CherThe origin story begins as anti-choice propaganda: In 1945, 19-year-old Jackie Jean Sarkisian, pregnant by a husband she barely knew, left her marriage after three months and returned home. She. There, Jackie Jean's mother, who had given birth to Jackie Jean when she was 13, demanded that she have an abortion.
“Cher: The Memoirs, Part One”
Years later, Jackie Jean described the experience: “I remember waiting in an old-fashioned chrome chair. The chrome was cold, but sweat was running down me, I was so scared. When they told me it was my turn, I went up to the table. But as I lay there, I knew I couldn't make it all the way, so I went down. Like Cher, in her eponym Dear: The Memoirs (Dey Street), remembers her mother saying to her, “Can you believe I almost didn't have you anymore?” »
But in Cher, nothing is simple, least of all the lives of women who try to exist within a system that is unfavorable to them. “She was at a terrible time in her young life, with only two roads to choose from, and neither was easy,” Cher writes of her mother's decision. “Confused and scared, she walked towards one road, then turned around and took the other. As a result, I survived and never questioned how close she was to not having me. It was his body, his life and his choice to make. Thank God she got off that table, otherwise I wouldn't be here writing these pages.
Cher's memoir, the first of a two-book project, written according to the New York Timeswith the help of three ghostwriters and a week-long visit from his publisher – spans from his mother's conception to a pivotal early 1980s conversation with his old friend, Francis Ford Coppola, which encourages Cher to really try acting. It's remarkably candid, full of intimate moments in the making of a star: here's Cher, 17, living at the Hollywood Studio Club in the early '60s; here she was, for the first time, performing in the nascent personal style that would define her character, after baggage handlers lost her trunks before a concert in San Francisco where she was opening for the Beach Boys.
There are also teenage encounters that the reader may question, such as the dates Cher went on Warren Beatty when he was 25 and she was 15; she later became good friends with him when they were dating David Geffen. (In 2022, a woman filed a lawsuit against Beatty, alleging that he sexually assaulted her when she was 14 and he was 35; a judge dismissed the suit, without prejudice.) His partnership of several Decades with Sonny Bono began when she moved in. with him at 16 and he was 27; she writes that they slept in her room in separate twin beds and that she earned her living by cooking and cleaning.
There are, as an adult, romantic relationships and love affairs with the “beautiful” Gregg Allman and, later, Gene. Simonswho was prone to exaggerated gestures like writing “I Love You Cher” above the Beverly Hills Hotel on her birthday, or renting an army tank filled with her favorite candy bar, Snickers.
But for Cher, who suffered three miscarriages by the age of 21, the first two requiring extensive medical care, one of the most enduring and hard-earned loves in her memoir was the one she had with the doctors who helped her reproduce. health care over the decades. His experiences in doctors' offices and hospitals, along with those of his mother, are a common thread.
After having Cher, Jackie Jean (who would later change her name to Georgia) also underwent two abortions, which Cher describes with compassion and simmering rage. Jackie Jean sought out the first while working as a waitress and living in a cheap hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, because “her life was spiraling out of control.” With the help of a restaurant regular, Jackie Jean sought help from a woman who secretly performed illegal abortions for $100 and found herself in such debilitating pain that she went straight to the home of a nurse and found herself bedridden for three weeks. . When she then asked her client what he would have done if she had died, he replied that he would have thrown her body into the river or risk going to prison. “Police breaking down the doors of clinics and private homes was as daily as their raids on brothels and casinos,” Cher writes. “Those caught helping women faced prison sentences (again, as is the case today) of three to five years on average and lost their license to practice if they had medical qualifications. »
Later, after Jackie Jean and Johnnie reunited and had another daughter together (Cher's sister, “Gee”), Johnnie, addicted to heroin, nearly burned down the house with the family inside while “preparing his last dose”. Jackie Jean took the girls and left. Pregnant again, “she had another illegal abortion and again it almost killed her,” an experience Cher remembers with terror.
Cher's thoughts and experiences with reproductive health care often highlight problems in her romantic relationships: at one point, while watching a TV show about abortion, Cher recalls casually commenting that women should have a choice. Bono snapped at her, silencing her. When describing the birth of her own first child, Chaz (whom Cher still calls “Chas”, with her permission, and as she explains in an author's note, it was “the name he used during the years covered in this book”), Cher recalls Bono's art direction shots of him smoking “looking pensive out the window”, while she panicked in her hospital bed. It is not from Bono that she seeks or receives comfort, but from “my wonderful gynecologist, Dr. Alfred Heldfond”, and from a Swedish nurse, Elizabeth, who has become Cher's closest friend. “I loved Elizabeth so much, even more when I later found out that her mother had died that day, but she still insisted on attending.”
Later, when Cher was pregnant with her youngest, Elijah, her first with then-partner Gregg Allman, Heldfond flew with her from Hawaii to California to ensure her medical safety and “agreed to deliver my baby as her last before retirement.”
Cher had already been pregnant with Allman once. The first time, she had just divorced Bono and they decided to get married. The morning after their Vegas wedding, Allman left for rehearsals and Cher remembers finding a plastic bag filled with white powder in his Dopp kit. “But I couldn’t wonder about it for too long,” Cher writes. “I still had to think about my pregnancy.” A doctor who, she wrote, had treated her through two miscarriages and one childbirth, discovered that she was suffering from ovarian cysts. “I can go ahead and take care of it,” he said. “I had known him for so long,” Cher writes, “I knew pretty much what he meant when he suggested it as a choice. I thought about how I had to stay in bed when I was pregnant with Chas and couldn't take a car for four months except for check-up appointments. I had to be at work on Monday. I needed to sing and dance. I had a child, a mother and a sister to take care of. I knew I had to make a choice and I knew what it was. It made it harder not having Gregory to talk to about it, but I made my decision and was very grateful for my doctor's compassion in giving me one.
