The kiss from a guitarist that convinced Cher it was over with Sonny

Standing barefoot on the balcony of our suite at the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas, I stared down, dizzy with loneliness as I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.

It was October 1972 and there I was, 26 years old and in what had become a loveless marriage. The success of our primetime Sonny And Cher show on CBS had changed my husband Sonny beyond recognition. Too busy trying to make an empire and be a mogul, he didn’t seem to care how I felt any more, or that I even had emotions.

That night, Jerry Ridgeway, our tour manager, planned to visit a fair with the rest of the band and his girlfriend Paulette, a warm, fun person who was four years younger than me and would become my best friend.

I was starved of female companionship and Sonny didn’t seem to mind that I had a friend, probably because he thought Paulette was young and not as smart as he was, so he never considered her a threat. What he didn’t bargain for was that hearing about her adventures threw my own situation into sharper focus.

I didn’t want Paulette’s life, I just was starting to wonder if I wanted mine. The tension building up inside me was making it hard to eat and sleep. Weight was falling off me. For Paulette’s birthday she had chicken cordon bleu, which I love. I remember trying to get myself to eat it and I couldn’t take a bite. That scared me.

To top it all off, I couldn’t tell anyone because I was afraid that something I said would get back to Sonny. So I just needlepointed myself to death – it was how I kept my mind occupied.

When I heard about the band’s visit to the fair, I was excited to think that Sonny might come along too, but I found him in our suite talking business with our lawyer Irwin Spiegel.

He called me over to sign something, saying: ‘We got a contract with Caesars.’ I had no say in the decision and signed the new contract for us to perform in Vegas every summer for God knows how many years, tying us into something I didn’t want to do because touring so much felt like it was killing me and I knew our daughter Chastity, who was three at the time, was suffering, too.

The realisation that my husband would always put business first over me and my feelings winded me. Suddenly I was angry, frightened, and felt completely trapped.

Remembering why I’d come, I forced a smile and said: ‘Hey, all the guys in the band are taking their girlfriends to this fair. It sounds like fun, wanna go?’

He barely looked up at me and said: ‘No, just go with Ridgeway and Paulette.’

From then on I started to feel hopeless and, soon, desperate. For a few crazy minutes out there on the balcony I couldn’t imagine any other option.

I did this five or six times. Each time I’d think about 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 solution, and I would step back inside.

Then one day everything changed. Between shows I went out on the balcony again and this time I thought, ‘I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave him.’

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It was Paulette who casually mentioned that Bill, a young guitar player who’d joined our band, had asked for an eight-by-ten photo of me from the office.

‘I do believe that Bill may have a crush on you!’ she laughed.

That night, when Paulette and I went to see The Righteous Brothers at the Hilton hotel in between our shows, I found myself in a group in a booth with Bill, a tall 21-year-old with a Texas drawl, sitting next to me and putting his hand on my knee. To this day I don’t know how he was so bold.

Later I joined Bill in the hotel lobby when he went to buy some cigarettes. There we ran straight into David Brenner, the stand-up comedian who opened our act. He almost passed out at the sight of me on my own in public with Bill. Me with a guy by myself? He might as well have seen Frankenstein with Dumbo.

‘Hi, guys, what are you doing?’ he asked.

David and Sonny were really close, and I figured he wouldn’t want to be the one to break this to him. I replied coolly: ‘Oh, we’re just buying cigarettes.’

David looked so nervous, but I’d already done it, I’d kicked over the can, milk was spilled.

Bill and I went outside to a big brick wall behind the hotel, leaning against it quietly side by side until he suddenly blurted, ‘We all wonder how you can live this way.’

Then he pulled me toward him and kissed me. It felt like my head almost exploded off my shoulders. Bill was a great kisser, but more than that, Sonny didn’t like to kiss. This kiss was what I’d imagined in sixth grade when I knew that kissing was in my future. We then went up to drummer Jeff Porcaro’s room, where the band were drinking beer, smoking pot and passing around guitars. Soon after, the phone rang and it was Sonny. ‘What the f*** do you think you’re doing, Cher?” he asked.

‘Oh, I dunno. Just hanging with the guys.’ You could have heard a pin drop. ‘Have you lost your mind? Come back to the room.’

I had no idea who I even was at that moment, because I told him: ‘Bill wants to understand more about his publishing rights, so I thought I’d bring him up to our suite.’

If I were Bill, I would have been thinking, ‘This is a bad idea, that’s my boss upstairs, I’m not going to go up to your room’, but he came with me and when we walked into our suite Sonny was waiting in a chair, staring at us in complete silence.

‘Could you go into the bedroom so we can talk?’ he asked Bill quietly, and Bill left the room. Still staring me down, Sonny looked different somehow. Pinched. Shaken. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.

I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth next. ‘I want to sleep with Bill.’ I didn’t mean it, but I thought saying those words was the only way that he would let me go.

The silence was deafening. Then he said: ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’

I have no idea what made me say what I did next: ‘Two hours.’ The whole conversation was insane.

‘OK,’ Sonny said, and without another word he got up and left the room.

I walked into the bedroom, where Bill was sitting up against the headboard with his legs outstretched, his ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette.

We just started to talk, which I never did before because I didn’t trust people not to go to Sonny. I don’t know what made me drop my guard and open up to Bill that night, but I told him everything.

That’s all that happened – we sat and we talked and I cried. Nothing else. Both of us were so exhausted. Besides, I wouldn’t have done that in my own bedroom, I don’t care what I was going through.

The next thing I knew it was about 5am and Bill had gone. I was still half asleep when Sonny came around my side of the bed, picked up my hand, and pulled my wedding ring off my finger. It took me a second to realise what he was doing, but I was too exhausted to care.

I woke up in the afternoon, still in a daze. As I wandered the Sahara’s upper corridors looking for my husband, I repeatedly told myself, I’m going to do this. I really am.

I eventually found him sulking in his dressing room, where I walked in and blurted: ‘Sonny, I need 500 dollars in cash. Now.’

Ever since we’d first started living together, he’d been secretly convinced I’d leave him one day, something he didn’t properly tell me until years later, although he’d written it in a poem he gave me way back. There was a line, ‘a butterfly to be loved by all but not by one’.

On the day he knew that moment had finally come, he also realised there was nothing he could do to stop me.

I can’t recall the exact sequence of events but something clicked inside me when I found out that Sonny had slept with Bill’s girlfriend the previous night out of revenge. I found Bill and asked him to come with me to Sausalito, a sleepy seaside town near San Francisco where Sonny and I once had a perfect foggy day together. I thought of it as a safe place.

We arrived in San Francisco in the early hours and took separate cabs in case anyone spotted us, but then our drivers both got lost in the notorious Bay Area fog. Later I discovered that Sonny sent private detectives to follow us, and they got lost, too. There was no way he was going to let me go off on my own.

Unable to find our way to the coast, Bill and I ended up back at the airport before eventually checking in to some cheap hotel at around 4am. There we made love, and it was unbelievable. I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again.

The confusing thing was that, although I was deeply unhappy, I still loved Sonny, but I was no longer in love with him like I had been in the first years of our relationship.

When we met in an LA coffee shop, in November 1962, I was a 16-year-old acting student with no money and no prospects and Sonny was working as a promoter, schmoozing DJs into playing the latest releases while going through a divorce from his wife Donna.

Then 27 and easygoing with a ready smile, he was the youngest child of a family of Sicilian immigrants. When he walked into the coffee shop, I swear it was like Maria and Tony in West Side Story: everyone else in the room faded.

High-school dropouts with unconventional looks, we both came from rocky homes. We both grew up too quickly and couldn’t settle in relationships, but we fit together, and that suited me just fine. I was young and pliable and happy to be taken care of. And he made me laugh constantly.

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He dug my weird sense of humour and was happy to do the things I liked because he was still a big kid inside. The women he dated wanted to be wined and dined at expensive restaurants, not taken shopping at Safeway for the promise of a pizza. Nor would they be happy to spend an afternoon painting together (he was terrible), modelling things out of clay or heading to the park with a picnic.

Over the next ten days or so we hung out and became friends. I had then just moved out from the beautiful big house in Encino, an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, where my mother lived with her fifth husband, Gilbert.

Gilbert had rented me an apartment in Beverly Hills, which I shared with Josita, our 22-year-old German maid. When she moved out I couldn’t afford my share of the rent and Sonny suggested I move into his place, cooking and cleaning for my keep.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve got twin beds,’ he said. ’And honestly, I don’t find you particularly attractive.’

As the weeks passed we became like a brother and sister, or more accurately a father and daughter, because I was the insecure kid full of phobias, the teenager who didn’t like silence and couldn’t get to sleep unless the television was on, which is still sometimes true.

One night, the black screen that followed the end of TV programming at midnight gave me a panic attack for some reason and Sonny told me to get into bed with him, pulling the covers over me before he rolled towards the wall.

‘Just sleep, OK?’ he said. ‘Don’t bother me.’

In his macho Sicilian way, Sonny took care of me. When I got sick, he took my temperature, tucked me up and got what I needed from the pharmacy.

While he was out I’d clean up the place and sing along to the radio or records by singers like Elvis, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis and Etta James. I can’t remember which song I was singing the day that Sonny walked in and heard me.

‘You can sing!’ he said, staring at me like he had never seen me before. ‘Yeah,’ I replied, turning back to make my bed.

‘But I mean you can really sing. Have you always been able to sing like that?’

‘No, Son, I just started today.’

‘Huh,’ he said, before wandering off into the kitchen to make dinner, a role he’d taken over since first sampling my cooking. Not that I complained, because he could throw together anything and make an amazing meal.

Before too long, I thought the sun rose and set on his backside, even though I knew that I wasn’t his type. My kind of body wasn’t in style yet, and one day when I borrowed a bathing suit from a friend to go to the beach, I watched Sonny’s face drop when he saw me.

‘My God, you’re skinny,’ he said. ‘You don’t have any shape at all! Is that all there is to you?’

With no curves, I looked like a matchstick, but one evening, after we’d been to the cinema, he kissed me, catching me completely off guard. I guess I’d finally grown on him and from that point there was no turning back.

When he was taken on as a gofer by 22-year-old Phillip Spector, who was producing hit records for some of the biggest artists of the day at the Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard, he persuaded Phillip to let me sing backing vocals on The Ronettes’ song Be My Baby. For the next year, Phillip hardly ever recorded a song without me singing back-up.

I loved singing and trusted Sonny when he told me that I should give up my acting classes. I probably could have done both but he was already starting to take over my life.

Sonny was a homebody, but he’d occasionally take me to nightclubs, never to dance but to meet people in the industry. I was often too tired to stay out late, and I didn’t see the point if I wasn’t allowed to dance or talk to anyone without him. He told me that anything a couple couldn’t do together wasn’t worth doing.

He wouldn’t even let me listen to music or wear perfume, because he didn’t like the smell. That was disappointing because I loved perfume, but I still didn’t realise that I was having to give up a lot of myself while Sonny gave up nothing, because the changes in how he treated me came very slowly. It was very Machiavellian (an author Sonny loved).

We loved being together and, although we’d get married formally in 1969, we cemented our future with silver rings we had made in a souvenir shop and a marriage ceremony of sorts in our bathroom. It was all kinds of silly, but I meant every word as we stood barefoot facing each other between the shower and the window, the mirrored medicine cabinet behind us.

I spoke my own made-up version of wedding vows, then he said a few words and we swapped our rings, kissed, and that was it. Our ad hoc ceremony was over in minutes, and then Sonny went into the kitchen to make spaghetti sauce while I hummed a happy song.

By the summer of 1963 he had become everything to me, the all-seeing eye who told me to give up the softball I enjoyed playing with my mum and our friends.

As persuasive as ever, he convinced me that I didn’t have time to ‘mess around with games’ any more and needed to focus entirely on my singing. His dreams for me were stalled by Phillip Spector, who insisted my voice wasn’t commercial enough and had the register of Paul McCartney. Sonny knew he had to find me the perfect song and he never stopped writing even if that meant staying up all night – the time when he was at his most creative.So hyped up that he couldn’t sleep, he’d sit at the piano or the kitchen table scribbling away. He didn’t know that many chords so he wrote all of our songs with the same three or four.

In November 1964, he and I stood at the microphone at Gold Star to record our last-ever backing vocal for Phillip Spector. It was for You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ by The Righteous Brothers, a song that would reach No1 around the world, earn a Grammy and become listed as one of the best songs of the century.

Although we were happy to be leaving on such a high note, we were broke without Sonny’s wages. Making money outside of Gold Star was going to be tough, but one night in early 1965 Sonny woke me up to play another new number he’d written.

He had a habit of scrawling lyrics on old shirt cardboard, filling in both the white and brown sides before handing it to me and I squinted at his terrible handwriting through sleepy eyes, trying to make sense of it. Then I listened to him singing it and, can I tell you, Sonny’s voice wasn’t amazing in the daytime, so imagine having to listen to it at 2am.

‘I got you babe,’ he sang, a little off-key. On first hearing, I wasn’t impressed. ‘I don’t like it,’ I declared, yawning. ‘I don’t think it’s a hit.’

Two hours later, he shook me awake again. ‘Cher, Cher, I think I’ve got it! Come and listen.’ With one eye open, I listened to the new version and nodded. ‘That’s better.’ I liked that he used ‘babe’. It came from my mum, who used that term of endearment for everyone. It was a habit that became a part of me, and Sonny used it too. But overall I still didn’t think much of the song.

It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong. When he wanted me to sing it back to him, I told him, ‘OK, OK, but then I’m going back to bed.’

We released I Got You Babe as a single in the summer of 65 and it changed our lives forever, taking us to No1 in both the United States and Britain, even knocking

The Beatles’ single Help off the top UK slot as it sold a million copies within two weeks and was certified gold.

That sentimental little tune became loved the world over by people with whom it resonated somehow and found its lyrics tender and sweet. Unbeknownst to me, I’d be singing it to audiences for the next 50 years.

© 2024 Cher

• Adapted from Cher: The Memoir, Part One, by Cher, published by HarperCollins on November 19 at £25.