Cher Scholar Review of The Memoir

Big Points

I’m not going to rehash the whole new Cher book. It should be read fully to get the feel of the old tales and new revelations. I’m just going to give my overall opinion and point out a few interesting patterns and things.

Apparently there were three ghostwriters and an editor who make weeklong house calls to  Malibu to hash out this thing out over four months. The first one produced a book of facts, the second one got Cher halfway into telling stories she didn’t really want to tell and the last one got her much farther along. Cher says a fourth edit would have been best. To me, this doesn’t sound like a failure of the ghostwriters, just the normal writing process, drafting and drafting, restarting and rejiggering until you get closer and closer until you finally give up and let it be what it is.

The project from the start was a difficult business, how to balance the obscure details fans want and with the big, over-told stories and basic life structure the nonfans need. I wouldn’t want to be the one to do it. Kudos to all the writers who brought this thing into existence, including Cher.

I think they did a fine balance myself. I do know some fans who are frustrated by the watered-down Cher storytelling style or the fact that information is missing. Of course there is a lot of missing information. I have my own list; you’ll see below. But I think those are understandable. Cher gets to decide. And the book ticks all the main boxes for me: it fleshes out her genealogy, covers her music experiences (some more than others), illustrates chosen life stories (much more than I thought we’d get, tbh), what it all felt like. Plus we got a great survey of Cher’s Los Angeles, where she lived and what she loves in L.A. This inspired me to make a map.

And hey, I’ve read all the Cher biographies and this one still felt new to me. It didn’t feel like a rehash of all the previous books. And it remains impressive that Cher had the clout to get two a volume memoir, something only presidents usually get.

We got way more Sonny stories than I thought we would. As a Sonny & Cher fan this made me very happy. Sonny’s memoir is mostly about Cher and Cher’s volume one is mostly about Sonny. The Sonny story is pretty crucial. We did get much less about Gregg Allman than I thought we would and barely anything about Gene Simmons, and Les Dudek was like a sentence. But we got information on all the boyfriends in-between.

And here’s the thing: the Allman and Simmons eras are very well documented in hundreds of magazines, interview clips and news articles that tracked Cher’s every move during those relationship years and other biographies cover them as well. KISS books alone give copious coverage to the Gene Simmons-Cher relationship (for those third grade St. Louis boys mocking it so much). Allman Brothers Band books likewise give much more coverage of their relationship. And the fact is fewer mainstream readers care about those relationships. Cher’s childhood and genealogy is not covered anywhere and so that information gives us clues into her personality. So if we had to choose between one or the other: childhood should get the ink. And I’ve always maintained that your genealogy works its way up through you in powerful and sometimes unseen ways.

It reminds me of Carol Burnett’s prequel memoir about growing up in Hollywood and living with her grandmother, One More Time (1986). It had nothing about her life in show business until her second book came out, Time Together: Laughter and Reflection (2011) . In a sense, Burnett too managed her story over two books.

I feel the same way about the incorrect facts. I do wish there had been some fact-checking for a few things but those are all things we can easily verify elsewhere (which is why fact checking seems like such a no-brainer). For example, as we know very well from last year’s blog posts, Cher’s advice column was not in Tiger Beat. It was in 16 Magazine. Although fans pretend to be aggravated by those finds, I think they are fun to find on some level because it gamifies the book for fans.

And although it was only a sentence, I loved the part where she talked about her fans, that if they don’t like something she tries, they still like her as an artist and person. That’s so important to say because Cher fans are so different and yet so open. And at the end of the day they are fans of Cher and not an accumulation of Cher stuff. I do think some artists would rather just be appreciated for their production. Either they don’t feel much like a person or they don’t want a kind of personal attention or maybe they just want the cash.

But then again, Cher does care an awful lot about the cash, by her own admission. And the reason for that, we can now see, goes back to childhood experiences.

This book reminded me there were a few categories I forgot when I was listing what musical movements Cher was  a part of. I mentioned she was a member of Phil Spector’s Gold Star Studios circle, part of the mid-1960s Southern California Pop scene (with the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Turtles and the Association) and was involved with The Wrecking Crew. But I forgot to mention she was an accidental part of the British Invasion. So weird but true.

And there were two scandals I would have liked to have heard Cher’s perspective on, both taking place during the Gregg Allman era: the Jenny Arness suicide and the Scooter drug trial. It’s hard to know how personal Cher wanted to get but she did give us much more information about the Average White Band/Ken Moss drug party. Cher was also quite candid about her fans (and the rest of America) criticizing her relationship with Gregg Allman and how she felt about it. That coupled with her fan appreciation sentence made me think about all the things fans have been through with Cher.

I made a list.

• The drug film Sonny made and their sudden subsequent uncoolness.
• The big style transition from the 60s to the 70s where a bunch of kiddos (enter moi) and old farts jumped on the Sonny & Cher bandwagon to the probable annoyance of existing 1960s fans.
• Divorcing Sonny.
• The hookup with Gregg Allman.  (I missed all this because I was in the single digits and didn’t read the news).
• Dating Gene Simmons and having to endure the whole hiding-in-a- hankey thing but also KISSness in general (and having to hear third grade boys disparage Cher as the Yoko Ono of KISS…and oh the sorrows I have seen!)
• Black Rose sublimations of Cherness.
• Epstein-barr (would we ever see Cher again!?) and the infomercials (I am the oddball fan that loves those probably for the same reason I love Vincent Price on a cooking show).
• The younger boyfriend  mini-scandals.
• The occasional verbal missteps that fire up a press but come and go.

Childhood

Although most reviewers wanted to discuss Cher’s experiences with her extraordinary mother, Georgia (and this book was just as much a biography of Georgia as about Cher), I thought Cher did a good job bringing John Sarkisian to life. He had always seemed like a flat villainous character before. I think one of the good things about this book is that it doesn’t try to villainize anybody. Interviews and press liked to draw out the shitty things Sonny did, but in the book people are drawn in their mysterious complexity: Cher’s birth father, her step-father, John Southall, Sonny, and even to a lesser extent Gregg Allman. It’s ironic that she describes Sarkisian as a spoiled youngest son because Cher’s mother was the most unspoiled child as there ever was. How did that even work?

It was also interesting to understand how Cher’s surnames evolved and when they were attached to her and how that affected her identity in odd ways. Pinky Sarkisian is forever etched into my imagination now. It has a lovely internal rhyme.

I appreciate the listing of movie and musical influences, both early and teenage. There were some obscure names in there (obscure now anyway) and it will be interesting to keep thinking about how Cher internalized those influences.

We knew nothing about her step-grandparents before and as it turns out they had a big influence on Cher’s idea of fashion in show business. The button box detail. (there were some great details to bring stories beyond sketches.)

In graphic detail Cher describes a childhood foot injury that she says gives her a “distinctive looping gait “(the Cher strut?) reminded me of the stage foot injury that happened somewhere during the Farewell tour and how much she depends on her feet.

When talking about her family, you got more of a sense of Cher’s feelings about things. This was what I think felt so compelling since she’s usually presenting as such a tough cookie. This especially goes for the very touching relationship between Cher and her sister, Georganne (or Gee). Those moments, in brief snippets, were very moving.

Over and over in this memoir cycle, Cher claimed the usage of “Babe” in “I Got You Babe” went back to her mother’s glam usage of the term. This differs from critics who liked to say Sonny was ripping of Bob Dylan’s 1964 “It Aint Me Babe.”

Cher also brought to life her time studying with Jeff Corey and her first jobs at Robinsons department store and even more detail about working at See’s Candies. And she sorts out all of Georgia’s husbands and lovers for us. That has always seemed sketchy and confusing before. And you can see how disruptive the constant moves become, the patterns that form between Georgia’s upwardly mobile times with her husbands (for the most part) leading to Cher’s glimpses of wealth in Beverly Hills and New York City, in contrast to severe poverty they experienced living in the Valley, where support systems of women took over. You can see these female support systems in Cher’s adult life entourage as well.

Cher’s early viral illnesses also tie into her later struggles with Epstein-Barr Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue.

Sonny

I believe that for decades Cher has been telling us the truth about Sonny but we just couldn’t hear it. She spells it out as much as possible here. I had no idea the infamous Melissa was gay. That puts quite a spin on Sonny’s ill-fated crush. Cher talks about Sonny’s beautiful hands again. “I just thought this guy was special. Everyone loved Sonny.” She doesn’t recount his childhood as all the other bios do (well enough). She does note that he was kicked out of LA’s Englewood High School for hiring a black band for prom.. She sorts through his odd jobs, who his friends were (Sam Cooke, Jack Nitzche), what his music creds were up to that point. I love thinking about Little Richard pretending to hit on Sonny and eliciting an eye roll. Her opinion of their relationships with Phi Spector.

Cher mentions multiple times how Sonny was an avid photographer and took the photo of her standing against the wall at Gold Star Studios. I’m not quite sure which one she means. Which is why it would be good to get a book of Sonny’s photographs someday (maybe sprinkled with some recipes?). Cher says she admired way he “put everyone at ease.”

One of my favorite parts of the book was the listing of locations in Los Angles, the clubs they went to, the restaurants, the record business hangouts, the houses where they lived. And this part has some of the best, almost unCher-like quips, like her story about how she came to be friends with Sonny and live with him, wrapping it up with  “And that’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man 11 years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce. I thought Sonny was the coolest person I’d ever met.”

She doesn’t shy away from discussing all the womens. Sonny would say when women came over, “That’s just Cher. I was just Cher.” And all those women’s attempts to wrestle Sonny into compliance or to wrestle money out of him. Apparently he was dating several women, and not just one who claimed she was  pregnant and wanted abortion money. Cher claims one of these women used the money to get their teeth fixed. Cher also claims Sonny wasn’t really a catch. He had no money and drove a Chevy Monza (in a sentence, how we judge men by their status as indicated by their cars). Cher would sit in the bedroom watching TV or drawing during his escapades. It’s fascinating to think about.

Cher is also pretty honest about her own complicity in slowly losing her autonomy in this relationship, how early illnesses cemented their roles as a woman to be helped and the “macho Sicilian.” Cher says, “I came to feel that he was the kind of guy who’d be there if something bad happened. Before too long, I thought the sun rose and set on his Sicilian ass, even though I knew that I wasn’t his type.” There’s a lot going on in that passage.

“Before too long I began to hero worship my roommate. The feeling wasn’t mutual.”

Cher describes herself as a kid full of phobias and panic attacks and how she evolved from a tag-along to a love interest over time.

And Cher never did expect any high romance. (It was astounding to me how unromantic both of her legal weddings turned out to be.)

Another fascinating character in the book was Uncle Mikey, Georgia’s brother. He was also a very shadowy character in prior books. His highs and lows were fascinating, including the high’s of owning two L.A. nightclubs, The Purple Onion (important to Cher’s story as the first live performance she ever gave) and the Haunted House on Hollywood and Vine, which fans know from the Halloween promotional video where they tour the club and dance. From watching Rifftrax movies, I also recognized the club as the main setting for the movie The Girl in Gold Boots. Cher described it as a “kitschy, goth go-go bar.”

Cher talks about their dogs, Sonny’s aptitude for fatherhood,  (very good, not surprising) and life with both his daughter Christy and also times when Georganne lived or traveled with them. Cher goes more into the Gold Star days than I thought she would. More than even the experiences recording her own albums. Cher doesn’t say much about times spent with Sonny’s family but that she liked his sister Betty. (Fran is the sister who wrote the book about their family’s legal battles, Bono vs. Bono. where family episodes with Cher can be found.)

Cher is faithfully honest about Sonny’s professional attributes (mostly his unwavering belief in Sonny & Cher) and his faults (he started to become controlling pretty early). She admits (similar to many other once  controlled women),  his perceived jealousy and attempts at controlling her “thrilled me because it meant he cared.”

You also come to appreciate how Sonny became Cher’s Dumbo’s feather.

And most of the Sonny section is about how long it took for her to understand that she could support herself both physically, financially and emotionally. She could live without this great love. She could deal with the business of show business herself (with help).

Cher says some of the happiest days of her life were these early years with Sonny when they were living together and working at Gold Star. She details the ups and downs of Sonny & Cher, from the days playing in bowling alleys, roller rinks and later in small nightclubs, who they opened for in the beginning (The Ronettes), who they headlined with (The Beach Boys, The Mamas and the Papas, The Righteous Brothers) and who they fell to the bottom of the bill with after their careers imploded (King Curtis and the Kingpins).

She tells of an early album of covers she did that was scrapped. Oy. All the fans wish we could hear those and other lost tracks. It sounds like “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” was also a Sonny & Cher, Brian Wilson, Darlene Love, Jack Nietzsche, Jackie De Shannon song under Phil Spector with the moniker of Hale and the Hushabyes,

Without rancor, Cher talks about early players, Coleen and Bridgit, managers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone. Remember they did a tabloid tell-all about Cher in the 1980s that resulted in me sending Cher a fan letter about to Cher telling her how outrageous it was. Cher says those managers were “brilliant liars, committed, charming.” Although she doesn’t believe, for reasons she explains, that the London Hilton episode was pre-planned. she says the managers did spread a rumor that a Saudi Prince had asked if Cher was for sale. How that was supposed to drive record sales, I do not know. (She says the lyrics of Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider” were changed to add a reference to the London Hilton.)

We see the first meeting of Cher and The Rolling Stones. One particularly funny story is about how Mo Ostin accidentally signed Sonny & Cher twice. Cher claims Bob Dylan loved her version of “All I Really Want to Do.” Other accounts say he didn’t like it. The picture of Sonny & Cher with Dylan was taken with Sonny’s camera. Cher explains the difference in stories between later managers Joe DeCarlo and Denis Pregnolato. One helped Cher, one ratted her out. She explains Sonny’s nose job and how his nose was ultimately an illustration of his resilience and strategy.

Cher charts the rise of “this odd little song” that was “I Got You Babe” and how the time in England were more of her happiest days with Sonny, how he told people she was “the missing piece” and they went from being labeled freaks in America to becoming famous overnight in England and returning as a mis-identified part of the British Invasion, with all the hysteria that entailed. Cher says she didn’t know she’d be singing the song for the next fifty years [on and off].

Is it me or is the “Laugh at Me” Martoni’s Restaurant story missing from the book? It seemed such a foundational story about how they were treated by “the establishment.” I wonder why it was omitted. She does talk about the cover up story about the fake Tajuana wedding.

And that she’s known her interior designer Ron Wilson since the Encino house. And he has decorated 19 houses for her over six decades. She’s got her people who are loyal to her, another case in point.

She talked about the unrelenting work: gigs, recording sessions, interviews, TV appearances, no dinners, movies or vacations. Only shopping. But she was torn because all the work meant more time with Sonny. And she says she didn’t like it when TV shows treated them like a novelty act. Cher says she started to become a shadow.

She talks about her relationship with Richard Avadon, the champion of the unusual looking. “We weren’t beautiful in the traditional sense at all.” The squared-off nails pic was from the first session (later they would revisit her nails in another 1970s shoot). She says Avedon and his stylists “made me feel beautiful for the first time in my life.”

Cher talked about her first experience with then-reporter, future Mask director Peter Bogdanovich who reviewed a show they did for Princess Margaret and he said they “howled like coyotes” among other insulting things for his Saturday Evening Post profile.

Cher talks about being an abstainer, like Sonny, but not caring if everybody else imbibed (her mother and uncle did, not to mention Sonny’s prescription usage) so she wasn’t supportive of Sonny’s drug film and she said it hurt their career instantly. “Record sales dropped immediately and offers dwindled.”

Cher admits that “keeping us relevant was a lot of work” and it made Sonny moody. Cher gave him some journals [which Mary Bono sold in 1998 to People Magazine after Sonny’s death] and they often communicated through those pages although she didn’t see, until years later, the moving entry he made on his 33rd birthday.

Enter William Fredkin, who was friends with Sonny, and stories about the movies Sonny & Cher made. This started Sonny down a path of thinking he was a movie maker, getting caught sleeping with his secretary and his jealousy surrounding Stephen Whitaker (no kissing!), Cher’s befuddled co-star in Chastity. She said Harold Battiste read a book on scoring so he could do the movie score for Good Times. Cher also loved the cool jazz version of “I Got You Babe.” [Me too; I played it at my wedding]. Cher seems to have fond memories of making Good Times, which was filmed in their Encino home. She talks about their customized ’64 mustangs (which she looks at every time they come up for auction), how she didn’t believe Sonny would ever get the movie made and once he got the funding she felt like “oh shit.”  She was on the birth control pill and felt chubby during the filming, having gained 15 pounds. She both loved and felt sorry for George Saunders and he was surprised at her classic movie knowledge. She talks about the elephant Margie.  Chastity was a shoestring affair with a 15-person crew. Cher doesn’t name him by name but says the director was a real person who had only done commercials before. They wore their own clothes. Cher admits she could have been offended by the portrait that was inspired by both Cher and her old friend Melissa.

Sonny had many more movie plans, a “Beat Goes On” musical and an animated film. The films were flops, each for different reasons, and this depressed Sonny. The firing of Greene and Stone sounds unpleasant. Cher says she liked Led Zepplin and wanted to change with the times but Sonny was 33 and was determining their direction. She talks about her miscarriages and the funny diagnosis of “an angry uterus.”

Cher took Sonny’s cheating, when she walked in on it, pretty hard. Sonny, like a true narcissist, blamed her for the situation in various conflicting arguments. She said she was “overloaded with sadness” and came to understand her mother had been hearing stories for a while. [But then oddly Georgia often chose Sonny’s side in later years.] Cher lightly goes into conflicts with her mother but it’s vague what the fallings outs were over. Later Cher admits everybody knew about Sonny’s affairs but her.

In the midst of these new relationship issues, Sonny and Cher start moving into the Tony Curtis houses (the St. Cloud house and the Owlwood house or “the big house”) and it’s surprising to know they owned them together at the same time. The Owlwood House on South Carolwood, a famous LA. house has a whole chapter in a book written about it (Michael Gross’s Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles) and is allegedly one of the biggest money sinkholes in Hollywood due to its gargantuan size (9 bedrooms and Cher said you could “starve to death” trying to find your way to the industrial kitchen). No one seems to hold on to it for very long. So to manage that house and another Bel Air house at the same time is a bit astonishing and shows how much cash flow Sonny & Cher might have had in the early 1970s.

As I said, we get more information about making Phil Spector records than we do Sonny & Cher records unfortunately. The rumor was Sonny’s production process was brutal on Cher, lots of lots of takes. But Cher doesn’t confirm or deny that. Compare this to all the stories we’ve heard around the making of “Believe.” The exception is the story of all the arguments surrounding the making of the Muscle Shoals Jackson Highway album.

One of my favorite eras of Sonny & Cher happens to be the nightclub era. This is because it feels like a metamorphosis. Although it was rough, it was also a rethinking of what Sonny & Cher were. Plus it seemed very cinematic in its own way. For example, the contrasting image of a newly glamourous Sonny and Cher in tux and gown making their way through supper club kitchens and waiting behind swing doors for their  cues, navigating the hecklers, the low turnouts, the band, the bad motels, the delight of a baby and toddler, (“Christmas everyday,” Cher’s words) and Sonny’s storytelling, “Good Princess Garbage Who Loved Garbage”, truly two people with their backs against the wall. Their relationship coming back together through the hardship of small time showbiz, Cher’s wise acre personality finding its way into the show.

The TV Shows

And that all paid off. I was always under the impression that the Nitty Gritty Hour was sort of a pilot episode for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and not a first attempt that didn’t go anywhere as Cher describes it.

She reminds us that their summer replacement led into the Henry VIII miniseries (which probably helped). She does list the names of her supporting actors: King, Cullen, Langston, Steve Martin, Teri Garr (who she says was “funny enough to have her own show”), Sounds like Ret Turner and Ted Zeigler were her favorites. She says her hair was a problem until Renata came abord and that she always did her own makeup until Mask. Before doing her solo number, she would always ask stage manager to go find Sonny so he could watch her sing from behind camera and she did this even after their divorce. Recently I found a scrapbook photo of just that backstage moment.

She also explained a big mystery to me: what that Bono Award statue was. What the heck was that? It was an Oscar with large nose and mustache. Ahhh. Oy.

I love the weekly schedule run-throughs. Carol Burnett did this in her book, too. What happened Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, weeks they had to double-up due to concert commitments (50 a year) or recording albums in one week with Snuff Garrett. (Cher admits she doesn’t “like story songs much.” )

Cher talks of being permanently tired but knowing “this is what I was supposed to do” and that it was fun singing “the best song” referring to the Vamp song. Of Sonny & Cher, “that’s all we want to be and that’s what we were.” Besides, she had Sonny in her ear saying “this is our time.”

Little did he know, Cher would take over time itself.

Cher was called at the time one of the top 10 best dressed women in America. Their TV show was in the Top 10. Enter Irwin Spiegel. Sonny starts smoking cigarillos and calling himself El Primo. No one was ever allowed over to “the big house” except on Christmas, Thanksgiving or Chastity’s birthday. (What a waste of all that space!)

It was also interesting to me that Sonny booked them on the Playboy TV show and they accepted gifts from Hugh Hefner (that big lion on the album cover depicting Chastity’s bedroom), but after their separation, Sonny would use her friendship with Hefner to try to say she was an unfit mother in their custody battle. Sheesh, Sonny.

But then Cher meets Paulette in 1972 and this is very crucial to the story. Getting to know Paulette better in the book is very, very important. She’s described as “a breath of fresh air” to Cher. She arrives as the girlfriend of their road manager but eventually becomes Cher’s assistant. She’s worldly in all the ways Cher is not. They swap desires to live each other’s lives. Cher is in a very bad place, not eating, sleeping and by her own admission “needlepointing herself to death.” She has been on the edge, literally, of not one but several balconies. (Oy. Imagine.) She has no control over her life and Sonny is forcing her into a schedule she doesn’t want. She’s watching Paulette and being pulled toward these after-show band hotel-room gatherings Paulette recounts to her. Meanwhile the guitarist has a crush on Cher. It involves a riff and an Etch-a-sketch and it’s where the book slows down remarkably into a veritable suspense story.

So one night in drummer Jeff Porcaro’s room (don’t get me started on the Toto thing, please), Cher breaks ranks and all hell breaks loose. David Brenner is involved, the whole band is involved. Sonny gets dark.

They go on with the show and an episode with The New Seekers, of all people. Cher tells of the Mother Nature skit in that episode in her book. Sonny tells another version of the same story in his. Cher maintains that they were not, in fact, great actors. But that they genuinely enjoyed doing the show and had work chemistry even as they were breaking up. Sonny’s account isn’t identical to this. People who worked on the show wrote about the famous Battling, Bickering Bonos and how Sonny and Cher would go their separate ways immediately after coming off stage.

Which is heartbreaking for all us kid fans who had their imaginations ignited by Sonny & Cher existing that stage ramp with Chastity. What other stage door was so pregnant with meaning as theirs? It’s like we hated to see them leave and had to keep imagining them living life as they disappeared into silhouettes. One of my favorite pictures of them is from a Cher tour book, Sonny & Cher exiting the TV stage with Chastity.

But then as Anthony Kiedis notes in his own memoir, Cher babysat for Sonny’s girlfriend’s kids (Kiedis) during this time. So…it sounds genuinely complicated.

Post Sonny

So the excitement keeps on keeping on after Cher separates romantically from Sonny. For one thing she remarks about “dressing without permission” and I think that’s an important phrase we also heard her use on the book’s speaking tour. Women wearing what they want to wear is one thing, but then braving criticism about it is another. Just the agency to wear WTF you want I think is something we take for granted now. Something men take for granted and something young women also take for granted. Bodily agency is what is being enacted here. And it’s been dismissed (sometimes even by me) as frivolous. It’s not.

Cher also depicts funny post-Sonny moments, like the first time she guffs signing a check with “All my love, Cher.”

We find out that the brother of the guitarist Bill Ham is Cher’s sometimes saxophonist Warren Ham (ex; Black Rose).

And besides lame weddings, the things Cher had to put up with astounded me. Just Bill Ham asking her what movie she wanted to see. David Geffen given her the first valentine’s day gift ever received (she cried). It’s incredible! The 600 cassette tapes she bought because she was finally allowed to explore her own music tastes.

I also found her relationship with Sonny’s girlfriend Connie very interesting. The whole Girls Room thing.

She talks about the affairs with David Paich and mentions the tour with the Toto guys, how she met David Geffen and their early days and all the famous rock stars she got to know through him. And all the movie stars, directors and producers. How Sandy Gallin, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Hooton and Warren Beaty all kept Cher’s relationship with Geffen a secret as part of Cher’s agreement with Sonny to not be seen in public with another man. Oy vay!

This statement when talking about Geffen thinking she would jump him: “I never made the first move with a guy in my entire life.”

Geffen famously rescued Cher from involuntary servitude with Sonny. That’s all well known. Cher states quite clearly, “Sonny was undoubtedly responsible for making us who we were but…he could never achieved that without my voice.” Cher references having to do this performance after one contract fight.

I did not know Cher had won a Golden Globe for Best TV Actress in 1974. She also won one in 1984 for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Silkwood) and in 1988 for Best Actress (Moonstruck).

At Bob Dylan’s famous birthday party she sang “All I Really Want to Do” with him and The Band and, I ididn’t know this, “Mockingbird” with Rick Danko. I wondered how hard it was for Sonny to see Cher’s experience and deep entree into the music business on the arm of David Geffen at that time. She penetrated the in-crowd of the music business in ways he never would. Although even so, the music biz always kept Cher at arm’s length.

She is quite candid about the Average White Band overdose party scandal. “Ken moss told everyone I was being an alarmist.” Wow.

She talks about the struggles with her own solo show after David Geffen stopped helping her get the best musical guests (because he was mad she left him for Gregg Allman which is understandable).  There were the censors who “read sex into everything,” the fact that the show was up against The Wonderful World of Disney.

She was at the Troubadour to see Etta James when she met Gregg Allman. The story is pretty funny. She was there with Geffen, Paulette, and Tatum O’Neal (she references O’Neal a bit dismissively, there’s probably an untold story or two in there). Allman’s friend Chank gave Cher a note that started with, ” dear enchanted lady” and ended with his phone number. There’s no mention of a finger sucking in this retelling of their first, disastrous date. The second date entailed dancing and went much better. Cher’s take of the Allman Brothers Band is that they were jealous and undermining of Gregg. She admits it was a mistake to have him come on her show, a “lose lose” proposition for everyone. She says the wedding was “not romantic” and there was no honeymoon and he “was gone the next morning”…which strikes me as a more egregious move than leaving his “dope kit” behind. Cher says it was hard to make these mistakes as “the most famous woman in America.”

Her show then went up against The Six Million Dollar Man during its second season and that show was a phenomenon. (Sonny guest starred on it, to add insult to injury.)

She didn’t see much of Gregg during the reboot of The Sonny & Cher Show, she says. He was kind of miffed about the whole thing, thought he was being made a fool of. I can see his point of view. The birth of Elijah seems very dramatic as it fell in between Allman’s rehabs. I forgot after reading the book the whole complicated story and if Allman was even there for it or not (he was and it sounded very moving; he named Elijah). But it Sonny who was on the road with Cher for many of Elijah’s milestones in hotel hallways (similar to the toddlership of Chas). This explains why during Cher’s Take Me Home tour we saw all those photographs Cher said Sonny took of Elijah.

Cher says it was a surprise to find out The Sonny & Cher Show was cancelled while she was on the road with Sonny. That’s surprising to me too considering the last show seemed so…well final.

Cher said it was her idea to drop her name from Allman and Woman and that her favorite track on it is “Do What You Gotta Do.”

The Gene Simmons section is even shorter than the Allman part (could they have warranted a chapter each?) but Cher tells the story of the $2,800 phone call he made to her from Japan. Simmons was really good with her kids, she says, giving KISS-fan Chasity lots of memorabilia, giving Elijah his first guitar and teaching him how to swim. Life in a bandana was a problem, though, as it turns out. It was hard to have a private life with paparazzi inside every restaurant. It’s very hard to eat pasta with a bandana on.

The rest of the book is about the Black Rose / Take Me Home Tour eras which included the factoid that Michael Keaton was the opening comedian for the Take Me Home shows, Cher’s affair with Les Dudek while working on Black Rose and Cher’s failed attempts to break into acting or even get an acting agent, despite being in the lucky position of having actors, producers and directors as friends. She only got encouragement from Shelly Winters and Francis Ford Coppola (who used to play cards with Sonny at the Encino house). She said Jack Nicholson got her the audition with Mike Nichols for The Fortune and she tells the story about why A Star Is Born didn’t happen.

She lists out the names of her dancers who all died of AIDs while only in their 30s. She also tells how her new assistant (after Paulette left to be with Dickey Betts), how Deb had no experience but was crucial in helping Cher get over her stage freight before the new tour, her first without Sonny, shows where the mic went out, the fire alarm went off and how she broke Sinatra’s attendance record and cab drivers would recommend the show to tourists.

The books literally ends with all the reasons Cher was getting movie role rejections: she was too old, too ethnic, too tall, too typecast as Cher, and had a punchline for a personal life. It’s a great place to end the first book.

The Possible Movie

As I said in a previous post, I think this book contains the synecdoche that represents the whole of Cher’s life, an era that defines the other eras.

The early 1970s journey back from being rock stars and those supper-club indignities feel like a very tactile beginning, their traveling nucleus,  their backs-against-the wall bonding through small tours. A movie could allude to everything that came before. Big concerts and tv shows never film as well. They always come across as flat and kitschy. With live shows, you very literally “had to be there.” These times on the road feel very 1970s, and also very A Star Is Born. (Which, by the way, Sonny and Cher track better to A Star is Born than Cher and Gregg Allman do.) It’s also interesting that when things were bad professionally, Sonny and Cher became good again personally.

Casting is always tricky with both Sonny and Cher. Imitations always collapse in flat cartoonishness. Which is egregious considering Cher is one of the most multi-dimensional people in show biz people. The actors should be cool but not publicly understood as cool. Steve Buscemi is a good example I always give. Before their time people. Under the radar people. Despite being right there. (Which reminds us of Sonny’s idea that being before your time is as bad as being behind your time.) They don’t even need to look like Sonny or Cher. It can be an allegory.

The core action is Cher leaving Sonny. That wasn’t the hard part of the memoir to write for nuthin. It pretty much is the movie. It’s the most dramatic sequence in the book by far. Because the first hard thing you have to do is the hardest hard thing you will ever have to do. This is  Cher’s first quintessential solo battle. It’s where the character discovers her strength.  And nothing afterwards could happen if this didn’t happen. And it was emotionally hard to happen. It was physically hard to happen. It was professionally hard to happen. It was a confluence of a lot of things. And that release of tension would release this very large Cher character into the world.

Meeting Paulette is also important to the story, her worldliness and independence and interactions with the band.

The most dramatic thing is this before and after Cher. Plus it’s about Sonny & Cher, arguably the most charismatic coupling ever. Even Cher will say there will always be Sonny & Cher. Sonny even said something similar on Bob Costas, how a magic seemed to happen when they got together, a frenzy.

At their story’s resolution, the Cher character launches into another life and amazing things the movie can allude to but things most of us  already know.

 

Memoir Archaeology

A playlist of TV show performances Cher specifically references in the book made by Cher scholar Alex:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4KcrHavQ0W-ONF7b3T0Yi2Qd2DcEwOK6&si=EvWJ4a9nLpBMSyyy

This LA map of Cher locations I made:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1msdsjnHHDIPBDyabT2p31zs-ukvqYoY&ll=34.09008937559771%2C-118.38576864999999&z=10