Cher started out as a backing vocalist in the Sixties, singing on many of super producer Phil Spector’s most famous records by the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Righteous Brothers, including You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. Spector and the “potty mouthed wiseass teenager” who always answered back hit it off, although Sonny warned her Spector “had eleven sides and you have to know all of them”. Cher says of Spector, “his moods were mercurial. You could joke with him until you couldn’t.”
A decade later, Cher and Harry Nilsson arrived at A&M studios to sing backing vocals for John Lennon. “We heard a crash. Then John came storming out really angry as a chair sailed out after him. As John ran past us, he yelled, ‘I’m never gonna work with that madman again. He’s f—ing nuts!’” Spector asked Cher and Nilsson to sing a demo on a song called A Love Like Yours, then released it behind their backs as a duet single. Cher drove to Spector’s “dark and spooky” mansion to confront him.
“It felt like a haunted house. Phillip was standing next to a pool table. He started to act weird. He became agitated and got kind of smart with me, like he was trying to intimidate me. He told me he could do whatever he wanted. Then he picked up a revolver. Staring at him as he twirled it around his fingers, I said ‘You can’t pull that shit with me, you asshole. You’ve known me since I was sixteen!’” Spector apologised. Cher left and tried to convince herself that the gun “probably wasn’t even loaded… but there was something about him that night that troubled me.” It was the same mansion where Spector shot and murdered Lana Clarkson in 2003.
She contemplated suicide at the height of her success
Sonny was so insanely jealous of Cher that he forbade their band and crew from talking to her, whilst he was flagrantly unfaithful with a succession of assistants, “dancer, actresses, waitresses, even hookers… I couldn’t imagine where he found the time!” He kept her under such tight control that when she started taking tennis lessons, he made a bonfire of her equipment. He secretly rewrote contracts, so that Cher became his unpaid employee.
In 1972, whilst appearing together in a residency at the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas, she says “I stepped barefoot onto the balcony of our suite and stared down. I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear. For a few crazy minutes, I couldn’t imagine any other option.” She talked herself down, but returned to the balcony “five or six times” over succeeding nights, until she had the revelation, “I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.”
