Cher: Part One: The Memoir (The Cher Memoir Book 1)

by Cher

I left without Chas, knowing she’d be safe with Linda. I drove away with a small bag of clothes. When the press got hold of the news that CBS had canceled our show, they went crazy, and the coverage was brutal. Sonny was right—America wasn’t happy.

I don’t know what I would have done without David, who was so loving and managed to take my mind off things. We went to dinners and to friends’ houses, and he rented me a house out on Carbon Beach in Malibu. I think Dean Martin owned it at one time. It was behind a bicycle shop and had a fire pit on the beach, which was the backyard, so that was perfect for summer. That house was always full of people: Chas, Linda, Gee, Paulette.

He signed me up with his business manager Gil Siegel so that I had someone he trusted to run my affairs. He also persuaded me to stop smoking—well, at least cut back—by buying me a beautiful diamond chain mail ring like a mini Slinky that rotated on my finger. The idea was that I could play with it instead of reaching for a cigarette. It was beautiful and I still have it.

January 21, 1974, Sonny and I arrived together onstage to wrap up our final show, the sixty-seventh we had done together since 1972. It was to be aired a month later, on February 27, and then there’d be one last show already in the can that would be broadcast in early March. People lined up outside CBS for hours hoping to be part of the live audience for our final taping.

My mom and Gee came to the studio to support me and were both crying because it was all over—the marriage, and the show, and the music. That was a hard thing to face. They weren’t the only ones in tears. The crew was in pieces. They’d become like family to us over the years.

On January 26, we were invited to attend the 31st Golden Globes. I’d been nominated for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy Television Series, and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was up for Best Musical or Comedy Series. Sonny and I decided not to attend. I stayed home and had my nails done instead. I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate, and Carol Burnett had won the title several times before, so I was convinced she’d walk away with the award this time too. As I was explaining to my manicurist why I wasn’t going to win, I heard the announcer read off my name. I was gobsmacked by the irony of it.

Mickey Rudin filed divorce papers in which he claimed that Sonny had held me in “involuntary servitude,” in direct violation of the US Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. He also accused him of “unlawfully dominating and controlling” my business interests and career. This legal move drove Sonny crazy and led him to file a counterclaim, demanding the millions he estimated he’d lose when I split up our partnership. Sonny also filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against David, seeking a temporary restraining order and accusing him of interfering with our contractual relationship.

I was asked to present the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score to composer Marvin Hamlisch for the soundtrack to The Way We Were. I made a mess out of his name. I mean a complete mess. David accompanied me, and there were even more photographers this time.

There were maybe ten of us there waiting when a woman in a black Chinese-style pantsuit emerged from behind a curtain and walked right past me with a smile. “Hey, kid,” she said as she passed. I froze. All I could think was She spoke to me. She spoke to me! It was Katharine Hepburn, a heroine of my youth, on her way to present an award.

I did see her one last time. I came across her sitting, legs crossed, on the desk in my doctor’s office making a telephone call. She was wearing what looked like an outfit straight out of On Golden Pond. What a sassy, independent dame.

Thanks to David, I was hanging out with amazing artists at the peak of their careers, all doing incredible things.

I wanted to push myself and my work to a new level. Knowing how I felt, David suggested I work with a songwriter like Jimmy Webb or a producer like Phillip Spector. I wasn’t too sure about working with Phillip again, but I trusted David completely, so after I finished my album with Snuffy, I went to A&M Studios in Hollywood.

I continued to live at the beach house in Malibu as my lawyers negotiated my divorce, which involved the division of an estimated $28 million worth of property and assets, which would be $175 million in 2024. I couldn’t have done any of it without David. He was always on the phone with Mickey Rudin making sure I was being taken care of.

On March 21, 1974, Gee and I found out that our father John Southall, the only man I’d ever called Daddy, was very sick. He was fifty-two. On April 13 Gee and I were heading home from New York when David, knowing how important a visit would be, arranged a private plane to fly us to Texas so we could see Daddy. We walked in the room and his skin so yellow, like the color of a banana. He was almost unrecognizable as the handsome father I remembered as he lay in bed in a veterans’ hospital not far from Burleson, dying of liver failure. When he saw me and Gee, his face lit up.

Knowing it was the last time we’d ever be together, Daddy began to cry. He died less than a week after our visit. His wife, Jane, later told us that he’d been in and out of consciousness, but after we left he was talking about Gee and me to her, saying that he was so glad he’d gotten to see us one last time. I felt so lucky that David had made our visit possible and that I had him to come home to.

I was so happy to be back in my dream home and was excited to share the big house with David, who moved in with me, promising to throw the kinds of dinners and parties I’d always dreamed of hosting and bringing his German butler Klaus and his cook Ida. I was especially delighted about Ida because she made that delicious chilled avocado soup I loved.

I heard that Sonny had signed on with ABC to host a new solo show, The Sonny Comedy Revue. Our friends at CBS had passed on the option even though Art Fisher would direct and several of our show’s veterans, including Teri Garr, Billy Van, and Freeman King, were on board. It had everything from Sonny’s monologues to his solo skits, and ABC liked that it would be a near copy of our show and planned to invite different female celebrities to take my place. In promotional interviews, Sonny joked that the only difference would be that when he looked left, there “wouldn’t be an Indian standing there.”

I didn’t want Sonny to fail, but I didn’t know what would happen to me if he succeeded.

David must have sensed my restlessness, because he set aside his empire momentarily to negotiate with CBS on my behalf and secure me my own show, to be simply called Cher. I didn’t know how he did it or whether I’d have to pay Sonny half of what I earned, but he and Mickey Rudin kept my career—and my spirits—alive. I was excited and scared and enormously grateful to David for brokering the deal.

I was talking with the band’s guitarist Alan Gorrie in the kitchen when he suddenly started sweating and his skin turned bluey-white. He told me he felt nauseous. “Why don’t we go outside for some fresh air?” I suggested. Out in the yard he felt better for about ten minutes, before doubling over and throwing up violently.

When I went back inside, it was like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You could feel the panic, as people were vomiting everywhere. Hamish then came running up to me and told me, “Robbie’s real sick upstairs in the bathroom, Cher. Can you help us?” When I said Alan was sick too, he told me they’d taken the same drug. I have always been cool in a crisis. Hamish and I were the only ones who hadn’t done any drugs, so we went around trying to take care of everybody.

Robbie was out cold, lying in about six inches of water in the bathtub. There were random people standing around, and Ken Moss was half blocking the doorway. Shocked, I screamed, “God, he looks terrible!” That’s when I noticed that Robbie’s fingernails had gone blue. I panicked.

I ended up talking to the brand-new gynecologist who had just started in their office. Breathlessly, I told him, “I’m at this party and everyone is throwing up. They took some kind of drugs but I don’t know which kind. Someone is lying unconscious in a bath with his fingernails turning blue.” “All right,” he said, his voice steady. “Take him to the emergency room right away. You can just drop him off, nobody will arrest you, and they’ll take care of him. You should take him right away, any breath could be his last.

After hanging up, I repeated everything he’d said to Hamish, who said, “OK.” Then I helped Alan into my car and drove him back to my house. After I left, Ken Moss told everyone that I was being “an alarmist” and that Robbie would just have an awful hangover in the morning, but he’d be fine, so nobody took him to the hospital.

The next day he woke early feeling horrible and, after taking a shower, called to see how Robbie was. The band said he was having a bad time after being driven back to their motel but seemed like he was going to be fine, so everyone hoped he’d dodged a bullet. Then they called back a few hours later and told Alan that Robbie had died. He broke down when he heard, and so did I.

It turned out the powder was a mixture of morphine and heroin. Robbie was twenty-four and left behind a wife and young son. All those who got sick had been given the drug by Moss. Although I couldn’t have done more than I did, I felt so bad for not forcing them to get Robbie to the hospital while there was still time. Alan left to be with his grieving bandmates, and when David came home and found me crying, he insisted on calling the police. Two detectives arrived to take my statement because I was a key witness to a potential crime.

Moss had fled the country. They also told me that they’d spoken with other people from the party and nobody had mentioned that I was there, which I thought was amazing. The investigation started a chain of events that would eventually lead to my testifying to a grand jury that convicted Moss of involuntary manslaughter for handing out high doses of heroin to his guests. Upon his return to the United States, Moss was arrested and went to prison.

The truth is all I did was save one man’s life and try to save another’s, but the implication was that I’d taken part in a seedy drug party and was an unfit mother after all. Sonny was furious. Everyone in my life wanted to know why I’d gone to that party by myself. Truthfully, it’s very simple: I wanted to. I didn’t want to have a chaperone. I just wanted to go to a party on my own.

When I asked Bob Mackie to take me, he asked what I wanted to wear. I knew immediately. “The souffle dress,” I replied. It was a dress he’d made for my most recent Vogue layout that was called “Fashion from the 20s to the 70s.” The dress had white feathers woven into the beading and was made of “souffle” material, which Bob told me was actually banned in the United States because it was so flammable.

The dress transformed into something truly enchanting when Bob sprayed it with water and patted it onto my skin so it just looked like my bare body was covered in beads and feathers. It didn’t occur to me how naked I looked until one of the guests came up to me and asked, “How does it feel to be naked?” I told him it felt great. To this day the magic of Bob’s dress has never been duplicated, though just about everyone in the universe has tried.

I have to give credit to David for everything: for getting me out of my contract, being such a loving boyfriend, and taking over my life that was such a mess. I would have gone running into the night screaming if I’d been him.

Even though my new dresses were no more revealing than the ones from The Sonny & Cher Show and the dialogue was no more provocative, I now had two censors on set monitoring everything I wore and did. All the things I had gotten away with when I was with Sonny, I wasn’t getting away with anymore as a single woman.

I was standing in a long flowing gown that fit the mood and singing when one of my censors came up and said I looked like a French prostitute. I said, “Are you kidding? This is beautiful.” The censors had a way of interpreting everything as being about sex. Bob started arguing with them, and I went out into the hall to calm down because I was so upset, which is where I saw Norman Lear and grabbed him. I told him, “Norman you’ve got to come up and help me. They’re telling me I can’t do this song because I look like a prostitute.” He went in and ripped the two censors a new asshole, telling them to get their minds out of the gutter.

By mid-January, I’d come to the reluctant decision that I couldn’t marry David after all. No matter how much I loved him, I wasn’t sure I was ready so soon on the heels of divorcing Sonny. David moved out to live at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a while, but we still hung out constantly and he told the producers that he would still help with the first season. David was always taking care of me. I think he thought I would change my mind and maybe I would have. I wasn’t sure of the decision. I wasn’t sure about lots of the decisions I was making, because I still had no practice making them.

David couldn’t believe that I’d gone from him to an Allman Brother. He called me up and told me, “If we’re walking on the street and I’m on one side, cross over to the other.” That was really hard for me to hear, because I still loved him.

Gregory and I had also made our own album that year, called Two the Hard Way by “Allman and Woman.” It was my idea to drop my name because I wanted people to focus on the music. I loved working with Gregory in the studio. Making music together felt easy. My favorite track is “Do What You Gotta Do,” because the lyrics described our relationship.

Sitting together in my dressing room at Caesars Palace, Francis and I reminisced. He told me how much he’d enjoyed my show and then, after a brief pause, added, “Why aren’t you making movies?” I almost burst into tears and thought, How are you seeing something in me that no one else does? Instead, I told him about the rejections I’d had for being too old, too ethnic, too tall, or too typecast. I was “Cher, of Sonny & Cher”—made a punch line for my complicated personal life.

Francis was sympathetic but added, “The problem is that until you do something, nobody will believe you can. The worst that can happen is that you fail, but at least you’ll have tried.” I told him his advice reminded me of something Shelley Winters once said to me: “If you’re really serious about acting, Cher, then stop fucking around and go to New York.” Francis smiled. “Okay, then,” he said. “So what are you waiting for?”