“I knew I had to date him, that was it. So I made a date with Scott later. [But] Cher had just been to see Sunset Boulevard. And she hunted me down the next day through management, people, whatever.
“They said, ‘Cher wants to have dinner with you.’ And I said: ‘I can’t… have dinner with her.’ And there was a dead silence at the end of the phone: ‘What?!’ ‘I can’t have dinner with Cher because I have a date tonight with Scott.’
“They went: ‘Right, hold on.’ Click. On hold. Over to the other line. Apparently they were going to ask her: ‘He’s got a date, and he doesn’t want to break it.’
“That was the chance of a lifetime for me. I’m not talking about having dinner with Cher, but my date with Scott. The management came back to me and said: ‘Fine, she says, bring him.’
”[…] And we all met up and had dinner with Cher and we had a fab time. At the end of the evening, she said to me: ‘Walk me to my car, you’ll love it.’ As we were walking to the car arm-in-arm, the photographers came out of the bushes, you name it.[…] And the next day in the tabloids, I was her new toyboy.
“But little did they know, the boy with the bicycle that walked out after us went and unhooked his bike. I put her in the car, went off, got my Jag, opened the trunk, put his bike in the trunk, and took I took him home. And he stayed. For eighteen years now.”
- John Barrowman on his first date with husband Scott Gill in 1994