Cher on THAT ‘rich man’ video, her famous exes and her message to her critics: ‘I don’t give a sh*t’
Cher reveals the real story behind THAT ‘rich man’ video, her famous exes and why she doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion.
Stellar
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Millions of her fans across the world have longed to know the full, intimate details of Cher’s life story for decades.
There was just one thing standing in their way: the woman herself.
Asked when she was first approached about the idea of publishing a memoir, the 78-year-old tells Stellar, “It happened a whole bunch of times.” So what kept her from sitting down to write it?
“I don’t know,” she replies nonchalantly. “I guess I just didn’t want to.”
And who dares tell Cher what to do? A trailblazer who has always resisted easy definition, a battler with a heart of gold and a world-class provocateur, she has never been afraid to go her own way. “I don’t give a sh*t what people think,” she says.
“I’ve been so destroyed by the press. There have been times when people just didn’t like me.
“People weren’t interested, or they’d had enough or they thought I was over.
“If I cared about what people think more than I cared about doing what I wanted and who I was meant to be? You can’t take yourself seriously when you’re down, and you can’t take yourself seriously when you’re up.”
Now, at least, she’s getting serious about her legacy, reinforcing and explaining that declaration across the 411 pages of Cher: The Memoir, Part One, which documents her life up to 1980. (A second instalment is due out next year – because what could be more Cher than a two-part memoir?)
In its opening chapters, she writes of a childhood so itinerant and chaotic even she refers to it as “Dickensian”; a serendipitous set of events that led to the launch of her recording career; a love life that was anything but dull; and a relationship with her own growing celebrity that changed how the world thought about women, fashion and pop culture all at once.
Yet Cher herself is hard-pressed to understand exactly why fortune favoured her. As she considers what it took to get here, one thing surprises her the most.
“I guess that I became famous,” she begins, breaking into a laugh. “I mean, come on. Because nothing about me when I was young screamed ‘fame’.”
Zigzagging across the US as a young girl with her singer mother, Georgia Holt, and younger sister Georganne “Gee” LaPiere, Cher endured stretches of embarrassment and isolation from schoolmates because her family was poor and unorthodox, and watched as a series of men entered and exited her mother’s life. Still, she wanted for little.
“When you’re a child, you don’t know that it’s different,” she reasons. “Now that I’m a grown-up, I wish it had been different … but I wouldn’t have been me if it was.”
Despite Holt’s messy love life and oft-thwarted ambitions of stardom, she doted on Cherilyn Sarkisian, the daughter she almost never had – just as she was due to have an abortion, then 19-year-old Holt decided she couldn’t go through with it. Months later, in 1944, a future star was born.
The pair went on to have a close but complicated bond; in the book, Cher writes that at one point, her mother “declared that ‘men are things you love against your will’.”
Cher’s own headline-making romantic history is anchored by her marriages to two men: singer, actor and politician Sonny Bono, father of Chaz Bono and her co-star on their wildly popular eponymous variety series in the 1970s; and musician Gregg Allman, whose battles with addiction she chronicles with clear eyes, and with whom she shared son Elijah Blue Allman.
She can’t know what Bono – who died in a skiing accident in 1998 – or Allman, who died of liver cancer in 2017, would have thought of the book.
But she has a hunch with regards to Bono, whose infidelity and control issues marred their union but whose soulful connection to her endured long after their 1975 divorce.
“I think he’d like it,” she says. “I’m not sure he’d like all of it. I tried not to paint him as a villain, because we stayed friends until the end. It was such a complicated relationship … I tried my best, but it doesn’t make sense sometimes.”
Bono has long been considered the Svengali who provided Cher an entrée into the world of celebrity; he was instrumental to her early musical success and the pair were hugely popular as a double act.
But Cher’s charisma as a solo performer was undeniable, to say nothing of her chutzpah.
She insists she is by nature a shy person, but her penchant for turning heads is legendary. In 1974, she arrived at the Met Gala in a “souffle dress” designed by Bob Mackie, her longtime collaborator.
It had to be sprayed with water and patted onto her skin, creating the illusion she was naked. Even today, the look is revered by fashion historians and has been imitated by the likes of Kim Kardashian.
An amused Cher remains secure in the knowledge that she did it first. “I would rather have worn the original Met dress,” she tells Stellar, “instead of trying to copy it.”
She pauses, then blurts out, “Mom, I am a rich man!” It’s a callback to a 1996 TV interview with US journalist Jane Pauley, in which she relayed the witty retort she made when her mother implored her to settle down and marry a wealthy man.
“God knows why I said it, except my mom was making me exasperated,” Cher says now. “I was like, ‘Mommm, Jesus Christ! You know, all of your friends were doing that or trying to do that when they were young. And it never worked for you guys.’ I don’t know why that came out the way it came out.”
A clip of the moment has been watched more than 2.3 million times on YouTube and, thanks to TikTok, has also become a modern-day rallying cry for female empowerment.
Reflecting on its popularity, Cher tells Stellar, “That’s like my favourite thing. I [still] see it. The other day I was driving down the street and it was in a painting. I’ll be in a store and I will see it on a pillow. It always makes me laugh.”
The second half of her memoir can expect to focus on Cher’s ascent to film stardom, which culminated in her Best Actress Oscar win for 1987’s Moonstruck. (She is uncertain about making more movies: “I believe what belongs to you comes to you. So I have no idea.”)
It will undoubtedly dig into her record-breaking successes on the pop charts, in particular her monster 1998 single ‘Believe’, which became the biggest hit of her career.
And with its release, she expects to sit down and talk, once again, about an outrageously fortunate life she never saw coming in a series of interviews like this one.
Asked if she minds, Cher replies: “They’re OK. I think you should talk to people. I bought in for this. This is what I’m supposed to do.
“So I enjoy it while I’m doing it. They’re not that big of a drag, but I just want to get to my next album. And talking is the enemy of singing.”
Cher: The Memoir, Part One (HarperCollins Australia, $49.99) is out now. The full interview with Cher originally appeared in Stellar, via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD), and Sunday Mail (SA).
For more from Stellar and the podcast, Something To Talk About, click here.
Originally published as Cher on THAT ‘rich man’ video, her famous exes and her message to her critics: ‘I don’t give a sh*t’
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