“I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.”
Trigger Warning: This article contains mention of suicide and emotional distress.
Cher is getting extremely candid about her marriage to Sonny Bono in her new book Cher: The Memoir, Part 1. While the couple captured hearts with their musical duets and love songs as Sonny & Cher, behind the curtain was another story—the “Believe” singer was so unhappy and “trapped” in her “loveless marriage” that she often thought of removing herself from his life in drastic ways.
“I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear,” Cher wrote in the book, according to People. “For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times.”
Though she thought about jumping off of a balcony multiple times, Cher never had the courage to do it and often considered how her actions would affect her loved ones, namely, her then-young child Chaz Bono, her mother Georgia, and her sister Georganne. Thinking of family stopped her, she said, adding that “things like this could make people who look up to me feel that it’s a viable solution.”
On a fateful day in Las Vegas, Cher realized that she didn’t need to end her life in order to get out of her and Bono’s marriage: “I don’t have to jump off. I can just leave him.”
Last year, the pop music icon told People that Bono “pissed me off royally and hurt me.” Cher, however, was able to find closure from that pain after Bono gave her a genuine apology for the way he treated her while they were together.
“One day he came into the kitchen at my house and said, ‘Cher, I want to apologize. I realized that I hurt you in so many ways, and I was wrong,’” she recalled. “That went a long way for me.”
Cher and Bono divorced in 1975 after 11 years of marriage; the couple met in 1963 while she was 16 and he was 27 and recently separated from his first wife. Bono later died in 1998 from a skiing accident at the Heavenly Mountain Resort.
If you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255, or go to their website, suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
