Five things we learned from the first part of Cher’s memoir

Cher started out as a backing vocalist in the sixties and sang on many of superproducer Phil Spector’s most famous records by the Ronettes, Crystals and Righteous Brothers, including You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. Spector and the “potty mouthed wiseass teenager” who always answered back hit it off, though Sonny warned her Spector “had eleven sides and you have to know them all”. Cher says of Spector, “his mood was 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 came flying out after him. As John ran past us he yelled, ‘I’m never going to work with that mad man again. He’s crazy!'” Spector asked Cher and Nilsson to sing a demo of a song called A Love Like Yours, then released it behind their backs as a duet single, Cher drove to Spector’s “dark and creepy” mansion to confront him.

“It felt like a haunted house. Phillip was standing next to a pool table. He started acting weird. He got excited and got a little smart on me like he was trying to scare me. He told me he could do whatever he wanted. Then he got a revolver. I was twirling it around his fingers and I said ‘You can’t pull that shit with me. You’ve known me since was sixteen!’” Spector apologized, trying to convince himself that the gun “probably wasn’t even loaded…but there was something about him that night that worried me.” It was the same mansion where Spector shot and killed 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 to talk to her, while openly cheating on her with a number of assistants, “dancers, 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, while performing 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 giddy 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 counted herself down, but returned to the balcony “five or six times” over subsequent nights until she had the epiphany: “I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.”