“If you can last long enough, people take you seriously,” says Cher, who scored her first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, “I Got You Babe,” at age 19. Since then, she’s rarely stood still in a career that has survived seven decades and won her Oscar, Emmy and Grammy awards. Still, it hasn’t all been gold trophies and applause. “I wouldn’t have chosen the horrible downs,” Cher, 78, confides. “The fabulous ups I would have chosen, but not the other.”
In a new two-part autobiography, Cher: The Memoir, the first of which was released on November 19, the singer looks back at her triumphs and heartbreaks. “My life seems to be longer than any other human being ever,” she jokes.
Cher admits she has a lot of mixed emotions about her years with her first husband, Sonny Bono. The pair met in 1962 when Sonny was working as a record producer for Phil Spector and Cher was looking for a break. They recorded together as Caesar & Cleo, and Cher cut singles under the name Cherilyn, but nothing caught fire. “America hated us, so we sold everything and came [to London],” recalls Cher, who credits getting kicked out of a London Hilton for wearing hippie clothing as a pivotal moment in Sonny and Cher’s unlikely success. “By the time we reached the Hilton’s revolving doors, escorted in person by the manager, there were two reporters standing outside,” she remembers. “We slept for 12 hours straight, and by the time we’d bathed and dressed, we were famous.”
“I Got You Babe” became a No. 1 hit in the U.K., the U.S. and Canada, but success proved fleeting. By the end of the 1960s, soft pop had fallen out of fashion and they were dropped by their record label. “If you can’t get a record deal, it can’t be more over than that,” says Cher. “It’s the idea that you worked your whole life, and then it’s, ‘We don’t want to waste our time on you.’ That’s a big deal for a singer.”
Cher Became a Primetime Princess
After mortgaging their home to make their first film, 1969’s Chastity, which flopped, the pair landed in Las Vegas, where Cher’s sexy costumes and comic put-downs of her husband won a following. They brought their act to television with The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1971. During its three-year run, 30 million viewers tuned in every week to watch the couple sing, do comedy bits and exchange snappy one-liners. As a solo artist, Cher also triumphed with the radio hits “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” “Half Breed” and “Dark Lady.”
In 1975, her divorce from Sonny thrust Cher into uncharted territory. “I was with him from 16 to 27. I didn’t have the skills that a person needed, really, to take care of themselves,” she admits. “I had to start from scratch, and I made lots and lots of mistakes.”
Her career suffered, too. Cher released a string of flops and even took some half- hearted attempts at disco and hard rock albums. “I’ve had lots of failures,” admits Cher, who says she has only reinvented herself out of necessity. “It was just that I fell out of grace or I didn’t have a job or wasn’t doing something.”
Cher Became a Serious Actress
In 1982, she moved to New York to take classes with the Actors Studio. After a stint on Broadway, Cher landed the role of Meryl Streep’s roommate in 1983’s Silkwood. Excited about the film, she went to a theater to watch a prerelease trailer for it, but she didn’t anticipate the audience’s reaction to her first serious acting job. “[The credits] said, ‘Cher,’ and everybody started laughing — the entire theater,” she recalls, calling the experience “heartbreaking beyond belief.”
She proved them wrong. Silkwood won Cher a Golden Globe Award. A few years later, Cher even bested her friend and Silkwood costar Meryl in the Best Actress category to take home an Oscar for Moonstruck. “Until I became an actress, I never felt like an artist,” Cher says. “I never felt like I was worthwhile.”
She eventually returned to music and earned the biggest hit of her career with 1998’s “Believe,” which won her the only Grammy of her long career. “With ‘Believe,’ I changed the sound of music for- ever, and it was an accident,” admits Cher, who allowed her producer to use a pitch machine on her vocals, which would be nicknamed “the Cher Effect.” “I honestly think that the most fun I ever had making a song was ‘Believe,’” she admits.
With the release of the first part of her memoir, Cher has achieved one more goal: telling her life story her own way. “[My mother] said to me, ‘You might not be the prettiest, you might not be the smartest, you might not be the most talented, but you’re special,’” says Cher. “She kept instilling it into me: ‘If you’re down and you’re out, you get up again.’”
