77 Cher - The Memoir Part 1
I'm glad she's doing her memoir in two parts, when I started the year with Barbra Streisand's I thought it would never bloody end everything was relayed in such immense detail.
Cherilyn Sarkisian was born in 1946 to a glamorous young Jackie Jean Crouch and her recently met bad boy husband Armenian/American Johnny Sarkisian. The marriage was short lived, and he floated out of their lives when she was a mere baby. Her singer/model mother Jackie Jean later to become Georgia Holt clocked up another 6 or 7 marriages, I kind of lost count, including weirdly yet one more to Cher's father when Cher was about 11 at which time they moved closer to the Armenian side of the family in Texas when she recounts how happy she was to learn about their ethnicity and customs.. She has a lovely picture of her and her new baby with 3 previous generations of the matriarchs in her Armenian family. Cher's maternal side which she went into in some depth, were drawn from some of the impoverished of Arkansas, the poor subsistence level people who went west to California during The Depression to pick grapes and cotton. Cher's maternal grandmother was just 13 when she gave birth to Cher's mother. Cher's own growing up years, similar to her mother's were very much of a peripatetic nature, as a baby she was handed over to an orphanage in the care of nuns to enable her mother to work, and when her mother came to reclaim her the nuns wouldn't let her go as they deemed her mother, being single, therefore unfit. Eventually she got her back. Their fortunes as a family ebbed and flowed depending on who her mom married, her third husband who fathered Cher's much loved sister was a good father to them both and his parents were much loved grandparents. Sadly the marriage didn't last Cher changed schools umpteen times as they moved about. Eventually at 16 she was to hook up with Sonny who was some 10 years older, friends first before they morphed into a couple. They started their edge into showbiz courtesy of Phil Spector, Cher was very much part of "The Wall of Sound" that gave his recordings their special edge. Eventually, with Sonny and on the advice of MIck Jagger, "try London you're too weird for the US" so there they launched themselves via "I've Got You Babe" and the rest is kind of history. Initial highs, followed by big dips when their careers were in the doldrums and they were consigned to working dives in backwaters, before re-emerging to great success when they broke into tv with The Sonny and Cher Show. By that time their marriage was all but over, Cher after putting up with years of Sonny's control, he stitched her up contractually. Other relationships follow, including a marriage to Gregg Allman. She talks of her two children, Chastity by Sonny and Elijah with Gregg Allman and their childhood, lots of famous names cropping up.Remarkably she and Sonny emerged from their acrimony to become friends and even worked alongside each other after their divorce; The book finishes with a conversation with the director, Francis Ford Coppola an early friend now an Oscar winner for The Godfather, encouraging her to break into films given that's where she wanted her career to go. I'm not sure I'd bother with part 2, I think she covered all the interesting bits in this book, but maybe. I quite enjoyed it, when she first became famous I remember how much I loved her hair and eyeliner, there's loads of pics in the book from those days, but I'll commit them to memory as it belongs to the library.
A respected senior police officer who’s seen as a hero by the public, dies suddenly in the witness stand at the Old Bailey. A career criminal is immediately arrested and the evidence against him is mounting up. Adam Green is a young pupil solicitor assigned to the defence team, knowing the outcome will make or break his career. A third book’s due out in Spring - I’m looking forward to it already.