Cher opens up about suicidal thoughts while married to Sonny Bono in memoir

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Cher opened up about a dark time in her early life in her new memoir.

The pop icon, 78, described a time when she experienced suicidal thoughts in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” out Nov. 19.

These thoughts, she wrote, stemmed from her unhappiness in her marriage to Sonny Bono. The couple officially tied the knot in the 1960s and welcomed a child, Chaz Bono, in 1969 before divorcing in 1975.

In her memoir, Cher wrote that when she was 26 and frustrated with her “loveless marriage,” she considered ending her life several times.

“I stepped barefoot onto the balcony of our suite and stared down. I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear,” she wrote. “For a few crazy minutes, I couldn’t imagine any other option.”

She said she reached this point “five or six times”, but each time she thought of her child, her mother and her sister, and would consider how she could get “people to look up to me” if she killed himself. feels that suicide is “a viable solution”.

Because of these thoughts, she wrote that she “wanted to step back in.”

Eventually, the singer’s outlook changed.

“Then one morning everything changed,” she wrote. “That night between shows I went out on the balcony again and this time I thought: I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.”

Even while fighting behind closed doors, Cher and Bono hosted the popular “Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” from 1971 to 1974 and “The Sonny & Cher Show” from 1976 to 1977.

Cher described in her memoir how she continued to work with him even as their marriage deteriorated.

“The confusing thing was that even though I was deeply unhappy, I still loved Sonny, but I was no longer in love with him,” she wrote. “We were a great team on TV, but at home things were falling apart. He didn’t notice me anymore, so he didn’t see it.”

She added that while she and Bono were “madly in love” during the first few years of their marriage, “The Sonny & Cher Show” changed her then-husband “beyond recognition.”

“I was able to live with him because I compartmentalized my feelings and was used to censoring what I said and did around him,” she wrote.

According to the memoir, Cher also opened up to Bono about her suicidal thoughts.

“Sonny and I were becoming friends again. One morning I came down to breakfast and he surprised me by saying, ‘You know, after you went off with Bill that night in the Sahara, I seriously thought about kicking you out from our balcony’, she wrote.

Bono was referring to a young guitarist Cher names only as “Bill” in her memoir, with whom she says she had a tryout while she and Bono were together.

“He kind of laughed it off and so did I,” Cher wrote. “It was crazy that he told me that. He continued: ‘I figured I’d plead insanity like Spade Cooley and get seven years in prison before they let me go. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.”

“‘Oh, you did, did you?’ I replied. “Well, there would have been no need to push me, because I was going to jump!” Within seconds we were howling,” Cher continued. “No one who saw our reaction to what had been the darkest moment in our marriage would have understood.

“I didn’t think for a second that Sonny would have actually pushed me off the balcony, but I’m sure it crossed his mind and he knew that jumping off had gone over mine too,” she added. “What else could we do but laugh?”

A few years after she and Bono were no longer together, Cher said he apologized to her for how he treated her during their marriage.

“He showed up at my door in tears. He sat in my kitchen and told me, ‘I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was dishonest and I had all those women and I didn’t think about how it could affect our relationship,” she wrote.

Cher said she “never thought” she’d hear him apologize and while “it couldn’t change anything”, it “felt good to know deep down that for the first time he’d realized how hurtful he’d been was and was sincerely sorry.”

Bono reflected on the end of their relationship and stage performance, as well as Cher’s public accusations that he had been too controlling, in a 1988 interview with St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

”It was very painful because what I did with the act was definitely out of love,” he told the magazine. “My whole goal was to promote Cher. So it was painful when it all came back as a dictatorial Svengali manipulating this poor girl.”

Bono also wrote about Cher’s mental health issues in his own memoir, “And The Beat Goes On”.

“Cher has always described herself during our last year together as a nearly suicidal 91 pound hostage and painted me as an uncaring slave driver,” he wrote. “If Cher was ninety-one pounds and nearly suicidal, I never knew, and she failed to communicate her dire condition. If I was a slave driver, Cher never complained.”

“I know why she told such lies,” he continued. “For as long as I’ve known her, Cher has played the role of victim. She’s played it to the hilt. She needs a villain. And who better or more convenient than me? I had no way to defend myself. She was famous and loved, I was a nobody, a has been. Nobody wanted to hear my side of the story.

After the couple finalized their divorce in 1975, Cher married musician Gregg Allman that same year, and they welcomed a child, Elijah Blue, in 1976.

In the 1980s, Bono continued to pursue a career in politics. He served as mayor of Palm Springs, California, from 1988 to 1992, and he represented California’s 44th congressional district in the House of Representatives from 1995. He died in a skiing accident in 1998.