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love with. When we’d finished, I said, “Is this it?” He said, “Yeah!” And I said, “Well, you can go home” (18).
I still think sex is a dumb thing unless you love somebody. I mean, I see some of these magazines with naked guys standing around looking like real assholes and I wonder how any woman could get turned on. They all look like Ken dolls, you know? I would never make it with some guy I’d just met. The only thing that sees you through life is a relationship with someone, so to just fuck without feeling or love is stupid (18).
    While growing up, she was never interested in academics.
I hated school because I didn’t fit into the right space. I kept thinking, “What’s the matter with all these people?” They try to cut off your edges and make you round so you fit in the round hole. I occupied some space in a couple of buildings but I was never a part of it. I was always thinking about something else. I was thinking about when I was grown-up and famous, where I’d want to live or who I’d go out with or what kind of dresses I would wear. All these little scenarios—I’d be sitting in classes thinking I was going to save people. Childish things that people think about when they’re children. I wasn’t into high school at all. I saw a lot of movies and idolized Audrey Hepburn. I also used to stand in my room and act out all the parts to West Side Story (27).
    Cher’s fascination with Audrey Hepburn led her to want to be just like the character Holly Golightly, whom Hepburn portrayed in Breakfast at Tiffany’s . In fact, in 1961, the first time she saw that famous movie, she was awestruck by Hepburn’s performance. Up until that point, all of the female movie stars were statuesque blondes who were entirely different in look and manner from herself. When she saw Audrey up on the movie screen as the kooky brunette who had the ability to turn the lives of everyone around her upside down, young Cher had a new role model. She recalls running home and announcing to Georgia, “Oh, Mother, you’ve got to see this picture—I’ve just seen a girl who’s exactly like me” (25). Cher’s sense of doing whatever she feels like doing has helped to make her the real-life Holly Golightly of her generation. Sometimes fantasies do come true, and they certainly have come true in a big way for Cher.
    For a while, in the early 1960s, Georgia and her daughters moved to New York City. Recalls Cher’s mother, “When she got into junior high, yes, I really started worrying about her. Because she wouldn’t date anybody her age. When we moved to New York City, she was 15, she was going with a trumpet player in Peggy Lee’s band who was 26—who thought she was 18. Yes, I worried about her—a lot” (28).
    When they moved back to California, due to one of her mother’s financially advantageous marriages, Cher was able to attend Montclair Prep School in Van Nuys, which was considered quite affluent. One of her classmates, Terry Loeffler, recalls dating Cher in the tenth grade.
She was nice but not especially pretty. She had a pair of legs that would scare you, they were so skinny. We always used to kid her about her legs. She was a hippie then. She and Judy Branch were superpals, really tight together. I remember that Cher didn’t have a car, but Judy did. Cher was fun, kind of flighty. She wasn’t particularly popular. There was definitely not a million guys around her. I remember she got in trouble a lot. Mrs. Young, the dean of girls, hated her (13).
    In May of 1962 Cher turned sixteen years old, and like all teenagers, she couldn’t wait to get her driver’s license. With her newly acquired license, one day she borrowed Gilbert La Piere’s Buick Skylark, for a drive to Hollywood from Encino. When she was in front of famed Schwab’s Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard a young man in a white Lincoln convertible cut her off and ran her into the drugstore parking lot. Freaked out by what he had done to Cher, the