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

by Cher

Pressing my mouth to her ear so that she could hear, I cupped my hand over it and yelled, “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.

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.

Life and genetics had already taught her that unless she was strong enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other, she wouldn’t make it. She might have been dirt-poor, but she carried herself like a queen.

Studying hard for a scholarship to college, Jackie Jean was devastated when Roy wrote and begged her to come home. He’d fallen off a curb in Oklahoma City and broken several ribs, putting him in a full-body cast. At fifteen, she gave up her dreams of higher education, and out of a strange mix of pity, love, and duty, she went back to care for her father.

So, miserable, she walked out after the three months were up and sought solace with her thirty-two-year-old mother. Instead of taking pity on her, however, Grandma Lynda demanded to know if she was pregnant. When it turned out that she was, Lynda, a waitress who had no intention of being saddled with “a brat,” took her to get an abortion.

That kind of shit has been happening to women since the beginning of time.

I was pretty loosely acquainted with reality.

One night we were over at the home of the model Betty Martin, who’d been married to singer Dean Martin for eight years until he abandoned her along with their four children.

She ushered her daughter, Liza, out with us. We did as we were told, and when we sat on the front steps Liza spontaneously burst into song with “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” I remember thinking that was strange, as I’d never been around a kid who just burst into song like that, even though she was pretty darn good. It was only later that I realized she was Liza Minnelli and that the woman on the stairs was Judy Garland. Now I realize she probably wasn’t drinking juice either.

Even though I was so young, my mother treated me like an adult confidante her whole life. I will never forget the time she broke down and asked me, “Cher, how on earth are we going to pay the rent?” Unable to think of an answer, a voice inside my head cried, I’m a kid, Mom. How should I know? I was always old beyond my years, maybe because I was treated like a grown-up from the earliest age.

“Please let us in. My husband’s trying to kill me!” We hid there until the police arrived. In the end, they let Dad off with a caution. They always gave Daddy the benefit of the doubt. The attitude at the time was to tell the man, “Hey, buddy, if you get rough with your wife, it’ll scare the kids. Go walk it off.” The cop even came inside and asked Mom, “Do you think you did anything to trigger this?”

If Mom had money in her purse, Gee and I could buy a tencent Popsicle from the Good Humor man, whose refrigerated truck played a melody as it drove slowly down our street.

Alone, broke, thirty-one years old, and unable to care for her children, she came close to the breaking point and later confessed that she suffered from such severe panic attacks that she almost ran screaming into the alley in her nightgown—anything to get out of that room.