One of the more likable qualities of the clunkily titled Cher: The Memoir, Part One is that its author appears to have taken great delight in writing it. Cher guides the reader through the first half of her inimitable life and career with chutzpah. She begins with her impoverished and often miserable childhood in California, proceeds into the years of musical stardom, and concludes with a cliffhanger of sorts, with our hero on the verge of her Eighties acting career. We shall have to wait until the publication of Part Two next year to read her thoughts on everything from her Oscar-winning appearance in Moonstruck to her musical comebacks, disappointments, and yet more comebacks in the subsequent decades. Still, as her publicity states quite accurately, hers has been “a life too immense for one book.”
The four hundred-odd pages that will be flying out of bookstores this Christmas are certainly immense in every aspect: not just the highs and lows of her remarkable professional and personal life, the two being intertwined in her marriage to Sonny Bono, but in the sheer grandiosity of her milieu. One of the first concerts she ever saw was Elvis: “the most exciting experience I’d ever had because I knew that I wanted to be on that stage in the spotlight one day too.” Cher: The Memoir is a paean to being in the spotlight, for all its downsides and difficulties. Its star loves fame and thrives on attention.
As Cher approaches her seventh decade in the industry, her preternaturally youthful features have resolved themselves, whether through good fortune or surgical intervention, into a perpetually amused pout. On this evidence, Cher is prepared — happy, even — to be candid about her gravity-defying life and appearance. Even if you’re a casual admirer rather than obsessive fan of the woman born Cheryl Sarkisian in 1946, there is much here to enjoy. The narrative begins with a jolt when Cher reveals that her mother, the small-time actress and singer Georgia Holt, intended to have an abortion after becoming pregnant by the first of her six husbands. Faced with the horrors of a backstreet clinic in Long Beach, she fled and decided to have her daughter instead. Cher encapsulates the situation elegantly. “It was her body, her life, and her choice to make. Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.”
That Cher raised herself from what she describes as a Dickensian childhood to become one of the most famous singers in the world took determination and talent. It also took her first husband, Bono, who met Cher when he was 27 and she was 16. It was a strange relationship from the beginning. Neither found the other physically attractive, and their 1964 marriage was a fabrication; it did not become legal until 1969. At the height of their success as a wholesome husband-and-wife duo, singing apparently uxorious numbers such as the wildly successful ‘I Got You, Babe,’ the male half of the equation was off scattering his seed around any woman who was beguiled by his fame as she sat at home. As Cher writes here, these included “dancers, actresses, waitresses, even hookers… I couldn’t imagine where he found the time.”
Cher contemplated suicide rather than divorce, fearing for the negative impact she believed it would have on her reputation, but she was trapped by Bono’s insistence on punitive contracts that rendered her his unpaid servant. When she finally realized that she could simply leave him, Bono chimed in that he should have murdered her instead. “I’d plead insanity, get seven years in jail, then get a book deal and my own show,” she has him saying. Had one of, say, Joni Mitchell’s husbands said this to her, the reader could expect a chapter of outraged tub-thumping. Cher writes instead that “within seconds, we were howling…what else could we do but laugh?”
As for the book’s gossip value, she has known everyone. And although the memoir isn’t as heavy on showbiz anecdote as might be expected, much of the name-dropping may yet surface in the second book. An exception is the megalomaniac genius-murderer, producer Phil Spector, with whom Cher briefly and unsuccessfully collaborated in 1974, shortly before recording her Star album. Cher makes a point of referring to him as “Philip Spector” and faces him down when he’s in his gun-wielding manic phase. “You can’t pull that s*** with me, you a**hole. You’ve known me since I was sixteen!”
The book perhaps owes its existence to Cher’s rival Barbra Streisand, whose stately, self-deprecating (and extraordinarily long) My Name Is Barbra beat her to publication by over a year. Yet while Streisand’s memoir often felt as if she were graciously giving you a guided tour of a well-stocked museum, Cher’s autobiography is a far looser affair. This is true to the spirit of a woman whose social media accounts have a let-it-all-hang-out quality, with such correct punctuation and grammar optional. Her scattershot style is, she explains, a direct result of her dyslexia. She disarmingly writes that “punctuation marks are like symbols to me that you throw in the air and they land where they land.”
Followers of the great survivor will adore this book, especially the long, surreal recitations of clothing labels that she wore. Nothing, apparently, has been forgotten, whether by her, her anonymous ghostwriter, or some put-upon researcher. (Pity the latter, sent to search through the most colorful archives imaginable.) Others will relish the way this defiant, witty autobiography sings loudly in that unmistakable voice.
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Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War and an editor at the Spectator World.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
