Sonny Bono Isn't the Big Story of Cher's Memoir, Her Mother Jackie Jean Is

I wasn’t going to read Cher’s new memoir Cher: The Memoir Part One (part two comes next year), or at the very least I was going to wait until I could get the audiobook from the library. But, dear reader, I am one of those millennials with a needlepoint pillow in my living room that reads, “Mom, I am a rich man,” in many shades of pink, and it happens to sit on a chair right next to my bookshelf, which is lined with memoirs, celebrity and otherwise. So I put my writer pants on and I walked down to my local book store, purchased a copy, and I saved the receipt to add to the folder of receipts I give to my dad when it’s time to do my taxes.

The pillow that inspired my reading is a reference to a Cher quote. In a 1996 interview, she recalled a story in which her mother advised her, “One day you should settle down and marry a rich man;” Cher responded, “Mom, I am a rich man.” I bring it up here because the headlines I’ve seen about the memoir are all about Sonny Bono, Cher’s first husband. I understand why, of course—their relationship was legendary, and we probably wouldn’t have Cher as we know it now were it not for him. It’s hard for me to say that because I want the story of Cher to be that she emerged from the womb a self-made pop star, but the proof is in the ghost-written pudding, as it were. She was a semi-homeless teenager when she randomly met Bono in a diner one day, and the rest was a story of right place, right time.

But I’m more interested in the other layer of the pillow quote: it’s addressed to her mother.

Chapter one of the memoir is titled “Georgia on My Mind.” It opens with a description of a photograph that Cher’s mother, Georgia, held dear. The picture is of an infant Cher, or Cherilyn, in a crib at a Catholic home for wayward mothers and orphans. Cher was put there when her parents, Georgia and John Paul Sarkisian, couldn’t afford to support her. John Paul was long gone, run off looking for work after abandoning his wife and daughter in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a place they only ended up in because he’d been running from the law. Georgia, or Jackie Jean, had to work 12-hour shifts at the 24-hour diner to make ends meet in hopes of getting her baby back.

But Jackie Jean wasn’t a stranger to hard living. Her own father took her hitchhiking across the country when she was just a child, making her sing at radio stations and bars for cash, on a mission to make her the next Shirley Temple. When that dried up, she’d hang out at the movie theaters during the day while her father worked whatever blue-collar job he could find. When that dried up, he put her on a train with a name tag around her neck en route to her aunt in Arkansas.

“When I grow up, I will not live this way,” Cher tells us her mother told herself. But generational trauma can’t be willed away. Her mother and her mother’s mother were married off and pregnant when they were still teenagers. The legacy of the women in Cher’s family is one of struggling to function under misogyny and poverty.

After Cher’s biological father, Jackie Jean had a string of husbands, all with varying degrees of wealth and alcohol addiction. One of those, John Southall, Cher says she did and still does consider to be her father, even though he and her mother were only married for a handful of years before he disappeared just like the rest of them.

“It’s hard to make sense of, but getting a husband was the go-to thing for women of that generation,” Cher writes. “It seems like Mom never quite lost the feeling that there was safety in marriage. Women were second-class citizens back then, that was the way the world worked (and frankly, we’re still fighting for our rights). Whatever the reason, she kept seeking protection through marriage.” Whether or not Jackie Jean ever got the protection she sought, or for how long, is up for debate. But it made enough of an impact on Cher for her to know, like her mother did when she was young and singing for her supper, that she wanted to do things differently.

For all of her hustling and suffering, Jackie Jean never made it in Hollywood. She had a few bit parts in movies and TV shows, but nothing more. There were times in her life when she lived like a pauper, trying to get acting jobs, and leaving Cher with relatives. Everything Jackie did was in service of being a star, because that’s what she was taught she was good for from a young age. Cher tries to tell her mother’s story without bitterness, but how do you measure the effect of that kind of neglect over the years? One thing the memoir makes crystal clear is that Cher was alone for most of her childhood. “My solution during the scariest or saddest moments of my childhood was to retreat inside my head,” she writes. I don’t think Jackie had the luxury of spending time in her own head, imagining what her life could be.

Jackie never got the fame she so desperately craved, but her daughter did. As Cher tells it, the first time her family saw her singing for an audience, her Grandpa Roy leaned over to her mother and said, “That’s you up on that stage, Jackie Jean! It’s you!”