‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher

This is a very odd book. Where you’d expect to find an author’s photo inside the dust-jacket it just says: ‘Cher is a global icon.’ As for the ending – there isn’t one. It feels as though the publishers snatched the manuscript out of Cher’s hands almost mid-sentence, saying: ‘Keep the rest for Part Two.’ Still, it’s a breathlessly exciting story.

With 5,000 screaming fans at the airport, success had arrived. And Cher was still only 19

‘I mean, jeez, my family,’ Cher exclaims at one point, ‘you couldn’t make it up.’ Her mother Jackie Jean, a dazzling beauty from a dirt-poor Arkansas background, had been taught not to sleep with anyone before marriage. So, aged just 19, she married a smooth-talking Armenian, Johnnie Sarkisian, and Cher, née Cherilyn, was born on 20 May 1946. But Johnnie soon disappeared, leaving Jackie Jean penniless, and Cher was consigned to a Catholic children’s home. Jackie then married again – and again, and again. Cher says she can’t remember whether there were seven or eight husbands, but the one she called Dad was husband number three, who lasted from when she was four until she was nine and provided a rare patch of stability in her life. He also gave her a half-sister, Gee, and they ‘have a bond that has lasted our whole lives’.

But then Johnnie turned up again and said the reason he hadn’t been in touch was because he’d been in prison for heroin-dealing (‘Addiction doesn’t just run in my family, it gallops’) and Jackie Jean remarried him. They went to live with his Armenian family in Fresno, who were all thrilled to have their missing grandchild back. But Johnnie soon resumed his heroin and gambling addictions and also set their house on fire, so that was the end of him.