Cher Read Online Free PDF Page B

comfortable with it, and I think she wanted me to be (22).
    By 1957, rock and roll music was sweeping America, and the rest of the world. Ever since James Dean starred in the 1950s famed coming-of-age-film, Rebel without a Cause , he had young girls swooning for him. Hedefined an attitude, a love of rock music, and a restlessness that teenagers in America seemed to share. It was the era of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley & His Comets, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. But for Cher, and millions of other rock and roll fans, there was only one “King of Rock and Roll.” According to Cher, “Well, Elvis was my first idol. I was a little bit young for it, but my mom took me to see him when I was 11, and the first time I ever saw him was on Ed Sullivan . Somehow, I really identified with him. Elvis was the beginning of rock & roll music for me” (23).
    Looking back on this era, Cher was later to recall, “For me, Elvis was a singing James Dean, and I was very rebellious. When I was growing up in Southern California, the role models were Sandra Dee and Doris Day, and everyone but me was cute and perky and blond. I was dark and moody and strange looking” (24).
    When she was in the fifth grade, Cher teamed up with four or five of her girlfriends, and they performed songs from the Broadway musical Oklahoma! Since none of the boys in her class was interested in such an activity, Cher ended up singing all of the boys’ songs—that Gordon MacRea performed in the show—plus “Pore Jud Is Daid” and “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” Cher and her girlfriends gave their concert performance of the musical in front of their class on the last day of the fifth grade. Cher recalls thinking to herself, “If we’d only had costumes” (25). Already she had Broadway aspirations. This was truly the product of a creative mind in the making.
    As a young girl, she grew up in a quite liberal household. Cher recalls her first exposure to homosexuals. “I think I was 11 or 12 years old,” she says of her mother’s lesbian friends Shirley and Scotty.
We were at Shirley and Scotty’s house. Shirley and my mom were in the living room talking all girlie stuff, and Scotty and I were making a salad in the kitchen. I was thinking how cool Scotty was, because she was the only person who treated me like I was a human being. We could just talk. I think I knew she was a lesbian, and I definitely sensed something different about her. But I liked her a lot. She was so much fun. My mom had a lot of gay friends, and I kind of thought, “Oh well, that’s just the female counterpart” (26).
    Georgia Holt specifically remembers Cher’s first date with a boy. “It was hysterical,” she claims. “I made her a new pink dress for a school dance and the boy brought a corsage. He was an ugly little fat boy, butCher was so excited she could hardly sit still when I did her hair” (11). Cher was thirteen years old at the time.
    In the early 1960s, it wasn’t long before teenage Cher came in contact with sex and drugs. She recalls, “When I was fourteen, I took four Benzedrine and I was up for the entire weekend. Chewed the same piece of gum for three days. When I came down, I was a mess, and went to my mom. She said, ‘I hope you learned some kind of lesson from this.’ And I said, ‘I swear to God I have!’ And that was the first and the last time for me” (18).
    Cher claims that her views on sex have changed very little from her school days.
I didn’t drink or do drugs or any of the things people would consider wild now. I wasn’t hopping into bed with everybody either. Of course, when I was fourteen, my girlfriends were all telling me how much fun sex was, and I could get away with it and that boys would respect me—as long as I didn’t go all the way. But I thought stopping short was ridiculous. I wanted to find out what it was all about, so I just did it, all at once, with this little Italian guy next door I was madly in