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Cher felt so overworked and under-loved by her first husband, Sonny Bono, that she considered jumping off a hotel balcony to get away from him, she writes in her new memoir.
In “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” out now, the singer and actress recalls how Sonny controlled every aspect of her life at the height of their fame on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,” which aired on CBS from 1971 to 1974.
“I was dizzy with loneliness,” Cher, now 78, writes of a night in 1972 when she considered ending her life. “I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.”
In fact, she considered it “five or six times.”
Cher writes how Sonny was so jealous that he wouldn’t let her wear perfume or even go to Tupperware parties, and also handled every part of their career and finances to the point that, despite being a huge star with a hit TV show and chart-topping songs like “I Got You Babe,” she didn’t even have her own bank account.
In October 1972, the couple — who were parents to a toddler — taped two episodes of their TV show back-to-back then flew to Las Vegas to play two gigs a night at the Sahara Hotel.
Cher, whose weight had plunged to 98 pounds, wanted to ask Sonny if he could go with their band to hear live music, “even though he never listened to any new music and wouldn’t let me play it at home,” she writes.
The actress and singer, then 26, walked in as Sonny was holding a business meeting and heart him “discussing how much money we’d made, so I said, ‘Oh great, let’s go to Europe.’
“Sonny looked at me with a frown and said, ‘Why? You can’t make any money in Europe.’”
When she said she meant to take a vacation, her husband — who had created the “Benevolent Army of El Primo” in which everyone in his orbit was issued a rank — “rolled his eyes and said, ‘Cher, c’mon.’”
Then he told her he’d signed a new contract for them to “perform in Vegas every summer for God knows how many years …”
“Defeated” by the idea of how all the performing was hurting her and their child, Cher writes that 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 [their child] 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.”
After repeating this act, one night between shows, Cher writes, she had an epiphany: “I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.”
Even then, Sonny controlled her life, as the two struck a deal where she would live with him during the week, continue working together and get weekends to herself at their Malibu beach house. Despite earning her own money, she was allowed a $5,000-a-month stipend.
“I didn’t care about any of that. I was free and had a bedroom of my own,” Cher writes.
The two finally divorced in 1975, and she went on to marry Gregg Allman that same year, before splitting from him — in part due to his drug addiction — four years later.
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.