Though Cher and Sonny Bono’s marriage lasted less than a decade, their musical hits endured. Yet Cher details in her new memoir that the success of her creative partnership with her late husband wasn’t equally shared.
Debuting this week, “Cher: The Memoir – Part One” centers on her childhood and her years with Bono, who she met when she was 16 and he was 27.
“It wasn’t passionate; I just loved him,” Cher told CBS in a recent interview. “He made me laugh. And we had a dream.”
That dream led Sonny & Cher to multiple hit songs in the 1960s, including “I’ve Got You Babe” and later the popular “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” which featured the couple’s banter, live performances and a glamorous Cher.
“When they started to realize that people were tuning in because of what I was wearing, then they just gave us all the money we needed,” she recalled.
Cher recalled how Bono began to change.
“He just started not to care,” she said. “About me.”
Her husband was jealous, Cher recounted, and things ramped up after a guitarist she identifies as “Bill” kissed her and Bono found out. She wrote in her book that she told Bono that she wanted to sleep with the guitarist. “It all seems crazy now. I didn’t mean it, but I thought saying those words was the only way that (Bono) would let me go,” she wrote.
“I thought if I do this, it’s over,” she told CBS. “He’s not gonna be able to come back. We’re not gonna be able to be Sonny & Cher. I just wanna blow it up. But I didn’t know I wanted to blow it up until I was blowing it up.”
Cher said she was offered whatever she’d wanted to stay with Bono and opted for “my own place in Malibu” and $5,000 per month.
Two years later, she said, she had a shocking discovery when her then boyfriend, music executive David Geffen, got hold of her contract.
“Sonny owned 95 percent of the company and his lawyer owned five,” she said. “And it was called Cher Enterprises, but I own nothing! And we’d worked together for almost 12 years.”
After she confronted Bono, Cher said, he told her. “I always knew you’d leave me.”
“And I said, ‘That’s not a reason! Son, how could you do it? I was there by your side working, all those nights, all those days, through good, through bad,’” she said. “He didn’t have an answer. And we were still friends after that.”
Cher and Bono divorced in 1975.
Bono later became a Republican congressman representing California’s 44th congressional district before his death in 1998 in a skiing accident.