Chapter One My First Memory I was four years old and living Laurel Canyon . I was a shy and introverted little girl, but sometimes I could be adventurous. My favorite game was hide-and-seek with Maria, the young Mexican girl who took care of me. We played in a little wooded area near my house. One day while I was hiding--I was a very good hider!--I suddenly realized that I was lost. No sign of Maria anywhere. It was late in the afternoon, and already starting to get dark and shadowy, especially for someone who's only knee-high. My little patch of trees looked to me like the forest in The Wizard of Oz , where Dorothy gets freaked out by the lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), and the trees had those huge, long, bony, fingery branches. I started calling, "Maria! Maria!" I wasn't crying yet, though, I was being brave, but I was really scared out of my little size-4 cotton underpants. It seemed like I was lost for days but it was probably more like half an hour--you can see that I was already becoming a little Drama Queen. That this is my first memory is pretty scary in itself. But there you go! My First Fear --or-- Sigmund, Have I got a (Four-Year-Old) Girl for you I hated to be left with a baby-sitter. One night my mother and stepfather were going out to a party (and what babes they were!). Out of nowhere, I threw this enormous tantrum. But when I think about it, it wasn't really a tantrum. I was genuinely heartbroken and terrified. I thought that if they went out that door, they would never come back, and I would be alone in this gray nothingness void for eternity. (You know ... something like Congress.) My poor parents--what a way to start a romantic evening. I cried and cried until I fell into a very small heap on the floor. Even while I was screaming, I thought to myself, What's the matter with you? Why are you going through all of this? This is silly . But I couldn't stop. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that at the tender age of four I'd already lost a couple of cards out of my original pack of fifty-two! My First Movie --or-- I'm Ready for My Close-up "Pluto"! When I turned four, my parents took me to see Dumbo , and I was never quite the same. We went into a huge palace called Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where there were young people dressed in Chinese costumes, waiting at the doors to take our tiny bits of paper and tear them in half. As we walked through the doors, I saw a sight that can only be described as nirvana: a colossal mountain of candy! But what was even more astounding was that the Chinese teenagers were just giving the candy away to anyone who walked up to them. My God, this movie thing is heaven ! Then one of the boys, who was carrying a flashlight, asked to look at our little piece of paper. He shined his flashlight at it and said, "Come this way" We went with him into the biggest room I'd ever seen. Up in the front, there was a stage so big that Godzilla could have tap-danced on it, with beautiful golden curtains. We sat in the dark. The huge golden curtains magically rose and the movie started! It was in color; I'd never seen color! It was huge, and there were all these characters scampering around. I was mesmerized. When the circus animals started singing and dancing, that was it for me. I was a goner. I didn't know it wasn't real. I was in the movie, right along with those elephants and crows. I want to do that , I thought. That was my first career ambition: to be a star in animated films. We were well into the movie when I realized I needed to go to the bathroom. At first I thought I could just hold it. Then I knew I couldn't, but I wasn't about to get up and go to the bathroom, because I didn't want to miss a second of Dumbo . I made a conscious decision: I just wasn't going to get up from my seat. So I peed in my pants. I gave up everything for my art! (Something I would come to regret in later years.) First Friends --or-- Cher, Why Do Your Little Playmates Have Stubble? I was a strange little girl. I was either really smiling or really morose. Sometimes I'd go off by myself just to sit in my room, and be private and quiet (of course I was only three and a half at the time). During the day, when I stayed at Mamaw's (one of my grandmothers) with no one to play with, I often lived in my head. I would sit under her lemon tree with my two invisible friends, Sam and Pete. They were both truck drivers, although Pete looked more like a lumberjack to me, with his black-and-red-checked shirt and hat with flappy things over the ears. We would pick the delicious cherry tomatoes growing on vines along a wall of Mamaw's house, and Sam and Pete and I would have tomato parties. And tea parties, too, with three cups and a real teapot, except my tea was lemonade. My friends and I would have long conversations about everything--what I liked, what I didn't like. I have to tell you that Sam and Pete were as real to me as Jimmy Stewart's Harvey was to him. Well, needless to say, my mother was bereft. Entirely freaked out. Here she had this beatnik toddler who talked to imaginary friends who were grown men with stubble. Though she didn't tell me then, she wanted to take me to see a psychiatrist. But Mamaw said, "Don't be ridiculous." My grandmother understood me: I was just terribly lonely The First Time My Mom Kicked Ass for Me I remember it like it happened week. It was a Saturday and I was sitting with my shaggy mutt, named Blackie, watching my mom get ready to go to work. She was playing Queen Anne of Austria in the play The Three Musketeers . She was getting ready to do a matinee. I remember how long it took her to pile her waistlength hair up in these elaborate curls, like Marie Antoinette. After she finished getting dressed, my mom let Blackie out to pee before putting him back inside for the afternoon. Living next door to us was a Swedish masseuse who was also the neighborhood busybody. She was an uglier meaner-looking version of King Kong, only much larger. She'd complain about Blackie running loose, even though my dog always stayed on our property. When my mom was ready to go, I walked out with her--just in time to see the masseuse calling Blackie into her house. My mom was furious and went next door to get my dog back. She asked nicely at first, but the Swedish woman blew her off, and a few minutes later a guy from the dog pound came around. Our neighbor had dropped the dime on Blackie! Since my dog had no tags, the guy couldn't release him to my mom; we'd have to go down to the pound later and retrieve him. I didn't know what they did at the pound, but I figured it was some kind of jail for dogs. My mom was so upset that it had to be something terrible. My mother went straight back up on our neighbor's porch and said, "If you ever do that to me again, Mrs. Bawl, I'm going to beat the hell out of you!" "You're going to do what ?" the Swedish woman said and shoved my mom, who fell down four cement steps, scraping her back along the way. My mother--my skinny little mother !--got back up and grabbed this bitch by her hair and started swinging her around like they do in wrestling matches. It was quite a sight--my mom was so frail looking, and she wasn't a brawler at all, but she had this huge masseuse by the head and was kicking the shit out of her. She was literally swinging this Hulk Hogan lookalike around the yard by her hair. "Go get her, Blondie!" yelled a man from across the street. The guy from the pound just stood there with his mouth hanging open. And I remember thinking, This is great! I'd never seen my mom act so fierce before. My mom was so cool. (I didn't use the word "cool" at the time, of course, but I knew it when I saw it, even at four.) When my mom finally ran out of steam, the masseuse was left on her knees, defeated and humiliated in front of the entire neighborhood. The one thing that ruined my mother's "Rocky" moment was the fact that she was late for the theater. She was also a mess, her face was sweaty and her makeup was running down her cheeks. As she rushed to the car, her Marie Antoinette curls flopping in her face, I remember thinking, Boy, Mom, I have a completely new respect for you . And Nurse Ratched never bothered any of us again. My First Television Epiphany My grandparents--we called them Mamaw and Pa--were the first ones to get a television. We would all sit together and watch boxing, baseball, Milton Berle. Boxers bored me--mostly I remember the Texaco commercial. A whole bunch of men in uniforms running around a gas station singing, "We are the men from Texaco, we serve from Maine to Mexico." One day there was no such thing as television, and the next day you had these little people running around inside this box. Amazing. When I was five, we got our own television, a maple console with a bigger screen than Mamaw and Pa's. Like everyone else in the house, I was so excited that I couldn't bear it, but I had to take a nap! The adrenaline was pumping through my little five-year-old veins, and there was no way I could sleep. I closed my eyes and pretended, but then my father came in and said, "I know you're not sleeping. C'mon, get up!" I walked into the living room, where the grown-ups were sitting, and that's when I saw One Million B.C . Reality was suspended. I became one with the prehistoric cast, completely absorbed, I just meshed into the screen with them. I fell out-of-my-mind in love with Victor Mature (what a hunk). That movie was all I could think about for days. My affinity for film was unnatural, even then. My First Memory of (Being Dark) in Darkest Mexico A trip down to Ensenada with my mother and her friends was a big deal. We'd stay in a cheap hotel on the beach, and there were always lots of kids around to play with. A real holiday. But I hated passing through Tijuana to get there. You'd see broken-down houses, and people drinking out of dirty washbasins--there was so much poverty, so blatant and in your face. Tijuana was Africa-poor. I felt powerless and awful. It just wrecked me. "Why doesn't somebody do something about this?" I asked my mother, a routine question for me. My mom was very much into helping people, one-on-one, even though we had almost nothing ourselves, but I never liked her answer. "This is just the way things are sometimes, Cher." Or, "It's such a big problem ..." All those stupid things grown-ups say when they can't figure out what to do. I also couldn't understand how tourists could stroll into the curio shops in Tijuana while people were out there starving on the streets, even children my age and younger. It got to the point where I'd just as soon dose my eyes till we passed through that town. I was maybe eight years old this one time when they stopped us at the border on our way back home. I always had a tan, and after three days in the sun and the ocean, I'd be black. The border guards decided that I was Mexican, and that my mom was trying to smuggle me into America. They took us into their office and started asking me these silly questions that no little girl would know the answers to: "What's the name of the baseball team in St. Louis?" "What is the capital of North Dakota?" "What was Babe Ruth's mother's maiden name?" Those idiot guards grilled us for about an hour. At first my mom was laughing, because it was so ridiculous, but then she got furious. I was getting pretty cranky my own damn self. I couldn't really understand why we were being harassed, but I figured that it had something to do with my looking different from my mother and little sister. They saw a dark person with two light people, and they weren't going for it. Finally they let us pass. My perfect English sank in, I guess. Plus I think they were intimidated by my mother, who could be a force to be reckoned with once you set her off, and she was pretty pissed by now. That day I learned that white/pale/blond/fair was better --or maybe just easier. My First Memory of My Sister One day my parents came back from the doctor's office with a surprise: My mom was pregnant. I didn't know what that meant, but the surprise was wonderful! We were going to get a baby from the Baby Store or from under a cabbage leaf , or the Stork , or the Gypsies ... (No, the Gypsies stole you if you were bad.) Oh hell, one was just going to fall out of heaven! (What bullshit anyway.) I was so longing for a baby sister; it was all I could think about. I remember being awakened in the middle of the night--it was time! I was taken to Mamaw's house while my mom went to the hospital. The first day she came home with my baby sister, Georganne, my mother was really nervous. My sister cried constantly, and nobody paid any attention to me at all. The baby, the baby, the baby ... I went into my little bedroom to take a nap, and my father came in and said, "I think I'll take a nap with you." We lay down, and he said, "You know, I don't know why everybody's making all the fuss. I don't think much of this new baby. What do you think?" "I don't know," I said. "I didn't get to see her that much--everybody's always running around her." "I know," my father said. "Let's go in and kidnap her." So we got up and took my sister out of her bassinet and brought her back onto my bed. She was making little scriggy faces and looking around. "You know, she doesn't really do anything," my father said. "But we'd better keep her till she grows some hair!" (That wound up taking years, but we got attached to her while we were waiting.) My father was really smart about things like that. I loved him, more than he could ever know. My First Memories of My Grandparents When my mother was at work, I usually stayed with one of my grandmothers, either Grandma Lynda or Mamaw. GRANDMA LYNDA AND GRANDPA CHARLIE Grandma Lynda, my mother's mother, would sometimes get embarrassed by my Grandpa Charlie, who was a sweet man but absolutely unsophisticated. Grandpa Charlie had grown up with twelve brothers and sisters in a log cabin in Placerita Canyon, eighty miles or so outside Los Angeles, where all the Westerns were filmed. He developed recipes for the Johnson Pie Company, and sometimes he'd bring his work home. "If you can eat it all, it's all yours," he once told me, setting down a chocolate cream pie. I ate the whole thing in one sitting and have never tasted anything like it since. Grandpa Charlie's father, who I called Papa Walker, still lived by himself in the cabin he'd built. He'd bought an expensive trailer, but he didn't like staying there, so he stored feed in it. Papa was a burly, red-cheeked outdoorsman who wore flannel shirts and one-piece long johns underneath. He'd feed the local deer, and when I came to visit I would watch them through the window of the cabin, just a few feet away. My grandmother told me that the cabin was Santa's house, and that these were his reindeer. One day I went out to Grandpa Charlie's backyard and saw one of my reindeer hung on a hook off a tree. My grandfather had grown up hunting for venison, and he'd gotten a yen for some. I was just completely and utterly appalled. Grandma Lynda tried to explain it to me, but I wasn't going for any of that "Now, Cher, all deer aren't Bambi" crap. MAMAW AND PA Mamaw was one of those mercurial Texans, like the little girl with the curl. She had a temper that she'd lose all the time with Pa, my grandfather, and then she'd be just fine. But she hardly ever lost her temper with me; she was wonderful with me and my sister, Georganne. Once she bought a broomstick and some clothesline rope and made me a trapeze in the backyard, hung off the limb of her lemon tree. In her sewing room she had a big tin button box, and I'd sit and play with it for hours on end, under her sewing machine. That box started my love affair with shiny things. Pa was the smartest man I ever knew, and the laziest. You could ask him about anything, and he'd know the answer, he was like a walking--well, maybe a sitting--encyclopedia. "Well, darlin' ...," he'd start, and then he'd tell you much more than you ever wanted to know about the question you'd just asked him, and a lot more than you could comprehend. When he was a young man, he invented a traffic light, using a vacuum-cleaner motor, an alarm clock, and red and green lightbulbs. He sold it for $75,000 back in Texas. Now he liked to sit in front of the television in a big stuffed chair and drink iced tea (with lemon--ugh!) and watch every baseball game that was playing in the universe. I was at their house one afternoon when he asked Mamaw to sew a piece of suede into an oblong pouch and fill it with dried beans. At first I thought she was making me moccasins, but then my grandfather took the suede pouch out to the garage (where he liked to tinker). When he came back in from the garage, he was carrying the pouch in his hand. He had put a tiny wire and two knobs into it. He ran the tiny wire from the pouch under the carpet to the back of the television. He placed the beanbag pouch on the arm of his overstuffed chair and then manipulated the dials in the pouch. I was amazed! He could change the channel and turn the volume up and down without touching the television. Pa had invented a remote control! He never sold it, though--he was just doing it for himself because he was too lazy to get up from that old stuffed chair. The First (of Many, Many) Times My Sister Got Me in Trouble Once Georganne wasn't so new anymore, everything settled down. I'd been pining for a Tiny Tears doll, but a real live sister was even better. "You have to help take care of the baby," my mom told me, "because now you're the big one, and I need your help." And from the time she was three months old, I had to watch my baby sister. Georganne was cute and blond, always laughing and giggling, and I had so much fun playing with her. But we still had the occasional catastrophe. Once I brought a bunch of my toys into the playpen for us, never thinking that she would wind up swallowing the tiny rubber wheels off my best blue car. When they found out, my mom was hysterical, and my dad was just pissed. I got sent to my room, but it was so over my head. (The baby did what ? And I was to blame for it ?) They called the doctor, and for the next couple of days they had to poke through my sister's diapers with a Popsicle stick, until they found the last damn wheel. It was rough going for me for a while. But it was just a small example of things to come. My First Protest/Walkout When I was in fourth grade, we had what was called a "sharing day" at my school. The other kids all brought in their favorite toy or flowers from their garden, or they talked about what they did in the summertime, or they read a poem. I was going to share something nice, too, but as one little kid after another got up and told some boring-ass story, it got to be too much for me. I couldn't bear all the Leave It to Beaver crap. When I got up to the front of the room to share, this is what I shared: "You guys are stupid, this school is stupid, and this sharing bullshit is stupid, so I'm going home." And I walked home, in the middle of the school day. When my grandmother asked me why I was home so early, I told her, and she fell on her ass, laughing. When my mom heard about it, she fell on her ass, too. My family rewarded that kind of independent behavior; they loved an individualist. Boy, if they'd only known what was ahead of them. The First Time I Realized That "Love Hurts" People drank pretty freely my parents' crowd , but it affected my father (technically, my stepfather) differently from everyone else. At first he'd be having a great time, and then he would go one drink too far. He'd stop laughing. He'd get belligerent and argumentative--he wasn't the same person at all. You'd just have to sit there and agree with everything he said and try to slip out of the room while he wasn't looking, if you could. My mother hated it when my father drank, because it threw everything into turmoil. Once she told me that he'd gotten jealous at a big party and dragged her across the floor. When they started arguing at home, I'd get sent to my room, but I could still hear the violent yelling. I just tried to be quiet and invisible in my bed. I hated those fights; they made me a nervous wreck at four. I knew my mother and father were crazy about each other, but they also tortured each other. They were young, jealous and immature; kind of like Sean and Madonna. They'd separate for months and then go back to each other. They split up for good when I was nine. I was so sad about it and missed my dad, but I knew we were better off without him. I'd already gotten the idea from my mom that men were these things that you loved against your will. He still visited my sister and me from time to time. But then he got a new wife named Jane and moved back to Texas. We didn't see him much after that. The strange thing is that I'm still very close to Jane. My First Ticket to Ride In my gang, I was the ringleader, I was always the one who'd say, "Let's go to the park." Or, "Let's put on a show." Or, "Let's go to Hornsby's Liquor Store," which was actually the convenience store where they'd give you a free ice cream, and a Coke in one of those old green bottles, on your birthday. I was also the only kid without a bicycle, but it never stopped me. I'd either borrow a bike or ride on someone's handlebars. But by the time I was eight years old, a bicycle was all I thought about. I wanted it more than anything; I also knew we couldn't afford it. We were so broke that Georganne and I had to stay at Mamaw's for six months while my mom lived in a rented garage apartment with an eight-dollar-a-month fold-up bed. On the day of my ninth birthday party, I was standing on my grandmother's porch, in my two-piece pink-and-white seersucker bathing suit, when my mom pulled up to the curb. At first she was blocked by the slope of the lawn, and I couldn't see what she was taking out of the car. Then I saw it, and my mouth dropped open. I was in total shock. I walked down to the most beautiful bicycle I'd ever seen in my life, and gaped at it--I couldn't believe it was really mine. It was maroon with gold pinstriping, and it had three speeds and narrow racing tires. It was the kind I'd only seen in magazines, much nicer than any of my friends' bikes. My mom told me later that she'd gotten it wholesale from a friend who owned an appliance store. I got on that bike in my bathing suit, and left my party; I didn't come back till after sunset. I just kept going and going and going. It was the first time I felt free. My First Run-In with the Yuban Can My mother was fabulous in a crisis, though after it was taken care of, she'd completely fall apart. When I was nine years old, I used to climb to the top of my swing set and then do flips off of it onto the ground. My sister kept her Crayolas in an old coffee can, and one day while she was coloring under the swings, I did a flip and came down on the coffee can. I was barefoot, and landed on the edge of the can with my full weight. My foot was just hanging there, and my toes were all backwards and they wouldn't do anything. I saw blood everywhere and started screaming--I must have been in shock. I knew it was bad, but I wasn't sure exactly what had happened. My mother ran from the house out to the backyard. She happened to have some dish towels in her hands. She wrapped my foot in the dish towels real tightly, and rushed me to the emergency room. The receptionist wanted her to fill out some forms, but my mom started yelling that she wanted me to see the doctor now . It was a Terms of Endearment kind of deal. The nurses laid me down on the table, and when the doctor (actually he was an intern) went, "Oh God!" I got really scared. I had cut my foot to the bone. The tendons were severed and had snapped all the way back to my knee joint, like rubber bands. They had to take these long hooks and go up underneath my skin to bring them back down so they could be sewn together again. When my mom saw that, she just fell to her knees on the floor. I was in a cast for the rest of the summer. Upon a follow-up visit, my regular doctor (who'd been on vacation when the accident happened) saw it and told my mother that the intern had sewn it up wrong and that I might never have the complete use of my foot. She was devastated, but told me that everything was fine. I did hobble around for quite some time after they took the cast off. However, in the end, my love of dancing was powerful enough to overcome my wanky left foot! Copyright © 1998 Isis Productions, Inc.. All rights reserved.
