When Cher was married to Sonny Bono, he gave a whole new meaning to “I Got You Babe.”
via: Daily Beast
“He took all my money,” the 78-year-old told The New York Times in an interview about the book, adding that she was not immediately aware of her financial situation and that she trusted Bono at the time.
“I just thought, ‘We’re husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine.’ It didn’t occur to me that there was another way.”
“To this day, I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, during what day, did you go, ‘Yeah, you know what? I’m going to take her money,‘” she added.
Cher was 16 when she first met 27-year-old Bono, according to the Times. The pair eventually became a couple and they married in 1964. They divorced in 1975. Bono died in 1998 in a skiing accident in South Lake Tahoe, California.
In her book, Cher also describes how Bono limited her social life, including not allowing her to hang out with other band members.
She was also so distraught over her “loveless marriage” to Sonny Bono that she contemplated throwing herself off the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room — one of “five or six” times she contemplated taking her own life.
The icon was 26 years old and her weight had plunged to 98 pounds as she was worked to the bone by her husband.
Cher reached her tipping point in October 1972 while the couple — who found fame with their mega-hit “I Got You Babe” in 1965 — was in Las Vegas performing two gigs a night in the Sahara Hotel’s Congo Room.
She was already exhausted when she was told that Sonny signed a new contract for them to perform at Caesars Palace in Vegas “every summer for God knows how many years,” Cher writes, even as they were still taping their hit CBS show, “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,” and raising their young child.
With the sudden realization that Sonny would always put “business first over me,” she writes in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” she was “pissed off, frightened, and felt completely trapped.”
She recalls stepping barefoot onto the balcony of her hotel suite and staring down.
“I was dizzy with loneliness,” she writes. “I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.
“For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times [during the Vegas stay], and each time I’d think about [her child] Chas, about my mother, about my sister, about everybody and how things like this could make people who look up to me feel that it’s a viable situation and I would step back inside.”
Finally, Cher recalls, one night between shows she “went out on the balcony again and this time I thought ‘I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.'”
It was a flirtation with a guitarist in her band that gave her the final push to leave Sonny, the man she met when she was just 16 and he was 27.
That night she confronted her husband and told him, “I want to sleep with Bill.”
She didn’t actually mean it, Cher writes, but Sonny — who she claims was so controlling that she was banned from wearing perfume — hadn’t listened to her previous pleas to let her go.
“The silence was deafening. Then [Sonny] said, ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’
“Two hours,” she responded. Sonny left, while Cher cried on Bill’s shoulder.
The next day, she asked her husband for $500 to leave — and discovered he had already slept with Bill’s girlfriend as revenge.
She flew with Bill to San Francisco, followed by private detectives sent by Sonny, where they checked into a hotel and had “unbelievable” sex.
“I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again,” Cher writes.
The two made a deal that she could live in their Malibu house on the weekends and, as she didn’t have a bank account of her own, receive a $5,000-a-month stipend — but keep their split a secret while they continued to live together during the week and star on their hit show.
Tensions softened within their mansion and, as the two became friends again, Sonny surprised her at breakfast one morning: “You know, after you went off with Bill that night at the Sahara, I seriously thought about throwing you off our balcony.”
He laughed as he told her he figured he could plead insanity and “get seven years in jail before they released me. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.”
Cher laughed, too, as she admitted, “‘Well, there would have been no need to push me because I was gonna jump!’
“Within seconds we were howling … What else could we do but laugh?”
She also delves into other life matters, including how she still works with her 96-year-old voice teacher.
“You’re not really supposed to be able to sing at this age,” she told the Times. “I’ve been singing my whole life. It will make me sad the day I can’t.”
Writing her self-titled memoir “exhausted me,” she said. Part 2 is expected some time in 2025.
Comments