14 Stunning Stories From Cher’s (First) Memoir

Cher has lived many lives — singer, actress, TV host, fashion icon, not to mention wife and mother. So when it came time to write her memoir, a single volume just wasn’t going to cut it. Part one of Cher: The Memoir, out today, follows the performer from her itinerant childhood through her breakout in Sonny & Cher and eventual divorce from Sonny Bono, stopping right as she’s about to make the leap into acting around 1980. (The rest will follow in part two next year.) But even though this is only half her life, Cher’s still got stories: memories of her wild childhood, struggles in relationships and Hollywood, and many celebrity run-ins. Here are 14 of the best.

Her mother named her after Lana Turner’s daughter.

Before Cher became the mononym she is today, her mother, Georgia Holt, was struggling to pick a baby name in the hospital. When a nurse said she needed to name her something, Georgia replied, “Well, Lana Turner’s my favorite actress, and her little girl’s called Cheryl. My mother’s name is Lynda, so how about Cherilyn?” Except that last part didn’t stick. Cher writes that when she later formally changed her name, she found out that the name on her birth certificate was, to her own mom’s surprise, not Cherilyn but Cheryl. “I was only a teenager, and I was in a lot of pain,” Cher’s mother told her. “Give me a break.”

Her mom turned down Desi Arnaz and Howard Hughes.

Showbiz ran in Cher’s blood, as her mother was a struggling actress with bit parts in a number of TV series. Georgia got regular work on I Love Lucy because Lucille Ball liked her. But on set, she also got Desi’s attention. “My mom admired and respected Lucy, so it made it even more difficult when she had to dodge advances from Desi Arnaz, Lucy’s husband,” Cher writes. And he was far from the only one. On The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Ozzie Nelson “once tried to show an actor — several times over — how to kiss Mom ‘properly’ in a scene.” Remember, he was married to Harriet in real life too! Not long after, Holt turned down a come-on from the producer Howard Hughes. “Afterward she’d complain bitterly, ‘I could have had my own show if only I’d lain on his couch,’” Cher writes.

She stowed away on a train as a kid.

One day after school, Cher decided she wanted to run away. She thew away her lunchbox and, with her friend Anita, ran into a field, where they found an old horse and rode it to the other end of its pasture. There, they spotted a train. “Before I’d given it any thought and allowing Anita no time to argue, I yelled, ‘Come on!’ and gave Anita a boost up with my cupped hands,” Cher writes. Soon, the train started. The friends eventually got off at the next stop, in Santa Ana, and got money from a worker to call their parents. “I couldn’t tell whether she was going to go ballistic or quiet, but after a short pause, she said only, ‘I’ll come get you,’” Cher writes of her mom. “Miraculously, she was still calm enough by the time she’d driven the forty or so miles to reach us until taking one look at me, she yelled, ‘And what did you do with your lunchbox?’”

She got grounded for going out with Warren Beatty.

When you’re driving in Hollywood, the target of your road rage just might be a heartthrob actor. Once, a 15-year-old Cher got cut off on Sunset Boulevard, and when she pulled over to yell at the driver, she realized it was Warren Beatty, fresh off starring in Splendor in the Grass. “My mother was nuts about Warren and so was my friend Penny, so I thought I’d better not let the moment pass for their sake,” she writes. So she asked Beatty for a cigarette, and he invited her back to his place. They ate cheese and crackers, kissed, and went swimming (she borrowed Natalie Wood’s swimsuit). Once she finally got home at 4 a.m., her mother grounded her, unaware of whom she’d been out with. The next day, Beatty called, and Cher said she couldn’t see him because she was grounded — until he asked to speak to her mother. “I wish I had a photograph of the look on her face when she realized who she was speaking to,” Cher writes. “She literally melted in front of my eyes. Ten minutes later, she was inviting him over. When she hung up, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were with Warren Beatty?’”

Diana Vreeland loved her — but Richard Avedon said she’d never be on the cover of Vogue.

In 1965, Sonny and Cher performed at the Waldorf Astoria Towers for “a swanky New York society soirée” honoring Jackie Kennedy. (The former First Lady had personally requested them, which Cher calls “the strangest invitation of our careers.”) After singing, Cher went to “a mammoth bedroom” where the women were fixing their makeup before dessert. “A strange-looking woman with dyed black hair and an enormous string of pearls marched up to me, lifted my chin in her bony hand, and said, in a masculine voice that seemed accustomed to giving orders, ‘My dear, you have a pointed head. You are beautiful,’” Cher writes. She was speechless. “Why aren’t you a model?” the woman continued. “Richard must see you!” The next day, Cher was invited to a Vogue photo shoot, where she learned the “wild old broad” she met was editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland and “Richard” was photographer Richard Avedon. Cher soon became a fixture of Vreeland’s Vogue, but once, Avedon told her that she couldn’t be on the cover because “you can’t have dark hair and dark eyes.” But a few years later, Avedon shot Cher’s first Vogue cover, for the April 1, 1972, issue, and he “was one of the first to congratulate me.”

She wasn’t too impressed by Sonny’s talent.

If you couldn’t tell from all the ribbing during their routines, Cher didn’t think that highly of Sonny’s musical abilities. Recalling a day that Phil Spector asked her and Sonny to sing backup for Darlene Love, she writes, “We all knew that if he asked for Sonny, he was desperate.” Later, Cher adds, “Sonny wasn’t a genius songwriter, but he was clever enough to be influenced by what he heard so that he could keep up with the trends.” And wait, there’s more: “Sonny wasn’t the best piano player in the world,” she writes, “so it was funny to see his technique during one of his marathon songwriting sessions. He would chord with his right hand and just use the index finger of his left.”

Sonny once burned her tennis clothes.

Sonny became controlling during their marriage, Cher writes, to the point where he wouldn’t even let her talk to their band members after a show. Later, Cher asked Sonny if she could take tennis lessons because, she says, “I was desperate for a distraction and some physical activity that would keep me from going insane.” Sonny set her up with a coach, and she never played with anyone else. After one lesson, her coach was hosting a party, and as some guests arrived, Cher “said hello to a couple of them in passing.” The man who later picked Cher up worked for Sonny, and told him that he saw Cher talking with other men. “I had no idea that they’d spoken, but later that night I looked out of my bedroom window and spotted flames,” Cher writes. “Peering closer, I saw that Sonny was stoking the incinerator in the back yard. When I realized he was burning my tennis clothes, I felt such a rush of anger and then complete hopelessness. I’d so enjoyed my lessons. I couldn’t believe he was being so controlling. I felt utterly betrayed.”

When she had a hemorrhage after giving birth, Sonny wasn’t around.

Cher struggled with pregnancies, having multiple miscarriages before she finally gave birth to her first child, Chaz. Her first night home from the hospital, she had a hemorrhage and passed out on the bathroom floor. But Sonny had gone out, so she stayed there until he got back to call the doctor. “Looking back, I wonder where the hell Sonny went the first night I came home with our baby, but at the time I was too tired and weak to even think,” she writes. “Despite his not being there, I have to say that Sonny was supportive and concerned, maybe out of guilt for wherever the hell he’d been at a time when I so needed him.”

Phil Spector threatened her with a gun.

Cher got her start in music singing for Phil Spector. Once she was a solo artist, Spector had asked Cher and Harry Nilsson to sing on a demo track. When Spector released it without their labels’ permission, Cher went to his house to reason with him. After she told him the issue, “he started to act weird,” she writes. “He became agitated and got kind of smart with me — a little too smart, like he was trying to intimidate me. He told me he could do whatever he wanted. He said our record companies could sue him if they didn’t like it. Then he picked up a revolver that I hadn’t previously noticed lying on the green felt. Staring at him in fury as he twirled it around his fingers, I said, ‘Don’t fuck with me, Phillip! You can’t pull that shit on me, you asshole. This is me, Cher, okay? You’ve known me since I was sixteen and you’re going to try to do this with me? Put that fucking gun down and promise me you’ll never do anything like this shit with my music again, okay?’” Cher then got “the hell out of there,” unharmed.

She took Chaz to Playboy Mansion as a child — but it “was entirely innocent.”

During their divorce, Sonny tried to get full custody of their child, Chaz, by claiming Cher was an unfit mother for taking him to the Playboy Mansion. But Cher said the visit “was entirely innocent,” and she just took Chaz to see Hugh Hefner’s pet monkeys. “Our little girl had known and loved Hef her whole life,” Cher writes. “In fact, his house was like heaven for her, a place where she could have ice cream served to her by a waiter in the Grotto.”

She had the “worst” first date with Gregg Allman.

Before he became Cher’s second husband, Gregg Allman (whom she calls “Gregory”) took her on “one of the worst nights of my dating life.” They started the evening at Dino’s on Sunset Boulevard. “We sat looking at each other, but neither of us could think what to say,” Cher writes. “Trying a line on me, he said he’d fly me to Hawaii for the weekend. ‘Does that work on other girls?’ I asked, knowing the answer was yes.” Afterward, they went to a party at the Continental Hyatt. “The party was full of way too many drugged-out people, and as the only sober person there, I felt like an alien,” she writes. “When Gregory tried to kiss me, I told him to stop. ‘Whoa, dude,’ I said. ‘You know what, why don’t you just take me home?’”

She got divorce advice from Lucille Ball — then gave advice to Tina Turner.

When Cher finally decided she wanted to divorce Sonny, she called her old friend Lucille Ball and told her, “You’re the only one I know that’s ever been in this same situation.” Lucy’s advice? “Fuck him, you’re the one with the talent.” Later, when Tina Turner was a guest on Cher, she went to Cher’s dressing room to ask for makeup to cover a bruise on her arm. “She sat down while I looked for it and then quietly said, very straightforward, ‘Tell me how you left him,’” Cher writes. “I looked at her and told her, ‘I just walked out and kept going.’”

She and Carol Burnett had a “chicken joke.”

It started when Cher had her CBS compatriot Burnett on Cher, and Bob Mackie made them “these insane matching chicken sweatshirts” for a sketch. “From then on, Carol and I had a chicken joke between us that got completely out of hand,” Cher writes. “I had fifty buckets of Colonel Sanders chicken delivered to her dressing room one day, and in retaliation, she sent me a clutch of live hens. We had loose chickens walking all over the set. The studio wasn’t thrilled, but we were having a great time. Lord only knows what happened to them.”

She couldn’t get acting work for years.

Cher dreamed of being an actor long before she took the leap to the big screen. “I might have had an Emmy, but my friends had Oscars,” she writes. (Hollywood problems.) She remembers trying to get movie roles “for five years” but writes that she “couldn’t even get an agent.” When Jack Nicholson introduced her to Mike Nichols while he was working on The Fortune, she writes, “Mike wasn’t mean, but he said, ‘There are two kinds of women, and you’re not the kind I need for this character.’” (Her reply? “I’m really talented, and one day you’re gonna be sorry.”) She also met with Jon Peters about a remake of A Star Is Born, but “realized he may have had an ulterior motive in agreeing to see me” after she heard the movie was partially inspired by her life. (His girlfriend, Barbra Streisand, got the role anyway.) Another producer, Ray Stark, asked her, “Do you know why a taco is shaped like a pussy?” during a meeting, and she “got the fuck out of there.”

Later, Cher ran into her old friend Francis Ford Coppola after a concert. “He told me how much he’d enjoyed my show and then, after a brief pause, added, ‘Why aren’t you making movies?’” she writes. “I almost burst into tears and thought, How are you seeing something in me that no one else does?”