Cher always thought her real name was Cherilyn. Then he found out it was Cheryl.
The end.
The story could be summed up just like that, but the 78-year-old singer, actress and icon of all things fabulous devoted a little more time to it in her recently published book, “Cher: The Memoir, Part One.”
“I thought Cherilyn was my name until the day, years later, I decided to legally change my name to simply Cher,” E! Reported online.
That's when the “Believe” singer discovered that her mother Georgia Holt had inadvertently put “Cheryl” on her birth certificate. Holt had planned to combine Cheryl (inspired by Lana Turner's daughter's name) with his own mother's name, Lynda. Cherilyn.
In response to what Cher said was her surprise, her mother had an appropriate response: “Give me a break.”
As Page Six describes, Holt told her daughter, “I was just a teenager and I was in a lot of pain.”
Also, great thing. Luckily, Cher's new memoir just gets juicier. He delves into his relationships with Sonny Bono and Gregg Allman. As Page Six points out, she names Val Kilmer as the only man who left her.
Here are a trio of other little-known but much more interesting Cher facts:
- Cher's early childhood was tough. Her father abandoned the family shortly after she was born, and she was briefly placed in a home for children and unwed mothers, according to the Times' review of the memoir.
- Cher tells in the memoir how, when she was 15, she kissed 25-year-old actor Warren Beatty in her pool. He had borrowed Natalie Wood's swimsuit. Wood was Beatty's lover at the time and co-star of “Splendor in the Grass.”
- Another fact he revealed to “Today”: He once turned to comedy legend Lucille Ball for relationship advice. “I said, 'Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you're the only one I know who's been in this same situation. What should I do?'” Ball, in colorful language, advised her to leave the marriage.
