Cher is a genuine superstar who has had an extraordinary career across music, film and television. Now her memoir recounts how she got there.

Cher prefaces Part 1 of her long-awaited memoir by recalling her reaction to seeing Elvis Presley performing at 1956 concert when she is just nine years old. Caught up in the shrieking crowd, a fire is sparked:

It was the most exciting experience I’d ever had because I knew that I wanted to be on that stage, in the spotlight one day too.

The Memoir Part 1 spans the artist’s emergence from a difficult childhood and into the spotlight, one she initially shares in the 1960s as part of the musical duo Sonny and Cher. Her story ends in the late 1970s on the precipice of an acting career that will span the 1980s, together with the resurgence of a solo singing career that still endures. The Memoir Part 2 will be released later in 2025.

Cher’s sass and quick-witted banter cemented the popularity of the television variety shows she and her late ex-husband Sonny Bono starred in during the 1970s. It has been reported that Cher was assisted by three ghostwriters in producing her memoirs. While the ghostwriter’s skill is to convey the subject’s voice while remaining invisible, it’s possible something may have gone missing in the process. While Cher’s narrative voice is warm and generous, it lacks the unfiltered, profanity-laced hilarity that has endeared her to so many on social media in recent years.

Aside from Cher, the most colourful character to emerge from these pages is Georgia Holt, Cher’s mother, who died in 2022 aged 96. Georgia endured a childhood of poverty, abuse and neglect until her alcoholic father, recognising her singing potential, began dragging her to every smoke-filled bar in town to sing for his liquor. Later, the pair wash up on the margins of Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, but things go from bad to worse. Writing about her family, Cher says:

Ours was a sad, strange story of Southern folk coming from nothing and carving out a life after the Great Depression. It wasn’t pretty and it was never easy. Every day was a fight for survival for most of my family going back generations. Resilience is in my DNA.

With her movie star looks and body of a goddess, young Georgia is an ‘accident waiting to happen’. That ‘accident’ turns out to be meeting Cher’s father, John Sarkisian, who later becomes a heroin addict with a ‘penchant for larceny and a shaky relationship to employment’.  Cher’s infancy is particularly rough and includes a miserable stint in a Catholic orphanage. Georgia criss-crosses the country with Cher in tow, going from waitressing jobs to beauty pageants, all the while finding, and then discarding, husbands. (She was married and divorced seven times to six husbands, twice to Cher’s father.) Eventually, Georgia returns to Hollywood, hustling walk on-roles in movies, but staunchly rejecting the casting couch to the everlasting admiration of her daughter. Georgia clinches what might have been her breakout role in the 1950 MGM movie The Asphalt Jungle, only to have it snatched away when another up-and-comer, Marilyn Monroe, books the job instead.

As a teen, Cher struggles at school with undiagnosed dyslexia, not to mention the burden of her unconventional looks and shabby second-hand clothes. But despite missing out on a role in her high school musical because her contralto voice is too low, she still harbours the vague idea that singing might take her places.

When Georgia trades up to a richer husband, Cher convinces her new stepdad to let her quit school and to pay for acting classes.  As a free-spirited, precocious teen, she roams the Hollywood streets of the early 1960s and finally, at 16, meets Sonny Bono, ‘a Sicilian with an amazing smile’, who is eleven years her senior. Bono, a relentlessly driven songwriter and record promoter, develops a strong platonic friendship with the oddball teen and later they become lovers and musical partners. In her estimation, Sonny’s no musical genius, but he’s a quick study with good instincts and he talks his way into Gold Star Studios, where producer Phil Spector is defining early 1960s pop with his uniquely engineered wall of sound recordings.  Cher’s account of the cramped confines of Gold Star and the legendary session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew are engrossing.

The studio was small and dingy as hell, but I couldn’t take my eyes of the musicians jam-packed into a tight rectangle. There were more people in that space than you could imagine, like sardines all one next to the other. I just thought, how is this physically possible?

Cher’s portrait of the infamous Spector (later, a convicted murderer who died in jail in 2021) isn’t affectionate (he pulls a gun on her at one point). She describes him standing on a raised platform in the studio in his sunglasses ‘presiding over the entire operation like a film director’. Meanwhile Sonny, convinced of Cher’s talent, is undaunted in promoting her to Spector. When Darlene Love of the Ronettes doesn’t show up for a session, Sonny and Cher are roped in to assist on back-up vocals. When Cher raises concerns about the quality of her voice, Spector cuts her off, ‘I don’t care, I just need noise. Get out there and sing.’

Later, Cher will sing back up on one of the biggest hits of the 1960s, the Spector-produced track by The Righteous Brothers, ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’. She recalls the electric atmosphere in the studio when the final product was played back and admits, ‘I never had that experience again, even on my own songs.’

Of course, Cher’s contribution to pop culture goes beyond music. Her unusual beauty helps her stand out and she’s drawn to fashion as a means of self-expression. When lost luggage results in Sonny and Cher performing in their ‘edgier’ street clothes, the kids in the audience go wild for their look, assuming they’re British. Bono takes the advice of 19-year-old Mick Jagger, touring the US for the first time with the Rolling Stones, and they head to London. On arrival, they’re immediately kicked out of the Hilton because of their appearance. A publicity storm ensues and their signature track ‘I Got You Babe’ becomes a massive hit. But with the rise of the 1960s counterculture, Sonny and Cher soon lose their appeal.  After all, as Cher puts it:

Sonny and I were the straight, square couple who sang middle-of-the-road songs, didn’t engage in drug culture, and now in the era of free love we became uncool for being married.

Sonny makes things even worse by recording a public service announcement condemning the use of marijuana and their record sales plummet. Cher never seems all that bothered when they fall out of favour with the in-crowd, perhaps because she’s always been more of an all-round entertainer than simply a ‘singer’. She and Sonny quickly reinvent themselves for the mainstream and their self-deprecating on-air banter becomes a staple of 1970s prime-time TV.

At the beginning of her TV career, Cher meets the talented costume designer Bob Mackie, aka the Rajah of Rhinestones, and soon becomes his muse. Their lasting collaboration has shaped Cher’s glittery, camptastic showgirl image and spans decades.  Cher’s affectionate and detailed descriptions of many of her fabulous outfits is a highlight of this book. She and Mackie loved to push the envelope and the so-called ‘bounds of decency’ according to the censors who enforced the television broadcast codes. (For anyone interested in fashion, there’s a supercut of her outrageous outfit ‘reveals’ on You Tube, which is an absolute delight.)

Cher’s years with Sonny Bono were marred by his controlling behaviour, extramarital affairs and a business arrangement which, unknown to her at the time, left her on the same legal footing as an employee in their ‘partnership’. Toward the end of their marriage, Cher turns to a much older entertainer, Lucille Ball, for advice:

I told her, ‘Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you’re the only one I know that’s ever been in this same situation. What should I do?’ Lucy and her husband had also become famous working together as stars on TV. And he was a womanizer too. Then Lucy had left him. She told me, ‘Fuck him, you’re the one with the talent.’

In a poignant case of history repeating, Tina Turner comes to Cher for the same advice a few years later.  Ultimately, Cher treats Bono’s memory kindly, crediting him with pushing her into the spotlight she’d always craved. In fact, she’s so generous and fair to everyone in this book (except, perhaps, to Phil Spector) that it feels, at times, somewhat bloodless. Hollywood Babylon this isn’t. Nevertheless, The Memoir Part 1 will be enjoyed not only by fans, but also by those with an interest in Hollywood and the music business of the 1960s and 70s.

Cher The Memoir Part 1 HarperCollins 2024 HB 432pp $49.99

Naomi Manuell is a Melbourne writer. She recently won the Melbourne Athenaeum Library Award for best ‘body in the library’ story at the 2024 Sisters in Crime Scarlett Stiletto Awards.

You can buy The Memoir Part 1 from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: Bob Mackie, Cher, fashion, Georgia Holt, Lucille Ball, memoir, music, Phil Spector, Sonny and Cher, television, Tina Turner


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