Inside Sonny and Cher’s Secret Dark Relationship

Cher was so distraught over her “loveless marriage” to Sonny Bono that she considered throwing herself off the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room – one of “five or six” times she considered taking her own life in the period, she reveals in her new memoir.

The icon was 26 years old and her weight had dropped to 98 pounds as she was worked to the bone by her husband.

Cher reached her turning point in October 1972 while the couple – who rose to fame with their 1965 mega-hit “I Got You Babe” – were in Las Vegas performing two concerts a night in the Sahara Hotel’s Congo Room.

She was already exhausted when she learned 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 though they were still recording their hit CBS- show, “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and raising their toddler.

With the sudden realization that Sonny would always put “business first before me,” she writes in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” she was “pissed, scared, and completely trapped.”

She remembers 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 (while in Vegas) and every time I thought about (her child) Chas, about my mom, about my sister, about everyone and how things like this could make people who look up to me feel it’s a viable situation and I would step down.”

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 fling 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, writes Cher, but Sonny – who she claims was so controlling that she was banned from wearing perfume – had not listened to her earlier pleas to let her go.

“The silence was deafening. Then (Sonny) said, ‘How long do you think you’re going to need?’

“Two hours,” she replied. Sonny left as Cher cried on Bill’s shoulder.

The next day, she asked her husband for $500 to leave – and discovered that 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 “amazing” sex.

“I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again,” writes Cher.

The two made a deal that she could stay at their Malibu house on the weekends and, since she didn’t have her own bank account, receive a $5,000-a-month stipend — but keep their split a secret while continuing to live together in during the week and features in their hit show.

Tensions softened in their mansion, and when the two became friends again, Sonny surprised her at breakfast one morning: “You know, after you left with Bill that night in the Sahara, I seriously thought about throwing you off our balcony. “

He laughed when he told her he figured he could plead insanity and “get seven years in prison before they let me out. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.”

Cher also laughed as she admitted: “‘Well, there wouldn’t have been any need to push me because I had to jump!’

“Within seconds we were howling … What else could we do but laugh?”

That could be her life’s motto.

Cher was born to Jackie Jean Crouch, from rural Arkansas, and Johnnie Sarkisian, a grifter and heroin addict.

Jackie Jean – who later changed her name to Georgia Holt – walked out on her husband after just three months of marriage, only to discover she was pregnant. In a panic, she almost had a miscarriage in the back street, but got out.

The couple was so broken that Cher was left in a Catholic orphanage in Scranton, Penn., to be cared for by nuns while Sarkisian raised money to get them to California.

Holt was forbidden to hold her daughter herself and eventually got Cher out of the orphanage with the help of a customer at the diner where she worked.

“One thing is certain: my childhood was never normal,” writes Cher.

Her mother married eight times to six husbands, including twice to Sarkisian.

Most of the future singer’s childhood was spent living in poverty in Los Angeles, and Cher writes how her saddle shoes were held together with rubber bands and patched with cardboard.

But the family was next to fame when Holt played a bit in “Gunsmoke” and “I Love Lucy” and, writes Cher, lost a role in “Asphalt Jungle” to Marilyn Monroe.

At 15, Cher romanced Warren Beatty, who was 25. A year later, she met Sonny – who was in the middle of a divorce – at a cafe, and he let her move in with him in exchange for cooking and cleaning. He first told her, “I don’t think you’re very attractive.”

But that changed soon enough. When a friend told him that Cher was not yet 18, she lied. “Okay… I’m not eighteen now, I’m seventeen. But my birthday is in May, so I’ll be eighteen in two months.”

It was Sonny who convinced his boss, music producer Phil Spector, to let Cher sing with the Ronettes one day when Darlene Love’s car broke down.

From there, the duo began recording together, first as Caesar & Cleo, then as Sonny & Cher, and achieved huge fame with their TV show.

Cher writes how they had their own private, non-legal wedding ceremony in their bathroom at home in 1963, weeks after she suffered a miscarriage.

By the time she was 21, Cher had suffered three miscarriages.

She also touched on Sonny cheating with his assistant one night. He told her it was her fault she didn’t have enough sex with him.

“I wouldn’t have had to look outside our marriage if I was sexually satisfied,” he insisted.

Cher writes: “It was such a piece of shit. but when he was done. found myself apologizing.”

They officially married in 1964 when Cher became pregnant with Chas (who is trans and legally changed his name to Chaz in 2010).

She writes that fame changed Sonny, who established the “Benevolent Army of El Primo” where everyone in his circle was given a rank. Sonny was, of course, El Primo.

Although she was dubbed his “Prima Donna”, Cher was not allowed to socialize with their band members or even go to a Tupperware party hosted by Brian Wilson’s wife. The couple stopped going to dinners, concerts and movies, and Sonny was so jealous that he burned her tennis clothes in the backyard.

But it wasn’t until they split and she began dating music executive David Geffen that Cher discovered the true extent of Sonny’s duplicity.

Geffen read Cher’s contract and discovered that she was working for Sonny as an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises.

“I’d worked my whole life, but apparently I had nothing to show for it. I never for a second imagined I’d have to protect myself from Sonny, of all people, but the contracts he’d gotten me to sign was secretly designed to deprive me of my income and the rights to my own career,” she writes.

“For years I racked my brain about how he could have done what he did and I still can’t get over it to this day.”

She called Lucille Ball — who famously dumped Desi Arnaz — for advice. The sitcom star told Cher, “F––k him, you’re the one with the talent.”

Years later, Cher would give Tina Turner advice on how to leave her abusive husband, Ike Turner.

Sonny died in a skiing accident in 1998, and despite everything, it’s clear in the book that Cher still felt affection for him.

After canceling a planned Aspen wedding to Geffen, who later came out publicly as gay, she married musician Gregg Allman and had a son, Elijah Skye Blue Allman.

That marriage was traumatic for a variety of reasons, as Allman was addicted to heroin and in and out of rehab.

“Looking back, I can see that I was a little bit crazy with Gregory,” Cher writes. “I kept doing the same thing hoping for different results and therein lies the insanity.”

The end came when Allman had a paranoid breakdown in their backyard one night, insisting he saw men with guns.

Cher, who is now dating 36-year-old music executive Alexander Edwards, sets up a future installment of her memoir by revealing that it was “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola who put a new idea in her head by asking, “Why aren’t you making movies?”