Having faced down poverty, illness, divorce,
and the ever-changing tastes of the public,
Cher continues to beat the odds, winning over
generation after generation of fans with her
unwavering dedication and endless talent.
From her early days to her recent struggles,
this is Cher's tragic real-life story.
Cher's parents, Georgia Holt and John Sarkisian,
had a short and tumultuous relationship that
ended in divorce when Cher was just ten months
old.
The singer would know little of her father
until Holt briefly reconciled with Sarkisian
when she was 11.
Cher's relationship with her father, a struggling
gambler and drug addict, was at times volatile,
and they rarely spoke.
Nevertheless, Cher took from her troubled
father a deep love and respect for her Armenian
heritage.
The man whom Cher would consider her real
father was Holt's third husband, actor John
Southall.
But even this marriage failed in the end,
and Holt and Southall divorced when Cher was
nine.
In fact, Holt married seven times in total.
In 1978, she told People magazine:
"In those days it wasn't right to sleep with
someone if you weren't married.
So I ended up getting married a lot."
"You have to know that Daddy drilled that
into my head, because Mother wasn't there,
he said, 'Don't you ever let a man touch you,
ever ever ever, unless you're married.'"
Holt's frequent divorces led to a nomadic
and often impoverished lifestyle for young
Cher.
An aspiring actress and singer, Holt subsisted
on bit parts in movies and the occasional
singing gig.
When Cher was only two years-old, circumstances
became so dire that Holt was forced to place
her daughter in the care of a Catholic orphanage
for several weeks until she could get on firmer
financial footing.
In a 2010 cover story, Cher told Vanity Fair
of her hardscrabble upbringing.
She recalled:
"I remember being really ashamed of my clothes.
I was so hard on my shoes...I remember going
to school with rubber bands around my shoes
to keep my soles on."
And Holt's occasional inroads to Hollywood
made for a sometimes confusing existence.
Cher explained:
"We ate a can of stew or a can of beans one
week, but then sometimes we lived in Beverly
Hills.
It was a very strange life."
In 1963, the 16-year-old Cher left home for
Los Angeles, where she met Salvatore "Sonny"
Bono, a 27-year-old songwriter and record
promoter.
Kicked out by her roommates, Cher moved in
with Bono, ostensibly in order to work as
a housekeeper.
Although Bono and Cher initially kept things
platonic, a relationship soon developed, both
personal and professional.
By 1965, Sonny and Cher had found success
with the release of their first hit song,
"I Got You Babe."
A gentle ode to young love against the odds,
the song struck a chord with '60s youth culture,
catapulting Sonny and Cher to international
fame.
Sonny and Cher followed "I Got You Babe" with
a string of hits, including a re-release of
their first single "Baby Don't Go" and 1967's
"The Beat Goes On."
Emboldened by their success, the duo attempted
to break into the movies with the 1967 comedy
Good Times, but the film was a critical and
commercial failure.
The couple then invested much of their accumulated
fortune into the film Chastity, a drama written
and produced by Bono as a starring vehicle
for Cher.
It too flopped, and brought the couple to
the brink of financial ruin.
Fate dealt Sonny and Cher yet another blow
as shifting tastes made their brand of light,
folky pop woefully unhip with youthful audiences,
who were turning to a heavier brand of psychedelic
music.
Now heavily in debt, Sonny and Cher headed
for Las Vegas, and reinvented themselves as
a nightclub act.
Ironically, Sonny and Cher's Vegas lounge
act became the key to their return to the
pop culture spotlight.
Their show relied in equal parts on music
and comedy, and opened the doors to considerable
TV success.
Premiering in 1971, The Sonny and Cher Comedy
Hour was a ratings hit, but by the following
year, cracks were beginning to show in their
relationship.
Although both Cher and Bono indulged in extramarital
affairs, Bono's constant womanizing took its
toll on Cher.
Speaking about her husband, Cher once explained:
"One woman, or even five, was not enough for
him."
Choosing to stay married for business reasons,
the couple struggled to maintain their public
facade while seeing other partners, some of
whom would live with them in their house.
In a diary entry dated August 21st 1973, Bono
wrote:
"My public wife is still Cher in order to
maintain all the things I want right now.
That's the way it has to be."
By 1974, the strain of maintaining a public
illusion of marital bliss had become unbearable,
and Bono finally separated from Cher.
In turn, Cher demanded a divorce, citing "involuntary
servitude" as the reason for the marriage's
dissolution.
Their divorce became final in 1975, and Cher,
who had always been content to allow Bono
to handle the business end of their careers,
walked away virtually penniless, and owing
her ex-husband millions of dollars.
Following her divorce from Bono, Cher attempted
to revive both her TV and music careers.
Her solo followup to The Sonny and Cher Comedy
Hour, titled Cher, was a hit, proving wrong
Bono himself, who had once told Cher:
"America will hate you and you won't have
a job."
Meanwhile, Bono's competing show The Sonny
Comedy Revue tanked after just one season.
Although Cher continued to captivate TV audiences,
her fortunes as a recording artist were dismal.
Her 1975 album Stars stalled at 153 on the
Billboard 200.
Her next album, 1976's I'd Rather Believe
in You, fared even worse, and failed to chart
at all.
Cher's next post-Sonny effort, 1977's Cherished,
also failed to chart.
Her subsequent album Two the Hard Way, which
was a collaboration with her new husband Gregg
Allman, was also a misfire.
The couple's clashing styles failed to excite
public interest among fans of either artist.
In 1978, Warner Brothers terminated Cher's
contract.
In the midst of her acrimonious divorce from
Sonny Bono, Cher entered into a whirlwind
romance with hard-partying Southern rocker
Gregg Allman, the vocalist for the Allman
Brothers Band.
Cher and Allman wed just three days after
Cher's 1975 divorce from Bono.
Only nine days later, Cher filed to dissolve
the marriage.
Having been sheltered from the notorious wild
side of the music business by Bono, the singer
was ill-prepared to deal with Allman's alcoholism
and heroin abuse.
In J. Randy Taraborrelli's biography Cher,
the singer explains that Allman was too impaired
to even understand that Cher was dumping him.
She said:
"He was so high he didn't even understand
me."
Allman, pledging to get clean and sober, reconciled
with Cher a month later.
However, Cher's decision to reunite with Sonny
Bono for a reboot of their successful variety
show in 1976 put further strain on the couple's
tumultuous relationship, leading to Allman
himself filing for divorce.
"People love to bring up that you were married
to Cher.
Are you tired of hearing about that?"
"Actually, she was married to me."
Allman relented when he learned that Cher
was pregnant with their son, Elijah Blue,
and the two remained married until calling
it quits for the last time in 1978.
In 2017, Allman lost his long battle with
liver cancer, passing away at 69.
Cher reacted via Twitter, stating:
"Words are impossible."
With her recording career in a tailspin.
Cher chose to focus on her acting.
In 1983, she was cast in a supporting role
opposite Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell in
Silkwood.
The film, based on the real-life story of
atomic energy whistleblower Karen Silkwood,
earned respectable box office returns and
critical praise for Cher, who won a Golden
Globe and earned an Academy Award nomination
for best supporting actress.
Cher followed her Silkwood success with critically
acclaimed dramatic roles in the films Mask
and Suspect.
But her greatest cinematic success would come
with the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck,
for which Cher nabbed the Oscar for best actress.
By the decade's close, Cher had successfully
returned to music with the 1989 hit "If I
Could Turn Back Time."
Yet, just as Cher was enjoying the greatest
successes of her career, fate would deal her
another blow, one that would temporarily sideline
her from both film and music.
While filming 1987's The Witches of Eastwick,
she discovered she had contracted Epstein-Barr
virus, although she wouldn't feel the full
brunt of the disease until some time later.
As she told The New York Times:
"For two years, I couldn't work.
It was terrible.
I ended the second year with pneumonia.
All these movie offers were coming in, but
I had to turn them all down.
I was really, really upset about it.
And when I came back, I had to work my way
back up from the beginning..."
By the 1980s, without Cher by his side, Sonny
Bono's career as an entertainer was over.
In 1988, Bono turned his attention to politics
in a successful bid for mayor of Palm Springs,
California.
Reinventing himself as a conservative politician,
Bono ran for Senate in 1992.
Although he lost, Bono was undeterred in his
ambition to hold national office.
In 1994, he was elected to Congress as a representative
of California's 44th district.
But Bono's new role as a star of the Republican
party would be cut tragically short.
While on vacation in Aspen in January 1998,
Bono died in a skiing accident.
Cher immediately flew from London to Los Angeles
when she learned of Bono's death.
In a tearful eulogy to her ex-husband, Cher
praised Bono for his intelligence and foresight.
She said:
"He was smart enough to take an introverted
16-year-old girl and a guy with a bad voice
and turn them into the most successful, beloved
couple of our generation.
He allowed himself to be the butt of our jokes,
but people don't realize he created Sonny
and Cher.
He knew what was right for us."
Cher's busy career left little time for her
to be a conventional mother to her children.
In a revealing 2014 interview with Entertainment
Tonight, Cher's youngest son Elijah Blue Allman
opened up about his troubled childhood.
He explained:
"When you go to boarding school at 7 years
old, it's kind of hard to feel like you're
not being shunned."
Although he's come to terms with his childhood,
he still holds some resentment toward his
mother.
Allman says:
"I'm at an age where I'm making peace with
it because you just have to.
But I still... it doesn't mean it's right.
It's still wrong to do that."
Allman and his wife, Marieangela King, briefly
moved in with Cher in 2013, but an undisclosed
dispute led to mother and son cutting contact
with one another.
Allman described his relationship with his
mother as a work in progress.
Allman says:
"We have our issues.
We've worked through a lot of them.
We've got some more to go, but when you're
an adult, you take on a different sort of
tone than when you're an adolescent...But,
there's unresolved stuff, for sure."
Despite their differences, however, Allman
says he still admires his mother.
He says:
"You know, she's really talented.
She's gorgeous, I mean, she's Cher.
What's not to love?"
Cher's marriage to Sonny Bono produced one
child: son Chaz Salvatore Bono.
Born Chastity Sun Bono, he underwent a two-year
female-to-male transition beginning in 2008.
Bono, then identifying as a woman, was outed
as a lesbian by a tabloid in 1990.
Despite Cher's reputation as gay icon, Bono
says that his famous mother initially struggled
to accept his sexuality and gender identity,
before eventually becoming an ardent advocate
for LGBTQ rights.
"I wanted her to be straight, get married,
have a child, get divorced, and live a normal
life.
Like everybody does."
Cher opened up on her acceptance of Bono's
transition in a 2018 interview with Pridesource.
The singer explained:
"I didn't go through it that easily.
There's such a fear of losing the child you
love, and what will replace that child...I
felt, who will this new person be?
Because I know who the person is now, but
who will the new person be and how will it
work and will I have lost somebody?"
Still, she knew her son's happiness must come
first.
Cher explained:
"It doesn't make any difference what anyone
else feels or what anyone else thinks.
Chaz is so happy now and we get along better
than ever."
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