GEORGIA ON MY MIND: A ONE-OFF COLUMN ABOUT TWO ONE-OFFS

SOME MEMORIES OF A MOTHER AND A DAUGHTER NAMED CHER

(Above: Cher photographed by Richard Avedon. August 20, 1969. T-shirt and skirt by Patti Cappalli for Addenda. Boots by Herbert Levine.)

I like this late-chapter Cher who is doing publicity for Part One of her memoir. I watched the extended conversation she had with Harry Smith on CBS Sunday Morning and found her more relaxed and open than I had ever thought possible, or known her to be. When folks are lucky enough to reach 78, they can, if still healthy, either be more … well … folksy … or curdle into a kind of crotchety version of themselves. Cher certainly went through what could be described - I’m being crotchety here myself - an all-crotch time in her career not only enabled by designer Bob Mackie’s genius at engendering her natural sensuality and sex appeal by sending it up at the same time he was pointing it out so that it stayed just on this side of what one considers vulgar and made it more pop culturally PG than rock-n-roll and R-rated, but it was also enabled by her physical freedom and allure and oddly devastating beauty she never really destroyed like so many women do in Los Angeles with all the reconfiguration she’s put herself through. Based on this book and the person she is presenting to the public to tell us about it, I’d say the reconfiguration has been more than physical; it is an ironic manifestation of the mindfulness into which her always ready irony has morphed. She seems with this book finally to have evolved and faced more than her evolving face and invited us to join her. It is an evolution that age and grace can grant to those who are willing to welcome it. I think she’s surprised herself, and maybe even likes herself more for being able to spring such a surprise on such a self. At least, that’s what I am feeling from seeing her in these interviews after having spent a lot of time with her once 34 years ago in order to profile her. Back then, she seemed to be one big inhale, that kind of breathtaking one big intake of breath that swept up all in her path along with it. She breathed us all in. It’s the stifling part of being a star. But she’s exhaling now. And good for her. She’s always had - still got - the diaphragm of a diva but she seems to be , yes, breathing in new ways. The flare of her nostrils will always be surgically parenthetical but she’s removed the parentheses of stardom from her life. She’s unframed herself to frame it all in book form - more irony at the ready, more mindfulness.

I wrote that story on her for the cover of Vanity Fair and its November 1990 issue which she did not like at all. She especially hated all the "process" stuff as Tina Brown would call the business side of the entertainment industry that she liked to fold into an article which made us seem part of the world which we covered and which this profile of Cher had in it once I was put through a second and third draft and inserted it all. Cher disputed publicly the numbers cited from her contracts but I got them all from her manager at the time on background so the Vanity Fair legal department gave them the okay when it was vetted and, believe me, things like that were gone over with a fine-tooth comb.

I don't think she liked the tone of the piece either - she badmouthed me in an Oprah interview and said, if I recall correctly, that she threw the magazine across the room she was so mad about it - since even though I was for years the go-to gay guy for gay divas there at Vanity Fair for its cover stories - Madonna, Cher, Bette, Barbra, et al. - I never worshipped those women which was part of my cover-story-enabling ability fluttering about on the surface, my never being intimidated by fame, that combined with a deeper ability as a writer more in awe of sentences and setting scenes than I was of celebrities, scenesters. I loved melding with words as they emerged from me and settled into view (that emergence, that moment of melding, still sustains me sitting at this desk here in Paris) more than I did nodding knowingly at those who emerged from rooms at the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Wilshire, my two main home-away-froms during that certain sort of Hollywood heyday of my career, and settled into view themselves as they pretended as they preened not to like being publicly viewed behind such privileged privets of privacy. Hollywood was never my Valhalla but it was, I see now, the early ironic part of the pilgrimage where I now more mindfully dwell. I never melded with being a celebrity myself although I attained a performative intimacy with it. Lying on a bed with Cher on her tour bus while getting motion sickness and trying not to throw up on her while we made beaded necklaces together - a thing she was into at the time and invited me to join in, a knowing nod of a scene she was setting for me to use in the story - was part of the zen-like practice I began to develop that could surface once again in a cheap seat at a countertenor’s concert here in Paris the other night with a lozenge in my mouth as I focused on not allowing myself to cough. I always knew the lives I covered were not the life I was living until I finally began covering my own life as a memoirist and columnist, framing myself once I was free of putting a frame around fame. I am neither the lozenge nor the cough. I am the willed silence to which I then surrender in my now cheaper seat where I in this late chapter of my own life still pay witness. I am the counter to the tenor of myself. This is indeed now a pilgrimage, not a career, even as I continue to bead the necklace Cher handed me to help her bead from the other end of it before I excused myself to steady myself in her bus’s bathroom. I stared into Cher’s mirror. I remember thinking: I will not throw up. I will not. There was a willed surrender to the wondrous absurdity of the moment before I went back and lay next to Cher in bed. I witnessed the intimacy we each were performing for the other. I continued to feel sick but I would not give in to it because the scene had been set and sickness was not to be a part of it. I melded with the scene, not her. We beaded together instead. We beaded. I bead still.

(Above: Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, in the Paris episode of I Love Lucy. She and Lucy became good friends and backgammon buddies.)

(Above: Cher and Georgia.)

(Above: Cher and Georgia.)

There were other things that Cher didn’t like about that story. She made Herb Ritts, who took the photos, promise not to show her tattoos on the cover and yet Tina insisted not only we do so but highlighted them in the cover lines. She rightly hated the title which I had nothing to do with since there was an editor at Vanity Fair in charge of writing Heds and Deks. She didn’t like my questions about her plastic surgery nor did she appreciate my asking about Chas - not yet Chaz - at that point being a lesbian and how Cher as a mother responded to that. But she was most upset that I spoke to her own mother, Georgia Holt, after she told me through her publicist not to speak to her and then gave her a guest-star spot in the story’s narrative. They were not speaking at the time although they became close again and Cher writes a lot about her in the book and was very moving and frank and perceptive about her in the CBS Sunday Morning interview. Commanding me not to do something as a journalist however - giving me an edict - is all the reason I need actually to do it. The DO NOT ENTER sign is always read as WELCOME to those of us who write for magazines or newspapers - or at least ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. Because enter we do. So I found a way to contact Georgia through a mutual friend and she graciously agreed to meet with me and go on-the-record about her daughter.

This is what I wrote in the story when Georgia makes her entrances:

“Cher's new film, Mermaids, is a warped tribute to her mother, Georgia Holt, a perennially aspiring singer and actress in Hollywood who is frighteningly youthful-looking for a woman of sixty-three. Even though Cher bought her a white Mercedes three months ago, at the moment they are not speaking. ‘Every once in a while I miss my mother,’ says Cher, ‘but it's better for me right now for us not to talk. Because we weren't communicating, and it was starting to wear on me heavily.’ The character called Mrs. Flax in Mermaids is always in a state of flux; she moves her two daughters from town to town at the drop of a love affair. ‘My mother was Mrs. Flax,’ says Cher. ‘She dressed really provocatively. We lived with all women in our house, too. She had three best friends, and they were beautiful women. My God, these women were knockouts! It was sort of like me and my girlfriends, I guess.’

“‘When I saw Mermaids, I went, “Jesus Christ, is that the way I did with my children?” says Georgia Holt, smiling. ‘And Cher says, “Mother, do you know how many times you made us move?” But I was always trying to move us to a better place. And I also don't remember being, you know, a sex machine. Maybe I was. When I went in to get a part, my agent always told me to wet my lips and pad my bra, do the number, and that's what I did.’

“We are sitting in the St. James's Club in Los Angeles. With six husbands behind her, Holt is still extraordinarily beautiful. A beige sweater shows off a perfect figure beneath a beige linen coat. Her frosted hair is a palette of beiges. Though fairskinned, she looks remarkably like Cher. Or, more precisely, Cher now looks like Holt.

“Cher's father, a gambler and drug addict, abandoned the family when she was only a few months old, and Holt, unable to support a child, had to put her in a Catholic home. It took her months to save up the money to retrieve Cher. ‘That mother superior was a bitch to me. She wanted me to put Cher up for adoption. I would go over and look through this little window, and Cher would be standing at her crib crying. I didn't know how to buck authority then. But now, boy, I'm telling you, I'd go through that woman so fast she wouldn't know what hit her.

"‘I think the anger Cher has toward me now is that I was real beautiful and blonde,’ Holt says. ‘I won several beauty contests. And she was dark. Nobody ever thought she was my child. And then Georganne comes along, this little blonde, blue-eyed beauty. I think Cher felt she was the ugly duckling. She never believed she was pretty. Of course, I never believed I was, either. My mother was highly critical of me, and even to this day I can't own beauty. Maybe that's what it is with Cher. She can't own it, either.’

"‘We were lying on the floor one night watching a video of Giant," recalls Mark Patton, who acted with Cher in Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. ‘She turned to me during one of Elizabeth Taylor's scenes and whispered, “When did you first know?” I told her I was five when I knew I wanted to be an actor. I'll never forget her response. “I just wanted to be famous,” she said. “The first thing I did when I learned to write was to practice my autograph.”’

"‘I never knew that Cher was going to hit the heights she has until she and Sonny opened at my brother's club, the Purple Onion, on Sunset,’ Georgia Holt told me. ‘It reminded me of when I was getting my second divorce in Vegas. I was lonesome for Cher, so my mother brought her over. I bought her a little velvet dress and Mary Jane shoes—she couldn't have been more than four years old. Frankie Laine was real popular then, and I took her to one of his shows. We sat right at ringside, and Frankie Laine sang “Little Coquette” to her. And she just...well, you know when somebody lights up? That's what she did at my brother's club. It wasn't even the voice. There was just tremendous power. And some kind of shining quality.’”

Fade out.

Fade in.

Thirteen years later, I had just gotten back to New York after being in Paris where I was hanging out with another Paris named Hilton in order to write a cover story on her for ELLE. The phone rang on the land line I still used. “Hello,” came the voice on the other end when I picked it up. "Is the Kevin Sessums, the writer?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” I responded.

“This is Chastity Bono,” the voice said. “I have my grandmother on the extension,” Chas told me. “Grandmother, get on the phone.”

“Hello,” said Georgia. “How have you been, Kevin?”

I was still getting over the surprise of the phone call. “How did you get my number?” I asked.

“We called information,” said Chas. “You’re in the phone book. There’s only one you in all of Manhattan.”

Georgia laughed in that slightly hoarse way that she passed on to Cher, the notes lowing low there in her throat yet higher up you just knew she was feeling a bit lightheaded and her loveliness itself was lit up with a kind of naughty hauteur mixed with equal parts moxie and how-about-that-ness. Chas told me that the reason for the call was that Georgia wanted to write a memoir and she had asked Chas’s advice about who would be a the best writer to work with her on it and Chas had suggested me.

“You’re a writer,” I said to Chas. “Why don’t you write it with her?”

“I’m too close to it all,” said Chas.

“Have you run this by Cher?” I asked. “She hated that story.”

“That’s because you got her,” said Georgia. “You understood her.”

“Yes, you certainly did,” said Chas. “You didn’t fawn. You captured my mom, that’s why I told my grandmother you’d be the best writer to work with her on her own book.”

I was looking for some extra work at the time since my Vanity Fair days were winding down so agreed to read what Georgia had put down on paper so far if she faxed me some of the manuscript on which she’d been working and then I’d fly out to Palm Springs where she lived in a neighboring community to discuss it further. She had an agent headquartered in Dallas, a detail I found a bit odd but maybe it was savvy since it was pointedly removed from her daughter’s LA show biz orbit. I adored Georgia once I arrived in Palm Springs but the discussions convinced me that I wasn’t the right person to write the book with her. Many of the things she confided to me in those few days I’ll take to my grave when I hope to see her again as we float about and continue to dish while I attempt to get that lowing, low-throated laugh to erupt yet again from her, perhaps its syrupy, sensual lilt all that will be left once all that is left of me is the search for it and others like it that I helped conjure in all my conversations across a career and a life. There are worst conceptions of death than the longing to live within the echoes of earthly, earthy laughter.

I didn’t want to reject Georgia outright, however, so I came up with a plan for her to reject me. We had talked about her friendship with Lucille Ball and how much she loved the divinely dirty mouth that Lucy had on her - something to which Cher alludes in her CBS Sunday Morning interview. So I wrote an introduction to show her in which I had them - Lucy and Georgia - playing backgammon and carrying on a conversation I imagined them having laced with Lucy’s expletives. Georgia read it on a visit to my Palm Springs hotel room with ever-widening eyes as I sat on the bed watching her read it. “We can’t write this,” she said after finishing it.

“But didn’t you say Lucy talked like that?” I asked.

“Well, yes. It does sound like her. But we can’t write that,” she insisted.

“This is the conundrum of the book that publishers and editors are going to want from you, Georgia,” I said. “They are going t want you to dish about Lucy and especially about Cher and all the men in your life. But you’re too much of a lady to write that book. You are just too much of a lady, Georgia.”

At that, she gave me a rather unladylike look that she must have first come up with back in Arkansas where she was born, a kind of innocence-gone-sideways side-eye. Here’s an excerpt, in fact, from her entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas that explains her a bit: “Georgia Holt was born Jackie Jean Crouch on June 9, 1926, in Kensett (White County). She was born in poverty; her father, the teenage Roy Malloy Crouch, was a baker, and her mother, Lynda Inez Gulley, was reportedly thirteen years old at the time she gave birth. Crouch would later have a younger brother, Mickey. Her father taught her how to sing and play guitar during her early childhood. After her parents separated, Crouch moved back and forth between them, estimating that she attended seventeen different schools. When she was ten, she and her brother moved westward with their father, hitchhiking from town to town as he looked for work. Her father encouraged her singing, stopping at bars along the way, where she sang for nickels and dimes. The three settled in a rundown one-room dwelling in Los Angeles, California. The teenaged Crouch worked in a doughnut shop. She married John Sarkisian in 1946; they divorced a year later, remarried in 1965, and divorced again in 1966. Sarkisian was the father of her daughter Cherilyn, born on May 20, 1946.”

Georgia continued to assess me and the situation there in that Palm Springs hotel room. Her side-eye focused more fully on me. “Oh, I know what you want from me, Kevin,” she said. “You want me to talk about ….”

And then she said something about her days in Arkansas that made me actually fall off the bed onto the floor. It might still be the most shocked I’ve ever been in my life and it takes a lot to shock me. I’ll honor her memory and not write it here - “We can’t write that,” I hear her now saying - but I would like to tell Cher maybe someday about it. I’m not sure if she’d dislike me even more or, in spite of herself, give me one of the lowest lowing laughs she’s ever let rip.

“Maybe you’re right though,” said Georgia after shocking me. “Maybe now I’m too much of a lady to do this.”

And so we parted professional ways, but we kept in personal touch for a few years after that and, when I walked the Camino, Georgia contacted me to tell me that she was going to pray for me all along the way and wanted me to give her the dates of my pilgrimage there in Spain so she could mark them in her calendar to remind her to say those prayers. “I’m going to be walking it along with you,” she said. I also remember her telling me that she had a friend who did long distance psychic massages and she wanted her to send them to me as well along my route. She asked if I would give her permission to do so. I did, and then also sent along where I was going be specifically in Spain each day so the psychic masseuse could pinpoint her astral projections toward me and the subtle body that exists there within such a plane could reach me where I was. This whole column has been a subtle form of prayer in its way - all writing is really - as I reach out to Georgia on whatever plane where she now exists. She’s melding with these words, these sentences. I am still on the Camino in many ways as I now live my life as a pilgrim. She’s still walking along with me maybe.

“We can write that,” I hear her say, the lowing of her laughter here in this bead-like ellipsis …