Cher (5 page)

I got the girls work on Ozzie’s show whenever I could. But I wasn’t a pushy stage mother. I did, however, push Cher into studying with Jeff Corey, the drama coach. And she was the youngest kid ever to qualify for the Pasadena Playhouse. But at the last minute she refused to join the group. I couldn’t force her to go because she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life (11).

Cher insists that she had a pretty clear picture of what she wanted to be when she grew up—a star. According to her, “I thought I was an angel from heaven sent to cure polio. When Dr. Salk did it, I was really pissed off. From the time I could talk, I began to sing. Singing just came from the inside—something I’d do without thinking whenever I felt good or was really blue” (17).

“I always knew that I was going to be somebody,” she continues.

When I was little, my mom and I used to go to Hollywood Boulevard and buy a couple of hot dogs and sit in our car watching the interesting people go by, and I guess I thought about it even then. I grew up thinking I wanted to be a movie star, because they were happy; they wore diamonds. That life would take me away from all that was real and ugly. I always felt really embarrassed about being poor, because I thought it was punishment for something I had done wrong (18).

She also recalls, “My mother once told me something that has stayed with me through thick and thin. ‘Honey, you’re not the prettiest or the most talented, so make the most of what you got.’ At the time, that hurt. I felt so ugly, while my sister was so beautiful, with this white-blond hair and green eyes, like my mom. Once we went to Mexico and they wouldn’t let me back over the border because they thought I was a Mexican and my mother was trying to sneak me in” (18).

Still, Cher did not give up her dreams of becoming famous; in fact, she practiced her signature until it befit a movie star. “I got my autograph together when I was twelve. I worked out the way I’d write it when I was famous. My mother always told me, ‘You have something, trust me!’ I had
no reason to believe her, but somehow I always did. Somehow, I always thought I’d become something fantastic” (19).

There were times when it didn’t look like her dreams were going to come true. “I was a mess,” proclaims Cher of her childhood self-image.

I knew I wanted to be famous, but I didn’t know what I could do. I would look in the mirror and see a not very distinguished-looking person. I wasn’t good looking. I wasn’t even cute. I wasn’t a Catholic, but I went to Catholic school and got A’s on all my catechism tests. I never could get behind the idea of penance, though. Once, when I was a kid, I said, ‘Mother so-and-so looks like Joe E. Brown.’ That nun beat the absolute shit out of me; beat me to a pulp and made me say the Rosary on my knees across the schoolyard. It was a killer, but I still believe in God and America, even if it’s bad for my image (20).

Georgia fondly recalls, “The girls always made me pretty little gifts of drawings. On Mother’s Day, they’d steal a rose from a neighbor’s garden and bring it to me on a tray with burned toast and runny eggs so I could have breakfast in bed. To this day, neither of them can cook” (11).

“I never expected Cher to do anything conventional,” she attests. “As a child, she was incredibly strong-willed and never wanted to fit in with the crowd. She didn’t kowtow to teachers or trends. Because she thought of herself as different she wanted to look different—she wore patent-leather shoes when teachers didn’t permit it or wild-colored glasses. But the outside is a mask. On the inside, she’s very conservative, straight, deeply emotional, and vulnerable,” says her mother (21).

Cher has also always been very outspoken. Recalling one incident that took place when she was ten years old, she explains,

At the school I was going to then, you were supposed to share something in class, you know, your feelings, stuff like that. And I got up and said, “This is shit. I really don’t enjoy it here, I really don’t like any of you.” And I walked out. I was ten. My grandmother kind of laughed. Eventually my family got used to the fact that I was a little bit strange. My mother invited that, because she thought it was much more interesting to be different. But she was never really comfortable with it, and I think she wanted me to be (22).

By 1957, rock and roll music was sweeping America, and the rest of the world. Ever since James Dean starred in the 1950s famed coming-of-age-film,
Rebel without a Cause
, he had young girls swooning for him. He
defined an attitude, a love of rock music, and a restlessness that teenagers in America seemed to share. It was the era of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley & His Comets, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. But for Cher, and millions of other rock and roll fans, there was only one “King of Rock and Roll.” According to Cher, “Well, Elvis was my first idol. I was a little bit young for it, but my mom took me to see him when I was 11, and the first time I ever saw him was on
Ed Sullivan
. Somehow, I really identified with him. Elvis was the beginning of rock & roll music for me” (23).

Looking back on this era, Cher was later to recall, “For me, Elvis was a singing James Dean, and I was very rebellious. When I was growing up in Southern California, the role models were Sandra Dee and Doris Day, and everyone but me was cute and perky and blond. I was dark and moody and strange looking” (24).

When she was in the fifth grade, Cher teamed up with four or five of her girlfriends, and they performed songs from the Broadway musical
Oklahoma!
Since none of the boys in her class was interested in such an activity, Cher ended up singing all of the boys’ songs—that Gordon MacRea performed in the show—plus “Pore Jud Is Daid” and “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” Cher and her girlfriends gave their concert performance of the musical in front of their class on the last day of the fifth grade. Cher recalls thinking to herself, “If we’d only had costumes” (25). Already she had Broadway aspirations. This was truly the product of a creative mind in the making.

As a young girl, she grew up in a quite liberal household. Cher recalls her first exposure to homosexuals. “I think I was 11 or 12 years old,” she says of her mother’s lesbian friends Shirley and Scotty.

We were at Shirley and Scotty’s house. Shirley and my mom were in the living room talking all girlie stuff, and Scotty and I were making a salad in the kitchen. I was thinking how cool Scotty was, because she was the only person who treated me like I was a human being. We could just talk. I think I knew she was a lesbian, and I definitely sensed something different about her. But I liked her a lot. She was so much fun. My mom had a lot of gay friends, and I kind of thought, “Oh well, that’s just the female counterpart” (26).

Georgia Holt specifically remembers Cher’s first date with a boy. “It was hysterical,” she claims. “I made her a new pink dress for a school dance and the boy brought a corsage. He was an ugly little fat boy, but
Cher was so excited she could hardly sit still when I did her hair” (11). Cher was thirteen years old at the time.

In the early 1960s, it wasn’t long before teenage Cher came in contact with sex and drugs. She recalls, “When I was fourteen, I took four Benzedrine and I was up for the entire weekend. Chewed the same piece of gum for three days. When I came down, I was a mess, and went to my mom. She said, ‘I hope you learned some kind of lesson from this.’ And I said, ‘I swear to God I have!’ And that was the first and the last time for me” (18).

Cher claims that her views on sex have changed very little from her school days.

I didn’t drink or do drugs or any of the things people would consider wild now. I wasn’t hopping into bed with everybody either. Of course, when I was fourteen, my girlfriends were all telling me how much fun sex was, and I could get away with it and that boys would respect me—as long as I didn’t go all the way. But I thought stopping short was ridiculous. I wanted to find out what it was all about, so I just did it, all at once, with this little Italian guy next door I was madly in love with. When we’d finished, I said, “Is this it?” He said, “Yeah!” And I said, “Well, you can go home” (18).

I still think sex is a dumb thing unless you love somebody. I mean, I see some of these magazines with naked guys standing around looking like real assholes and I wonder how any woman could get turned on. They all look like Ken dolls, you know? I would never make it with some guy I’d just met. The only thing that sees you through life is a relationship with someone, so to just fuck without feeling or love is stupid (18).

While growing up, she was never interested in academics.

I hated school because I didn’t fit into the right space. I kept thinking, “What’s the matter with all these people?” They try to cut off your edges and make you round so you fit in the round hole. I occupied some space in a couple of buildings but I was never a part of it. I was always thinking about something else. I was thinking about when I was grown-up and famous, where I’d want to live or who I’d go out with or what kind of dresses I would wear. All these little scenarios—I’d be sitting in classes thinking I was going to save people. Childish things that people think about when they’re children. I wasn’t into high school at all. I saw a lot of movies and idolized Audrey Hepburn. I also used to stand in my room and act out all the parts to
West Side Story
(27).

Cher’s fascination with Audrey Hepburn led her to want to be just like the character Holly Golightly, whom Hepburn portrayed in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. In fact, in 1961, the first time she saw that famous movie, she was awestruck by Hepburn’s performance. Up until that point, all of the female movie stars were statuesque blondes who were entirely different in look and manner from herself. When she saw Audrey up on the movie screen as the kooky brunette who had the ability to turn the lives of everyone around her upside down, young Cher had a new role model. She recalls running home and announcing to Georgia, “Oh, Mother, you’ve got to see this picture—I’ve just seen a girl who’s exactly like me” (25). Cher’s sense of doing whatever she feels like doing has helped to make her the real-life Holly Golightly of her generation. Sometimes fantasies do come true, and they certainly have come true in a big way for Cher.

For a while, in the early 1960s, Georgia and her daughters moved to New York City. Recalls Cher’s mother, “When she got into junior high, yes, I really started worrying about her. Because she wouldn’t date anybody her age. When we moved to New York City, she was 15, she was going with a trumpet player in Peggy Lee’s band who was 26—who thought she was 18. Yes, I worried about her—a lot” (28).

When they moved back to California, due to one of her mother’s financially advantageous marriages, Cher was able to attend Montclair Prep School in Van Nuys, which was considered quite affluent. One of her classmates, Terry Loeffler, recalls dating Cher in the tenth grade.

She was nice but not especially pretty. She had a pair of legs that would scare you, they were so skinny. We always used to kid her about her legs. She was a hippie then. She and Judy Branch were superpals, really tight together. I remember that Cher didn’t have a car, but Judy did. Cher was fun, kind of flighty. She wasn’t particularly popular. There was definitely not a million guys around her. I remember she got in trouble a lot. Mrs. Young, the dean of girls, hated her (13).

In May of 1962 Cher turned sixteen years old, and like all teenagers, she couldn’t wait to get her driver’s license. With her newly acquired license, one day she borrowed Gilbert La Piere’s Buick Skylark, for a drive to Hollywood from Encino. When she was in front of famed Schwab’s Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard a young man in a white Lincoln convertible cut her off and ran her into the drugstore parking lot. Freaked out by what he had done to Cher, the young man followed her vehicle into the parking lot to
apologize. He was wearing a pair of glasses, but even with them on, Cher recognized that he was none other than Warren Beatty. Cher asked him if he was nuts for driving so recklessly. He apologized profusely, and Cher nonchalantly asked him if he had a cigarette.

When he replied that he did not, he offered to go into a nearby gas station to get a pack of smokes. When he returned with the cigarettes, he asked her if she wanted to go up to his house to get something to eat. Since Warren was the first bona fide movie star that she had ever met, she accepted. He ended up serving her cheese and crackers and a Coke. Although she knew that Warren was dating Natalie Wood at the time, she had sex with him. When she came home at 2:00 a.m.—two hours past her parentally imposed curfew—Gilbert was waiting up for her and sent her immediately to bed.

The next morning, Cher told her mother about getting cut off on Sunset Boulevard by Warren Beatty, knowing that Georgia was a fan of Beatty’s movies at the time. Naturally she omitted the part about having sex with the young movie star. Not long afterward, Warren telephoned Cher’s mother in an attempt to get her out of trouble. According to Cher, Beatty charmed her mother into letting her off the hook. Warren seemed to like the fact that teenage Cher La Piere wasn’t awestruck at his movie star status, and on more than one occasion, she went back to his house to talk, hang out, and have sex. They were to remain friendly over the years.

She was later to state that she really liked him, but she was not in love with him. “That was before Sonny,” she was to explain in the 1990s.

Warren has probably been with everybody I know and unfortunately, I am one of them. But since I was only sixteen, maybe I can get out of it with that. I don’t know if I was a bimbo then, but I had a pretty low self-esteem, and I had never really been around men. I still don’t know anything about them. But you want to know what? I honestly don’t care what people think of who I choose to be with (8).