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heard the news of Sonny Bono’s death—having spoken scathingly of him for years? Why have Cher and Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary Bono, gone from “sisters in sorrow” to bitter enemies? The breakup of Sonny & Cher, who left whom? And, who was having the most extramarital affairs at the time of their top-rated television show? What is the truth about Sonny Bono being on prescription drugs at the time of his fatal skiing accident? Exactly what plastic surgery has Cher had done to herself in a constant race against time and aging? What are Cher’s insecurities? What is behind the obsession with her looks? What was the reason behind Cher’s affair with openly gay record-company executive David Geffen? Did she hope she could make him go straight? In the 1980s, when Cher would have done anything to become a serious movie star, to what ends did she have to go? Which movie directors did Cherlove, and which ones did she hate? Is she a pain in the ass to work with? What drove Cher to appear in those dreadful infomercials in the 1990s, the ones that nearly ruined her career? Cher made her brilliant return to movies in 1999 in Tea With Mussolini . What was her big gripe with director Franco Zeffirelli? Was Cher’s eulogy at Sonny Bono’s funeral from her heart, or was it just a brilliant opportunity for her to gain publicity? What went into Cher’s un-“Believe”-able 1990s comeback? This biography will help to explain these mysteries, and the appeal of this one-of-a-kind pop icon.
    For Cher, the story of her life, and of her brilliant career, has just begun. She has experienced vast heights of achievement and lived through low points of creative inactivity, but through it all she has remained true to only one person, herself. She is a triumphant survivor in a cutthroat business. She is a clever woman who can be defined by only one word: Cher!

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    CHERILYN SARKISIAN
    About ten miles from the Mexican border and nearly a hundred miles east of San Diego lies the decidedly unglamorous little town of El Centro, California. The town is comprised of plain little houses made of stucco, nestled in the heat and dust of the desert—population 19,000. An unlikely spot for the birthplace of one of the most dazzling figures in show business, this is where Cherilyn Sarkisian was born, on May 20, 1946.
    The daughter of a teenager named Jackie Jean Crouch and her often absent husband John Sarkisian, Cherilyn was named after Lana Turner’s little girl Cheryl. Jackie Jean, who had aspirations of becoming an actress, later changed her name to Georgia Holt, and to date has been married eight times—three of those marriages were to Cher’s father. According to Cher, “Even though my mother was married a whole bunch of times, I don’t really remember very many times when there was a man in the house” (6).
    When Cher was born, her mother could not even afford to take care of her. There was no such thing as daycare for the babies of working mothers, so Cher was placed in an orphanage for several weeks until her mother could save up enough money to support a child. “Honey, I worked in an all-night diner from seven at night until seven in the morning for $3.00,” explained Holt. “I boarded Cher in a Catholic home at the time. I got a singing job in the Manilla Bar & Grill—a real dump—but in 1946 it paid $75.00 a week. That was a lot” (7).
    Georgia was later to reveal, “That mother superior was a bitch to me. She wanted me to put Cher up for adoption. I would go over and lookthrough this little window, and Cher would be standing at her crib crying. I didn’t know how to buck authority them. But now, boy, I’m telling you, I’d go through that woman so fast she wouldn’t know what hit her” (8).
    John Sarkisian was not around when Cher was a little girl; in fact, she doesn’t remember meeting him at all until she was eleven years old. “I hated him,” she later recalled of her first encounter with her father. Following a stint