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

by Cher

“Georgia, Georgia . . . ,” he began, and I burst into tears. I couldn’t believe he was singing a song about my mom. As tears dripped onto my sandwich, I’d never felt more connected to anything in my life. Ray Charles’s voice and the melody seemed to express exactly how I felt.

He was so handsome with that amazing smile and lustrous black hair, exactly the same color as mine.

I had no idea why everyone was acting so insane. I was too young to get that part of it, truthfully (but if I had been three years older and my mom had been three years younger, we would have fainted).

“Mom, can we stand on our seats and scream, too?” “Yes,” she replied, grinning like a teenager and taking off her high heels. “Come on, let’s do it!” So we did, straining on our tiptoes to see him.

In another photograph Mom kept for years, her maternal grandparents and their children were captured on the front porch of their funky-ass log cabin in the backwoods of Missouri, flanked by their hound dog.

You can tell how hard their life was by the state of the cabin and the look on my grandfather’s face. Not one person in the picture was smiling, least of all my great-grandfather Isaac Gulley, a railroad worker with a bushy beard. He once snapped the neck of my grandmother’s beloved pet kitten after it got into their bucket of milk. They were so poor there wasn’t anything that could be spared, not even for a kitten. She remembered that every day for the rest of her life because she loved that kitten so much and even taught it tricks, including how to push a doll’s buggy.

With the psychic abilities that also ran in my family, she sometimes had premonitions in her dreams and in 1923 had a vivid nightmare that her husband blew up and then fell to the ground in a million tiny pieces like confetti. It was so real to her that, the following day, she gathered her children around her to tell them. By nightfall her husband, Isaac, was dead. Isaac blew up stumps for the railroad for a living and that day he lit too close on the dynamite fuse. He was blown sky high in the explosion.

Jesus

Roy looked everywhere for Lynda and listed her as a missing person. When he couldn’t find her, he took Jackie Jean to stay with his sister Lodema and her husband, Wesley. Her uncle molested her.

Aw come on

Roy never stopped searching for Lynda, and when he finally tracked her down, he got her pregnant again and persuaded her to come back.

What the

Too afraid to tell him that she’d married a Sicilian man, she agreed. Shocked by how her children were living, she returned a few days later with some money and clothes, but Roy forced her into bed. After the Sicilian found out what happened, he knocked several of Grampa’s teeth out and told his wife that he’d adopt her children.

REAL MEN

Roy stayed in Oklahoma, and had no contact with the children he’d attempted to murder even though his daughter still missed him. That year was only made better for Jackie Jean by her stepfather, who gave her the affectionate nickname “String Bean.”

Once again, though, Lynda grew jealous of their closeness, and when my mom reached thirteen—the same age her mother had been when she’d given birth to her—she told her she’d have to go back to live with Roy. She was leaving the Sicilian for his nephew and taking Mickey with her. I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn’t make it up.

She couldn’t face the chaos of life with her father, so Jackie Jean scanned the want ads and found work as a live-in maid in Hancock Park. Her employer’s home was huge and her chores tough, but my mother never complained because it was the best place she’d ever lived.

She neded to go back to zella

With the encouragement of her teachers, she finally became the “somebody” her daddy always wanted her to be, although it broke her heart that nobody in her immediate family cared. Every night she curled up on the bathroom floor sobbing into a towel so that no one could hear her, and there were times when she even considered killing herself.

My smooth-talking Armenian father, Johnnie Sarkisian,

Here we go!

The women in my family rarely chose their men well and Jackie Jean was no exception, but with Lynda her sole role model, she stood little chance. Beneath his polished veneer, my father would become a heroin addict with a penchant for larceny and a shaky relationship to employment.

Aw come on

With nowhere else to go, my mother reluctantly agreed and was taken to a sympathetic doctor in Long Beach, one of a handful of professionals who helped women illegally despite the risks of imprisonment (not unlike today).

I survived as a consequence, and I’ve never questioned how close she came to not having me. It was her body, her life, and her choice to make. Thank God she got off that table, though, or I wouldn’t be here to write these pages.

I was born under the sign of Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, so it’s like there are three of us in here. Premature, I wanted to get the hell out of there, find me some wheels, and get going.

While my mother was recovering in the hospital, a nurse came into her room and asked, “And what are you going to name your baby?” My mother had no idea, but the woman insisted so she 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?”

When I applied for my birth certificate, I was shocked to find that I was officially registered as Cheryl and asked my mother, “Do you even know my real name, Mom?” “Let me look at that!” she cried, snatching the document. Presented with the evidence, she shrugged. “I was only a teenager, and I was in a lot of pain. Give me a break.”

With their money running out, Jackie Jean knew she needed to do something. She applied for a position as a hatcheck girl at the Copacabana nightclub on East Sixtieth Street, where the boss—a mobster—demanded to see her legs. After she nervously lifted her dress, he was so impressed that he upgraded her to cigarette girl so that his customers at the Brazilian-themed club and restaurant could admire them too.

Her concerns were only magnified when she sensed the nuns’ disapproval of her from the outset for being a Baptist.

Weird

With no way to contact Johnnie and no one else to turn to, she decided that the minute my dad came back from New York she’d insist he get me out. My deadbeat father never returned or even sent word.

Good lord

In time, she convinced herself that the only reason she was destined to meet him in the first place was so that I would exist. That was all he was good for.

The behavior of those nuns haunted my mother her whole life. Mine is one of hundreds of similar stories of children kept by the Church or put up for adoption against the will of their frightened young mothers, who were condemned as being sinful or irresponsible.

SMH

I woke up one day in 1994 in a chateau in France, where I’d been invited to a songwriting symposium, and the words poured out of me in one sitting. They begin: “Your faith is not faithful. Your grace has no grace. Your mercy shows no mercy. Is there no way out of this place?” I didn’t hold back, because it continues: “There’s a baby sobbing softly, in a crib that’s now a cage. She’s done nothing to deserve this, but it sanctifies their rage.” The chorus was “Sisters of Mercy, daughters of hell.” When I first played it to Mom, she sobbed and sobbed, but I think it made her feel vindicated and took some of the pain away.

But then she produced an old wooden highchair with a worn decal of Bambi. “This was yours when you used to live with us,” Mackie announced, eager for me to have it. “Live with you?” I asked, so taken aback that I could barely speak. In my mind, I thought, Fuck, the blows just keep on coming!

“It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is a poor man.”

To this day I feel sorry for my grandmother and the life she had, and I’m even more sorry that she instilled so much toxic stuff in my mom, who was so needy of her love and approval. She would tell me the same about marrying a rich man when I was growing up, and it’s where she got her belief that if you were beautiful, you deserved a man who’s loaded.

Being the only kid there, I was made a big fuss of, and when I could no longer keep my eyes open, I’d curl up under my mother’s coat at the back of the theater and fall asleep.

At one cocktail party he spotted a tipsy Michael Ansara make a pass at her while she was getting their coats from the bedroom. Chris grabbed her and shook her until she thought her head would snap off. When they got home, their fight turned more violent. He pushed her up against a wall and closed his fingers around her throat. Her survival instincts kicked in and she cried, “What will happen to Cher if you kill me and go to jail?” In his drunken angry state, it was only his fondness for me that made him stop.

Aw come on

My mom married John (Husband No. 3), but this time for love. He was and is the only man I think of as my father.

An only child, John had no memories of his own dad, Eunice James Harmon Southall, known as “E. J.,” who was gassed in the First World War and died in 1934 at the age of forty-one.

Most important, the only man I ever called Daddy loved me and treated me as his own. That was good enough for me.

My babysitter by then was a Mexican teenager named Maria whose job was to distract me from the distress of my parents’ going out at night. Every time they left the house, I’d throw myself on the floor and pitch a fit, kicking, crying, and screaming. I was young, and I was terrified when they left at nighttime. I also knew that things had changed and I was overreacting a gargantuan amount. Sometimes, in the midst of these tantrums, I’d even ask myself, Cher, what the fuck are you doing? (I know it was early for that word, but I was only ever around grown-ups, so I’d heard it.) They’re just going to dinner! But I didn’t understand that feeling of abandonment, even if it was an emotion I came to honestly.

I was so obsessed with the idea that I was an angel sent to cure the disease that when Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off.

I parked my car and stepped out as an old man walked by. Stopping in his tracks, he looked at me quizzically, grinned, and cried, “Cherilyn Southall? Is that you? Well, damn, girl, you all grown up!” To this day, I have no idea who he was. He wasn’t family, just someone who remembered me being in that tiny place as a kid. I was astonished and excited, even though I couldn’t for the life of me place him. From the polite conversation that followed, I’d bet good money that he’d never even heard of a singer named Cher.

I swear that sorting those pretty buttons with rhinestones, sequins, and mother-of-pearl into little piles sparked my lifelong love of shiny things. Just ask Bob Mackie.

Daddy must have seen me go to my room, because a few minutes later he came in and sat on the edge of my bed. He knew exactly what I was feeling because the first thing out of his mouth was “I don’t see what’s so great about that new baby? She’s just a baby, right? She doesn’t do anything but cry. That’s no fun. But I guess we’d better keep her for a while and see how she turns out. Now, why don’t you and I go get some ice cream?” It made me feel that my daddy understood what I was going through and how sad I was.

John Southall made me feel seen for the first time, and it was he who helped me grow to love Gee, even though I lost my treasured place as the only child.

Later that evening Dad got it into his head that Mom was flirting with someone. My mom wasn’t necessarily a flirtatious person, but men were always drawn to her. Livid, he grabbed her by her hair and started to pull her outside, but when she fell off her heels, he kept dragging her across the tiled floor in front of everybody. Not one of the men intervened.

Cho!

This constant unpredictability made me hypervigilant about the moods around me and gave me what I call a faulty emotional thermostat as I, too, began to swing between extremes. There are photos of me taken when I was little where I’d be scowling in one frame and doing a Rita Hayworth pose seconds later. To this day I can jump right from happiness to drama, or from gleeful poses to Lady Macbeth, in a blink.