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young man followed her vehicle into the parking lot toapologize. He was wearing a pair of glasses, but even with them on, Cher recognized that he was none other than Warren Beatty. Cher asked him if he was nuts for driving so recklessly. He apologized profusely, and Cher nonchalantly asked him if he had a cigarette.
    When he replied that he did not, he offered to go into a nearby gas station to get a pack of smokes. When he returned with the cigarettes, he asked her if she wanted to go up to his house to get something to eat. Since Warren was the first bona fide movie star that she had ever met, she accepted. He ended up serving her cheese and crackers and a Coke. Although she knew that Warren was dating Natalie Wood at the time, she had sex with him. When she came home at 2:00 a.m.—two hours past her parentally imposed curfew—Gilbert was waiting up for her and sent her immediately to bed.
    The next morning, Cher told her mother about getting cut off on Sunset Boulevard by Warren Beatty, knowing that Georgia was a fan of Beatty’s movies at the time. Naturally she omitted the part about having sex with the young movie star. Not long afterward, Warren telephoned Cher’s mother in an attempt to get her out of trouble. According to Cher, Beatty charmed her mother into letting her off the hook. Warren seemed to like the fact that teenage Cher La Piere wasn’t awestruck at his movie star status, and on more than one occasion, she went back to his house to talk, hang out, and have sex. They were to remain friendly over the years.
    She was later to state that she really liked him, but she was not in love with him. “That was before Sonny,” she was to explain in the 1990s.
Warren has probably been with everybody I know and unfortunately, I am one of them. But since I was only sixteen, maybe I can get out of it with that. I don’t know if I was a bimbo then, but I had a pretty low self-esteem, and I had never really been around men. I still don’t know anything about them. But you want to know what? I honestly don’t care what people think of who I choose to be with (8).
    With her mother constantly working at one odd job or another, and an ever-changing array of father figures moving in and out of her life, Cher did not have an entirely stable home life to give her security. It was also at the age of sixteen that Cher decided to drop out of high school and go out into the world to discover for herself who she was. For Cher, this was the beginning of a wondrous new life, a life that would see all of her dreams of stardom turn into reality.

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    I GOT YOU BABE
    It was in early 1963 that Cher said “goodbye” to high school and left her mother’s house. While Georgia was a very well-manicured actress who was always beautifully made-up, her daughter Cher was on the decidedly unglamorous side. Charlie Greene and Brian Stone eventually became the managers of Sonny & Cher. Stone recalls of teenaged Cher, “She was a pimply-faced little kid” (29). According to Greene, she not only had a bad complexion, she had zero fashion sense, stringy hair, and was usually wearing worn-out blue jeans and a rumpled T-shirt.
    Admitted Cher, “I was poor when I grew up, and I couldn’t bear that—because I looked a certain way; before getting a chance to tell people what I had to say, they would know I was poor. I was ashamed that I was poor. I felt that somehow it was my fault. I didn’t understand it, but I figured it was something I was doing wrong” (30).
    Charlie Greene’s wife, Marci, recalls,
At the time, Cher didn’t know the first thing about being a girl, which was strange because her mother’s one of the most glamorous creatures I’ve ever seen. But Cher knew from nothing. I can’t blame her. Her background had been very, very poor. She had very long hair and she used to iron it. That was what she did. She had none of the basics. No clothes sense; no clothes. She never wore anything. She’d take the same jeans off the