Cher is opening up about how her late ex-husband Sonny Bono controlled her during their marriage and musical partnership.
On Monday’s episode of “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard,” the 79-year-old singer reflected on her turbulent personal and professional relationship with Bono, with whom she rose to fame in the 1960s as the pop duo Sonny & Cher.
In 1962, the former couple first met in Los Angeles when Cher was 16 and Bono was a 27-year-old aspiring music producer. Bono, who was working with record producer Phil Spector at the time, became Cher’s mentor, manager and creative partner. The two formed Sonny & Cher in 1964 and they tied the knot during an unofficial wedding ceremony in Tijuana, Mexico, later that year.
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“We had a lot of fun, and he was special in a way, and then it became very treacherous,” Cher recalled.
In 1965, Sonny & Cher made their breakthrough with the success of their song “I Got You, Babe,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The duo, who officially married in 1969, went on to release scores of other hits with Bono handling songwriting, production and business, while Cher was the breakout star and the duo’s main draw.
Their success later expanded into television when they launched the variety show “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” which made them household names in the early 1970s.
While appearing on “Armchair Expert,” Cher explained that her relationship with Bono began to unravel at the height of their fame as he began to increasingly control her day-to-day decisions.
“This is when now this kind of new side of Sonny comes out,” Shepard said.
“Yeah,” Cher agreed with a nod.
“Which is like incredibly controlling,” Shepard continued. “You have this huge success. There’s a lot of money. You’re not allowed to leave the house. You’re allowed to go shopping. That’s pretty much all you’re allowed to do, right?”
“Yes,” Cher said.
“And he’s cutting you off from friendships you have,” Shepard said. “Was it happening slowly? Was it more like you woke up one day and were like, ‘Oh, I don’t have a life’ or while it was happening, were you like, ‘What’s going on?'”
“It took a little while,” Cher admitted. “I couldn’t do anything.”
Cher recounted how she began learning to play tennis and would practice at a friend’s house. The “Believe” hitmaker recalled a harrowing incident that occurred after Bono discovered that she had been seen at her friend’s home during a party after playing tennis.
“I’m leaving, but she’s having a huge party. So there are people coming in,” she recalled. “And so Dennis, my friend, told Sonny that I was there, but lots of people were there and lots of men were there.”
“And he burned my clothes,” Cher said. “In the yard.”
Cher explained that her realization of how Bono was exerting excessive power over her life “came on kind of slowly.” The Grammy Award winner said that part of her difficulty with fully grasping the situation stemmed from the difference between how Bono treated her on the set of “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and his behavior at home.
“I was free on the show, and he was funny, and we got along,” Cher remembered. “It’s such a strange dichotomy because we would be laughing, and we’d be having the best time and then when we were at home, it was kind of more cut and dried.”
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Cher recalled that she also discovered that Bono was cheating on her during the rocky later years of their marriage. After Shepard remarked that Bono had “lots of other girlfriends,” Cher told him, “I didn’t know except the one.”
Shepard cited an incident that Cher wrote about in her 1998 memoir “The First Time,” in which she went to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and found another woman “putting her boots on” in the home the singer shared with Bono.
Cher told Shepard that she had no thoughts of leaving Bono at the time despite the shocking incident. She explained that she stayed in the relationship largely due to “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.” However, she clarified that her reluctance to leave wasn’t because she was driven to preserve the show’s massive success.
“It wasn’t that, because I was so happy with the show. And he was so nice on the show. And so, at the show we would be having the best time, and we were more working than we were at home,” she said. “It was such a polar opposite, because on stage we had a blast. He let me have all the freedom that I wanted to, and then we came home.”
“The show kept us together a lot longer than we would have been anyway, because we had such a good time,” she continued. “He was so fun, and he was so funny, and we worked so well together.”
However, Cher recalled that she grew increasingly unhappy with their marriage and her lack of autonomy amid the power imbalance. In February 1974, they decided to divorce, and their show was canceled two months later.
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Shepard recalled that Cher only learned how little control she had over the money that she and Bono had earned during the divorce proceeding after Cher’s friend and music executive David Geffen asked to review her contract.
“It’s not until Geffen looks at this contract and says to you, ‘Do you realize 100% of this money goes to a company called Cher Inc. that is owned 95% by Sonny and 5% by his lawyer?'”
“0% for Cher?” Shepard’s co-host Monica Padman asked in disbelief.
“0%,” Shepard said.
“It was like born yesterday, because they would bring me a bunch of share enterprises contracts to sign and it was always like when I was getting ready to go on stage,” Cher said.
“Yeah, what are you going to do — read 20 pages of legalese?” Shepard said.
“And the next day, he said, ‘You’ve got to get out of this,'” Cher recalled of Geffen. “So I went to Sonny and I said, ‘I’ll stay with you if we’re partners. And he said no.'”
Shepard pointed out that over their time working together, they made some “serious, serious money.”
“And you didn’t walk with half of that is what you’re saying?” Shepard asked.
“I didn’t walk with any of it,” Cher said. “None of it.”
In 1975, Cher and Bono finalized their divorce, which was formally settled in a 1978 marriage settlement agreement.
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During their divorce proceedings, Cher also learned that their finances were in poor shape, since much of the money had been spent, reinvested or lost in ventures managed by Bono.
Rather than receiving a cash payout, Cher was granted 50% of the publishing royalties from their work together.
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Although the divorce left Cher with limited immediate wealth, the royalty agreement proved to be valuable in the long-term, reportedly earning her tens of millions of dollars paid out gradually over decades.
After the split, Cher embarked on a far more successful solo career, while Bono moved away from music and later entered politics.
In 1998, Bono died at the age of 62 in a skiing accident in Lake Tahoe, California. Bono and Cher were parents to their only child, Chaz Bono.
While appearing on “Armchair Expert,” Cher reflected on building her own fortune, admitting, “I have never had success with men and money.”
