In her recently released memoir, Cher: The Memoir — Part One, the singer and actress writes about her complicated relationship with her ex-husband Sonny Bono. When Cher realized that she wanted to leave Sonny, she didn’t know exactly what to do. The fact that they worked together made everything even more challenging. Luckily, Cher had a friend who had gone through something similar. That friend was Lucille Ball.
Like Cher, 78, the late Lucille Ball and her (ex-)husband Desi Arnaz also had a professional showbusiness relationship in addition to a romantic one. Because of this, Cher decided to reach out to Lucille for advice, she revealed in her memoir.
“I told her, ‘Lucy, I want to leave Sonny and you’re the only one I know that’s ever been in this same situation. What should I do?'” Cher wrote in her memoir, according to Entertainment Tonight. “Lucy and her husband had also become famous working together as stars on TV. And he was a huge womanizer too. Then Lucy had left him.”
Lucille had some blunt advice for Cher, which Cher recalled in her memoir and on the Today show. “She told me, ‘F— him, you’re the one with the talent,'” Cher wrote.
Lucille and Desi were costars on I Love Lucy, which ended a few years before the couple finalized their divorce. Similarly, the final episode of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour aired around the same time that Sonny and Cher’s marriage ended.
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Cher and Sonny met in 1962 when Cher was 16 and Sonny was 27. Describing why she loved Sonny, Cher told CBS, “He was different than anyone else. And he made me laugh. And we had a dream.”
However, after some time, Cher began to feel like their marriage was “loveless,” via People. She felt “trapped.”
Additionally, she felt like Sonny had changed, she explained to CBS.
“He just started not to care,” Cher told the news outlet. “About me.” In her book, she wrote about telling Sonny that she wanted to sleep with a guitarist in their band that she referred to as “Bill.”
The reason she told Sonny this was not because she actually wanted to sleep with Bill, Cher explained. Instead, she wanted to damage their relationship, or “blow it up.”
“It all seems crazy now. I didn’t mean it, but I thought saying those words was the only way that he would let me go,” Cher wrote in the memoir. “I thought if I do this, it’s over. He’s not gonna be able to come back. We’re not gonna be able to be Sonny & Cher. I just wanna blow it up. But I didn’t know I wanted to blow it up until I was blowing it up.”
