Staring at us over the rim of his spectacles, the man behind the desk at the London Hilton gazed at my striped bell-bottoms and my husband Sonny’s ruffled shirt and caveman-style fur vest as if he had an unpleasant smell under his nose.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘We don’t have any reservations in that name and our hotel is completely full.’
As he walked away, Sonny leaned over to look at the leather-bound register and found our names entered in ink.
Pop star Cher at the Golden Globe Awards in 2010
‘Excuse me!’ he called. ‘There it is, Bono! B-O-N-O.’
The man returned. ‘As I explained, Mr Bono, the hotel is full.’ He was so dismissive and arrogant, I could have cried.
It was August 1965, a month after the release of our single I Got You Babe back in the USA. Teenage audiences there had gone wild for our look, for which we had to thank the luggage handlers who’d lost all of our bags when we’d played a gig near San Francisco.
With nothing but our regular clothes to wear onstage, we stepped into the spotlight in our floral bell-bottoms, funky tops, jewellery, and striped pants, and the Northern California kids flipped out when they saw us.
They really lost it but we were told that advertisers would never agree to us having regular slots on the most popular music shows on American TV because the older audience couldn’t understand what we were.
‘You’re too far ahead for folks here,’ one producer advised us.
With some money in our pockets and both of us feeling more hopeful than we had in a while, Sonny decided that we should ramp up our profile and thought back to a conversation he’d had with Mick Jagger, who we’d met in LA when the Rolling Stones started their first American tour in 1964.
After they came into the Gold Star studios where Sonny worked for producer Phillip Spector, he took me to meet them at their hotel. Not that I said much to them. Mostly I just smiled, because I was increasingly hesitant to open my mouth in the company of men if Sonny was around. I had learned to tell from a single glance when he disapproved.
Sonny hung with Mick mostly because he was old for his years and full of good suggestions. When Mick heard we weren’t getting anywhere in the States, he suggested we try Britain: ‘Trust me, man, they won’t be afraid of you there.’
At the time we were still renting a house near Hollywood Boulevard, furnished with a few pieces of secondhand furniture including a battered old upright piano that Sonny had found in a pawnshop. It had three broken keys but, as Sonny pointed out, ‘they’re all at the bass end where we never sing.’
To raise the money for the fare, we’d given up the house and sold the TV and my old red sports car, which was basically worthless after the engine burned out. I put water in the radiator, but nobody told me it needed oil too.
As far as I was concerned, no one in England even knew what Sonny & Cher was, but by the time we reached the Hilton’s revolving doors, escorted in person by the manager, there were two reporters standing outside.
‘Sonny, Cher, did the Hilton just kick you out?’ they asked. ‘Was it because of how you look?’
Too exhausted to speak, I let Sonny handle everything. When the journalists had what they wanted, he hailed a taxi to take us to another hotel where the bed was lumpy, there was no TV and water trickled out of the shower.
We slept for 12 hours straight and by the time we’d bathed and dressed, we were famous. Photos of us being ejected from the Hilton were on the cover of the evening newspapers and everyone wanted first crack at us for interviews on their TV and radio shows. It was madness.
People said later that our managers had arranged the whole Hilton fiasco to get publicity for our arrival. But the man at the desk looked at us as if we were dirt under his fingernails, and I doubt he was that good an actor.
Genuine or not, it worked. Within days we were on Top Of The Pops, and I Got You Babe soared to the top of the British charts and remained there for a fortnight. Just a few weeks earlier we wouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of the hottest London nightclubs, but now we were in with the ‘in’ crowd. The Rolling Stones introduced us to Rod Stewart and I was mad for both Sandie Shaw, whose love of being barefoot matched mine, and stunning Dusty Springfield.
We also met John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Looking around at all those famous people, I joked that if someone had set off a bomb it would have been the end of music.
At record stores we pushed through screaming throngs of teenagers who all wanted to be close to us. I wasn’t used to that kind of adulation. I’d only seen it with people like the Stones or people who were ‘famous’ and I didn’t see myself that way.
The highlight of London for me was the shopping. Thanks to an Indian model Brian Jones from the Stones hooked up with, I discovered a newly opened boutique in Kensington called Biba. When I walked in, I stepped over the sign that hadn’t been hung yet; they were still setting up and there were clothes lying on the floor, but I didn’t care.
Sonny Bono and Cher at Heathrow in 1967 after flying from Paris to go on Top Of The Pops
Casting aside my hippie persona, I chose a plastic pantsuit in taxicab yellow which had to be cleaned with Windolene, and some zipped linen suits with tunic tops. By the time we left England, we spotted many of our young fans walking around in their own versions of our clothes, which we loved. The trip was more than we ever hoped for. Everyone was so friendly, but the farther north we got, the stronger the accents became and the less I understood what people were saying. Finally, I just smiled and said yes.
We’d have gladly stayed – despite the food – but news of our success had hit the United States and we found ourselves number one in both countries.
Arriving back in New York, we stepped off the plane to 5,000 screaming teenagers rushing to- ward us as we entered the arrivals hall. I nearly turned tail and ran.
The police helped us to our waiting limousine, but the fans still almost ripped off the door. Some thought we were one of the so-called British Invasion bands that had started with The Beatles. Everything British was suddenly the hippest thing going on in America, so it was funny that we were American and had to go to Britain to get famous first.
Even Princess Margaret was a fan, inviting us to perform at the Hollywood Palladium when she flew into LA for some charitable events.
The whole event was a fiasco. It started late, Frank Sinatra dropped out at the last minute so Bob Hope introduced us instead, and the acoustics were so bad that, coupled with sound problems, we performed terribly.
Halfway through our set Princess Margaret asked for the sound to be turned down because she had a headache.
Fortunately, that was an exception. In January 1966 we were invited to headline at the legendary Hollywood Bowl, a venue we’d only played at the bottom of the bill. To be at the top this time, with the Righteous Brothers and The Mamas & The Papas supporting us, was a thrill; it was even more thrilling when tickets sold out in 24 hours.
Soon we could afford to buy a house on the estate where I’d lived with my Mom and stepfather Gilbert in the upmarket LA suburb of Encino, complete with a massive bathroom, the most gigantic closets and a swimming pool with a view over the San Fernando Valley.
When I was a child there was a time when we were so broke that my shoes had to be padded with cardboard to stuff up a hole and wrapped with rubber bands to keep the soles from flapping.
Now Sonny and I each had our own 1964 Mustang, gifted to us by the Ford Motor Company and customised by the man who’d also crafted the Batmobile. Mine was candy-pink with pink fur carpets and ermine trim, while Sonny’s was painted in 40 layers of gold paint with black-and-white fur seats.
Our lives were so insane during this period. Still a teenager, I was so insecure about becoming poor again that I started buying two of everything in case we needed to replace things that had worn out. There was no logic to owning two electric frying pans or two hair dryers – I’d have been a broke housewife with great hair – but it made me feel better because since childhood I’d been accustomed to losing what I had.
But despite having everything we wanted, Sonny and I never seemed to enjoy the fruits of our labours in the same way that our peers did.
We could only do what he wanted to do. We didn’t go out to dinner or to movies and he didn’t want me to see my old friends or go anywhere without him except shopping.
Nor did we go on vacation unless it was a day or two tagged on to the end of a gig. If I complained, he’d look at me like a disapproving father and tell me, ‘This is our time, Cher,’ which I understood.
Capitalising on our popularity he worked us constantly, with hardly a moment between gigs, recording sessions and interviews. But our sales dropped from millions of copies to tens of thousands when in 1966 Sonny felt compelled for some reason to release a statement condemning the use of marijuana, alienating our younger fans.
Even while we were going from city to city, trying to keep our careers alive, we moved into a beautiful new house in Bel-Air. Sold to us by Tony Curtis, it had a billiards room, panelled library and a huge swimming pool, but we couldn’t afford any furniture because Sonny had spent all our spare cash.
Much of it went on investing in two films – Good Times and Chastity. Both starred the two of us and would, he promised, ‘be like the Beatles films, only better’. But neither was a hit.
I loved that new house, but it also marked a distinct change in my relationship with Sonny. To help him finish off Chastity, he hired a ‘secretary’ to take dictation, a woman who happened to be young and blonde. That old chestnut.
In March 1969 I gave birth to our daughter Chastity and on the first night I was home from hospital I passed out on our bedroom floor. I woke in time to make it to the bathroom where I had a haemorrhage. I don’t know how long it was before Sonny came home and called the doctor who stemmed the bleeding and, looking back, I wonder where the hell he went on the night I came home with our baby.
Despite his not being there, I have to say that Sonny was supportive and concerned, maybe out of guilt for wherever the hell he’d been when I so needed him. But a few weeks after Chastity was born, he confessed that we owed a huge sum in back taxes.
‘We’re broke, Cher,’ he said. ‘We have to go back on the road.’
It had never occurred to me that Sonny didn’t know enough about finances and might not be the best man for the job. Now I learned that we were so hard up that he’d been borrowing money from our chauffeur.
When I started shaking with fear Sonny took me by the shoulders and said: ‘Just give me two years and I promise we’ll be bigger than ever.’
‘Okay, Son,’ I told him as bravely as I could, wiping my eyes. ‘Two years.’
To start the next phase of our career, we went back to London to appear on a TV show hosted by Tom Jones. He and I sang a duet and it was Sonny’s idea to storm on to the stage and forcibly drag me off as if he were angry with me for singing with another man, leaving Tom shrugging and perplexed.
It was all pre-rehearsed, but the irony was that Sonny’s act wasn’t that far from the truth.
Back home, Sonny put our house on the market and booked us into the only dates we could get, doing the supper-club circuit and performing in hotel and casino dinner theatres. Having played to thirty thousand screaming fans, now we were lucky if we had an audience of more than a hundred. At one show we had to play for four people.
A lot of the places were real dives and finally I got tired of people wishing they were somewhere else. At one late show a heckler in the audience yelled something which made me think: ‘Okay, man, f*** you.’
Whatever I said in reply must have been funny because people in the audience started laughing. Sonny just kind of took a step back, looking at me like, ‘Okay let’s see where you’re going.’ Then he joined in and we started to have fun between ourselves so it didn’t really matter what the audience thought, because we were just enjoying ourselves together.
We slowly developed an act that people would line up to see. They didn’t come for our singing; they wanted to hear our jokes.
Mostly I’d poke fun at Sonny and he’d fire back with retorts.
‘Hey, Cher,’ he’d say. ‘Do you remember when kids used to try to rip my clothes off and scream?’
‘Now they’d scream after you ripped your clothes off,’ I’d snap. Timing was everything.
After months of refining our act, our shows started selling out and in June 1971 everything changed when CBS offered us our own primetime TV slot. The ratings for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour went sky high, bringing in huge names like Muhammad Ali, Elton John, Tina Turner and Bob Hope among many others,
I got even busier when Sonny decided that in addition to preparing and filming a show each week we should also get back into recording new music and out on the road. The song Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves, from my album Cher, became my first-ever Top Ten hit as a solo artist and even earned my first Grammy nomination. But with something like 50 concerts under our belts by the end of that year, it took an enormous amount of time and effort to juggle performing, our TV show, and our private life.
One of them had to take a hit and in tomorrow’s Mail I’ll describe how our success led to the end of our marriage as Sonny’s controlling behaviour drove me to the verge of suicide.
I let my credit card do the talking in snooty shops
The only time Sonny allowed me out of the house alone was to go shopping. I loved being out on my own and went whenever I got the chance.
During one of these outings, I was walking near Rodeo Drive when I spotted in a shop window an amazing pantsuit with a psychedelic check pattern and a big red stripe down the front. Walking in, I said to the sales assistant, ‘Oh my God, I love that! Where does it come from?’
She took one look at me, said, ‘It’s very expensive, miss,’ and turned and walked away. I followed her and asked politely, ‘But who’s the designer?’
With a sigh she replied, ‘Rudi Gernreich.’
‘Could I try it on?’ She gave me a thin smile. ‘Miss, as I have already explained to you, that item is very expensive.’
She was so dismissive of me in my little crop top and bell-bottom pants that I lost patience.
‘How many colours does it come in?’ I asked. Looking at me askance, she replied, ‘Three.’
‘Great. I’ll take one in every shade.’
‘Oh . . . I see.’ I watched her expression shift. ‘Well, do you want to try them on?’
‘No. I’ll just take them,’ I replied, slapping my credit card on the counter.
The bill was more than I ever thought anyone could pay for anything, but it was worth it to see the look on that bitch’s face.
The night Tina turned to me…
Early in our relationship, our German shepherd puppy got under Sonny’s feet while he was cooking and yelped as he shoved it to one side with his foot.
‘Hey, Son, don’t do that!’ I said.
Before I knew it he had spun around and pushed me up against a wall. He didn’t yell and he didn’t hit me, but he had a hold of my shoulders and his face was clenched. I was so vehemently opposed to being manhandled, having seen my mother go through it, that I thought, ‘F*** this.’
Cher and Sonny Bono in the 1967 film Good Times, directed by William Friedkin
Staring into his eyes, I said, ‘Let me tell you something. If you ever touch me like this again, it’ll be the last time you ever see me.’
I wasn’t kidding, and he could see that I meant it.
Years later, one of the guests on my prime-time TV show, Cher, was Tina Turner, a breathtaking performer who appeared with her then-husband Ike.
Before we went on she came to my room asking if I had some cover-up. She had a bruise on her arm she didn’t want showing on camera.
She sat down while I looked for it and then quietly said, very straightforward, ‘Tell me how you left him.’
‘I just walked out and kept going,’ I told her.
When we were rehearsing onstage after, Tina and I were up on a riser and Ike was on the ground. As he played, he didn’t smile once; he just played the guitar without any emotion.
I just knew that whatever he was feeling wasn’t good.
Dali’s ocelot, an orgy and a very fishy toy
In the early days of our success we were staying at the fabled St Regis hotel on New York’s East 55th Street where we met up with Francis Ford Coppola, who we’d known since he was a budding filmmaker in LA.
There we bumped into the famous surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who invited us to a party that his wife and muse, Gala, was having in her suite.
We went as requested and Dalí received us graciously, wearing a velvet blazer and looking as weird as he always did.
His pet ocelot, Babou, lounged on a couch nearby.
Everyone was either beautiful or bizarre and all of them looked as if they were high. Several wore frilly black lace and carried silver-topped canes.
Feeling terribly square, I didn’t know what to do or say. I guess I did a good enough job pretending to be cool, because as we were leaving, Dalí declared, ‘You must come to dinner tomorrow night.’ It was a command, not a request. The next night Dalí greeted us in his studio, which was small and dimly lit and it was immediately apparent that an orgy had recently taken place.
An open door led to a large room where people were naked or in various states of undress.
One bra-less chick came out wearing a see-through blouse that might as well have been clingfilm.
Feeling something digging into my side I twisted in my seat and saw a strange object sticking out of the crack between the cushion and the chair.
Curious, I pulled it out to discover a gorgeous painted rubber fish.
I was even more entranced when I switched on the little remote-control gizmo attached to it and the fish’s tail swished rhythmically to and fro.
I assumed that it was a toy for the bathtub. ‘Oh my God, Salvador, this is beautiful!’
I said. ‘Yes,’ he replied, his smile crooked. ‘It’s lovely when you place it on your clitoris.’ I couldn’t drop that fish fast enough.
Accompanied by the bizarre orgy people, we then walked to a nearby restaurant, where we were joined by the Franco-American artist Ultra Violet, who was wearing a man’s shirt and tie with a velvet skirt.
She sat next to me and, saying nothing, repeatedly tapped my leg with her cane.
If she does that again, I thought, I’m going to smack her.
Less than ten minutes after we’d sat down, Dalí rose to announce, ‘I forgot, we have a previous engagement.’
With that, they all got up and moved to the next table a mere five feet away.
Apparently, they were over us.
We were so relieved that we could no longer hold it in and started screaming with laughter.
I’m sure Dalí thought we were all cretins, but by then we were beyond caring.
- Adapted from Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher (HarperCollins, £25), to be published November 19. © Cher 2024. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 23/11/2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.