In "Cher: The Memoir, Part One," the 78-year-old icon shares details about being overworked and fully controlled by her first husband, Sonny Bono, who allegedly admitted considering murdering her even as she contemplated suicide.
The pair rose to fame with their 1965 hit "I Got You Babe," and by the time "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour," which ran from 1971 to 1974, catapulted them to stardom, Cher was burned out and looking for a way out.
Cher wrote that Bono was jealous and controlling, and wouldn't let her wear perfume or even go to a Tupperware party hosted by the wife of Beach Boy Brian Wilson. He also controlled every aspect of her career and finances.
In 1972, when Cher was 26 and the pair were parents to toddler Chas, who later came out as trans and changed his name to Chaz, the couple taped two episodes of their TV show in Los Angeles before heading to Las Vegas to perform at the Sahara Hotel. Bono then told her he'd signed a contract for them to "perform in Vegas every summer for God knows how many years."
"I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear," she wrote. She stepped "barefoot on the balcony of our suite and stared down."
"For a few crazy minutes I couldn't imagine any other option. I did this five or six times, and each time I'd think about Chas, about my mother, about my sister, about everybody and how things like this could make people who look up to me feel that it's a viable situation and I would step back inside," she wrote.
Eventually they struck a deal that allowed her a bit of freedom as she worked to leave him. She would live with him during the week so they could continue working together, while she had weekends to herself at their Malibu house. But despite being famous and earning money, she had no bank account of her own, and was given only a $5,000 per month stipend.
As the settled into a tenuous sort of friendship during this separation, Cher writes that Bono admitted he had considered killing her in a fit of jealousy.
Cher wrote that Bono told her at breakfast one morning, "You know, after you went off with Bill that night at the Sahara, I seriously thought about throwing you off our balcony."
He told her he had thought about simply pleading insanity to "get seven years in jail before they released me. Then I'd get a book deal and my own show."
She wrote that she laughed, and admitted, "Well, there would have been no need to push me because I was gonna jump!"
Later, when they split up and Cher began dating record executive David Geffen, he went over her contracts and she learned how much Bono had been keeping from her. She was contracted as an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises, controlled by Bono.
"I'd worked my whole life, yet apparently, I had nothing to show for it. I'd never for a second imagined that I needed to protect myself from Sonny, of all people, yet the contracts he'd had me sign were secretly designed to strip me of my income and the rights to my own career," she writes.
She went to Lucille Ball for advice, knowing Ball had left her husband and business partner Desi Arnaz.
"F**k him, you're the one with the talent," Cher recalled Ball telling her. Years later, Cher offered similar advice to Tina Turner, urging her to leave Ike Turner.
Sonny and Cher divorced in 1975, and she went on to marry Gregg Allman later that year. They split four years later dur in part to his drug addiction.
"Cher: The Memoir, Part One" is out now.
-- With reporting by TMX
Originally published on Music Times.
