Even after decades of an endlessly turbulent private life, Cher is not a superstar who seems plagued by self-doubt.
‘I’ve Always Taken Chances… It’s WHO I Am,’ she exclaimed bluntly on social media just over a year ago as fans fretted over her decision to start a relationship with 36-year-old music producer Alexander Edwards, 40 years her junior.
And the 77-year-old singer and actress has certainly taken another chance now with another man. Only this time Elijah Blue Allman is her 47-year-old son.
Cher has filed in Los Angeles Superior Court to become sole conservator of Allman, her son by second husband musician Greg Allman, due to his alleged substance abuse and mental health issues.
According to legal papers, she believes he cannot properly take care of himself or ‘manage his own financial resources’.
Cher has filed in Los Angeles Superior Court to become sole conservator of her 47-year-old Elijah Blue Allman, her son by second husband musician Greg Allman
Cher and Elijah Blue Allman during Filmex ’77 at Century Plaza in Los Angeles
She claims she hasn’t been able to ‘discuss Elijah’s preferences concerning the appointment of a temporary conservator’ because his ‘mental and physical health issues’ render him ‘unable to form or express a preference’.
Any money he gets, she adds, ‘will immediately be spent on drugs, leaving Elijah with no assets to provide for himself, and putting Elijah’s life at risk’.
A court-ordered conservatorship — potentially giving her control not only of the purse strings but many decisions in his personal life — is ‘urgently needed’.
Cher also revealed that Elijah owns no property of his own but makes $120,000 a year from a trust fund set up by his father.
Cher is a master of career reinvention but her image as a hovering, protective mother is certainly quite a transformation from what her children have previously said about her maternal instincts.
Her transgender son Chaz, by allegedly abusive first husband Sonny Bono, once bleakly observed: ‘My mum did not comfort me with kisses and cuddles. It was not the family way.’
Elijah, meanwhile, told the Daily Mail in 2014 that parental support during his serious health issues was ‘not one of her strong suits’.
Yet she is certainly taking a significant risk by filing for conservatorship of an adult child given the stink that ensued when Britney Spears’s father did the same.
Cher also revealed that Elijah owns no property of his own but makes $120,000 a year from a trust fund set up by his father. Pictured: Elijah backstage at Solid Gold in 1984
Under California law, Jamie Spears was able to assume almost complete control over the personal life, career and $60 million of his troubled pop star daughter for nearly 14 years after convincing a court she couldn’t cope.
A judge ended the arrangement in November 2021 after an outcry from her fans and Britney telling a court that under the ‘abusive’ arrangement she’d been drugged, forced to perform and even prevented from having children
Unlike the widely vilified Jamie Spears, Cher at least cannot be accused of naked self-interest and of stealing her offspring’s hard-earned fortune, accusations Spears denies.
However, the enormous power of the conservatorship system was exposed in the Spears case and critics claimed that, whatever Britney’s problems, they didn’t justify the loss of liberty that it entailed.
By her own admission, Cher may not have showered her children with conventional maternal doting as she battled to maintain one of the most enduringly successful careers in showbusiness, but the tough love of a conservatorship would be entirely in keeping with her take-no-prisoners reputation.
Three months ago, she was accused of hiring four men to ‘kidnap’ Elijah from a New York hotel room in November 2022 in a bid to get him help for his addiction.
Cher dismissed the kidnap claim as a ‘rumour’, adding that she wouldn’t admit it if she had ordered one. She said: ‘I’m a mother. This is my job, one way or another, to try to help my children.’
Cher and Greg Allman with their 10-week-old baby son Elijah Blue Allman in Los Angeles
She appears particularly determined to keep her son away from his British wife Marieangela (Angie) King, 36. They wed in 2013 but broke up in 2021 when Elijah filed for divorce citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.
King was born in India to British and German parents, and is reportedly a cousin of ex-Chancellor George Osborne.
Cher’s legal filing says that King, who met Elijah on a blind date, cannot be his conservator because ‘their tumultuous relationship has been marked by a cycle of drug addiction and mental health crises’ and that King ‘is not supportive of Elijah’s recovery’.
King and Elijah remain legally married. In October, she made a court filing saying they’d agreed to pause their divorce proceedings but she hadn’t seen him in six months. King complained at the time that his mother was ‘interfering’ with Elijah’s health care.
While Britney Spears’s vehement opposition to her conservatorship only gradually emerged over years, Elijah has already been posting on Instagram of ‘imprisonment via conservatorship’.
In a comment via his lawyer, he declined to say whether he intended to oppose his mother’s petition at a hearing scheduled for next month.
He’s previously made no secret of his instinctive rebelliousness and difficult relationship with Cher. He and King eloped ten years ago after his mother cold-shouldered their engagement.
Elijah Blue Allman poses with his wife, Angie King, around his Beverly Hills home
He later told the Mail: ‘I’ve always been the black sheep of my family. The reason being we just have different value systems and we just have a different mentality and that clashes a lot.’
He said that after starting his own hardcore rock band, Deadsy, with school friends in the mid-1990s, he and his mother didn’t talk to each other for several years.
Cher divorced Elijah’s father in 1979 — just four years after they married — because she couldn’t cope with his heroin addiction.
The singer of the Allman Brothers Band died in 2017 from liver cancer having been almost completely absent from Elijah’s childhood.
Cher’s determination to keep her children away from drugs failed dismally. Her older son, Chaz Bono, has also struggled with drug abuse.
Elijah, who said he grew up relying on some of his mother’s famous boyfriends — such as Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise — for father figures, claims he started taking cannabis aged 11, buying drugs in Harlem when he returned at weekends to his mother’s Manhattan home from boarding school.
Recounting a familiar tale of tormented Hollywood offspring, he told the Mail that his mother’s ‘superstardom’ deserved much of the blame for their family problems, leaving her children in the shade and making Cher prioritise earning money.
He added: ‘I think that’s too big for anyone (famous) to escape.’
He was sent to boarding school aged seven, a decision that left him feeling his mother had ‘shunned’ him, and said she once ‘punished’ him for misbehaving at school by sending him for a year to a strict military academy.
Cher’s older son, Chaz Bono, has also struggled with drug abuse. Pictured: Cher, Chaz and Elijah in 1981
In later life, he was romantically linked with socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, and actresses Heather Graham and Kate Hudson.
He said his drug problem worsened when he started touring with his band, claiming: ‘I was smoking dope (heroin), taking a lot of pills, any painkiller we could get and drinking.’
Asked whether Cher had been a good mother, he said: ‘She’s had her moments and I know she’s tried . . . I know it’s a real regret, a real thing that for sure haunts her.’
Cher has acknowledged that her children ‘paid’ for her fame, telling Vanity Fair in 2010: ‘I did the best I could do, and yet it was definitely lacking.’
In the same interview, she also acknowledged the extent to which drug abuse had overshadowed her family, saying: ‘It’s weird, because both of my children had the same drug problems as their fathers — same drug of choice.
‘My father was a heroin addict, and my sister’s father was an alcoholic. But it jumped us.’
Not that she shunned drugs for ‘moral issues’, she stressed. ‘I tried a couple of drugs, but I never felt good out of control. I have the constitution of a fruit fly.’
Cher has never flinched from avoiding men who are trouble. She now has a challenge on her hands that won’t be so easily dispensed with as a difficult boyfriend.