As she hurtles towards her 80th year, Cher has an awful lot to say. At the end of the 411 breathless but soberly delivered pages of the first instalment of her eagerly awaited memoir, we’re marooned in 1980, not even halfway through her life.
At that point, she’s living in a bonkers Egyptian-style house in Los Angeles and picking over the rubble of her relationship with Kiss singer Gene Simmons, whom she’d initially confused with English actress Jean Simmons. She has just been told by Francis Ford Coppola to pursue acting ahead of her stuttering but still-lucrative singing career. Part Two promises much, but my, how Part One delivers.
Those expecting a campy celebration of a sequin-festooned showbusiness life may well be disappointed. Part One gives us the moment in 1946 when occasional bar singer Jackie Jean (later Georgia) Sarkasian, pregnant with Cherilyn, is lying on a backstreet Long Beach abortionist’s table.
Eschewing frippery, Cher unfurls a life full of Dickensian poverty, mansions with servants, heartbreak, good luck, bad luck, financial chicanery and unlikely events – from an appropriately surreal dinner with Salvador Dali (“it was immediately clear that an orgy had recently taken place”) to Jackie Jean turning down Howard Hughes – plus an array of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them characters, such as John Hames, wooden-legged pie-maker extraordinaire.
Since Cher’s father, Johnnie Sarkisian, was a heroin addict and felon who lost his father’s trucking business in a poker game, her peripatetic upbringing from Manhattan to California was handled by her complicated mother (whose own father tried to gas her, incidentally) and a succession of stepfathers (Cher isn’t sure how many) who were for the large part kind, albeit mostly drunks. Little wonder, then, that Cher would be old before her time, but barely educated and suffering from what seems very much like an undiagnosed dyslexia and dyscalculia double whammy.
Not one to shy from awkward detail, she shares her first period (on a train; beyond embarrassing) and the loss of her virginity (“a massively overrated experience”). But as is the way with those destined for fame, the planets begin to align in unlikely circumstance: when she’s cut up by a car on Sunset Boulevard, the careless driver just happens to be Warren Beatty. Who, of course, seduces her.
When she meets the Californian-Sicilian Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, she’s gullible enough to believe his claims to be descended from Napoleon Bonaparte and tumbles into the most significant relationship of both The Memoir: Part One and her life.
Britain never quite grasped how huge Sonny & Cher were beyond the global hit “I Got You Babe”. In the US, when their singing career rapidly plummeted from audiences of 30,000 to four people attending an Ontario show, they resurrected themselves into wildly successful prime-time television royalty.
Sonny played the bumbling buffoon, Cher the ice maiden with the one-liners, but in real life their roles were reversed. He was a workaholic, promiscuous control-freak whose doomed quest to become a filmmaker almost bankrupted them. Worse, his sneakily named Cher Enterprises company gave him their income, while the incurious Cher was merely a salaried employee. Yet long after they separated, they enjoyed a Parisian weekend together – a trip that even she admits was “not easily understandable: it doesn’t make sense”.
With Sonny relegated to professional partner only, Cher embarked upon a relationship with David Geffen, who proposed to her, and later came out as gay. She left him 18 months later for musician Gregg Allman, her second (and final) husband, who capitalised on her naivety to conceal his heroin addiction: “I had noticed that he wore long-sleeved shirts all the time, even in bed.”
It’s an extraordinary and extraordinarily cathartic memoir. Even when she’s winning during a journey that defies rational belief, Cher still thinks and acts like the underdog she so often was as a child: only the most flint-hearted could fail to root for her.
Like its author, The Memoir: Part One lives in the moment, so the next forty-something years are barely alluded to. This is more than enough for now.
