I thought that I didn’t want to do it like that, because if you’re going to tell your life, you have to count your life. So I went back and made the decision to say a lot more than I really wanted to. There are just some things that are so private that I couldn’t express them.”
Cher considers her life to be divided into two clear eras. His childhood and early career with Sonny Bono encompass this first stretch. The second phase addresses her heyday as a film actress. That is the reason why his memoir has been divided into two parts.
The first one is available on shelves from November 19; and these are the most shocking revelations in its pages:
Before becoming a global icon, Cher grew up in poverty that she described as “dickensiana”. His mother, Georgia Holt, an actress and singer of little fortune, married “six or seven times”as the artist was able to remember, and dragged the family through a chaotic economic swing, from occasional opulence to the most absolute destitution, “according to the partner” that Holt had at the time. This constant uncertainty led Cher to change schools at least 25 times.
But the instability at home had deeper roots. Cher’s maternal grandfather, an alcoholic and abusive man, also played a dark role in her family history. It was he who took Cher’s mother to sing in bars as a child, hoping to turn her into the next Shirley Temple..
The obsession with success led the grandfather to embark on a trip to Hollywood with his young daughter, hitchhiking more than 2,000 kilometers from Oklahoma. However, fame never came, and dreams of greatness turned into family tragedies. On one occasion, the grandfather even tried to poison his children with gas.
Cher was just 16 years old when she met Sonny, a man 11 years her senior, who initially took her into his apartment as his assistant and unpaid housekeeper. Although at first the relationship was platonic, over time it evolved into something romantic.
In her memoir, Cher reveals that her marriage was largely an illusion manufactured for show. Although the public believed for years that they had married in a quick ceremony in Tijuana in 1964, they did not actually formalize their union legally until 1969.when his legal team insisted on regularizing his marital status. Cher details that her first “wedding” was an impromptu exchange of rings in the bathroom of her home, with no witnesses present.
“The marriage had to be done quickly and privately so that no one would find out that we had been faking it all along,” he writes. Shortly after signing the documents at his Hollywood mansion, Sonny immediately returned to his office, without ceremony or celebration.
However, Sonny’s control and jealousy defined much of their dynamic. According to Cher, Sonny manipulated contracts to ensure that she worked as a virtual unpaid employee at his company and controlled details of her life as trivial as what clothes she could wear. “He didn’t even allow me to wear perfume because he didn’t like the smell.”he narrated.
As Cher’s book details, Sonny maintained a constant flow of lovers, from secretaries to actresses and sex workers. “I couldn’t imagine where I found the time,” he writes wryly.
One night, she discovered Sonny with his assistant in her own home, a moment she describes as devastating. Bono did not acknowledge his fault, but instead attributed his infidelity to the supposed lack of intimacy between them.
In an act of emotional rebellion, Cher also had an affair with one of the guitarists in her band. That same night, after a show in Las Vegas, Sonny made a disturbing gesture: he approached Cher’s side of the bed, took her hand, and slid her wedding ring off her finger. She remembers being too exhausted to react in the moment, but aware of the seriousness of the act.
The final breakup came when Cher decided to leave him, a decision Sonny made in a threatening manner. According to her, Bono later confessed that, upon receiving the news, he considered pushing her off the balcony of his Las Vegas suite, convinced he could get away with pleading insanity.
Although they continued to work together after their separation, the marriage was a constant battle of power, jealousy and control. In the end, Cher made it clear that her distancing was to rediscover herself. “I didn’t leave him for another man. “I left him for another woman, for me.”he sentences firmly.
The singer also recounts the emotional crisis she experienced towards the end of her relationship with the musician and composer. At 26, trapped in what she describes as a “loveless marriage,” Cher reached the breaking point. “I stood barefoot on the balcony of our suite and looked down. I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to cross the edge and just disappear.”he confesses in a deeply moving passage.
This destructive impulse visited her on multiple occasions, between five and six as she relates, but each time her love for her son, Chaz, and her concern for her mother and sister stopped her. She also thought about the people who admired her and how her decision could negatively influence them. “I didn’t want anyone to believe that suicide was a viable solution.”he explains.
Finally, a moment of clarity transformed his perspective. “One morning, everything changed,” he writes. That night, as he stared into space from the balcony, he realized that he didn’t need to jump. “I can leave it”he thought. That epiphany marked the beginning of their decision to end their relationship.
Another dark anecdote involves Phil Spector, the famous producer with whom Cher began her career as a backup singer in the 1960s. Although they initially had a cordial relationship, their friendship became strained over the years.
The situation came to a head a decade later, when Cher went to confront Spector at his mansion after discovering that he had released a song recorded as a demo by her and Harry Nilsson without her consent.
Upon arrival, the mansion, described in the book as “dark and creepy,” became the scene of a tense confrontation. “Phillip was next to a pool table. “He started behaving strangely, like he was trying to intimidate me.”remember.
The tension escalated when The man took a revolver and began to turn it between his fingers. Cher did not let herself be intimidated. “I told him, ‘You can’t try that shit with me, you moron. You’ve known me since I was sixteen.’”he relates. Eventually, Spector apologized, but Cher left the house with a lingering sense of unease. “I tried to convince myself that the gun probably wasn’t even loaded, but there was something about him that night that disturbed me deeply,” he admitted.
Years later Phil Spector would make headlines for his violent behavior and conviction for murder in 2009 after the actress’ death. Lana Clarkson in his mansion.
