Five things we learnt from Cher’s memoir

‘When he wasn’t being a d--k, [he] was so amusing I could almost love him’: Sonny Bono and Cher in Italy, 1966 - Marcello Salustri/Mondadori Portfolio

“I’ve lived too long, and done too much,” Cher recently proclaimed. What’s more, the 78-year-old American superstar singer, model, actor and comedian remembers all of it. Cher: The Memoir, Part One is published today, covering the first half of her turbulent life.

In vivid detail, Cher recounts her lurid family history, wild childhood with her struggling actress mother, her bizarre and dysfunctional relationship with eccentric hustler Sonny Bono (11 years her senior), their unlikely rise to pop success as a fake married couple, reinvention as a TV comedy duo, bad marriage, infidelity, divorce and controversial love affairs with bad boy rockers Gregg Allman and Gene Simmons of Kiss.

It takes Cher up to 1980. Volume Two, covering five decades of Oscar-winning movies and solo superstardom, will be released next March.

Here are five things we learnt from the first instalment.

Her marriage to Sonny Bono was fake – sort of

Cher offers vivid insights into the weird private life of Sonny and Cher, a relationship full of love and humour alongside overbearing psychological manipulation and control, financial skulduggery and Sonny’s rampant infidelity.

She was a 16-year-old wannabe actress when they met; he was an – oddball – yet charismatic – 27-year-old record company hustler in the middle of a divorce. Cher was sofa surfing with some lesbian dancers, and when they threw her out Sonny let her stay in his one bedroom apartment in exchange for being his unpaid housekeeper and assistant. Although neither found the other physically attractive (“You don’t have any shape at all!” Sonny told her) one thing led to another.

Although they went on to become American pop’s most famous married couple, Cher reveals they weren’t legally wed for over 5 years. The official story of a quickie marriage in Tijuana following Sonny’s divorce in 1964 was a publicity fabrication, covering up an impromptu ring swapping ceremony in the bathroom of their first home with 17-year-old Cher presiding and no witnesses.

They only tied the knot legally in 1969 under the advice of attorneys, signing a document with a justice of the peace in their Hollywood mansion. “The ceremony had to be done quickly and privately so nobody would find out we had been faking our marriage from the beginning,” writes Cher. “In those days the truth would have been a career ender. It was over in minutes. Sonny went straight back to his office.”

Phil Spector once pulled a gun on her

Cher started out as a backing vocalist in the Sixties, singing on many of super producer Phil Spector’s most famous records by the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Righteous Brothers, including You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. Spector and the “potty mouthed wiseass teenager” who always answered back hit it off, although Sonny warned her Spector “had eleven sides and you have to know all of them.” Cher says of Spector, “his moods were mercurial. You could joke with him until you couldn’t.”

A decade later, Cher and Harry Nilsson arrived at A&M studios to sing backing vocals for John Lennon. “We heard a crash. Then John came storming out really angry as a chair sailed out after him. As John ran past us, he yelled, ‘I’m never gonna work with that madman again. He’s f—ing nuts!’” Spector asked Cher and Nilsson to sing a demo on a song called A Love Like Yours, then released it behind their backs as a duet single. Cher drove to Spector’s “dark and spooky” mansion to confront him.

“It felt like a haunted house. Phillip was standing next to a pool table. He started to act weird. He became agitated and got kind of smart with me, like he was trying to intimidate me. He told me he could do whatever he wanted. Then he picked up a revolver. Staring at him as he twirled it around his fingers, I said ‘You can’t pull that shit with me, you asshole. You’ve known me since I was sixteen!’ Spector apologised. Cher left and tried to convince herself that the gun “probably wasn’t even loaded … but there was something about him that night that troubled me.” It was the same mansion where Spector shot and murdered Lana Clarkson in 2003.

She contemplated suicide at the height of her success

Sonny was so insanely jealous of Cher that he forbade their band and crew from talking to her, whilst he was flagrantly unfaithful with a succession of assistants, “dancer, actresses, waitresses, even hookers…. I couldn’t imagine where he found the time!” He kept her under such tight control that when she started taking tennis lessons, he made a bonfire of her equipment. He secretly rewrote contracts, so that Cher became his unpaid employee.

In 1972, whilst appearing together in a residency at the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas, she says “I stepped barefoot onto the balcony of our suite and stared down. I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear. For a few crazy minutes, I couldn’t imagine any other option.” She talked herself down, but returned to the balcony “five or six times” over succeeding nights, until she had the revelation “I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.”

Sonny later admitted that when she broke the news, he contemplated pushing her off that very balcony, convinced he could get away with murder (“I’d plead insanity, get seven years in jail, then get a book deal and my own show”). They wound up howling with laughter about it.

They lived separate lives in their 12,600 square foot Hollywood mansion, maintaining an illusion of married domesticity for their TV show The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour whilst Cher embarked on love affairs and Sonny moved girlfriends in, spied on her with private eyes and bribed her therapist to share her secrets. Lucille Ball (who had divorced screen husband Desi Arnaz) hooked her up with Frank Sinatra’s attorney, whilst her new boyfriend, record executive David Geffen, helped extricate her from a contract described as “involuntary servitude.” When someone asked if she had left Sonny for another man, Cher replied “No, I left him for another woman. Me.”

Abused wife Tina Turner sought out Cher’s advice. “Tell me how you left him?” Tina asks. “I just walked out and kept going,” says Cher. Yet Sonny and Cher continued to perform as a married couple until 1974 and even did a divorcee TV series together in 1976. “That’s how bizarre our connection was,” admits Cher. “When he wasn’t being a d–k, Sonny Bono was so amusing I could almost love him.”

She is obsessed with clothes (music, not so much)

There is a lot about clothes in Cher’s book. It seems like she can remember every outfit she ever wore, where it was bought, or how she or her (later) designers made it. She appeared on the cover of Vogue three times (she has now covered the magazine six times in total) and Time magazine once, in 1975, wearing “what became known as the Naked Dress”, made by designer Bob Mackie of a flammable souffle material sprayed with water and patted onto her skin “so it just looked like my bare body was covered in beads and feathers.”

There is not so much about music in Cher’s book, however. She always loved to sing but “never kidded myself that what I did was great. I didn’t even like the sound of my voice that much.” She never liked her 1971 US number one single Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves, saying “I don’t really like story songs much.” Nor did she care for 1974 no 1 Dark Lady. “It was another story song, but people loved it, so who am I to judge? I never got the opportunity to pick my own songs back then,” she notes. “They were always chosen for me by a man.” She didn’t have a particularly high opinion of Sonny’s musical abilities either. “He wasn’t the best piano player and didn’t know that many chords so he wrote all our songs with the same three or four.”

Sonny worked at night on a second hand piano that was slightly out of tune. He would wake Cher up in the small hours to play her new music. She writes: “Can I tell you, Sonny’s voice wasn’t amazing in the daytime, so imagine having to listen to it at 2am. ‘I got you babe,’ he sang, a little off key. ‘I don’t like it,’ I declared, yawning. ‘I don’t think it’s a hit’.” She asked him to add some modulations and went back to bed. “Unbeknownst to me, I’d be singing it for audiences for the next fifty years.”

She grew up in “Dickensian” poverty

She describes her family history as Dickensian, which barely does it justice. It is a backwoods saga of poverty, teenage pregnancies, spousal abuse, alcoholism, gambling and larceny. Her deadbeat alcoholic grandfather took her mother on the road as a young child, singing on bar tops for change. He thought she was going to be the next Shirley Temple, so, in 1934, father and daughter hitch-hiked 1300 miles from Oklahoma to Hollywood.

Fame proved elusive, and later grandpa tried to gas his children to death. Her mother, meanwhile, grew up to win beauty pageants and become a small time actress, married “6 or 7 times” (Cher’s not sure), their lives swinging from poverty to affluence depending on the state of her career or husband.

They moved constantly and Cher changed schools at least 25 times (“I never kept count”). She briefly dated Warren Beatty when he was 25 and she was a 15-year-old high school dropout. They met when Beatty nearly crashed into her on Sunset Boulevard whilst she was illegally driving her mother’s latest husband’s car, then somehow talked her into going home with him. “He was so drop dead gorgeous, I had to steady myself as he walked towards me.” She was grounded for returning home at 4am, until Beatty phoned her mother and sweet talked her. “Ten minutes later, she was inviting him over.”

“The last time he called, I was with Sonny,” Cher writes. “He said, ‘Do you want to go to dinner?’ I said, ‘Well I have a boyfriend.’ He said, ‘Okay, do you wanna go to lunch?’ It was so cute, and so him.”

Cher: The Memoir, Part One is published by Harper Collins

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