“Why should one’s art then be an achievement? Why not more an adventure?”
— Poet Robert Duncan
We’re all waiting to see how much of Cher’s autobiography is a kiss and tell. She has said time and again that she never wanted to do that sort of memoir and was disappointed that Sonny did so with his.
But why should that keep one from telling their life story? Is that all a life is about? Sex and gossip? What about all the other struggles, joys and actualizations of the self?
Reading Ann Powers’ book on Joni Mitchell, it was interesting to see the point at which Joni Mitchell switched from making new music to legacy-building. This took the form of accepting tributes and re-releasing music in various ways.
Cher doesn’t seem interested at all in legacy building. I think she said as much in an interview last year. But this is part of what any memoir or compilation album or tribute speech or liner note is doing. Because after you’re gone, people will turn to these as points of reference. And sometimes this is because “the great work” itself becomes unavailable or gets misinterpreted as it loses the context of its time.
Legacy building happens differently for politicians and poets and painters and rock stars and actors. But there seems to me different ways you can go with legacy building as an artist:
- A relationship tell-all, (not the same as a sex tell-all), especially if you had a life-changing one, like Cher with Sonny. Surely there’s something in certain relationships that were inspiring or in some cases character building. Katharine Hepburn handles this with class and honesty when she talks about Spencer Tracy in her autobiography Me.
- Stories of the ridiculous and transcendent things that happened to you. And usually these things happen with people around you who you loved or hated and they experienced these same things too right along side you and so are part of your story. These events are also part of their stories.
- The change agents of your life. What or who sent you off at a 90 or 180-degree directions? What were the twists and turns in your before-then otherwise linear plot. These can be situations as often as people.
- Your creative problem-solving. All of us have had to do this. It reminds me of poet Frank O’Hara’s obsession with the process of painting and poetry and determining the difference. How does your brain works to solve problems of your work? What tools did you use to work things out?
In any case, no one can top Sonny’s kiss-and-tell by a sexist rockstar (well, rockstar to some degree…in some minds…in my 7-year old mind). Sonny dropped the mic on this kind of tell-all, in my humble opinion.
He started a sexual relationship with underage girl (who became Cher) and then wrote a whole book to complain about it. It makes Gregg Allman’s crass comments about his “hot” sex with Cher and other women (“they have two purposes: to make the bed and make it in the bed”) seem downright gentlemanly in comparison.