Everything Cher Reveals About Sonny in Her New Memoir
ByKatja Vujić,
a social media editor at the Cut.She also writes about culture, sustainability, news, wellness, and style.
Photo: ax B. Miller/Fotos International/Getty Images
The first installment of Cher: The Memoir is finally here. In part one, Cher takes us through the first 34 years of her life. With vivid descriptions, hyperspecific recall, and frequent run-ins with Hollywood legends, the memoir is a juicy, wild ride, taking the reader through abuse and poverty and wealth and glamour. The woman has lived.
The book also offers insight into the relationship that first brought her into the public eye: Her marriage with Sonny, also known as Salvatore Phillip Bono. The pair first met in 1962, when Cher was 16 and Sonny was 27. They gained fame as a singing duo, made two movies, and, after a spell of financial hardship, retooled their way to the comedic variety act that eventually landed them The Sonny & Cher Show,which aired on and off through the ’70s. Sonny wielded increasing control over Cher’s life throughout the course of their relationship, and looking back, Cher notes signs of jealous behavior early on. Here’s everything we learned.
Cher and Sonny were initially roommates
In Cher’s account, she met Sonny at a Los Angeles coffee shop called Aldo’s when she was 16 and he was 27. At the time, she writes, he was more interested in her friend Melissa, who was gay and did not return his advances. Weeks later, Sonny moved into the building next door to Melissa’s, where Cher had been staying after leaving her mother’s house. When Melissa kicked her out, Sonny invited her to move in, telling her he didn’t find her attractive but offering free room and board in exchange for cooking and cleaning services. “That’s how I became the potty-mouthed sidekick to a man eleven years older than me who was in the middle of a divorce,” writes Cher.
Cher turned down Warren Beatty for Sonny
Cher describes going on a few dates with Warren Beatty just before meeting Sonny, including a late-night swim. But “the last time he called,” she writes, “I was with Sonny. He said, ‘Do you want to go to dinner?’ I said, ‘Well, I have a boyfriend.’ He said, ‘Okay, do you want to go to lunch?’ It was so cute and so him.”
Cher didn’t think very highly of her future husband
Throughout the memoir, Cher makes it clear that she often found Sonny lacking. Describing the time when they were roommates, before becoming romantically involved, she writes that he cheated on all the women he dated. “Almost all his relationships remained casual, because he certainly wasn’t looking for love and most of the women were looking for a man who could support them,” she writes. “He was charming and funny, but he had no money, drove an old Chevy Monza, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a random teenager. He wasn’t a catch.”
She also insults his abilities as a musician and performer. “He realized I was a better dancer, and that made him feel uncomfortable, but he also didn’t want me going dancing on my own either,” she writes. She also writes that he “wasn’t the best piano player in the world,” and says “he didn’t know that many chords so he wrote all our songs with the same three or four.”
She doesn’t directly describe their sexual relationship, but when writing about the end of their marriage in the mid-1970s, she recounts sleeping with Bill, a guitarist from their band. She doesn’t go into detail, but everything we need to know is communicated with one devastating sentence: “I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again.”
Sonny and Cher weren’t legally married until 1968
Upon the finalization of Sonny’s divorce from his first wife, Donna, in 1963, Cher writes that despite the fact that she was too young to wed without a parent’s permission, “we were as good as married in my heart.” She describes his proposal to her a few weeks later: “Sitting in a park one day listening to a guy playing sax, he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you think it’s time you asked me to marry you?’” The impromptu marriage ceremony that followed took place in the bathroom of their home with no witnesses and no official documentation. A press release claiming they’d married in Tijuana in 1964, she writes, was false.
The couple didn’t legally marry until Cher became pregnant in 1968, when, as she tells it, Sonny called from his office to say he was coming home and they were getting married. This wedding, too, took place at home — but this time in the library of a much bigger home, with two witnesses and an attorney present. “The ceremony had to be done quickly and privately so nobody would find out we had been faking our marriage from the beginning,” she writes.
Cher claims Sonny cheated on her constantly
Although the early years of the couple’s marriage are described as being relatively happy, if exhausting, Cher describes waking up in the middle of the night to catch Sonny cheating on her with a recently hired secretary in the living room. When she confided in her mother, Cher says she told her that she’d been “hearing stories about him for some time now.” Later, describing her 29th-birthday party, she writes that Sonny attended with one of many girlfriends, and that she and some friends joked about his cheating habit. “We figured that Paulette, Gee, and Chas’s nanny, Linda, were the only women in our circle Sonny hadn’t slept with,” she quips.
She also says that after the end of their relationship, a mutual friend admitted to her that “throughout the time we were together, Sonny had been with dancers, actresses, waitresses, and even hookers in our home and on the road.” While Cher maintains she had no idea he was cheating so often and “couldn’t imagine where he found the time,” she also writes that he blamed her for his cheating, telling her, “I wouldn’t have had to look outside our marriage if I was sexually satisfied.”
Cher claims she would get in trouble just for having conversations with other men
Throughout the book, Cher describes many instances of Sonny’s controlling and tyrannical behavior. Describing the disastrous filming of the couple’s second film, Chastity — written by Sonny and starring Cher — she writes that her budding friendship with her co-star, Stephen Whittaker, disturbed her husband so much that he rewrote the script to remove all of their intimate scenes. She also writes that, after convincing Sonny to let her take private tennis lessons with a female instructor, she happened to say hello to a few incoming party guests while leaving her tennis instructor’s home. Denis Pregnolato, who was employed by the couple at the time, was picking her up from the lesson. “When we got back, he reported to Sonny that he’d seen me talking to some men,” she writes. That night, she saw flames in the backyard and realizes that Sonny was burning her tennis clothes.
In another instance, during a tour, Cher claims Sonny banned the couple’s band members and other employees from speaking to her at all. As she describes it, her only free moments in the marriage were when she got to go shopping. She writes that she was forbidden from speaking to other men without her husband present and was not included in virtually any decisions Sonny made about the couple’s finances and careers.
Cher writes that toward the end of the marriage, she considered suicide
Over the course of the couple’s relationship, Cher describes increasing mental-health struggles brought on by an exhausting schedule, an isolated social life, and what she describes as Sonny’s indifference toward her and her feelings. She writes that in 1973, the year she and Sonny presented at the Academy Awards, her husband signed her up for sessions with a therapist — who, it turned out, was reporting back on everything they spoke about. “I remember when I found out I screamed at Sonny, ‘How could you do this?’ and he didn’t even have an answer,” she writes. “Isn’t that an extreme of betraying somebody’s trust, having their therapist tell you everything they’re saying? I was fucking furious. I felt violated, like I had been raped. It made me feel like I had before, as if there was no way to protect myself.”
In 1972, during a week of shows in Las Vegas, Cher writes that she reached a breaking point. “There I was, twenty-six years old and in what had become a loveless marriage. Sonny had given me the vehicle and the confidence to become the somebody my mother always told me I would be, and then he just lost interest,” she writes. She goes on to say that she started to consider suicide: “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.” Each time, she says thinking of her loved ones stopped her. Eventually, she came to a different conclusion: “One morning everything changed. 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.”
Lucille Ball advised Cher on how to leave the marriage
After a period of separation during which Cher and Sonny continued to film their show and pretend to be together, Cher discovered that the contract she was under gave the bulk of the ownership and profits from The Sonny & Cher Show to Sonny. She called Lucille Ball, who’d been in a similar situation with her husband Desi Arnaz and their show I Love Lucy. “Fuck him, you’re the one with the talent,” Ball told her. Soon after, divorce proceedings were underway.
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