The Phone Call with Cher that Made Me Want to Be 78

Over the course of her career, Cher has earned herself a number of nicknames­—the Goddess of Pop, the Queen of Comebacks, the Matriarch of Midriff (okay, we may have come up with the last one ourselves)—but perhaps the best way to describe her is the way she describes herself in her single-sentence author bio on the backflap of her new memoir: “Cher is a global icon.”

Icons are not born; they are built. And for the first time, in her two-part memoir, the 78-year-old is giving the world insight into how she built and rebuilt herself. Published this month, Cher: The Memoir, Part One spans the years between the multi-hyphenate superstar’s birth in 1946 to the start of her New York acting career in the early ’80s. Sorry, Moonstruck superfans, you’re going to have to wait until 2025 for the Nic Cage gossip in Part Two. Sparing no detail, and missing no opportunity for a laugh, Cher opens up about her “Dickensian” childhood (including a brief stint in a Catholic orphanage), her life as a teenage runaway, her marriage to (and divorce from) Sonny Bono, her meteoric rise to fame, and more—much more. I chatted with Cher about the process of putting her life story down on paper and how she managed to avoid getting pulled down by the criticism (not to mention drug abuse) that dogged her early life and career.

This is the first book in which you tell your life story—in full—in your own words. Why now?

Well, who thought I was going to live this long? Now seems as good a time as any.

You have already given so much of yourself to the public; how did you decide to give us so much of yourself in these pages?

In the beginning, I didn’t want to. That’s why I kept redoing it. I wrote it like a billion times. At first, I didn’t go there. I didn’t plan on not going there, but when I read it back, I realized, this is really stupid. If you’re just gonna do it halfway, don’t do it. What’s the sense of telling your life if you don’t tell your life?

So you went all in.

Yeah, because when I started, I was really having fun even though it was a bitch. I mean, I couldn’t believe how hard it was. Also, you know, I do everything at the last minute. So I was way late. I was working five, six, seven hours a day. It got to be too much for me, but I still kept going.

Were there any stories you wanted to keep for yourself?

There are some things that are just nobody’s business, but there are not a lot. I went way past my comfort zone. Way past.

In the book, you recall a number of occasions when the press got your story wrong, sometimes hilariously, sometimes painfully. Do you hope this memoir will correct the record on anything?

People have gotten so much wrong—especially about Sonny and my relationship. I mean, I did my best, like I really tried so hard to make people try to understand it because it doesn’t play well. We were friends, way after we were divorced, and it was a strange relationship because I was pissed off at him in quite a number of ways. I just didn’t hold a grudge. Well, maybe I held one little grudge, but not really.

What was the one little grudge?

It’s like a teeny bit of a grudge and a bigger question. I said to him, “When did you decide that it was okay to take my money?” and he said, “Well, I knew you’d always leave me,” and I went, “That’s not a good enough reason!”

No, definitely not! You write so movingly about your lifelong friendship with Sonny but also so honestly about how controlling he was in your marriage and how coercive he was financially. Do you have any tips about how you can stay friends with an ex who’s hurt you without ignoring the pain they’ve caused?

I didn’t ignore it, but it just didn’t seem—well, no, it was important. I was about to say it wasn’t important, but it was important; it just wasn’t important enough. I wouldn’t let anybody else in the world—not even people not born yet—get away with that shit.

So how were you able to move past that with him?

It was just us. I’m looking at my doorway right now, and if Sonny walked through my doorway, we would still be Sonny and Cher.

The world has changed a lot over the course of your life and career, but on so many issues, you have been consistently ahead of your time, whether it be gay rights or women’s rights, or even showing off your belly button.

It’s so crazy when you think about what girls are showing now.

It is! But you maintained your confidence in your own style and comfort in your own skin in a world that didn’t seem ready for either. How did you not let the criticism get to you?

Because it was stupid and because it had no meaning to me. I mean, my clothes were beautiful. People are still trying to do the naked dress.

It feels silly to ask you where you get your confidence from. You are Cher, after all! But reading the book, I get the sense that you always were Cher, even before the rest of the world knew what that meant.

I just kept tripping forward. And I’m still working on it because I come from a time when you didn’t get a chance to know your worth and didn’t get a chance to find out who you were. I was with Sonny at 16, and when I left him at 27, I hadn’t really grown all that much. I mean, in some ways I had, but in other ways, I really hadn’t. And so I was way behind, and I’m still pretty much behind. I just do things. And sometimes they’re fabulous, and people are like, “Oh my God, you reinvent yourself.” And sometimes they’re just like, “You’re so passé.” When I went to Las Vegas it was an elephant’s graveyard, and now everybody wants to be there.

You write, “Addiction doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops.” And as an adult, you were surrounded by heavy drug and alcohol use, but in the book, you just never seemed interested. How did you manage to avoid the draw, especially at a time when experimentation was so popular?

Can I tell you something? You’re the only one who has gotten it so far: I wasn’t interested. I mean, I tried drugs a couple of times. I took a Benzedrine, and I was awake for a weekend chewing the same piece of gum, and then I was crying and I went to my mom, and she said, “Did you learn your lesson?” And I said, “Yes.”

You tried things, but somehow they never stuck?

You know, I didn’t try that many because I knew they weren’t for me. I didn’t want to do cocaine, because when someone was doing cocaine, they just talked to you endlessly about boring things. If they were doing downers, you would want to go to sleep along with them. I mean, heroin? Who wants to do that? It’s just like, which one of those things is fun? I never got it.

It would be easy to see a two-part memoir project as a career capstone, but you begin the books with lyrics from your own song, “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me.” Should we believe you when you say—or sing—that “this is far from over”? Will there be a Cher: The Memoir, Part Three?

No. God, no. Unless I live another 20 years, and that’s doubtful. You know, everybody in my family lives to their 90s or into their 100s, but you’re drooling on yourself at that point. So, no. But including those lyrics at the beginning was really important to me because it was a song I did for Burlesque, and it has always been me.

What do you mean by that?

I mean that I don’t usually quit. I have to be crawling on the ground—and even then, I’ll crawl on the ground and keep going. Because it’s just who I am.

Well, it’s gotten you pretty far.

That’s true.