My favorite part of Cher’s recently published memoir, bar none, is the biographical note: “Cher is a global icon.” Virtually any other celebrity would be required to rehearse a slew of accolades. But not Cher. In her case, it’s patently unnecessary. You already know her. You’ve always known her.
I’ve always known her, too. In the early 1970s, I was a faithful viewer of the “Sonny & Cher” variety show. To my seven-year-old mind, they had already achieved the most significant fame that a kid from the Houston suburbs could reasonably measure: they had been animated guest stars on “Scooby-Doo.” I’ll say it again. “Scooby-Doo.”
When Sonny and Cher settled in for an extended residency at Houston’s Livestock Show and Rodeo, I begged my parents to take me to see the duo’s Astrodome performance. “We’re not rodeo people,” my mother coldly informed me. “But I’m a ‘Scooby-Doo’ kid,” I replied. As it turned out, mom was right. The hog-tying did absolutely nothing for me. But Sonny and Cher exceeded my dreams. When they launched into “I Got You Babe,” the Dome’s massive crowd responded with a veritable roar. It was my very first concert.
In the first volume of “Cher: The Memoir,” the author traces the contours of her life from her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s through the onset of a film career in the 1980s that would launch her celebrity into superstardom. Her formative years, by any degree, were dizzying: born in 1946 as Cheryl Sarkisian to a Cherokee mother and Armenian father in rural Missouri, she became an entertainer, out of sheer necessity, at an early age. Her parents, for lack of a better word, were hustlers: her father was a grifting heroin addict while her mother lived on the fringes of movieland, working as a cigarette girl at the Copacabana and landing bit parts on shows like “I Love Lucy” yet never quite catching that elusive big break.
Cher grew up with a rootless backdrop that included her mother’s ever-shifting array of husbands, all the while traveling, nomad-like, from one place to another with stints in Pennsylvania, Texas, California and New York. As a fourth-grader, Cher caught the acting bug after performing in “Oklahoma!” Taking her cues from the likes of Elvis Presley and Eartha Kitt, she began training her famous contralto.
In 1962, at age 16, Cher met Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono in an LA coffee shop. She was mesmerized by the smooth-talking Sonny, who raffishly claimed to be a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. Eleven years her senior, Sonny was working for famed record producer Phil Spector at the time. By 1964, Sonny and Cher were married. Under Sonny’s tutelage, she sang backup on several Spector recordings, including the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.”
Originally dubbing themselves as Caesar and Cleo, they began releasing singles, eventually landing a middling hit with “Baby Don’t Go” as Sonny and Cher. After recording their first album “Look at Us,” the duo achieved stardom with “I Got You Babe” in 1965. Written by Sonny as a retort to Bob Dylan’s bitter “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “I Got You Babe” found the couple sparring with the Beatles at the top of the charts.
Behind the scenes, life was anything but easy. By the early 1970s, the couple transitioned to television after the hits began drying up. A control-freak of the highest order, Bono proved notoriously difficult to live with, a situation that was no doubt exacerbated with the birth of their child, who now goes by Chaz, in 1969 and Cher’s success as a Sonny-less solo artist with the chart-topping hits “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” and “Half-Breed.” Even still, Sonny kept his wife in a kind of constant, isolated motion. In a telling moment of high camp, he dubbed their touring entourage as the “Benevolent Army of El Primo,” with Cher playing the role of Prima Donna to Sonny’s all-encompassing, self-created moniker His Supremeness.
Not surprisingly, by the time that the couple alighted at the Astrodome in 1974, they were headed for divorce proceedings. By the late 1970s, as Americans turned away from its once ubiquitous variety shows, Cher found herself in a different kind of quandary. She was largely famous for being famous, yet eager to fully remake herself beyond Sonny’s long shadow. “It’s a thousand times harder to come back than to become,” she points out. “Becoming famous is hard, but making a comeback is almost impossible.”
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As volume one comes to a close, Cher lingers on the edges of one of popular culture’s most intriguing comebacks, with the singer rebranding herself as a bona fide movie star. But make no mistake about it, Cher’s is a uniquely American story. The product of a diversity of experiences and surviving on pure grit, Cher is us.
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