Cher’s memoir contains new details about her divorce from Sonny Bono

CNN
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Although Cher and Sonny Bono’s marriage lasted less than a decade, their musical hits endured. Yet Cher describes in her new memoir that the success of her creative partnership with her late husband was not equally shared.

Debuting this week, “Cher: The Memoir – Part One” centers on her childhood and her years with Bono, whom she met when she was 16 and he was 27.

“It wasn’t passionate; I just loved him,” Cher shared CBS in a recent interview. “He made me laugh. And we had a dream.”

That dream led Sonny & Cher to several hit songs in the 1960s, including “I’ve Got You Babe” and later the popular “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” which featured the pair’s banter, live performances and a glamorous Cher.

“Once they started realizing people were tuning in because of what I was wearing, they just gave us all the money we needed,” she recalled.

Cher recalled how Bono began to change.

“He just started not caring,” she said. “About me.”

Her husband was jealous, Cher said, and things escalated after a guitarist she identifies as “Bill” kissed her and Bono found out. She wrote in her book that she told Bono 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 (Bono) would let me go,” she wrote.

“I thought if I do this, it’s over,” she told CBS. “He won’t be able to come back. We won’t be able to be Sonny & Cher. I just want to blow it up. But I didn’t know I was going to blow it up until I blew it up in the air.”

Cher said she was offered everything she wanted to stay with Bono and chose “my own place in Malibu” and $5,000 a month.

Two years later, she said, she made 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 don’t own anything! And we had been working together for almost 12 years.”

After she confronted Bono, Cher said, he told her. “I always knew you would leave me.”

“And I said, ‘That’s not a reason! Son, how could you do that? I was there by your side working, all those nights, all those days, through good, through bad,'” she said. “He had no 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.