Inside Sonny and Cher’s secretly dark relationship — and how Lucille Ball encouraged her to leave him

Cher was so distraught over her “loveless marriage” to Sonny Bono that she contemplated throwing herself off the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room — one of “five or six” times she contemplated taking her own life during that period, she reveals in her new memoir.

The icon was 26 years old and her weight had plunged to 98 pounds as she was worked to the bone by her husband.

Cher reached her tipping point in October 1972 while the couple — who found fame with their mega hit “I Got You Babe” in 1965 — was in Las Vegas performing two gigs a night in the Sahara Hotel’s Congo Room.

Behind their smiles, Bono and Cher had a troubled marriage, as the singer reveals he was possessive and controlling. Getty Images

She was already exhausted when she was told that Sonny signed a new contract for them to perform at Caesars Palace in Vegas “every summer for God knows how many years,” Cher writes, even as they were still taping their hit CBS show, “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and raising their young child.

With the sudden realization that Sonny would always put “business first over me,” she writes in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” she was “pissed off, frightened, and felt completely trapped.”

The couple met when Cher was just 16 and Bono was 27 and already separated from his then-wife. Getty Images

She recalls stepping barefoot onto the balcony of her hotel suite and staring down.

“I was dizzy with loneliness,” she writes. “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. I did this five or six times [during the Vegas stay], and each time I’d think about [her 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.”

The pair had a top-rated variety show on CBS, with big name guests like Farrah Fawcett. CBS via Getty Images

Finally, Cher recalls, one night between shows she “went out on the balcony again and this time I thought ‘I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.'”

It was a flirtation with a guitarist in her band that gave her the final push to leave Sonny, the man she met when she was just 16 and he was 27.

That night she confronted her husband and told him, “I want to sleep with Bill.”

They had their child Chastity — now known as Chaz — after Cher suffered a string of devastating miscarriages. Getty Images

She didn’t actually mean it, Cher writes, but Sonny — who she claims was so controlling that she was banned from wearing perfume — hadn’t listened to her previous pleas to let her go.

“The silence was deafening. Then [Sonny] said, ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’

“Two hours,” she responded. Sonny left, while Cher cried on Bill’s shoulder.

Cher with mother Georgia Holt in 1946 in Gardena, California. Courtesy of Cher

The next day she asked her husband for $500 to leave — and discovered he had already slept with Bill’s girlfriend as revenge.

She flew with Bill to San Francisco, followed by private detectives sent by Sonny, where they checked into a hotel and had “unbelievable’ sex.

“I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again,” Cher writes.

The singer and her sister, Georganne Bartylak. Courtesy of Cher

The two made a deal that she could live in their Malibu house on the weekends and, as she didn’t have a bank account of her own, receive a $5,000-a-month stipend — but keep their split a secret while they continued to live together during the week and star on their hit show.

Tensions softened within their mansion and, as the two became friends again, Sonny surprised her at breakfast one morning: “You know, after you went off with Bill that night at the Sahara, I seriously thought about throwing you off our balcony.”

Cher with mother Georgia Holt and sister Georganne Bartylak. Holt died aged 96 in December 2022. Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

He laughed as he told her he figured he could plead insanity and “get seven years in jail before they released me. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.”

Cher laughed, too, as she admitted, “‘Well, there would have been no need to push me because I was gonna jump!’

Cher with second husband, Gregg Allman, and their son, Elijah Blue Allman. Courtesy of Cher

“Within seconds we were howling … What else could we do but laugh?”

That could be the motto of her life.

Cher was born to Jackie Jean Crouch, from rural Arkansas, and Johnnie Sarkisian, a grifter and heroin addict.

Jackie Jean — who later changed her name to Georgia Holt — walked out on her husband after just three months of marriage, only to discover she was pregnant. Panicked, she nearly had a backstreet abortion, but walked out.

It was music billionaire David Geffen who told girlfriend Cher that Sonny had failed to pay her. Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

The couple was so broke that Cher was left in a Catholic children’s home in Scranton, Penn., to be cared for by nuns while Sarkisian raised funds to get them to California. 

Holt was banned from even holding her daughter and eventually got Cher out of the children’s home with the help of a customer in the diner where she was working.

Cher went to Lucille Ball for marital advice — and the comedy legend got salty. NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images Meanwile, Tina Turner came to Cher for marriage advice amid her abusive relationship with Ike Turner. CBS via Getty Images

“One thing is for certain: my childhood was never normal,” Cher writes.

Her mother went on to marry eight times with six husbands, including twice to Sarkisian.

Most of the future singer’s childhood was spent living in poverty in Los Angeles, and Cher writes how her saddle shoes were held together with elastic bands and patched with cardboard. 

Cher and Chaz Bono (center) wept at the funeral for Sonny Bono, alongside Bono’s widow, Mary Bono. AFP via Getty Images

But the family was fame-adjacent as Holt played bit parts in “Gunsmoke” and “I Love Lucy” and, Cher writes, lost a role in “Asphalt Jungle” to Marilyn Monroe.

At 15, Cher romanced Warren Beatty, who was 25.  A year later, she met Sonny — who was in the middle of a divorce — in a coffee shop and he let her move in with him in return for cooking and cleaning. He first told her: “I don’t find you particularly attractive.”

But that changed soon enough. When a friend informed him Cher wasn’t yet 18, she lied. “Okay .. .I’m not eighteen now, I’m seventeen. But my birthday is in May, so I’ll be eighteen in two months.”

Cher on the cover of her album “The Prisoner” in 1979. Getty Images

It was Sonny who convinced his boss, music producer Phil Spector, to let Cher sing with the Ronettes one day when Darlene Love’s car broke down. 

From there, the duo started recording together, first as Caesar & Cleo, then as Sonny & Cher, and achieved huge fame with their TV show.

Cher writes how they had their own private, non-legal wedding ceremony in their bathroom at home in 1963, weeks after she had suffered a miscarriage.

By the time she was 21, Cher had suffered three miscarriages.

The first part of Cher’s memoir is out now. AP

She also walked in on Sonny cheating with his assistant one night. He told her it was her fault for not having enough sex with him.

“I wouldn’t have had to look outside our marriage if I was sexually satisfied,” he insisted.

Cher writes: “That was such bullshit. but by the time he’e finished. found myself apologizing.”

They officially wed in 1964 when Cher became pregnant with Chas (who is trans and legally changed his name to Chaz in 2010).

She writes that fame changed Sonny, who established the “Benevolent Army of El Primo” in which everyone in his orbit was issued a rank. Sonny, naturally, was El Primo.

The star is now dating 36-year-old music exec Alexander Edwrds. They’re seen with his son Slash. AFP via Getty Images

Even though she was dubbed his “Prima Donna,” Cher wasn’t allowed to socialize with their band members, or even go to a Tupperware party hosted by Brian Wilson’s wife. The couple stopped going to dinners, concerts and movies, and Sonny was so jealous that he burned her tennis clothes in the backyard.

But it was only after they split up and she started dating music boss David Geffen that Cher discovered the true extent of Sonny’s duplicity.

Cher performed at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in October. AFP via Getty Images

Geffen read Cher’s contract and discovered she was working for Sonny as an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises.

“I’d worked my whole life, yet apparently, I had nothing to show for it. I’d never for a second imagined that I needed to protect myself from Sonny, of all people, yet the contracts he’d had me sign were secretly designed to strip me of my income and the rights to my own career,” she writes.

“For years, I’ve racked my brain for how he could have done what he did, and I still can’t get over it to this day.”

The icon in a creation by her favorite designer, Bob Mackie, in 1978. Getty Images

She called Lucille Ball — who ha famously left Desi Arnaz — for advice. The sitcom star told Cher: “F––k him, you’re the one with the talent.”

Years later, Cher would give Tina Turner advice on how to leave her abusive husband, Ike Turner.

Sonny died in a skiing accident in 1998 and, despite everything, it’s clear in the book that Cher still felt affection for him.

After calling off a planned Aspen wedding to Geffen, who later publicly came out as gay, she wed musician Gregg Allman and had son Elijah Skye Blue Allman.

That marriage was traumatic for different reasons as Allman was addicted to heroin and in and out of rehab.

“Looking back, I can see that I was a little bit crazy with Gregory,” Cher writes. “I kept doing the same thing and hoping for different results and therein insanity lies.”

Cher and Bono rose to fame with the song “I Got You Babe.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The end came when Allman had a paranoid breakdown in their backyard one night and insisted he saw men with guns.

Cher, who is now dating 36-year-old music executive Alexander Edwards, sets up a future installment of her memoir by revealing it was “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola who put a new idea in her head by asking, “Why aren’t you making movies?”