Cher Spent a Surreal Evening with Jackie Kennedy When She Was 19 Years Old

Cher once spent a magical evening with Jacqueline Kennedy when she was 19 years old, the music icon writes in her new memoir.

Cher: The Memoir, Part One includes an anecdote from late 1965, when Cher and her then-husband, Sonny Bono, were invited to a “swanky New York society soirée” at the Waldorf Astoria Towers with the former first lady as the guest of honor. When the hosts, millionaire Charles Engelhard and his wife Jane, asked Kennedy who she would like to invite, “she shocked them by replying, ‘I’d really like it if Sonny and Cher would come and perform,’ ” Cher wrote.

Bono and Cher’s agent accepted the invitation, and they were allowed just one rehearsal with their band before their performance.

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When the group returned to the home later that evening, they found themselves performing for just 20 guests. “We’d never played a house before and were accustomed to arenas, not long living rooms with low ceilings,” Cher, now 78, wrote.

They were not invited to the dinner, although Cher noted she was “far too nervous about meeting the widow of JFK to eat, so I couldn’t have cared less.” Sonny and Cher were even ushered out the door after they finished their set, much to the disappointment of Kennedy, who wanted to talk with them over dessert.

Sonny and Cher returned to the party, where the men “adjourned to smoke cigars, and the women in the room stood up as one and walked out.” Cher followed the women to a “mammoth bedroom,” where she first had an odd encounter with an older woman who told her she had a “pointed head.”

Later, Cher finally sat on the bed alongside Kennedy, who was 36 at the time. Cher was the “youngest by far” at the party, at 19.

Kennedy “sat down next to me with such an elegant bearing that she reminded me of my mom,” Cher wrote. The “I Got You Babe” singer found herself “tongue-tied” and all she could ask was how Kennedy’s children Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. were doing two years after their father’s assassination.

“They are very well, thank you,” Kennedy told Cher, she wrote. “‘I Got You Babe’ is one of our favorite songs, and the children love to sing along.”

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“She was so sweet and kind,” Cher wrote of Kennedy, who died in 1994 at 64. “When we went back into the dining room, Jackie sat us immediately to her left and was great at putting us at ease. Sonny gave her something for the children, two little Catholic saint medals, which as a woman of faith she appreciated. She told him that he looked ‘almost Shakespearean’ with his pageboy haircut, and from that moment on he was like putty in her hands. Well, I think he was putty before, but that only helped.”

Cher: The Memoir, Part One was released on Nov. 19. The second part is expected later this year.