So I finally finished the book last night. Finally! I really wanted to enjoy it slowly. Anyway, lots to talk about. I’ll do a review later, after we go through the television appearances in support of it.

But first I want to talk about the big scene! That action-packed chapter.

First let me just say something about this picture, which is from the back cover of their last duet album. I remember a talk show years ago where the host was showing this photo (somewhat snarkily), indicating Sonny might be a tad fat in this photo. Cher immediately came to his defense, saying something about this is just the way the picture looks, pointing to his…oh wait, I forgot to give us a partial-Sonny-shirtless alert. This guy liked to show off his rug, huh?

Anyway, I have always been fascinated by The Sonny & Cher bedroom, stories that take place in it, pictures of it…I don’t care if the reality was just sleep and reading books. Cher once said most of their lives took place in their bedrooms. And this is one of my favorite pictures of them. There are some pictures of Sonny & Cher that show the real story in a way and I think this is one of them: El Primo with his Prima Donna.

So back to the memoir. Cher often talks about how she wanted to tell stories in this book versus just relay a bunch of facts you could look up somewhere else. This book has a lot of storytelling in short bits but not many scenes dramatically re-enacted over a long period of time.

Except the chapter about Cher breaking up with Sonny. This chapter stands out. Every other chapter operates differently. The other ones are packed with as much life as she can fit into them, often years worth of events in one chapter. But this chapter slows it all down. Is this because the scene is that important in her life? Or is it because this story had the biggest impact on her Sonny & Cher fans and it’s the incident the public is most dying to read about?

Of all the things Cher has done in her life before or after this chapter, this scene feels like the fulcrum. It’s like the birth of Christ in the timescale. B.S. (before Sonny) and A.S (After Sonny).

People have often treated Sonny like an incident, a flash-in-the-pan, at most a kind of a Porter Wagoner figure (not to diminish the bigness of Porter Wagoner), a launchpad for a big female star. But the energy of the book (and Cher’s due diligence in other chapters letting us know all of Sonny’s accomplishments) tells you otherwise. It’s hard to compare this part of the book to the other relationships at the end (Gregg Allman, Gene Simmons and Les Dudek). The Gregg Allman relationship reads like one drawn-out series of many breakups and try-agains, starting all the way back to the first date, which was kind of shocking to read. I mean we all knew there were a few breakups but it seems “he disappeared in the morning” quite a bit. Gene Simmons gets a few packed pages, Les Dudek not much more than a paragraph. We don’t have any scene that dramatically depicts any of those breakup days.

The Sonny and Cher breakup gets its own chapter.

First, it’s important to go back to this same scene in other biographies about Cher. It’s always seemed a bit anticlimactic. Cher at her wits end, on the ledge a time or two, and then announcing to Sonny one night in a hotel that she wants to sleep with The Guitarist.

(In some books, he’s only referenced that way, like Jerry Lee Lewis’ teen wife. But he has a name. It’s Bill Hamm.)

And that was it, nothing like a drawn out episode unwinding through many hours and days and a whole traveling band freaking out in the background.

In other bios it was a short cast: Sonny, Cher and “The Guitarist.”

But in Cher’s memoir, this scene was a legitimate page turner, starting with Cher explaining her loneliness which built up to her ennui around hearing that her best friend and personal assistant, Paulette (and the beginnings of their relationship is fascinating too), was hanging out after their live shows with the whole band in a hotel room. “She’d tell me some variation of ‘I don’t know, go to the bedroom of one of the guys in the band to drink beer, smoke pot, and pass around guitars. It’s not that exciting, Cher.” (274) .

These people traveled and worked with Cher (arguably for her) but she didn’t even know them very well because she wasn’t allowed to fraternize with them. And she wanted to.

I won’t recreate the chapter here (as if I could). But the crush The Guitarist had on Cher is super sweet. Cher talks about performing the song “Superstar,” (which is about a fan in love with a guitarist), and she gives us her thoughts while singing it live: “I’d noticed him playing my riffs back to me one night when we performed…I thought ‘God, he’s really good, and he’s really listening to me.’” (The listening thing is poignant because the only artist Cher had access to at this time, her husband, was most decidedly not listening to her). Unbeknownst to Cher, The Guitarist was nursing a big crush on her, at one point getting caught by Paulette while was trying to render Cher’s portrait on the band’s Etch A Sketch.

(The band shared an Etch A Sketch? I am immediately wondering what I was doing with my brother’s Etch A Sketch at this very moment in the late months of 1973.)

As I mentioned, in the previous stories, the scene only contained Cher, Sonny and The Guitarist interacting. But in reality, the cast was much bigger, full of band members freaking out about what Cher was doing, worried about losing their jobs. David Brenner, the comedian opening for them, was too afraid to tell Sonny. The drama included the whole band, their friends, limo drivers, airport personnel. The scene is surely a movie unto itself.

It’s like Cher crossed the top of fulcrum and then all the chips fell down on the other side and everyone was worried Cher (whom everyone agreed was living an impossible life) was finally making a life decision that was going to lose them their jobs (and in one case, Sonny’s, a hard-won career).

It’s a completely digestible narrative that fully explains why it took Cher so long to change her life and also how she became the strong Cher persona we know today.

So it’s a scene that describes a fulcrum.

But then we return to the title.

All the other titles serve to explain or summarize what follows: Tony Meets Maria, Georgia on My Mind, New York, New York, etc. Most of them are song titles and they work like labels, which is what most titles do.

But then you come upon a title that, itself, works like a fulcrum.

A good example I happened to read the very same day I read this Cher chapter is a poem by Billy Collins titled  “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House.”

Fulcrum titles (I don’t even know if they’re really called that but that’s the best I can do right now) don’t work like labels. In a label title you would expect the poem above to be about guns. There’s not a gun mentioned in the entire poem. You’re meant to read the poem and then return to the title and go “ahh yes…I see.” The title is equivalent to the poem, not an introduction of it. The whole point of the poem is answered by the title and only the title. It gives the title a lot more weight and meaning. In fact, the meaning can’t be made without both the poem and title.

Title poems are decorative in comparison. You could read any of the other Cher titles or not. There are no additional or hidden meanings set up between other titles and chapters for the most part.

You read the chapter title “I Will Always Love You” and you think of Dolly Parton leaving The Porter Wagoner Show. Porter Wagoner was really upset with Parton for leaving and she is singing this song to him as both a love song and a fare-the-well, I’m-leaving-your-employment song. You’d expect Cher to similarly talk about how she will always love Sonny even though he had oftentimes been a dick to her.

Nothing like that happens. She doesn’t say that at all. She tells that dramatic story and ends the scene. Then you go back to the title and there’s something extra there. The title renders a kind of judgement on the text, cluing in the reader to something unsaid in the chapter: after all of this, I still loved this person and pretty strong.

Cher is not often sentimental-seeming. Her story about seeing the Silkwood trailer back in the early 1980s is a good example. Everyone in the darkened theater (not knowing Cher had snuck in with her sister) laughed when her name came up on the screen after Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell. Instead of crossing those people off as assholes, she labeled this a unified, visceral response that “you couldn’t really argue with.” Maybe she said “what a bunch of assholes” first and has just never mentioned that part in the retelling. But her story is very grounded in a kind of collective realism and not much her feelings.

So glimpses of these feelings can be very moving. But am I, myself, just a sentimental, sappy. essentialist Sonny & Cher fan overreading a chapter title? Where these titles just stuck on by an editor after the fact?

Valid question. I am sentimental, yes, but am also worried about being sentimental. I could always be over-reaching.

Except that there was a similar song gesture during her interview on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio. And there was no mediation there with an editor. It was just Cher and the interviewer,  Lauren Lavernehad, talking about Cher’s life in thematic segments followed by a somewhat tangential song (her childhood matched up with an Elvis song, the Phil Spector sessions matched up with “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”) and then at the end of the Sonny segment, Cher picked this Bonnie Raitt song. She introduces it with an “Ugh” like it took some muster to voice its title, “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

🥹

As Sonny might say, “Yeesh, Cher.”