Cher Recalls ‘Fiasco’ Performance in Front of Princess Margaret in Her New Memoir: ‘I Was Mortified’

When Princess Margaret asks you to perform, you don’t say no.

That was Cher’s philosophy, anyway — and the iconic entertainer tells the story of the “fiasco” performance at the Hollywood Palladium in her new book Cher: The Memoir, out Nov. 19.

Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth, had flown into Los Angeles for “a series of charitable events” with her husband, Lord Snowdon, Cher wrote.

“Having read all about us in the English press, the princess invited us to perform at the Hollywood Palladium,” Cher continued, alluding to herself and Sonny Bono, who performed as the duo Sonny & Cher (and were also then husband and wife).

“This came as a surprise, because the old guard either had no idea who we were or thought we were freaks,” she wrote. “It boggled the imagination how much that wasn’t our audience. The best that could happen is we’d live through it.”

Cher wrote that she and Sonny didn’t want to accept the offer to perform, “but we couldn’t say no to Princess Margaret.”

“I think we were wearing white outfits, but we should have been wearing camouflage,” she added. “The whole event was a fiasco.”

Frank Sinatra — who was supposed to introduce Sonny & Cher — dropped out at the last minute, so Bob Hope introduced them instead, the performer recalled. The event started late, there was no stage (“so we stood on the dance floor,” she remembered) and, to top it all off, Princess Margaret had laryngitis.

“The acoustics were so bad that, coupled with sound problems, we performed terribly,” Cher wrote, adding that Peter Bogdanovich — who was then a critic for the Saturday Evening Post — wrote that the two “howled like a pair of coyotes.”

“The audience must have agreed, because very few people applauded, and halfway through our set Princess Margaret asked for the sound to be turned down because she had a headache,” she wrote. “The engineer then accidentally cut the mic and interfered with what we could hear, which threw Sonny completely.”

This angered Sonny, and the two couldn’t wait for their performance to end.

“I was mortified,” Cher wrote, adding, “It was like a bad dream that we couldn’t get out of; we just had to stand there and wait for it to be over.”

Can’t get enough of PEOPLE’s Royals coverage? Sign up for our free Royals newsletter to get the latest updates on Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and more!

Though the Princess Margaret performance proved disastrous, it wouldn’t be the last time Cher performed before royalty. Just last year, Prince William and Kate Middleton joined Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and her husband Prince Daniel to see Cher hit the stage for the Royal Variety Performance at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 30.