Before Twitter morphed into the strange ghost town of X, with lurking users wondering whether to post or stomping off in high dudgeon for Bluesky and Threads, Cher was one of its finest sheriffs. Publications including The New York Times analyzed her grammar-defying style and compiled her stinging critiques of the then and future president Donald J. Trump.
In Volume 1 of her confident, confiding new autobiography, which covers the period from her birth on May 20, 1946 (“under the sign of Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, so it’s like there are three of us in here”), to the dawn of her serious movie career in the early ’80s, Cher explains that her distinctive syntax on the platform evolved from undiagnosed dyslexia. “Punctuation marks are like symbols to me that you throw in the air and they land where they land,” she writes.
Happily “Cher: The Memoir” is not the round of verbal 52 pickup this portends, but a detailed and characteristically profane recollection of its author’s eventful life: singing, dancing and acting her way out of a childhood so “Dickensian” there were rubber bands around the saddle-shoe soles and ants in the Rice Krispies.
Cher’s embodiment of that trendy wellness buzzword “resilience” started from the moment her mother, Jackie Jean Crouch (later Georgia Holt), bailed on an abortion appointment. “It was her body, her life and her choice to make,” Cher writes. “Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.” Her famous contralto has been modulated, but not Autotuned past recognition.
Cherilyn, as she was called, though her birth certificate read Cheryl, is America’s melting pot personified, and her long place on the front (and sometimes back) burner of pop culture evokes both the country’s loftiest promises and its worst failures. A great-grandmother on her mother’s side had Cherokee heritage, raising her children in a log cabin in the Missouri backwoods, in poverty that dripped down generations. Cher’s biological father, who was Armenian, stole, gambled and would become a heroin addict.
During the Depression, Jackie was forced from the age of 5 to sing on bar counters for nickels. Rather than confront his many problems, her own father once tried to gas her and her brother in their beds. Understandably, Jackie was on the move for most of the rest of her 96 years: working as a cigarette girl at the Copacabana nightclub; losing a role in “The Asphalt Jungle” to Marilyn Monroe right before she found out she was pregnant with Cher’s half sister, Georganne; and getting hit on by Desi Arnaz after appearing as a Paris model in a potato-sack gown on “I Love Lucy.”
“Was it seven or eight husbands in the end?” Cher wonders.
As a minor subjected to whiplash-inducing itineracy (Pennsylvania, Texas, California, New York), she watched these husbands come and go while bouncing from school to school. She was variously stashed with neighbors, babysitters, in-laws and mean nuns — some of whom banned patent leather, lest it reflect panties.
In fourth grade, having witnessed her mother in drama class, she staged a performance of “Oklahoma!” Elvis and Eartha Kitt inspired her, but Cher also identified strongly with Dumbo, the Disney elephant. I need to be up there, she decided, meaning the big screen, though big ears to flap away into the sky might have appealed as well.
Going “no-contact” with difficult relatives has become troublesomely au courant. Cher’s approach is more full body contact, followed by eye roll. “I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn’t make it up” is a typical aside. (You understand why “Snap out of it!” from “Moonstruck” is one of her most-memed lines.)
Men in this memoir must be greeted with a skeptically arched eyebrow. To borrow Cher’s Twitter patois for a sec, IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME, OK?! She was only 15 when Warren Beatty lent her Natalie Wood’s bathing suit and took her for cigarettes and a swim. She was 16 when she met the 11-years-older, mid-divorce Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono, who lied to her about being a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, and she moved into his apartment in exchange for cooking and cleaning — not sex, at first.
A fan of Machiavelli, he became her first husband and de facto manager. Her second, the Southern rock singer Gregg Allman, like her father, struggled with heroin.
Sonny and Cher found themselves astraddle changing morality codes: Being married afforded them more freedom for innuendo in their act. A song he scrawled on shirt cardboard, “I Got You Babe,” took them to (temporary) superstardom, knocking even the Beatles’ “Help!” off the top of the U.K. pop charts. (Maybe in Volume 2 Cher will address how it became a punchline in “Groundhog Day.”)
The couple had sizzling chemistry in performance, but backstage he was an old-fashioned, controlling Norman Maine type, in cahoots with her therapist and secretly popping Valiums even though he would make public service announcements against marijuana that got him pegged as square. Cher was mostly abstemious.
He worked her like a pack mule and controlled her outside activities to an absurd extent, calling their entourage the “Benevolent Army of El Primo”; she was Prima Donna, he was dubbed His Supremeness, with embroidered jackets to match. (The ’70s may have been “the decade taste forgot,” but Cher remembers every detail of her clothes.) Their films “Good Times” and “Chastity,” for which their child was named — discussion of his gender transition is deferred — flopped.
Occasionally Cher will turn from the who, where and when of what happened and linger for a moment on the why. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she writes. “Becoming famous is hard, but making a comeback is almost impossible.”
It remains to be seen how she’ll cope with the comeback of her most public antagonist in 4,000-character spurts, if at all, but these 400 pages show the mettle behind the Mackie. Here’s to a sequel with sequins, expected in 2025.
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