Cher‘s marriage with Sonny Bono turned sour after he blamed HER for his cheating because she refused to have sex with him whenever he wanted, she claims in her new memoir.
She was recovering from her third miscarriage when she discovered he was sleeping around and he told her: ‘I wouldn’t have to look outside of our marriage if I was sexually satisfied,’ she claims in Cher: The Memoir, Part One, which was released Tuesday.
The legendary singer also describes her ex-husband as controlling and ‘Machiavellian.’
Bono took his manipulation so far that she was banned from seeing her friends, could only leave the house to go shopping and couldn’t even wear perfume because the singer-turned-politician didn’t like the smell.
‘There was something inside him that I could never understand, something that took him from being this fabulous funny guy to being someone who would take everything from me,’ Cher reflected in her book.
‘For years, I’ve racked my brain for how he could have done what he did, and I still can’t get over it to this day.’
The first installment of the memoir by 78-year-old Cher, born Cheryl Sarkisian, is dominated with details on her relationship with Bono.
The pair met in 1962 in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, when she was introduced to one ‘Salvatore Philip Bono’.
Cher’s turbulent marriage with Sonny Bono turned sour when he blamed her for his infidelities because she wouldn’t have sex with him whenever he wanted, she claimed in her new memoir
She was recovering from her third miscarriage when she discovered he was sleeping around – his lame excuse was ‘I wouldn’t have to look outside of our marriage if I was sexually satisfied’
Cher writes that he was ‘one of the most interesting men I’d ever seen’ and that she admired his ‘beautiful hands with long, tapered fingers’
They hung out and became friends and when Cher told him she had been asked to move out of her apartment, Bono said she could move in with him if she cooked and cleaned the place.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,’ he told her. ‘And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.’
Cher described how she was both ‘insulted and relieved’ to hear that.
The 11-year-age difference – she was just 16 and he was 27 – didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that Bono was in the process of divorcing his first wife, as Cher thought he was the ‘coolest person I’d ever met’.
At that time, Cher was doing acting lessons but soon stopped to spend her days hanging out at the famed Gold Star Studios, where Bono worked as an assistant to the legendary producer Phil Spector.
According to Cher, their relationship was like ‘father and daughter’ and soon she realized that she was in love with him.
But even at these early stages, Bono was also controlling: Cher says he was ‘possessive’ and said that they never went out dancing, even though he knew she loved it.
Cher at the 67th Annual Golden Globe Awards in 2010, she started her path to fame alongside Bono in their duo Sonny & Cher
The couple had an 11-year difference between them: Cher was 16 and he was 27 when the younger singer moved in with Bono
Bono was ‘already starting to take over my life, even if I didn’t notice,’ she claims. And soon Bono ‘hated my being involved in anything he wasn’t part of.’
Just like dancing, he made her quit other hobbies and passions such as playing softball with her family and her friends which left her ‘devastated’. Her older lover’s explanation for this was that she ‘didn’t have time to mess around with games’.
Her book Cher: The Memoir, Part One was released on Tuesday and opens by detailing her messy relationship with Bono and his ‘Machiavellian’ behaviors
Then it began to cross the line towards physical when Bono pushed her up against the wall with his shoulders and face clenched.
Cher told him that if he ever touched her like that again she would ‘leave your a**,’ in what turned out to be an empty threat.
They became intertwined emotionally, financially and creatively. Their singing duo had a big break in 1964 with the song ‘Baby Don’t Go’, followed by ‘I Got You Babe’ which turned the act Sonny & Cher into America’s sweethearts.
Soon, they were invited to go on tour with the Beach Boys and flew to London where they gathered even more public adoration after they were denied entry to the Hilton because of the way they dressed.
Once they hit the big time, Bono ‘worked us constantly,’ adding more gigs onto their already overloaded schedule, Cher writes.
They never took a vacation unless it was a day or two after a gig and they never went out to dinner. The vice grip Bono had on her autonomy grew when Cher was banned from wearing perfume because the older man didn’t like the smell and would only let her out the house to go shopping.
Bono got physical with Cher one time – she warned him if he ever did that again she would leave him immediately
‘We could only do what he wanted to do,’ Cher says. ‘The changes in how he treated me came very slowly so I didn’t even notice. It was very Machiavellian (an author Sonny loved).’
Amid all this emotional turmoil, by 1967, Cher had suffered her third miscarriage and wondered if she was ever going to get pregnant.
Then she caught Bono cheating on her while half asleep with his secretary he hired for dictation for the movie Chastity he wrote and produced.
She says: ‘It’s such a f****** cliche. It broke my heart but you’ve got to give him an A for effort.’
Yet when Bono came round to beg for forgiveness, Cher forgave him – despite his outrageous excuse.
‘He told me he was sorry but insisted I was to blame for not having enough sex with him. “I wouldn’t have to look outside of our marriage if I was sexually satisfied,”‘ she writes.
‘That was such b******* but by the time he’d finished I found myself apologizing.’
The tension around Bono’s infidelity escalated after the pair went to see the movie The Dirty Dozen, and Bono turned on Cher because she said she liked it.
Then she caught Bono cheating on her while half asleep with his secretary he hired for dictation for the movie Chastity he wrote and produced
‘Do you know why you like it so much? Because you’re sexually frustrated,’ he told her.
When Cher became angry and frightened, Bono ordered her to pull their car over, got out and slammed the door. Cher spared no second to drive off and when Bono returned home, he blamed her for leaving him by the side of the road.
It was the first of many instances where he would use his words and their deteriorating situation to knock her ‘off balance’ when she least expected it.
Cher recalls the feeling of having to stop herself from going ‘insane’ at home and how she began to take tennis lessons to find joy outside of her situation.
Bono set her up with a female coach but one day after the lesson, the coach was hosting a party and Cher briefly said hello to some of the guests – this short interaction was reported back to Bono by Cher’s driver.
Cher writes: ‘Later that night I looked out of my bedroom and spotted flames. Peering closer I could see that Sonny was stoking the incinerator in the backyard.
‘When I realized he was burning my tennis clothes I felt such a rush of anger and complete hopelessness. I couldn’t believe he was being so controlling. I felt utterly betrayed.’
Cher’s first child, a girl called Chastity who later underwent gender reassignment in 2009 and became Chaz, was born in 1969.
Bono burned Cher’s tennis clothes after her personal driver ratted out that she walked to some people on the way out of her lessons
Cher writes: ‘When I realized he was burning my tennis clothes I felt such a rush of anger and complete hopelessness. I couldn’t believe he was being so controlling. I felt utterly betrayed’
But bringing a child into the world didn’t end the horror of the pair’s decaying relationship. On the first night she came back from the hospital, Bono went out, leaving Cher to pass out on the bathroom floor when she suffered a hemorrhage.
Cher reflected in her book: ‘Looking back, I wonder where the hell Sonny went the first night I came home with our baby, but at the time I was too tired and weak to even think.’
At this point, the public had no idea of their relationship’s increasing tension and the Sonny & Cher brand was stronger than ever thanks to their hit CBS TV shows like The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
But at home, Bono was ‘disconnecting’ from Cher and their situation was ‘falling apart’.
‘I was able to live with him because I compartmentalized my feelings and was used to censoring what I said and did around him…
‘….since we’d been together I knew the rules and how I should behave so as not to cause any problems.
‘We’d been partners. Family. But he didn’t seem to care how I felt anymore, or that I even had emotions.’
The reality of Cher’s situation began to set in and the pop icon concluded that, at 26 years old, she was in a ‘loveless marriage’.
The couple’s first child, a girl called Chastity, who later underwent gender reassignment in 2009 and became Chaz, was born in 1969
She played Bono’s games against him and rebelled by having an affair with their band’s young guitar player, Bill. But in one of the most bizarre passages of the book, Cher admits she blurted out her intentions to sleep with Bill to Bono’s face.
Incredibly, he replied: ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’
When she told hm she needed two hours, he said ‘ok’ and walked off.
That night while Cher was half asleep, Bono walked round to her side of the bed and pulled her wedding ring off, later screaming at her: ‘America will hate you for breaking us up!’
Ironically, Cher later found out that Bono had slept with Bill’s girlfriend as an act of revenge. And amid the breakup drama, one of her mutual friends with Bono admitted that during their marriage Bono had been having sex with dancers, actresses, waitresses and even prostitutes while they were on the road.
He would get an extra room he could enter through a side door in the suite he shared with Cher, the friend said.
Some of the women he slept with even contacted Cher and said he had told them they were in an open marriage.
Then came the devastating revelation about the finances – which only happened in 1973 when she began dating music mogul David Geffen.
Cher didn’t have access to any of the money she had made from her contract and described the experience as a ‘kick to the gut’
When CBS was about to pick up the option for another season of ‘The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,’ Geffen asked her what her contract was.
Geffen called her back and described the financial arrangement as ‘involuntary servitude’.
Bono owned 95 percent of a company called ‘Cher Enterprises,’ and his lawyer Irwin Spiegel owned the other five percent, while Cher owned nothing.
According to the contract, Cher got a salary she was never paid and three weeks of vacation per year. Cher couldn’t even sign a check or withdraw money without Bono or Irwin’s signature.
With no stake in the company, Cher couldn’t access any of the money she had made from it – and could only work with Bono’s permission.
She reveals the discovery was ‘devastating’ and that it felt like a ‘kick in the gut’.
‘I couldn’t fathom that this was true. I couldn’t understand the meaning – how did it happen?
‘How could Sonny do that in good conscience? He’d been everything to me and for some time I’d been everything to him.’
Then Geffen told her the worst news of all – she was locked into the contract for another two years.
‘It took several days for the full horror to sink in. I’d worked my whole life yet apparently I’d had nothing to show for it,’ Cher recalled.
