Ask Cher for her number, you won’t get it. Why? Well, the singer admittedly doesn’t know her own phone number.
She opened up to friend and former NBC News correspondent Harry Smith Nov. 20 during a conversation about her new book, “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” about her dyslexia and its impact on her life.
“I want to tell you something that’s really embarrassing, though,” she said. “I don’t know my address, and I don’t know my phone number.”
“But I don’t care!” she added. “If people want to find me, they will.”
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Throughout the course of her memoir, Cher explains she always knew something was wrong with her, and she especially struggled in school as a child.
It wasn’t until later in life that she got some answers about herself when her first kid, Chaz Bono, was diagnosed as dyslexic by specialists during childhood.
“When I read some of the literature they sent me about dyslexia, I thought, 'Oh s---. That’s me',” Cher writes in her book about the moment she found out about her child’s diagnosis.
She says she had “never even heard the word” until Chaz’s diagnosis. “But it explained so much.”
“It felt like an old mystery had finally been solved, left over from my childhood,” she adds, noting that “the difference was that there were systems in place to help” her child that “were never available” to her.
Cher told Smith she does have a creative solution in the event she ever needs to look up her phone number.
“I have my mobile. If I want to know what my phone number is, I just click to ‘Lucille Ball.’ That’s what my name is,” she revealed.
Ball has a special history with Cher. Cher recalls in her memoir attending an election results party, hosted by Jack Benny, in 1972 with the TV star.
Cher explains she didn’t want to be at the party and writes that “Lucille was clearly bored too, because as the votes started coming in she began making wisecracks about the ‘windbags’ giving commentary on what each update meant.”
She was taken by Ball’s antics.
“I had known her since I was little, but this night she got me in trouble. I couldn’t help but giggle at her commentary,” she writes.
“She was being so funny and irreverent. If you knew Lucy, she was a balls-to-the-wall kick-ass chick, not taking anything from anybody,” she adds.
Eventually, her giggles annoyed her then-husband, Sonny Bono, and party guest Johnny Carson.
Cher says that Carson “complained to Jack Benny’s wife about the disturbance,” and she was confident Ball would get in trouble.
“Then I realized that nobody was going to say a word to her because she’d have neutered them. Everyone was terrified of Lucy,” Cher writes. “I, however, was a different thing altogether. Like a naughty child, I was banished to the den.”
Not long after, Cher looked to Ball when she needed advice about how to leave Bono. She decided to give Ball a call since the “I Love Lucy” star had been in a similar situation and eventually divorced her TV co-star, Desi Arnaz.
“I told her, ‘Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you’re the only one I know that’s ever been in this same situation. What should I do?’ Lucy and her husband had also become famous working together as stars on TV. And he was a huge womanizer too. Then Lucy had left him. She told me, ‘F--- him, you’re the one with the talent,’” she writes.
Cher and Bono did eventually divorce in 1975, and she went on to marry Gregg Allman shortly thereafter. She and Allman welcomed a son together, Elijah Blue, in 1976 and divorced a few years later.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
