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Cher opened up about a dark time in her early life in her new memoir.
The pop icon, 78, described a time she experienced suicidal thoughts in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” out Nov. 19.
These thoughts, she wrote, stemmed from her unhappiness in her marriage to Sonny Bono. The pair officially tied the knot in the 1960s and welcomed one child, Chaz Bono, in 1969, before divorcing in 1975.
In her memoir, Cher wrote that when she was 26 and frustrated with her “loveless marriage,” she contemplated ending her life multiple times.
“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,” she wrote. “For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option.”
She said she reached this point “five or six times,” but each time, she would think about her child, her mother and her sister, and would consider how if she killed herself, she might make “people who look up to me” feel that suicide is “a viable solution.”
Because of these thoughts, she wrote that she “would step back inside.”
Eventually, the singer’s outlook shifted.
“Then one morning everything changed,” she wrote. “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.”
Even while struggling behind closed doors, Cher and Bono hosted the popular “Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” from 1971 to 1974, and “The Sonny & Cher Show” from 1976 to 1977.
Cher described in her memoir how she continued working with him even as their marriage deteriorated.
“The confusing thing was that, although I was deeply unhappy, I still loved Sonny, but I was no longer in love with him,” she wrote. “We were an amazing team on TV but at home things were falling apart. He didn’t notice me anymore, so he didn’t see it.”
She added that while she and Bono were “madly in love” during the first few years of their marriage, in her view, “The Sonny & Cher Show” changed her then-husband “beyond recognition.”
“I was able to live with him because I compartmentalized my feelings and was used to censoring what I said and did around him,” she wrote.
According to the memoir, Cher also opened up about her suicidal thoughts to Bono.
“Sonny and I were becoming friends again. One morning I came down to breakfast and he surprised me by saying, ‘You know, after you went off with Bill that night at the Sahara, I seriously thought about throwing you off our balcony,’” she wrote.
Bono was referring to a young guitar player whom Cher names only as “Bill” in her memoir, with whom she says she had a tryst while she and Bono were together.
“He laughed a little at that and so did I,” Cher wrote. “It was crazy that he was telling me. He went on: ‘I figured I’d plead insanity like Spade Cooley and get seven years in jail before they released me. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.’”
“‘Oh, you did, did you?’ I replied. ‘Well, there would have been no need to push me because I was gonna jump!’ Within seconds, we were howling,” Cher continued. “No one watching our response to what had been the darkest moment of our marriage would have understood.
“I didn’t think for a minute that Sonny would have actually pushed me off the balcony, but I’m sure it crossed his mind, and he knew that jumping off had also crossed mine,” she added. “What else could we do but laugh?”
A few years after she and Bono were no longer together, Cher said he apologized to her for how he treated her during their marriage.
“He showed up on my doorstep in tears. Sitting in my kitchen, he said to me, ‘I’m sorry for what I did to you. I was dishonest and I had all those women, and I didn’t think how it might affect our relationship,’” she wrote.
Cher said she “never thought” she would hear him apologize, and while “it couldn’t change anything,” it felt “good to know deep down inside that he’d realized for the first time how hurtful what he’d done was and was genuinely sorry.”
Bono reflected on the end of their relationship and stage act, as well as Cher’s public accusations that he had been too controlling, in a 1988 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
‘’It was very painful, because what I did with the act was definitely out of love,” he told the outlet. “My whole thrust was to promote Cher. So it was painful when it all got bounced back as a dictatorial Svengali who was manipulating this poor girl.”
Bono also wrote about Cher’s mental health struggles in his own memoir, “And The Beat Goes On.”
“Cher has always described herself during our final years together as a near-suicidal, ninety-one pound hostage, and painted me as an uncaring slavedriver,” he wrote. “If Cher was ninety-one pounds and near-suicidal, I never knew it and she failed to communicate her dire condition. If I was a slavedriver, Cher never complained about it.”
“I know why she said such lies,” he continued. “For as long as I’ve known her, Cher has played the part of a victim. She’s played it to the hilt. She’s needed a villain. And who better or more convenient than me? I had no means of defending myself. She was famous and beloved. I was a nobody, a has-been. No one wanted to hear my side of the story.”
After the couple finalized their divorce in 1975, Cher married musician Gregg Allman the same year, and they welcomed one child, Elijah Blue, in 1976.
In the 1980s, Bono went on to pursue a career in politics. He served as the mayor of Palm Springs, California, from 1988 to 1992, and he represented California’s 44th congressional district in the House of Representatives starting in 1995. He died in a skiing accident in 1998.
