Cher felt so trapped in her marriage with Sonny Bono that she contemplated suicide — multiple times.
In her new memoir, Cher: The Memoir, Part One, released November 19, the Hollywood superstar, 78, reflects on her “loveless” marriage with the late musician and their rise to fame as iconic entertainment duo Sonny & Cher in the ‘70s. During this period, she felt so controlled and isolated by Sonny that she believed ending her life was her only escape.
“I was dizzy with loneliness,” Cher recounts of a night in 1972 when despair brought her to the edge of a Las Vegas hotel balcony. “I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.”
This dark thought plagued her “five or six times,” she admits, as Sonny’s jealousy and tight grip on their finances and schedule left her feeling powerless. The Grammy-winning singer didn’t even have her own bank account and was instead given monthly stipends.
At the time, the couple juggled a grueling workload with raising their toddler. When an “overworked” Cher suggested taking a vacation, Sonny dismissed her outright. Instead, he locked them into long-term contracts, adding to her mounting exhaustion and caring only about “how much money we’d made.”
“Defeated” by his control, Cher writes of standing barefoot on the balcony, contemplating escape.
But one night, she had a revelation: “I don’t have to jump off; I can just leave him.”
Cher eventually divorced Sonny in 1975.
