This is the second blog post where we compare Sonny and Cher’s respective memoirs, And the Beat Goes On and Cher, The Memoir (parts one out now). In Part 1 we looked at how the books were organized and how they each talked about family history and childhood.
Now we’ll look at their lives together in the 1960s. Fair warning, this is going to be looong. Often when I start a blog I think, should this be an official Cher Scholar page or a blog? For instance, this is too long for a blog post but it also doesn’t rise to the level of a permanent page.
Oh crap. It’s even longer now.
Let’s get starting. First, reading these books side-by-side really shows the unusual complexity of this relationship. The second read, I feel Sonny is not as cold and calculating as I remember (although he is often factually wrong and rationalizing). He does some mea-culpas, especially when he’s about to tell a story where he’s going to look bad or sexist. These two disagree on many more “facts” than I thought they would and not over things you’d assume (like fights) but over who enjoyed what and when things even happened, like big important things, like their legal wedding.
I had to remind myself Cher is remembering her life back from the age of 77 in 2024 and Sonny, with the help of a diary, was remembering back from the age of 56 in 1991. Some of the disagreements are solely between them. We’ll never know what the true answer is if there even was one (what they said to each other in private moments). Then there are the disagreements maybe colleagues or family could resolve. And then there are those discrepancies anyone could have easily be researched and verified (like the name on a record label). Those are the most mind-boggling disagreements.
But it’s fascinating to me that for the most part they tell the same stories, they both think the same stories are important and life-defining but maybe they each remember different details about it. Aside from that it is interesting to note which crucial stories each one leaves out of their timelines (Cher doesn’t tell the “Laugh At Me” story and Sonny doesn’t say a word yet about Carol Kaye’s famous bass line).
We have to remember these are two separate people living separate but intertwined lives. Sonny is not perfect (and is often unlikable in Cher’s book and Cher is often unlikable in Sonny’s tale) but neither of them ever rise to the level of a big, bad villain.
The pages dealing with how Sonny and Cher met up through the end of the 1960s were pages 57 to 178 in Sonny’s paperback book and pages 124-240 in Cher’s hardback book.
The Meet Cute
Sonny describes their “meet cute” with those words, like it was a RomCom. I was shocked by this. I only just learned the term “meet cute” from Substack and here Sonny was using it back in 1991! And then Cher uses the very same term in her memoir. Where the hell have I been?
It was November of 1962 and Sonny says they met at Aldos, “an Italian restaurant.” Cher correctly identifies it as a coffee shop above a radio station. It was Cher, Red and Melissa as a group meeting Sonny.
Sonny describes Cher as “gorgeous” and Cher comments on Sonny’s “amazing smile,” his beautiful hands and that he was wearing a black mohair suit and a mustard shirt with a white collar and cuban boots. Sonny thinks Cher had “character” but was “unreadable.”
They both mention Cher’s comment about Cher admiring Sonny’s wearing “black on black” but in Sonny’s version, Cher says this at the coffee shop and in Cher’s version she tells this to Sonny later when they go dancing.
Cher remembers that they went to the Red Velvet Club right after meeting at the coffeeshop and that Sonny was more interested in Cher’s friend Melissa (who was actually gay they both tell us). But in Sonny’s version they all four went to Club 86 (a lesbian club) the next night and it was Melissa and Cher poking fun of the boys by taking them there.
Their Past Histories
Sonny says Cher had been working at See’s Candy Store. Cher correctly identifies his first pseudonym as Don Christy (the pseudonym he muffed in his own history).
Sonny’s Apartment
“It wasn’t long” (Cher), three weeks (Sonny) before they ran into each other again when Cher spotted Sonny moving in to his apartment at the “sprawling complex” (Sonny) at Franklin and Vine in Los Angles. They both tell a story about looking through the windows of their respective apartments and seeing each other. After hearing about Cher’s living situation woes, Sonny offers to let her move in with him. “No funny business” (according to Sonny) but Cher has Sonny saying, “I don’t find you particularly attractive.” Sonny doesn’t mention this. He insists that front the beginning he felt something for Cher. He says she was gorgeous, “flawless except for a big nose, which I thought gave her character, something perfect-looking women lack,” and that she was statuesque, coquettish, alluring, streetwise, had an “intoxicating aura,” magnetism and “incredible strength” and that he was “already deeply smitten.”(Lots of good adjectives there.)
Sonny talks about Cher’s chronic fears how she needed to have a TV on all night to sleep and how hard it was for him to plug the TV into the bedroom for her because there was no outlet. Cher mentions needing the TV on all night too and that she was full of phobias, one being that she was afraid of silence. Cher says their relationship was like brother and sister/father and daughter at first.
Cher tells the bathing-suit story, that Sonny’s face was “crestfallen” when he saw her shape and then says, “my kind of body wasn’t in style yet.” “God, you’re skinny,” she remembers him saying. Sonny mentions nothing about this or the other women he was dating while Cher first lived with him.
They both tell the story that Cher lied about her age and said she was 18 and then 17 but was really 16.
Georgia
I think where the memoirs probably differ the most is in their depiction of Cher’s parents, John and Georgia.
I don’t know if Sonny was too hard on Georgia or if Cher glossed over a lot. Cher admits her mother once bought her new clothes and then returned them in a fit of anger and Sonny tells this story as one of the stories about how Georgia was a less than great mom. Sonny describes her as a “pretty party girl” who “measured success by men and cars” and was very competitive with Cher. Cher glossed over their periods of not-talking or Georgia not talking to Cher as things she just can’t remember.
Although allegedly Sonny and Georgia got along off and on (even after the divorce), Sonny does not have much nice to say about Georgia. And his comments are mostly in defense of Cher. It’s possible he was upset with Georgia again when he was writing his memoirs. But you also get the sense that Cher has left a bit of drama out of hers. By her own admission, she could go long periods without speaking to her mother and this was all really vague in her memoir.
Of Georgia Sonny says, “she defined the phrase ‘a real piece of work.’” He admits she was “striking” and “beautiful” and had the attitude of a star.
He pulls no punches: “Motherhood wasn’t high on Georgia’s list of priorities. She liked men, parties, fast cars, and fancy restaurants. She preferred the high life. That she had a daughter, Cher, who turned heads on her own was almost too much for her to handle. There was room for only one beautiful woman in her life—Georgia. That explains the volatility of her and Cher’s relationship. It explains why Cher was so rebellious and anxious to get out of her mom’s house that she dropped out of school after the tenth grade and set out on her own. It was a long time before I heard Cher say anything nice about her mother.”
Wow. Cher doesn’t really take it to the level of volatility.
Another thing completely different is that Sonny says Cher’s biological dad worked for them when they were on the road as road manager. I vaguely remember a story Cher told about her Dad working with them and then trying to sell pictures of himself with Cher and Chastity to the press to support his drug habit and this is how Cher became estranged from him yet again. Sonny says her father died with him and Cher died not talking. Cher says nothing about this. Her comments about John Sarkisian are not terrible but not particularly fatherly either. More bemused and annoyed. She might mention his death and those later-day circumstances in her next memoir, when he dies.
Early Love
Sonny says their relationship was all a tease for the first few months until a kiss on the couch occurred after a conversation about Cher’s lesbian friend, Melissa. Cher doesn’t mention this, but recounts a significant kiss with him after seeing the movie The Balcony. This was after their forced separation by Georgia. They both tell this story of Georgia trying to separate them. Cher says it wasn’t until she was whisked off to Arkansas that Sonny began to have feelings for her.
At first, they slept in twin beds. How Sonny could have been such a ladies man with twin beds, I’ll never understand. But anyway, Cher says she would get scared and was allowed to crawl in bed with Sonny but he would say, “Don’t bother me.” Sonny says he didn’t “make a move” until one night he got into her twin bed.
They both agree this early time was some of their fondest memories of the relationship. Sonny recounts it as “two lost kids found direction in each other” and says somewhat poetically, “I wanted to be the boy who walked the fence to impress the girl. And Cher believed I could do that.”
Cher tells stories of doing art projects with Sonny and acting like kids.
Sonny mentions that their relationship was not very physical or sexual, but he keeps getting Cher pregnant somehow. The both talk about the pain of three early miscarriages which began before they started recording together. Cher admits she “went into herself” after those miscarriages. Sonny says they was hard on him, too, and because they couldn’t talk through it, Cher being so withdrawn. They both wanted to have children together. The first miscarriage was particularly heartbreaking for them and scary. During a later miscarriage, Cher says she was out shopping with her friend Joey when problems started and that she had the miscarriage in their bathroom. Sonny was at a Mohamad Ali fight that night, Cher says, and she spent the next day in the hospital. Cher doesn’t mention a concert date in Minneapolis that Sonny was obligated to perform without her or, according to Sonny, the promoter would sue. Sonny tells the story and how horrible he felt about it. “Shitty” he says. Cher said each miscarriage was worse than the last and she dreaded talking to her friends about them, seeming to support Sonny’s theory that she withdraws when in pain.
They both talk about their non-legally-binding bathroom wedding. Cher says their rings were from a souvenir shop on Olivera Street. Sonny says they were from and Indian souvenir shop at Sunset and Vine.
Sonny describes Cher as often very withdrawn and elusive. He says she would go into a “black hole” for days. But also that she was smart instinctually, just lacked education, poise and confidence. He says her only job had been at the candy store. (He either forgets or doesn’t know about Robinson’s department store.) He says she didn’t become the independent, “who gives a damn” woman until after their divorce, after she continued to work on herself. But then Cher calls Sonny the most private person she’s ever known. “He hid so much of himself.” Cher says that after the very beginning, “he never asked much about me.” She feels he became less and less interested in her as a person and that she started to feel like a shadow. Sonny said Cher was “a tough read”, “impossible to read,” that there was a pattern of her not wanting to talk to him. He says Cher had “the grace, mystery and independence of an ally cat.”
They both agree Cher could dance. Cher says Sonny got jealous of the fact she was a better dancer and didn’t let her go out dancing anymore. Sonny says, “people were always paying compliments to Cher about her dancing.” Sonny admits he was insecure.
Cher remembers every house they lived in, the style and sometimes décor (and sometimes about Sonny’s decorating skills). Sonny mentions a few, but not each one.
Hero Worship
Cher admits she stared to hero worship Sonny but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Sonny says “there was no question that Cher had stars in her eyes, [about Sonny] but for the life of me, I didn’t know what she had in her head.”
Christy Bono
Cher contends that Sonny was a great Dad with Christy and that she visited once in a while and they would all hang out together. Sonny laments often in his book that he was not a good Dad with Christy and that he didn’t give her enough of his time. He says this over and over again.
Specialty Records
They both tell a story or two about Little Richard and the day Sonny brought home the Cadillac. They both mention the crappy Chevy Manza Sonny was driving. Sonny talks about creating the song “Needles and Pins” with Jack Nitzsche and having Jackie DeShannon and The Searchers record it.
Working With Phil Spector
They both have a “working with Phil Spector” section. Cher says he wasn’t “unstable yet” but alternatively moody and funny. “You had to read the room,” Cher says and that if he was mad he would act like he didn’t know you. Sonny confirms this (in his story about the end of their working relationship). Cher says she could give as well as she got with Phil Spector and that this could irritate Sonny (who was the only one of them who was officially employed there). Cher claims Spector told Sonny that she “was funny and showed spirit.” In Sonny’s version, Spector and Cher had “no chemistry” and that Spector was jealous of Sonny’s relationship with Cher.
Sonny starts his Spector session by saying he wanted Spector to produce Cher. “I was convinced that this skinny teenage girl with bad skin, a big nose and an unusually deep voice was star material.” Is he being ironic? No, I think he’s serious. But what happened to “gorgeous”? Sonny spent more time with Spector than Cher did. Whenever Spector was lonely, it seems he would call Sonny to hang with him in silence. And Sonny alludes to “dark and troubled thoughts,” a “troubled mind,” “odd behavior” and “an explosive temper.”
Sonny says Phil Spector called him his “funk.” Cher says Spector never considered Sonny much of a singer and called “Cher, Sonny, Gracia, Fanita and Darlene” collectively his “funk element.” Who is right here? Maybe Darlene Love could weigh in on this one. I have a feeling I know what she’s gonna say.
Speaking of which, Sonny and Cher both agree that the only person Phil Spector took crap from was Darlene Love, who Sonny says had “the balls of a buffalo.” But only Sonny talks about how racist Phil Spector was to his own wife Ronnie Spector, the reported separate toilets and dinnerware he made her use at home and how he locked her in her bedroom for days. Sonny says in public he lavished her with attention but not in private.
They both tell the same story about leaving for a hamburger one day without Spector’s permission but in Cher’s story Sonny wasn’t with them and was just as angry when they returned. In Sonny’s version, he took the girls and it was Spector who was furious.
Sonny mentions the Wrecking Crew but not by that name (the documentary which coined the term hadn’t come out for decades yet) but Cher calls them that.
They both talk about recording “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” (Cher calls it a “once in a lifetime song.” and the time Leon Russell came in drunk and belligerent which was a showstopper at the time because he was normally so quiet and shy.
Early Sonny & Cher
They both agree that Cher was terrified to sing alone. Sonny says she would cry if asked to do a solo and would wilt (his word) when asked to sing. Cher doesn’t dispute this. She says her voice would get locked up from stage fright.
The both tell the story of Sonny finding Sonny’s cheap, broken piano. Cher has him finding it at a pawnshop for $85 and “I still have that ugly thing.” Sonny talks about a $100 pawnshop diamond ring he found for Cher but not a piano at a pawnshop. Sonny says the $50 piano came from a used furniture store. But then Sonny says it was the “85-dollar piano” when he introduces the song “I Got You Babe” on both of their Live albums.
One: “7 years ago they had three things: an $85 dollar piano, a philosophy and each other.”
Two: This is in 1973 and by this time they are separated but not divorced. They are still working on the TV variety show together and are publicly together but they are living in separate wings of The Big House. In this second intro, it’s “ten years ago” and now they had a brass bed Sonny mentions (from a junk store or a drug store). Cher talks about this bed in her memoir. It was from an A-frame house they rented on Sycamore Trail behind the Hollywood Bowl. The shower leaked and the rug “was kind of hatchet,” Cher says. The bed was from a secondhand store and they thought at first it was an iron bed. But it was just filthy and when they started cleaning it together Sonny said, “Cher, I think this is brass!”
“Excited, we ran out and bought about twenty boxes of steel wool Brillo pads, scrubbing it all night long until it was gleaming. That damn bed was brass and it was beautiful.” Sonny probably invokes it here to remind Cher of the talismanic power of this lucky object and the excitement of their early romance.
Cher says Phil Spector didn’t think Cher had a commercial voice. She said Sonny liked the movie Cleopatra and decided on their first moniker should be Caesar and Cleo. Sonny agrees with this story. Cher said she cut his hair into that Caesar style. She said Sonny learned from Spector that b-sides should be instrumental numbers with silly titles so as not to detract from the a-side. And that Sonny inserted the “corny dialogue” in their version of “Love Is Strange.” The b-side was “String Fever” by S. Christy. Arranged by Jack Nietzsche. Sonny talks about recording “The Letter” (which Sonny says “bombed…our families didn’t even buy it”) and “Love is Strange” with Harold Battiste arranging. This was late 1963, Sonny says ashe talks about the “bare-bones” record making he learned from Spector. They both talk a bit about Sonny’s friendship with Jack Nietzsche.
Cher talks about their early gigs on the “DJ circuit” at rolling rinks and bowling alleys looking like Dick and Dee Dee or April and Nino. Very clean cut. Sonny is more specific: their first gig was a roller rink; their second was a bowling alley; there was no third gig.
They both agree Sonny wasn’t a genius songwriter but Sonny wrings his hands over this more than Cher does. Sonny goes into his feelings of imposter syndrome, mostly because he was surrounded by geniuses like Jack Nietzsche, Leon Russell, Brian Wilson and Phil Spector. Plus Bob Dylan and the Beatles were everywhere. In Cher’s memoir she talks about how even so, Sonny could make it happen and that was one of his superpowers in a way. Sonny says he had heard once that Cher said his songs “sound like shit until they’re unraveled” and that he often had trouble communicating his songs to Cher and others.
Cher said her early stage fright was torture. They both talk about her locked voice and resistance to walking on stage.
Sonny is definitely smarting from Cher’s later charge in portraying him as a “controlling Svengali.” In Cher’s defense, I actually think that part comes later in their relationship. Sonny feels Cher always portrays herself as the victim. By the way, Cher took great pains not to do this in her memoir. And Sonny talks about all the pressure he was under to launch their careers, although he admits Cher never complained about anything. He could just sense it, she had big goals. They both agree Cher was happy to let Sonny “chart their course.” And Cher looks back and can sympathize with his moods and stress levels during times they were struggling. They both agree they felt like it was “the two of them against the world.”
They both talk about recording “Ringo, I Love You.” (Cher’s first solo but not her first recording as I had always assumed.) They both agree Phil Spector loved the Beatles. At least Cher gets her pseudonym right: Bonnie Jo Mason. Sonny misremember it as Bobbie Joe Mason.” (Yesh, Sonny. Another thing you can look up!) Cher says they recorded it at Gold Star Studio B, “the size of my car.” Cher says she cringes at the early records and how nasal she sounded. She blamed teenage allergies. She talks about an album of covers they made for Liberty Records. “Nothing came of that.” (Where is it??) Sonny doesn’t mention any of this.
Cher talks about how ‘devastated’ they were when the first records went nowhere. How it made Cher stop singing around the house and then Sonny stopped working with Phil Spector. Later she says Sonny felt it “was time to leave” almost as if it was Sonny’s idea. But Sonny actually details his last phone call with Spector and a disagreement they had about the changing music scene that Spector didn’t want to acknowledge and how the Beatles were changing everything, Sonny says, “the Beatles ended Spector’s reign,” how this led to his being immediately frozen out, if not actually fired.
Cher talks about Sonny’s relationship with DJ Sam Riddle from his promotion days. Sonny is pretty honest about what that “promotion” entailed which was a lot of ways of describing payola.
They both talk about meeting Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, with similar assessments of their characters. In fact, they both start new chapters at this juncture. chapters 7 and 11 respectively. Cher equates them to characters like in the Tony Curtis movie, Sweet Smell of Success. Cher says they re-energized Sonny and were “a match to our fuse.” They both talk about living with them for a while to save money. Sonny talks about Greene and Stone helping them get their Atco contract with Ahmet Ertegun.
Cher talks about her “vocal freeze” during the recording of “Baby Don’t Go” and they both talk about Phil Spector’s financial investment in it.
Sonny & Cher both talk about meeting The Rolling Stones. They both talk about the bus trip to their first Los Angeles concert but Sonny doesn’t mention Cher almost getting pulled out of the bus by a female crazy fan. They both say the Stones wanted to stay with them but that they didn’t have any furniture. (I thought that actually happened and I envisioned Mick Jagger sleeping on their floor. Turns out Sonny imagined that too and that’s why he said no.) In Cher’s version, they all met in a lobby of a hotel where the Stones were staying and they were innocently flirting with her, which Sonny didn’t like. In Sonny’s version, the desire to crash with them came by phone. Sonny contends he never met them until the bus trip concert. But maybe all this happened on the same day.
Cher tells the story of Mo Austin signing them twice by mistake but Sonny doesn’t mention this. Cher talks about the role Bridget and Colleen played in their early style and how they lived in Sonny and Cher’s garage apartment. Sonny doesn’t talk about them at all. Cher admits she dressed up Sonny in outrageous clothes first because he was already dressing experimentally, that she actually wasn’t brave enough at first to wear the looks she persuaded him to try. Sonny doesn’t talk much about clothes.
First Fame
Things started looking up when Cher made “All I Really Want to Do” on Imperial. Sonny says that Imperial wanted just Cher. This is different than all the stories of Sonny masterminding two recording contracts, one for Cher and one for the duo.
Cher talks about how Sonny wrote “I Got You Babe” and how she didn’t love it at first. Sonny remembers that she did like it and claimed she was going to keep that piece of cardboard it was written on forever. (She didn’t.) Sonny claims they both knew it would be a hit. Cher says it was only when they were recording it in the studio, when people were coming around to find out what they were doing, that she knew it was good. It almost sounds like she still isn’t fully convinced.
Cher says it was released as a single. Cher is wrong about this because Ahmet Ertegun fought for “It’s Gonna Rain” to be the a-side against Sonny’s wishes. It was Sonny’s behind the scenes promotion work with Sam Riddle (again) that got “I Got You Babe” played instead.
At this time, Sonny & Cher appeared in the movie Wild on the Beach to sing “It’s Gonna Rain” (giving weight to that being the single) and Cher says Sonny was convinced that this song “would cash in” and that he was also fascinated and absorbed in learning from the movie’s director. Sonny doesn’t mention this movie experience at all.
They have dramatically different London stories. Cher tells a very simple story that Mick Jagger and Jack Good ((of Shindig) both advised them to go to England. She says they hocked their furniture to go. She tells the story about the London Hilton turning them away as soon as they arrived and their being reporters outside wanting to talk to them about it (that’s the suspicious part), but she doesn’t believe this was a set up because the man checking them in didn’t seem that good of an actor. Later she says when they did the song “See See Rider” on her first solo album, they changed a verse to reference the London Hilton experience.
Cher talks about loving her trip and this being one of her favorite times with Sonny, shopping and being suddenly famous. She says Stone and Greene did plant a rumor about there being a Saudi Prince offering Sonny money for Cher (sounds like a Tom Cruise movie plot and also makes me think they would try that hotel trick). She talks about giving her first autograph there in London. In Sonny’s book he says she’s been practicing that autograph and Cher admits in her memoir she had been practicing it since she was about 11 or 12 years old. Chersays the food wasn’t great but everything else was.
Cher says it was when they returned to America, that “I Got You Babe” had become a hit there. It was like they returned as barnacles on the ship of the British Invasion.
Sonny’s chain of events is very different. According to him the song took off “like a rocket” to number 1. He does tell a story about being denied a room in a hotel but he puts that happening in New York City at The Americana Hotel and that there was a verbal altercation between the desk clerk and Stone and Greene, not Sonny. But Cher has a definite memory of Sonny taking a photograph of the registration book. Sonny & Cher had to stay at Ahmet Ertegun’s house, Sonny says. (Later he tells a stories about a few libertine parties at Ertegun’s place where S&C felt out of place, including one Thanksgiving that was where a model threw up all over the turkey). Sonny also does not believe it was a publicity stunt. Sonny doesn’t believe it because he didn’t think Greene and Stone were that smart. “All I can say is, they should have been so clever,” he says. Ok, I believe it then. (Sonny is so convincing. See?)
THEN he says they went to London, “which was the center of everything hip in music,” he reminds us. From Sonny’s telling it that the song was Top 10 there before they went to London and he even remembers pandemonium for them at LAX when they left, that the airport “ground to a halt” due to them. Sonny says the London Hilton also refused them a room, along with any other hotel in town, and so they again stayed at a flat owned by Ahmet Ertegun. Cher remembers them retreating to a kind of divey “pre-war” hotel.
Sonny also has a completely different memory about London’s affect on Cher. He says Cher was “scared of foreign countries” and that it was “a control issue.” (Isn’t Sonny the one with the control issues?) He says Cherhated the entire experience and couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to go shopping.
He goes on to talk about Cher’s theory that she wouldn’t live past 30, her general hypochondria and fatalism. This struck me as sad because Cher talks about real viral infections like mono that took her down during this period and how kind Sonny always took care of her when she was sick in these early days and how that kind of set up their whole relationship.
In Cher’s story, her first taste of American fame was the hoards of screaming fans (5k) at JFK upon their return. She says they were broke when they left LAX and they came back rich. She notes signing her first autograph there.
These are huge differences, not trivial ones. Where were they when the song finally broke? Cher claims Georganne was on the London trip too. Maybe she can give her two cents on Cher’s mood in England and what happened when. Could one or both of them be conflating different memories. Entirely possible. Memories are famously unreliable.
Anyway, they both agree on how much work they had to do while they were in London: tv shows, interviews, trips to mod clubs. Both mention meeting Rod Stewart, Sandie Shaw and the group the Small Faces (who Cher says the Rolling Stones introduced them to). Cher remembers also meeting Dusty Springfield, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But Sonny says they did not meet the Beatles that trip. He says there was a rumor Lennon hit on Cher at a club but the Beatles were all off promoting their new movie Help!.
Sonny says he hired a documentary crew to follow them around to make movies of their songs. He says it cost him 35k but that all the footage was lost somehow and he still grieves about it. Cher doesn’t mention this at all.
Cher calls this time “crazy ass crazy” and “madness” and Sonny calls it a big blur. They both say they were dazzled by fame and were glad they became famous together, to experience it with each other.
Cher does mention Hampshire House Hotel off of Central Park but only that they stayed there after they get back from London. They both tell the story about Cher doing some expensive shopping during that stay. Cher says they finished the album Look at Us at a NYC recording studio. She also mentions a party at Ahmet Ertegun’s but focuses more Ertegun’s his wife than the decadence of the party.
Cher says that around this time Sonny got his nose job due to a deviated septum (from all the fist fights).
Cher says it was the “suit people” who found out they weren’t really married and came up with a press release about a secret Tijuana wedding in October of 1964. It was a lie they both agree. Sonny talks about the “fabricated wedding in Mexico.” He says they weren’t able to wed in 1964 because his divorce to Donna wasn’t finalized yet. Cher talked about postponing the wedding until she was 18.
Sonny says then the label Reprise reissued older songs, like “Baby Don’t Go” which went to #8 US and #11 UK and then “Just You” which went to #20 US. Then later it was “But You’re Mine” (#15 US and he doesn’t mention it but it also went to #17 UK), Vault reissued “The Letter” (75), Sonny mentions “The Revolution Kind” going to #70 and “What Now My Love” (misspelled “What Now, My Love”) going to #16 in 1966, He’s correct on those numbers, according to Wikipedia, except for “What Now My Love” which according to Wikipedia went to #14.
Cher talks about this time they had 5 songs in the top 20 at the same time Cher says and that only Elvis and the Beatles had done. This was probably from all the labels they had been on re-releasing old songs to cash in on them. (I was in the middle of researching this with cher scholar Robrt Pela but we never finished). They both talk about appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, who Cher says mentioned they had 5 songs in the top 50 (see, here is where it is all confused). And Sullivan muffed her name, called her cheer.
Sonny didn’t like being called a hippie. He is still upset Nancy Sinatra “of all people” called them clowns. (This is ironic, if true, since her biggest hit was with Sonny’s song). They both mention their agents at William Morris wanting them to change their look. They didn’t like being called fakes. Sonny maintains they were who they were.
Which honestly feels like a middle-of-the-road kind of place. They liked looking the way they did but socially did not fit in with the debauchery of the early rock scene. They were outsiders from the beginning, outsiders from even the circle of affected outsiders. This has carried through for Cher even through her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But people treated them like a freaky fad. Cher talks about this too. They were perceived as a novelty act. And clothes were the thing that could be changed so could they please change it? They were not protest singers, Sonny admits, although he did dip his writing toes in that water. It was a bad fit, he admits. But Sonny says they did identify with the culture of peace, love and idealism, humanity and harmony, They believed Dylan when he said the times were changing. But their act was non-threatening, polite. They were straight arrows (Sonny’s words) and married (ostensibly). Well, on that point they were kind of fake.
Sonny says he was often called a fag for his cloths and hair. “Some idiots tagged us as commies,” he says which tells you a lot about Sonny’s politics. (Like of all things!)
Then Sonny tells the “Laugh at Us” story about Martoni’s Italian restaurant, the “industry watering hole.” where managers, promoters and A&R guys would coagulate. Sonny says he saw Sam Cooke there the night he was murdered. Sonny describes the altercation between Sonny and Cher and some college football players eating at a table nearby “with red, meaty faces and buzz haircuts.” Sonny remembers Cher asked them to “please cut it out” and that they responded with “whatcha gonna do to us, baby?” (Ok, that is pretty bad.) Sonny said he had a poker friend, a mob friend named Tony Ricco, (are we in the song “Copacabana” right now?) went over and said something about brass knuckles and they left but that the end result of it all was the owner asking Sonny and Cher to never to come back because trouble always came with them, which hurt their feelings considerably. Sonny went home and wrote the song went to #10 (US) and #9 (UK). “Cher loved it,” Sonny says but Cher doesn’t even tell the story.
They both agree on Cher’s love of shopping and how much home ownership meant to both them (hardly communist, he has a point). They both mention buying the Encino house and Georgia’s connection to the neighborhood but Sonny read it more as competition between the two of them. Cher never mentions the competition thing but that the house was near where her mom once lived with Gilbert. She said it wasn’t the house of her dreams because it was in the valley and she liked living where the action was. She was still pretty excited about it, she says. She says that after they moved in “Mom and Gee” moved near them, a few blocks away but that Cher only visited their house a few times. It was now when Cher purchased two of everything in fear of future poverty (and she later says how useless two of everything is when you’re broke again). She talks about the Encino neighborhood bike paths that Sonny would explore with his new dirt bike (behavior as seen in the movie Good Times). In fact Sonny admits that Cher’s shopping was all about clothes (Cher tells the story of being insulted on Rodeo Drive and then buying four copies of an outfit in every color….emotional spending) and Sonny’s “vice” was motorcycles and cars. So he was spending money too.
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Cher talks about the Sonny & Cher clothes line at Gordon and Mark of California. Sonny doesn’t mention this. She talks about the Dear Cher column in 16 Magazine but she mistakenly attributes it to Teen Beat. Sonny also doesn’t mention this.
They both tell the story about playing for Jackie Kennedy in 1965 in NYC. Someone was throwing a party in her honor and she asked for Sonny & Cher to play. Cher doesn’t talk about how bad their set was, like Sonny did. She only mentions eating dessert with her (they weren’t invited to dinner) and the ladies withdrawing while the men smoked cigars and that this is where she met Diana Vreeland who told her she had a pointed head and that “Richard must see you.” Enter Cher’s relationship with Vogue and Richard Avedon. Sonny doesn’t mention any of the Vogue stuff. Cher says that Jackie told them “I Got You Babe” was one of the family’s favorite songs. The children would sing along. Sonny gave her kids Catholic medals. Jackie said Sonny looked “almost Shakespearean” and after that “he was putty in her hands.”
In Sonny’s version he also remembers the catholic medals he brought for the kids but that they were both very intimidated by the guests there and he interprets this event as “their first fall from the spotlight” because they couldn’t be themselves. Sonny does remember Jackie’s haircut compliment but only that it “seemed complimentary” but mostly just reminded him Sonny and Cher were “just players to her.” Again, they were seen as “an amusing clown act.” Sonny says the sound system destructed and he calls it “an embarrassing fiasco.” Is he conflating this with the later-Princess Margaret performance?
Only Cher tells the story of playing for Princess Margaret in Los Angeles at the Palladium. (The events are like bookends of royalty). According to Cher, this was the fiasco performance, not the Jackie Kennedy one. She says they were shocked to have been invited because “the old guard” thought they were freaks. But they didn’t feel like they could say no. Cher says, “it boggled the imagination how much that wasn’t our audience. The best that could happen is we’d live through it…the whole event was a fiasco. It started late, the princess had laryngitis, Frank Sinatra dropped out…there was no stage , the acoustics were so bad that, coupled with the sound problems, we performed terribly.” Peter Bogdanovich was there and reviewed them by saying they howled like coyotes. “When Princess Margaret asked for the sound to be turned down due to a headache, the engineer then accidentally cut the mic and interfered with what we could hear….it was like a bad dream we couldn’t get out of.”
They both mention the Hollywood Bowl show with the Mamas and the Papas and the Righteous Brothers except that Cher correctly notes the fourth act was Jan & Dean and not Dean Martin. (Sonny. Mr. Cher had a good laugh imagining the concert that included both the Mamas and the Papas and Dean Martin.) Cher says that this show sold out in 24 hours. She tells of her proud mother and uncle attending…sounding not so jealous. In Sonny’s version they did the group show and then latter sold out the bowl in 24 hours by themselves.
Sonny says that around this time The Rolling Stones recorded “Shut Up, Sit Down” a song he had written with Rowdy Jackson. He is very wrong about this. There is no song called “Shut Up, Sit Down” but a song that has that lyric in it on the album Out of Our Heads. The song is called “One More Try” and it was on the U.S. album release, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Sonny Bono/Roddy Jackson song on that same album is called “She Said Yeah.” Sigh. He got the wrong song, the wrong name of the wrong song and his co-writer’s name wrong. And it was look-up-able. (Oh, and search Sonny on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddy_Jackson)
Sonny says the summer of 1966 they were everywhere and it was an electrifying time. His family no longer make jokes about his ambitions and he had delivered on his promise to this “scared, confused, skinny girl.” Sonny says when they looked at each other during performances, the love was real and never stronger or deeper. But the second studio album didn’t do as well (#35 US, #15 UK) and Sonny felt he should have been more worried. Sonny talks a lot about the pressure he felt during this time. He, just like Cher, was afraid they would lose everything. Cher would say things like she wanted them to be really big (bigger) and Sonny felt it was never enough. The Kinks and The Who were changing music but he couldn’t change (just like Phil Spector couldn’t change a few years earlier). There were The Doors, psychedelic experimentation and drugs. They were squares, no longer hip, Sonny says. His solo album Inner Views was his attempt to experiment. But Sonny didn’t really want to be rebellious. He says he sometimes hears radio plays of “Pammie’s on a Bummer” but he calls his own song moody and contrived. Cher says she was “crazy about” Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Cream and Eric Clapton but Sonny was the boss so…
Sonny insists he always believed in Cher’s star power and her having a solo career and never felt any competition with that. He calls her pure magic in front of an audience. “No one had to tell me Cher was hot” but then he says of the imbalance of their talent, “that was the hand I was dealt with and I tried to play it as best I could.”
Cher was easy to write for, Sonny says, when talking about the song “Bang Bang” and he lists the Wrecking Crew members who worked on it but not by that name: Tommy Tedesco, Glen Campbell, Hal Blaine and Leon Russel. He says Cher didn’t like this song but he crows the fact she still plays it live. He says it was Cher’s first million-selling solo single. He says he wrote it while riding down Sunset Blvd in his Astro Martin convertible. Sonny says this time the KHJ LA program director had to be convinced but the song went to #2 (US) and #3 (UK). Cher doesn’t mention the song in her memoirs, (Eee!! It’s probably the most covered Cher song of all time), but I remembered her referring to it somewhere last year….maybe in the memoirs press. Turns out it was from the French radio interview (the song did well there according to the DJ). Cher says there “it was such a strange song. We loved it. It sounds like it shouldn’t be a relationship song. It was a strange take on love.” “
They both talk about Cher giving Sonny 12 leather-bound journals. Cher says it was at Christmastime and Sonny remembers it as a 33rd birthday present. Cher said it was to help his moods and Sonny credits it for helping him start to think about his life which in turn helped him with his memoirs (he mentions it at the beginning and sprinkles entries from it in his book) and they both agree Sonny took to it, staying up at night to write in it and giving it to Cher to read and write in too. They both agree it was then used to communicate with each other. Cher felt like her opinions would land better in the diary than they would face to face. There’s a note on his 33rd birthday about how he’s never without Cher and that she’s truly a star and his stabilizer, his generator and his reason. Cher says she doesn’t remember this entry but someone showed it to her from “a book he published.” I assume she means his memoir excerpt is not in that book. It could be from when Mary published Sonny’s diary entries in People Magazine after his death. (I have a copy on the way.) Cher said she never would have guessed he felt that way.
First Irrelevancy
Sonny also admits that fame did a number on his head, that he lost sight of his goals, his identity and he started to distrust managers and advisors. Cher talks about how Sonny took on managing their act by the end of the decade and how stressful that was for Sonny.
Making the movie Good Times felt like the beginning of the end to this reader.
Cher says Sonny had poker and clam-eating contests with his friends which included William Fredkin (who Cher says was a documentary film maker at the time) and Francis Ford Coppola (who Cher says was a UCLA student at the time). Sonny says Colonel Parker advised their agent that they should do a film like the Beatles were doing, a cheap movie with an album to support it. Sonny agrees Friedelin was a poker buddy and became the movie’s director.
Sonny says his songwriting wasn’t breaking any new ground and he wanted to make a movie but that Cher was disinterested in the movie idea.
Now here they diverse biggly again around Cher’s love of acting. Both agree she wasn’t enthused about Good Times at first, just as depicted in the movie. Sonny thinks she never was but Cher says she eventually got into it. She just thought her first acting role would be in a serious movie, like the role in the movie Chastity.
Sonny doesn’t think Cher really wanted to be an actress. “She wanted to sing…was always singing,” Sonny says. He says she wasn’t really into her acting classes with Jeff Corey. This could be his rationalization for asking her to quit them. Cher insists in her memoir that she didn’t think she would ever be a viable singer (due to her low register) and that it made her very sad to give up acting classes, but she did it for Sonny. Sonny says “she was ambivalent about the craft and never showed much interest in attending classes.” In reconstructed dialogue with Cher, Sonny tells her half the times she skips class.
Sonny believed her mother was pushing the acting lessons on her. And Georgia, Sonny says, wasn’t happy about her quitting them. And this, Sonny says, ended all three of them into a session with Georgia’s therapist. (This almost sounds like a tug-of-war over control of Cher.) Cher describes loving the classes and feeling like she was doing well in them, getting good feedback from Jeff Corey and we was very excited when she him in a movie. Considering her late 1970s and early-80s devotion to launching an acting career, you kind of believe Cher on this one. But then again, we saw her drifting away from a movie career at the turn of the century in exchange of big concert tours.
In any case, Cher agrees she was wary of those Beatles’ novelty films. “Sonny decided he was a filmmaker now,” Cher says, and hired a screenwriter. Sonny says his name was Nichols Hymes but the title card of the movie and Wikipedia list the name as Nicholas Hyams. But then Sonny fired them and took over the screenwriting with Fredkin they both mention. Cher says one of the issues was Sonny’s calls for urgent, middle of the night script conferences. Sonny’s version is that the writer’s pitch was good but his final script was crazy and surreal.
Cher was frustrated by the “endless” discussions. Cher admitted the movie was funny, albeit stupid and corny and describes her roles as Tarzan’s Jane, a Sherriff’s showgirl and a gumshoe P.I.’s moll. her says the movie was backed initially by Paramount and once Sonny got the funding, which Cher didn’t think he would, she felt “oh shit” I have to do something now. She felt huge because she had gained 15 pounds on birth control but loved meeting and talking to George Sanders. She also liked her experience at Africa USA Wild park. The most difficult part was being murdered with blanks while playing Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the Sam Spade spoof. She ended up walking off the set saying “Screw you, Billy” after they all dismissed her suffering and told her to “man up.” She also said the lion cub almost mauled Sonny in the Jungle skit. She said her mother was really proud of her and Cher’s response was, “I had to laugh” – which is very elliptical. In fact, Cher’s comments about her mom tend to be elliptical. Cher says Paramount pulled out. Sonny confirms this and that he put up the rest of the money needed to finish it. This would come to haunt him later. The gorilla filmmaking started at this point.
Another big discrepancy in the two books is the story of when Cher caught Sonny having sex with his secretary. Cher says it happened during the filming of Chastity and Sonny puts it during the filming of Good Times. Sonny says he hired a typist/secretary to take notes and he was having sex with her one night and Cher walked in. He says Cher gave him the “cold shoulder” after that but eventually came back around (seemingly on her own). Sonny says this was the only time Cher ever caught him cheating but that this was not the only time he did it. He says this was the era of the double standard, he was an Italian sexist but that he’s come to see the error of his ways after two more marriages. We’ll cover Cher’s version of this when we get to the movie Chastity.
Cher just says that the reviews were good and her performance was called “effortless” which Cher wasn’t sure was an insult or compliment and that Sonny was also called “a natural.” She admits it wasn’t a box office success and that Sonny became depressed and that he had “overextended them financially” for the film. Sonny admits they shot at their own pace and went over budge and the studio “pulled the plug.” They were only 2/3 done, Sonny says. Sonny doesn’t talk about the reviews or his experience acting or any of the locations or scenes. He only discusses the writing of it and the money aspects.
When it was released, Sonny says he went around to Chicago theaters and all of them were empty. For the Austin, Texas, premiere there was a parade and press but only nine people actually in the theater. Sonny in the retelling sounds honestly shocked about this and at the same time insists he “honestly never believed the movie was going to be successful” because he knew Sonny & Cher were already “on the wane” and that the film’s premise wasn’t in synch with the times. Here is where Sonny tries to convey that he’s “in the know” about show business even when he fails. This is a pattern in the book. Sonny claims the experience “hardened us” and he admits he blamed Cher for her lack of seriousness about the movie. Distance grew between them and he lashed out, slamming doors and throwing glassware. “Cher would let me have it.”
Cher talks about being on the Carol Burnett show and first meeting Bob Mackie. He designs her first dress for the “You’d Better Sit Down” song (23:29) from this 1967 show. Sonny doesn’t mention Carol Burnett but he later mentions late-decade Laugh In appearances she doesn’t mention.
Stone and Greene get fired. Cher says one day they were just gone, that Sonny didn’t like all the attention they were spending on their new clients Buffalo Springfield and Iron Butterfly. Cher says Sonny told her Stone and Greene stole from them but that she read later Sonny had to buy out their contracts for $250,000. Sonny talks about how there’s always a honeymoon period with managers. (To Cher’s credit, she’s kept hers for longer periods of time.) Sonny says Stone and Greene had become creepy copies of Sonny & Cher, dressing and talking like them, hanging out with their circle and that “we resented it.” Then they found Joe De Carlo who became their new manager and both Sonny and Cher agree he was like a father figure to them. Sonny says he would say things like “kids, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
Music: Sonny said they worked on “Little Man” in London while while they were promoting Good Times in the UK. He used a cap of a coke bottle on the strings to the piano for the gypsy sound. It was a top 10 in the UK but didn’t fare well in the US. Cher doesn’t mention this song or “The Beat Goes On” but Sonny talks about his philosophy of life goes on, about failure, defeat and opportunity, that you always need to keep problem solving. “I was a fighter,” he says and that first came up with the “drums keep ponding rhythm to the brain” line and the la-di-da-di-de fill. He says nothing about the production of the song or how Carol Kaye invented the bass line (which arguably made the song what it was). Radio play got the song to #6 but people didn’t rush out to buy it, Sonny says. The song, like the rest of their later 60s material, was out of kilter with the hip scene.
Tony Curtis House #1: They both talk about the crazy experience of going to the Tony Curtis party (not knowing him personally at the time) at Carrolwood. Sonny says they were invited to the party via one of his poker pals. They both mention either the square footage of the house (Cher) or the number of rooms (Sonny). Sonny says it was the biggest house they’d ever seen. (they both remark on how it felt to pull up to the house) and how the next day Curtis sold them his other house on St. Cloud in Bel Air (only 34 rooms). Cher told Sonny someday they would live in the Big House and Sonny responded, “Ok, bud.” Both say how much they liked Tony Curtis even though he put them through the hard sell when he showed them the St. Cloud House: You wanna be seen as a show biz winner? Imagine kids in the pool! Cher says the St. Cloud house itself was her dream house. They bought it for $250,000 and Sonny says Cher was in heaven. She had arrived. She doesn’t dispute this. Problem was their income was dwindling. They were down to some commercials and backyard parties and the house was expensive to maintain. Royalties were meagre, Sonny says. By 1968 there were no more hits and only a handful of concerts. Sonny started to think some of their happiest days were when they were poor and Cher later would feel this way, too. But that they couldn’t go back.
Sonny says they sold their Encino house furnished and they had no money for new furniture. Cher says all they had was a four-poster canopy bed and a dinning room table and four chairs. Ron Wilson decorated their kitchen for them as a housewarming gift.
The Drug Film: Everyone who was a teen at the time remember this film. The eye-rolling Sonny (and Cher, although she wasn’t in it) anti-drug film. Cher correctly calls the film called Marijuana and she hints at the ridiculousness of Sonny, a man in his 30s, wearing silk pajamas sitting in their opulent home talking to teenagers about drugs. Cher says they showed the movie for years to 12th graders.
Interestingly, both portray the other one as the more adamantly opposed to booze and drugs. Cher says Sonny was anti-drug because he was older, more conservative person. Sonny says Cher was anti-drug because her father a drug addict which had caused havoc in her life. Cher admits she didn’t imbibe because she never saw imbibing really help anyone and she didn’t enjoy it when she tried it; but that she didn’t judge others who did like her mother or uncle (she doesn’t mention Gregg Allman). Cher says the drug film killed their record sales and appearance offers and they went from selling in the millions to the tens of thousands. She admits Sonny was likely on prescription medication at this time, too, painkillers and valium.
Sonny doesn’t even mention anything about the film at all.
Chastity The Movie: Cher says that at a low point, Sonny started writing this movie and that he was influenced by The Graduate and new filmmaking. Sonny says he was bored with music and wanted to be in the movie business. His friend William Fredkin told him to “write a damn movie.” Sonny says the movie was a challenge to write. He calls it a loving interpretation of the enigmatic Cher, an unsolvable paradox. He still believed in her talent. Sonny said in his diary he felt Cher would be one of the “best actresses of our day. I hope I can prove it.”
He wanted it to be like the timeless epics. He wanted to make a statement too, be profound. It was about a quest for identity, a search for the meaning of life. He says it was overwritten but he claims Cher and Fredkin liked it. Cher agreed she liked the original script. But the movie had no studio, director or money and Sonny needed 150-200K. He said he understood that it was unheard of to finance your own movie. But he did it anyway. (It’s hard to know if he did know he shouldn’t put up his own money of if this is just another example of Sonny maintaining that he knows the score all time.) But Ahmet Ertegun “floated them some cash” and arranged for a few other investors. Sonny want to NYC to find investors but couldn’t.
The Salvador Dali Story: Sonny says while he was in NYC looking for investors when the Salvador Dali incident happened. They both tell this story. Cher says it was at the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. They were there with Francis Ford Coppola and Dali’s wife was having a party in their suite. They ran into Sonny & Cher and invited them to their suite party one night and then dinner the next night at a restaurant.
The both talk about the fish vibrator Cher picked up at the suite party. Cher describes it in detail as a plastic fish with a tail that would wiggle when you turned it on. Cher starts to play with it and Cher has Dali say, “It’s lovely when you place it on your clitoris.” Sonny has Dali say, “this is what nuns in Spain use to masterbate.” (You could probably write a thesis paper on just these two responses to that toy). They both agree that the vibrator incident made Sonny and Francis Ford Coppola start laughing uncontrollably.
Sonny says Dali’s crowd assumed Sonny & Cher were kinky and that there were all kinds of things going on at the penthouse suite. But Sonny remembers the dinner happening on the same night. After hanging around the suite without any food arriving, they all decided to go out to dinner. Sonny remembers Helmut Newton being there. Cher remembers Ultra Violet being there and tapping on Cher’s leg with her cane incessantly. In Cher’s story they went to the restaurant and all sat together for some uncomfortable time before the Dali group said they had to be somewhere else and moved to the next table, from then on ignoring them. Sonny says the Dali party immediate sat down at another table and ignored them.
Cher says they worked with a 15 person crew on Chastity and the director was a real person and not Sonny, a director of commercials who didn’t really know what he was doing, Cher calls him a clichéd hack. Sonny doesn’t mention the director at all except to say he was fired during the editing process for taking too long. It was really low budget, Cher providing her own clothes. Cher knew that Sonny had been inspired by her when he wrote it and says, “I could’ve been offended but I wasn’t” The lesbian episode was based on Sonny thinking Cher had been in a relationship with her earlier roommate Melissa. Cher says she hit it off with her British co-star Stephen Whitaker, mostly because he seemed interested in what she had to say and they bonded over a love of acting. It wasn’t sexual at all Cher says. But Sonny was jealous of them and moved scenes around to keep them apart. He cut all the intimacy out of the script, Cher says.
During the making of the movie, Sonny & Cher did the Soul Together, Martin Luther King tribute concert benefit at Madison Square Garden where Cher met Jim Hendrix. Cher says they were at the bottom of the bill. Sonny doesn’t mention the show at all.
It’s here where Cher brings up the dictation secretary Sonny was caught sleeping with “who happened to be young and blonde,” Cher remembers details about this episode, the wrought iron gate she saw them through when she woke up late one night to get a glass of water. Cher insists she had no earlier suspicions. She recounts coming to bed after she caught them, what she said to him and then packing off to her mother’s house the next morning and her mother telling her she’d “been hearing things” about Sonny’s philandering. Cher said she was “overloaded with sadness” and that she did not just “come around” eventually, as Sonny claims, but that Sonny came to Georgia’s house the next day to talk Cher into coming back, eventually blaming her for their not having enough sex.
Around this time Cher says, her mother stopped talking to her and sent her a list of grievances but Cher doesn’t say what those grievances were. You wonder if one of the might have been Cher’s obsession with Sonny, even after he was caught cheating on her. While in Scottsdale filming Chastity, Sonny says they met with a psychic who predicted a good thing would come from the movie and Sonny interprets this to be their new baby. Cher doesn’t mention this.
Sonny said the movie shoot was beleaguered with problems, bad weather, illness, equipment breaking, fights, script problems. Sonny said he watered down the sex scenes, yes, but that it was still “plenty hot.” (It wasn’t). He admits he was worried about Cher and Whitaker because of their looks and pats on the back, “not that I had been faithful to Cher” and that Cher’s double told him an affair was in progress and that “everyone on the set knows.” Cher claims she was friends with her double, a woman named Joanna (see photo at right). Sonny says he had a talk with Cher and the flirting stopped.
Sonny and their new manager, Denis Pregnolato, finished editing the movie and postproduction was expensive, Sonny says, so he needed more money. They went on tour for cash. And while Sonny was editing the movie, Cher was on bed rest. She was pregnant again. No studios were interested. While Denis and Sonny were in NYC to find investors Sonny’s hotel room was burgled. Then the William Morris agents that had once been supportive agents for them walked out of a meeting with Sonny and Denis. Eventually American International Pictures distributed the film.
Sonny’s final assessment: the movie stank. Cher says in the end the film’s R rating meant that the kids it was aimed for couldn’t even see it and it was panned by the critics. They were both too sick to attend the premiere. Sonny agrees with this. He says the movie had one week of good box office before dying. He said the distributor changed the poster to add a buxom body to Cher but it didn’t help.
Cher says the lost their agent but Joe DeCarlo stuck by us. Sonny says he had given up on Joe De Carlo by then (but he doesn’t say why).
Sonny and Politics: Cher says Sonny offered his services to the Robert F. Kennedy campaign. In fact they would have been with RFK the night he was shot but for the shooting schedule for Chastity. Cher also said Sonny had an idea for a bill that George McGovern was interested in. But students accused Sonny of being rich establishment. Sonny says Cher was apathetic about politics. He says he eventually saw the hypocrisy of politics, the phoniness. (Sonny is a mayor as he writes this, not yet a congressman.) He says he sees politics as a lesser state of show business. (I’ve heard that depiction in my own house too from someone who has written for both show business and Washington, D.C., but it’s an ironic way to think in terms of real impact.)
Their Relationship and Marriage: Cher recounts a bad event after going to see The Dirty Dozen movie where Sonny turned on her and started a fight in the car and then disappeared for the night which Cher said became a pattern, a kind of cover for Sonny to put Cher off-balance and then disappear for the night. Sonny doesn’t mention this but does admit he was never faithful. She tells the tennis lesson story where Sonny got jealous and burned all her tennis clothes and that Denis Pregnolato (who was living with them at the time) told Sonny she had been talking to men at the instructor’s party. Sonny doesn’t tell any of these stories.
Sonny instead tells of the pressure he felt from Cher, not that she was ever saying anything. He felt their career supported their marriage and was inseparably linked. He felt pressure to maintain their music career but songwriting had become a task. Sonny says he plotted and planned and that Cher always had faith in him and that he needed her confidence. They both agreed he was tenacious as a superpower. As Sonny stirred the show biz waters, Cher went to bed at 10, Sonny says. Cher says she was always so exhausted by their unrelenting schedule (and now she’s a night owl). Sonny said she shopped and did needlepoint. Cher says she shopped and did needlepoint because that’s all she was allowed to do.
Sonny insists their relationship depended upon success. He says it was unspoken and unstated and that Cher never complained but it was “quite obvious” when she “disappeared inside” The years 1972-4 would prove him wrong about this when Cher would leave him at their most successful peak It wasn’t the lack of success that ended it. Sonny admits their relationship was lopsided, not balanced and not healthy.
Cher says they’d been faking a marriage from the beginning but Sonny decided they needed to be married. Cher recounts this as happening before Chaz was born and they had a quick ceremony in the library. She says it was very unromantic but that she didn’t care. Sonny claims that when he found out Cher was pregnant during the making of Chastity he suggested “we should go legit.” (Why not during all the other pregnancies?). Sonny says they didn’t get married until Chastity was a toddler and that it happened in the den and he says it was not nearly as romantic as when they used to sing together on stage.
So they both agree it was not romantic but they disagree about where and when it happened.
By the end of the the decade, Sonny said his only confidant was Denis Pregnolato and Cher says her only confidant was Joe De Carlo.
Chastity The Person: Both say the other one figured the baby would be a boy, but that they personally didn’t care.
Cher: “Sonny was convinced it was a boy and that’s all he wanted. I didn’t care.” Cher claims Sonny said, “remember Cher, I want a boy.” Sonny: “Cher was convinced she was having a boy. I didn’t care.” (This is all complicated by the Chaz Bono story.)
During the pregnancy, Sonny became nicer Cher says. He took her to Cedars of Sinai in “our ridiculous Rolls Royce limo.” Cher talks of all the pictures Sonny took and how she hated it at the time but is now glad he did it, just like he said she would be. Cher says Chaz’s middle name is after Sonny, her Dad. Sonny says Chastity Sun the Sun for the light she brought into our lives. Well, at least they agree about the Chastity part.
C
her says she felt anxiety about being a mother and that her own mother didn’t come to see her in the hospital and that broke her heart. Cher says they weren’t speaking and she has forgotten why. She hemorrhaged the night she came home from the hospital and sonny was MIA. sonny doesn’t mention this. Cher says her mother came to visit three months later and then just criticized her mothering.
Sonny claims Cher would cry if Chastity didn’t smile enough, that maybe the baby didn’t love her (post partum anyone?). Cher only mentions struggling with an early nurse who didn’t think she knew how to do anything and being determined to do mothering the best she could.
Sonny says the baby was everything to them. Cher says it was like Christmas every day. Sonny talks again about feeling guilty about being a poor dad to Christy.
By this time they were borrowing money from their chauffeur that they needed for their “ridiculous” Rolls Royce limo.
Muscle Shoals: Three weeks later Cher was working again for Vogue. When she returned from the shoot, Sonny told her they were flat broke and owed 270K to the government for unpaid taxes. Sonny says it was 200k. Cher said neither Sonny or her knew anything about taxes. Neither of them had ever been in a job long enough to pay taxes (that’s amazing!) and Sonny never trusted their managers with the money stuff. They couldn’t finish paying for the St. Cloud house and the market was bad for selling it. Cher admits she had a panic attack and withdrew but that Sonny promised her he could turn it around in two years. “Give me two years and we’ll be bigger than ever.” And she believed he could (and he did). Cher says it was his faith this time that pulled her through: “He had a great belief in us.” Sonny doesn’t tell the give-me-two years story in his book but I have a vague memory that he did tell it somewhere in an interview.
Sonny said Ahmet Ertegun still believed in them but that Jerry Wexler only wanted Cher without Sonny for the next record. He said he also lost his role as producer.
For Cher this was the beginning of the next phase. She mentions the This is Tom Jones appearance in London (Sonny does too) and the Jackson Highway album. Sonny was not producing but he was interfering a lot, she said, and claimed he was only there for support and to take photos. But due to all the arguments, Jerry Wexler ended up in the hospital from stress and Cher had to retreat to the cemetery across the street to lay down and talk to all the dead people. She read Sonny’s diary where he said it was the best album she’s ever done. Sonny tells this part too, about this being her best album yet. He calls it a great album.
But they were dropped from Atlantic anyway. That was the end of Ertegun’s great belief I guess. “The album stiffed,” Sonny says.
Sonny says it was Joe De Carlo who suggested nightclubs which they resisted at first because they saw themselves as rock and rollers. But Sonny was depressed and they needed money. They started at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969 opening for Pat Boone. Cher hated it. They both agree on this. The audience was too close, Sonny says. Cher was back to looking straight at Sonny when they performed. His diary says “her magic grows” but he admits he has to keep her in line now. “I never let her get too far out of line” and he acknowledges how bad that sounds. He was a chauvinist. No argument there. He says Cher hated the travel and not being a star. (This is an interesting claim because she did long, long concert tours later on.) Sonny says they became professional vagabonds on the Fairmont Hotel circuit. They went all over the U.S. and Canada with Chastity and a nanny in tow and it was a great joy. Cher agrees with this. She says they all became closer during this time even though times were hard. And a stage repartee developed. Sonny doesn’t say how it came to be, like Cher does, but he gives an example.
And here we come to the end of 1969.
We have to acknowledge, in Sonny’s defense, he may not have been allowed to the ink and the space to tell as many stories as Cher was allowed. Sonny didn’t receive an icon or a legend’s memoir contract and he may have had to cut out a lot to fit everything into a smaller book. Editors could have been involved. Or maybe he self-edited. But even so, he surely seemed to misremember more than Cher did.
Things I found working on this:
“Home of the Brave” by Bonnie and The Treasures (Sonny says it has Sonny and Cher on backup)
Graham Reed talks about “Pammie’s On a Bummer”
One of the Hollywood Bowl radio promo spots. 93 cents!?
Chastity Movie Radio Interview
The Drug Film (in case you missed it in high school)
So my friend Sherry texted me a Cher question a week or so ago. Sherry is a writer and editor for tech and finance research firms in the New York City area. She is also one of the writers I met at Sarah Lawrence back in the 1990s and she published a great book of poetry, The Palace of Ashes and is also an enthusiast of the great American Southwest landscapes and Indian Nation jewelry and I’ve gotten to know her better during her yearly trips out to that area.
There’s yet another rollup called “John Wilson’s Animation Wonderland VHS.” These are all animated poems and short stories, including Ernest L. Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat” narrated by Paul Frees (1976). Many of them are children’s stories and folk tales and are without any credits (although some of the actors sound very familiar), like Alvin Tresselt’s “The Smallest Elephant in the World,” Peter Hughes’ “The Emperor’s Oblong Pancake” (narrated by Edward Everett Horton, whom I love in the classic movie Holiday), Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (narrated by Vincent Price), the American folk tale “Johnny Appleseed,” the Japanese folk tale “The Stone Cutter” (narrated by Swedish comedian Harry Stewart), “The Chocolate Princess” (author unknown, narrated by Bill Cosby, and I hate to say it but this seems like a very good story and its easy to pretend Bill Cosby isn’t reading it), the Norwegian folk tale “The Salty Sea” (“Why the Sea is Salty”), Greek mythology’s “King Midas,” Mary O’Neill’s “Hailstones and Halibut Bones,” the original story of “The Early Birds” (narrated by Jonathan Winters and voice actress Joan Gerber), Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinder Box,” the American legend “The Fish and the Burning Stones,” John Townsend Trowbridge’s “Darius Green and His Flying Machine,” a historical retelling of “The Battle of Bunker Hill,” William Shakespeare’s “Jacque’s Speech” from the play As You Like It and “Two Songs” from “Love’s Labor Lost,” and Cyrano de Bergerac’s “A Voyage to the Moon.”
