Cher recalls how devastating split with Sonny Bono drove her to nearly kill herself
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Pop icon Cher is pulling back the curtain on what went down in her marriage to Sonny Bono, revealing the exact moment it all crumbled.
Cher's upcoming memoir 'Cher: The Memoir, Part One', set to release on November 19, is already making headlines as it documents how her marriage to Bono officially fell apart.
The 78-year-old legend opened up about a moment that was the final straw in their troubled relationship—a kiss with a young guitarist that changed everything.
The kiss that ended it all
It all started when Cher got wind of a rumor. Through a friend, she heard that a young musician named Bill who had recently joined the band had a major crush on her. Initially, Cher brushed off the idea; after all, she was still married to Sonny Bono.
But as time went on, she found herself starting to entertain the thought. "I found myself in a group in a booth with Bill, a tall 21-year-old with a Texas drawl, sitting next to me and putting his hand on my knee. To this day, I don’t know how he was so bold," she wrote in an excerpt obtained by Daily Mail. The chemistry wasn’t something she could ignore.
"Later, I joined Bill in the hotel lobby when he went to buy some cigarettes. There we ran straight into David Brenner, the stand-up comedian who opened our act. He almost passed out at the sight of me on my own in public with Bill. Me with a guy by myself? He might as well have seen Frankenstein with Dumbo," she wrote.
However, Cher and Bill weren't fazed. "Bill and I went outside to a big brick wall behind the hotel, leaning against it quietly side by side until he suddenly blurted, ‘We all wonder how you can live this way.’ Then he pulled me toward him and kissed me," she recalled.
Cher didn’t hold back when describing the kiss, either. "It felt like my head almost exploded off my shoulders. Bill was a great kisser, but more than that, Sonny didn’t like to kiss. This kiss was what I’d imagined in sixth grade when I knew that kissing was in my future," she wrote.
Confrontation with Sonny Bono
Of course, it wasn’t long before Sonny Bono found out about the kiss. Cher got a phone call from him, and he was furious.
"What the f**k do you think you’re doing, Cher? she recalled him yelling at her. The tension was palpable and she could practically feel the silence that followed. You could have heard a pin drop. ‘Have you lost your mind? Come back to the room," Sonny told her.
But Cher, still in a daze from her encounter with Bill, wasn’t going to back down. She tried to play it cool instead, making up a flimsy excuse. "I had no idea who I even was at that moment, because I told him: Bill wants to understand more about his publishing rights, so I thought I’d bring him up to our suite," she wrote.
It was a risky move, but surprisingly Bill agreed to go with her. "If I were Bill, I would have been thinking, ‘This is a bad idea, that’s my boss upstairs, I’m not going to go up to your room,’ but he came with me," Cher added.
When they walked into the suite, Sonny was there, waiting in a chair and staring at them in total silence. The tension could have been cut with a knife.
End of an era
What happened next was a shock to Cher. Instead of flying into a rage or demanding an explanation, Sonny Bono simply let her spend the evening with Bill. Cher made it clear that nothing intimate happened that night, but the damage was already done.
The following morning, it was as if the decision had already been made for both of them.
"Sonny came around my side of the bed, picked up my hand, and pulled my wedding ring off my finger. It took me a second to realize what he was doing, but I was too exhausted to care," Cher wrote.
"Ever since we'd first started living together, he'd been secretly convinced I'd leave him one day, something he didn't properly tell me until years later, although he'd written it in a poem he gave me way back. There was a line, 'a butterfly to be loved by all but not by one,'" she noted.
A dark moment in Cher's life
Before their split became official, Cher went through a period of intense emotional turmoil. She admitted that things got so bad, she even contemplated taking her own life.
"Standing barefoot on the balcony of our suite at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, I stared down, dizzy with loneliness, as I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear," she revealed.
"It was October 1972 and there I was, 26 years old and in what had become a loveless marriage. The success of our primetime 'Sonny And Cher Show' on CBS had changed my husband, Sonny beyond recognition. Too busy trying to make an empire and be a mogul, he didn't seem to care how I felt anymore, or that I even had emotions," she added.
