Alert – Cher: As I swore at the driver of a white convertible who had cut me up, I realised it was Warren Beatty. ‘Do you want to come to my place?’ he asked. I was 15…

From the day that I got my driving licence I had my Los Angeles version of freedom and at the age of 15 I was driving along Sunset Boulevard in my stepfather Gilbert’s Buick one night when a white Lincoln Convertible cut me off.

Pulling into the parking lot of the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy, I jumped out and yelled, ‘What the f***’s the matter with you? You almost hit me!’

The man was wearing big, black-framed sunglasses, but I could still tell that he was unbelievably handsome, with one of the sexiest smiles I’d ever seen. When he took off his glasses, I realised that it was Warren Beatty. He’d just been named the ‘New Star of the Year’ for his Golden Globe-nominated role in the hit movie Splendor In The Grass, in which he co-starred with the married actress Natalie Wood, who became his lover.

Ten years older than me, Warren was so drop-dead gorgeous I had to steady myself as he asked my name.

‘Cher,’ I replied.

‘Well, Cher, do you wanna get something to eat?’

I hesitated. It was close to my curfew, and I was already worried I’d be late but then I thought of how much of a fan my mother was, so I shrugged and said, ‘Sure.’

‘Do you want to come to my place for something?’

My knees almost buckled in the face of his charm and that smile — a devastating combination. ‘Okay.’

I followed his car to a beautiful house with an amazing pool in Beverly Hills. He showed me inside, fixed us some cheese and crackers, then leaned in and kissed me. Now, this is interesting, I thought as I kissed him back. The two of us went swimming, with me in Natalie Wood’s bathing suit, and we had a great time. Afterward I drove home in a happy daze at 4am and found Mom and Gilbert standing on the doorstep in their nightclothes, furious that I’d defied my curfew again.

Ten years older than me, Warren was so drop-dead gorgeous I had to steady myself as he asked my name, writes Cher

‘You will not go out again until you’re 21!’ my mother yelled before sending me to my room, but nothing could burst my bubble.

The following morning the telephone rang. It was Warren. ‘Let’s go to dinner,’ he said. I could hear his smile.

‘No,’ I told him as my mother strained to eavesdrop.

‘Then how about swimming?’ Laughing at his random suggestion, I didn’t want him to know how young I was or that I was grounded, so I told him, ‘My mother’s p****d with me for getting home late, so I’m not going any place.’

‘Let me talk to your mom,’ he laughed. I wish I had a photograph of the look on her face when she realised who she was speaking to. She literally melted in front of my eyes and when I arranged to meet him she was beside herself.

‘You have to tell me everything!’ she whispered as I went out the door.

Warren and I saw each other for two more dates and I enjoyed his company. But that was that. The last time he called, I was with my future husband Sonny.

‘Do you want to go to dinner?’ he asked.

‘Well, I have a boyfriend,’ I said.

‘Okay, do you want to go to lunch?’ It was so cute and so him.

Any other mother might have stopped me from meeting up with a man notorious for sleeping with almost every woman he encountered in Hollywood (and New York, and Paris, and London, and Kuala Lumpur). But my childhood was never normal.

Somewhere in the back of a drawer my mother hid a small black-and-white photograph of me that I’d never laid eyes on. She couldn’t bring herself to share it with me and broke down each time it was even mentioned.

Of all the millions of pictures taken of me over the years, that was the one I most desperately wanted to see but never did. To the day she died, the pain of the moment that picture was taken in 1947 was as raw as ever.

From what little I’d learned, the tiny square of celluloid depicted me as a baby clinging unhappily to the rails of my crib in a Catholic children’s home. I’d been placed there at the suggestion of my deadbeat father Johnnie Sarkisian, a smooth-talking Armenian heroin addict with a weakness for gambling.

He and my mother Jackie Jean met at a dance in LA towards the end of World War Two and she soon discovered that he was ‘Mr Wrong’ rather than the ‘Mr Right’ she’d hoped to meet after her unhappy childhood.

Her mother Lynda walked out on her father Roy, a drunk who was arrested more than 30 times for violence and drunkenness, when she was only five.

Cher in 1955… it was unsettling to move as often as we did, she writes… adding that she’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night after a nightmare and not know where she was

Even then, Jackie Jean had a singing voice so powerful it could have been that of a grown woman and Roy put her to work, swinging her up on to the counter of speakeasies during the Prohibition era to perform while he drank.

No matter how tired or hungry she was, and barefoot on the counter because she didn’t have shoes, she kept going until they’d collected enough for food and liquor. The stink of those bars remained with my mother forever.

Only six months after I was born on Monday, May 20, 1946, Johnnie came home one night and told her that he’d lost his father’s trucking business in a card game. Everything was gone.

He promised he’d find work in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania but after they’d checked into a cheap hotel, following a long bus journey there, the jobs he’d bragged about never materialised.

When they were down to a few cents — enough to buy me two bottles of milk — my mother told him that he had to do something. He said he’d hitchhike back to New York to borrow money from his sister and arranged for me to be put in the home run by nuns so that my mother could bring in a wage as a waitress while he was away but he never came back.

She’d come to visit me but was shocked when the nuns said she wasn’t even allowed to hold me. All they’d let her do was view me through a small window in a door.

After freeing me from the nuns, she made her way to LA where she eked out a living waiting tables and met a devastatingly handsome young drama student named Chris Alcaide.

She enrolled in the same drama school as him and had her classes at night while filming commercials for Hotpoint washing machines and peppermint chewing gum during the day.

My babysitters would drop me at the drama school in the evenings and I’d watch them rehearsing. Being the only kid there, I was made a big fuss of, and when I could no longer keep my eyes open, I’d curl up under my mother’s coat at the back of the theatre and fall asleep.

I memorised my first Shakespearean monologue at the drama school. At four, I didn’t have a clue about ancient prose or iambic pentameter. I just liked the rhythm of the words and the sounds they made and I surprised everyone by coming out with the Song of the Witches from Macbeth, which begins, ‘Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble…’

Nobody could believe that I could pick up something so complicated and repeat it. The skill has served me well my whole life.

My Mom and all the cast were so good at their performances that at four it felt real to me when she played Laurey in Oklahoma! and fellow student Michael Ansara, as the villain, Jud, attacked her. The moment Mom started screaming for help, I became so hysterical that I had to be taken outside. I only calmed down when Michael gently explained that it wasn’t real.

It was Michael who inadvertently caused Mom to leave her husband after months of fighting. Chris was a jealous type and when he spotted a tipsy Michael making a pass at her at a cocktail party he grabbed her and shook her until she thought her head would snap off. When they got home, their fight turned more violent. He pushed her up against a wall and closed his fingers around her throat. Her survival instincts kicked in and she cried, ‘What will happen to Cher if you kill me and go to jail?’ In his drunken angry state, it was only his fondness for me that made him stop.

Not long after she broke up with Chris she met the first true love of her life and husband number three, a struggling actor named E. J. ‘John’ Southall. Charming, handsome and penniless, the suntanned, sweet-talking Texan, was and is the only man I think of as my father.

After my sister Georganne — Gee as we’ve always called her — was born in September 1951, it was Daddy who saw my hurt at losing my treasured place as the only child.

‘I don’t see what’s so great about that new baby,’ he told me. ‘She doesn’t do anything but cry. That’s no fun. But I guess we’d better keep her for a while and see how she turns out. Now, why don’t you and I go get some ice cream?’

We were all really happy in that first year of Gee’s life, but Daddy’s drinking was becoming a problem. He would start what would become scary arguments with my mother, which sometimes turned violent.

I tried to distract him if he was headed into that stage, sitting on his lap or asking him to come into the yard with me, but if that didn’t stop him, I’d melt away and try to become invisible. Sitting quietly on my bed, I would become a nervous wreck listening to my parents screaming in the next room.

One night we were over at the home of the model Betty Martin, who’d been married to singer Dean Martin for eight years until he abandoned her along with their four children.

At the party Betty was hosting, Dad got it into his head that Mom was flirting with someone. Livid, he grabbed her by her hair and started to pull her outside, but when she fell off her heels, he kept dragging her across the tiled floor in front of everybody. Not one of the men intervened.

I was playing with Betty’s daughters, and we all came running downstairs to see what the commotion was, just in time to see five-foot-tall Betty march up to Daddy, poke him in the chest, and yell, ‘Hey! Nobody behaves like that in my house. Now get the hell out!’

Mom was visibly mortified, all the other men stood still, and I felt my face redden with shame. It was one thing for Daddy to behave like that at home, but to show himself like that in public was quite different.

When I was nine everything finally went south between my parents. One night, my Mom’s new boyfriend, Bill, was over and the four of us were watching TV when Daddy flew in and chased Bill outside, grabbing the butcher’s knife from the kitchen on the way. My mom thought he was going to kill us.

Storming out to Bill’s Cadillac he started stabbing at the convertible, slicing the roof and the interior leatherwork. In her haste to get Gee and I to safety over the garden fence, Mom ripped her toenail clean off.

Getting a husband was the go-to thing for women of that generation and Mom kept seeking protection through marriage. Even now, it’s hard to remember — was it seven or eight husbands in the end?

Gee and I got used to men passing through and our lives were a case of feast or famine, depending on whoever was around at the time.

One minute there were ants in the Rice Krispies and milk that had gone bad, the next we were living in a gigantic pink Beverly Hills mansion and eating lobster thanks to her short-lived marriage to real estate magnate Joseph Harper Collins in 1957.

At one point, she re-married my father and we moved to Vegas to live with relatives. I was just starting to settle into life there and being part of a large, loving family when the man who’d fathered me f****d everything up — like he always had.

Unbeknownst to any of us, he’d gone back to gambling and taking heroin and one night he was preparing his latest fix when he nodded off, setting the bed on fire. My sister and I were in our room when smoke started curling under the door.

Grabbing us, Mom called him every name under the sun for almost killing us but he was so stoned he couldn’t even respond. We left Vegas that night but, incredibly, she took him back again.

When cash was scarce we’d move to cheap apartments in the San Fernando Valley which is separated from LA by the Hollywood Hills. As soon as work was plentiful again, we’d leave the crummy apartments and hurry back to town to be closer to our friends and all the action.

It was unsettling to move as often as we did, and I’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night after a nightmare and not know where I was. Isn’t it ironic I chose a career in which I’d be on the road my whole life and never know what town I’d wake up in? I still wake up sometimes not knowing where I am.

When I was 14 we moved to New York following Mom’s marriage to banker Gilbert LaPiere. Just as Gee and I were settling into life in Manhattan, Mom decided she couldn’t face a second East Coast winter and had to return to the sun. We hadn’t even been in New York a year.

Back in LA, Gilbert bought her a shiny new Cadillac and a beautiful big house complete with manicured gardens, a swimming pool, and a view of the horses grazing on Clark Gable’s estate.

Although Mom was happier back in LA than she had been in New York, there were tensions building up in her marriage. She may have told herself she was content. But deep down, she wasn’t. She knew it, and eventually Gilbert began to realise that all he was doing to make his wife happy didn’t matter.

Tired of the ups and downs of her moods and desperate to get out on my own, I persuaded my long-suffering stepfather to rent me a furnished apartment in Beverly Hills with Josita, our 22-year-old German maid.

The deal was that we both had to get a job so we could put money toward the rent but, although I started working at a candy store in Beverly Hills I was burning the candle all night, dancing in the clubs around Sunset Boulevard. I eventually fell with hepatitis and had to quit.

As I gradually recovered, I started worrying about what I’d do next and where I’d go. ‘Jeez, Cher. What the hell is to become of you?’ I thought, but then, in November 1962, I was sitting in a coffee shop with some friends when an intriguing stranger with a Caesar-style haircut joined us in our booth.

His name was Sonny Bono and we were about to embark on the relationship which would change both of our lives forever.

Liza and Judy

On the night that my father attacked my mother at Betty Martin’s party, Betty made up a room for Mom and me so that we didn’t have to go home. I was always grateful to her for that.

The following morning, I hung out with her girls who were roughly my age and we visited another family living across the street. As we walked in their front door, I looked up and saw a small, pretty woman standing halfway up the stairs and carrying in her hand what I assumed was a glass of orange juice.

When she saw us in the doorway, she said, ‘What are you doing inside, girls? It’s a beautiful day. Go outside and play.’ She ushered her daughter, Liza, out with us. We did as we were told, and when we sat on the front steps Liza spontaneously burst into song with Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

I remember thinking that was strange, as I’d never been around a kid who just burst into song like that, even though she was pretty darn good. It was only later that I realised she was Liza Minnelli and that the woman on the stairs was Judy Garland. Now I realise she probably wasn’t drinking juice either.

Mission impossible

My solution during the scariest or saddest moments of my childhood was to retreat inside my head. I think a part of me has been doing that ever since. Such was my imagination that I decided I was an angel sent from God whose mission was to cure polio, an infectious disease that caused paralysis and could kill children who were the worst affected.

I was so obsessed with the idea that I was an angel sent to cure the disease that when Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was really p****d off.

Dirt poor

When my maternal grandmother Lynda was 12, her widowed mother sent her to live with relatives in Arkansas. That’s where she met my grandfather Roy Crouch, a baker’s assistant who’d fled an abusive childhood in Oklahoma to work in a café owned by his elder sister.

The second youngest of nine children, Roy didn’t get along with his mother, Laura Belle Greene, an imposing figure, almost six feet tall and part Cherokee. She had a fierce temper and beat her smart-mouthed son with a buggy whip. Despite that, I wish I’d known her, as she was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman who passed on her love of music to her children and, ultimately, to me.

Desperate to escape, Roy dreamed of becoming an outlaw like Jesse James but then he met Grandma Lynda and fell for the young farm girl with no life experience. After a moonlit swim together, she was pregnant and gave birth at the age of 13 to my mother, Jackie Jean, in 1926.

Lynda was too young to cope with a baby, and Roy, tired of her complaining, turned to other women and the illegal whisky known as ‘moonshine’ during the Prohibition years. When he was drunk, he sometimes beat her, continuing the cycle of violence that began when he was small.

After attacking the local sheriff, who tried to arrest him for bootlegging, Roy went on the run with Lynda and their baby, living the outlaw life he’d always dreamed of.

They could only find menial labour, and my mother’s earliest childhood memory is of being pulled over uneven ground on a burlap sack while her mom picked cotton, stopping every couple of hours to nurse her. A thumb-sucker, Jackie Jean was given one of the fluffy white bolls as a pacifier.

• Adapted from Cher: The Memoir, Part One by Cher (HarperCollins, £25), to be published 19 November. © Cher 2024. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 23/11/2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.