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(NewsNation) — Cher’s new memoir — “Cher: The Memoir Part One” (the second comes out next year) — is so good and juicy, it’s every entertainment reporter’s dream. She dishes the dirt on everything, including her marriage to Sonny Bono.
Among the salacious revelations in the book:
- Cher met Sonny when she was 16 and he was 27. The two initially became roommates as he was interested in her friend Melissa.
- Even when they did start dating, she described him as “charming and funny, but he had no money, drove an old Chevy Monza, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a random teenager. He wasn’t a catch.”
- His musical abilities were suspect: “He realized I was a better dancer, and that made him feel uncomfortable, but he also didn’t want me going dancing on my own either,” she writes, adding Bono “wasn’t the best piano player in the world,” and “he didn’t know that many chords so he wrote all our songs with the same three or four.”
- After they were married, Bono cheated on her constantly, with Cher writing, “Paulette, Gee, and Chas’s nanny, Linda, were the only women in our circle Sonny hadn’t slept with.”
- Sonny was controlling and tyrannical — forbidding her from hanging out with friends and band members. At one point, he even forbid the band members from speaking to or looking at Cher.
- When she finally did divorce Sonny, she called Lucille Ball for advice as Ball had just divorced Desi Arnaz. Ball told her: “F— him, you’re the one with the talent.”
But a friend of Cher’s (who also knew Sonny) told me if Bono — who went on to become a congressman and died in a ski accident in 1998 — were alive, the legendary musician would have never written a word about him.
”Even after everything he did to her — she still has a lot of love for Sonny,” the friend said. “If he was still with us, no way would she have written the book. She is loyal to the bone.”
A rep for Cher didn’t return emails.