Cher and Sonny Bono’s marriage seemed like couple goals when the duo sand duets, but it also drove the singer dangerously close to suicide.
Cher has opened up about the difficult marriage in her new self-titled memoir, sharing that she contemplated jumping off the balcony of their Las Vegas hotel room close to the end of their marriage.
“There I was, twenty-six years old and in what had become a loveless marriage,” Cher wrote of a particular night in October 1972. “Sonny had given me the vehicle and the confidence to become the somebody my mother always told me I would be, and then he just lost interest.”
“I stepped barefoot onto the balcony of our suite and stared down,” she recalled. “I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear. For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option.”
She continued: “I did this five or six times, and each time I’d think about Chas, 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 solution, and I would step back inside.”
Cher and Sonny Bono separated in 1974 and divorced in 1975, they remained friends until his death in 1998. Cher also gave the eulogy at his funeral.
