“and I said mom I am a rich man you know” — Cher
Cher was talking about her mother’s hopes that she’d settle down and marry a wealthy man when she recalled her reply. She told Pat Kenny the story on Kenny Live, broadcast on November 13, 1995.
Her mother, Georgia Holt, was born in poverty in Kensett, Arkansas, on June 9, 1926. Cher was born to Holt and John Paul Sarkisian in El Centro, California, on May 20, 1946. Recalling her childhood to Hoda Kotb in 2024, Cher said her father took the family to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and placed her in an orphanage while Holt worked at an all-night diner.
Cher’s own relationship with money and marriage became a business struggle. She was 16 when she met 27-year-old songwriter Sonny Bono at Aldo’s coffee shop in Los Angeles in late 1962. Around their 1974 split, she discovered that he owned 95 percent of Cher Enterprises. She told him, “I can’t be working for nothing.”
Holt’s marriages hadn’t brought lasting financial security either. In a 1987 interview she said the alcoholics and millionaires she’d married left her without money, and the last took back her 5-carat ring. At the 1988 Oscars, accepting her award for Moonstruck, Cher recalled Holt telling her, “I want you to be something.”
The 1995 exchange began with Cher discussing leaving London to try living in Ireland. Kenny suggested she was mellowing and that her mother would welcome it. Cher explained that Holt wanted her to settle down and marry money, and that’s when she recalled her answer.
Years later, she placed that private conversation at a time when she was “struggling to get a movie made.” She repeated the story to Jane Pauley on Dateline NBC in 1996 while promoting It’s a Man’s World. On June 17, 2019, Cher wrote that she’d answered “WITHOUT THINKING” and described the remark as being about “EQUALITY.” In a December 2020 interview she added, “It still has a meaning to me. I don’t need that; I am that.”
The 1996 interview resurfaced in September 2016. Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” video featured the framed version “Mom, I am a rich man” on June 17, 2019. November 13, 2026, marks 31 years since the Kenny Live broadcast.