Cher Reveals Sonny Bono Once Hired Private Detectives to Tail Her After She Left Him for Another Man

Cher was once tailed by private detectives hired by Sonny Bono.

In her new autobiography, Cher: The Memoir, Part One, the multi-hyphenate wrote about her complicated relationship with Bono, who died in 1998.

During a rocky period in their relationship while working on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in the 1970s, Cher, 78, became attracted to a guitarist named Bill. She told Bono in a moment of desperation that she wanted to sleep with Bill.

“Ever since we’d first started living together, he’d been secretly convinced I’d leave him one day,” Cher wrote of Bono, “something he didn’t properly tell me until years later.”

Despite having a show with Bono the evening she wound up leaving him, she recalled feeling as though “there was no way I could do that.”

Upon Cher’s leaving, Bono told her, “America will hate you for breaking this up.” She then packed a bag and went to hide in her friend Paulette and Ridgeway’s room, where Bill was and “begged” her to go with him to the airport.

“I can’t recall what happened next or in exactly what sequence, but something clicked inside me when I found out that Sonny had slept with Bill’s girlfriend the previous night out of revenge,” she recalled. Cher then asked Bill to come with her to San Francisco using the money Bono gave her.

Cher and Bill arrived in San Francisco to drive to Sausalito and took separate cars for safety reasons. Their respective cars wound up getting lost in the foggy San Francisco Bay.

She later found out that Bono hired private detectives to tail them — and they got lost as well. “There was no way he was going to let me go off on my own,” she wrote.

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Cher and Bill wound up at a hotel and checked in around 4 a.m. into separate rooms to keep any unwanted gossip about her and Bono away — but wound up sleeping together. “A little later, we made love, and it was unbelievable. I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again,” she continued.

The following morning, the private detectives found Cher and she returned to Los Angeles. The Sahara hotel, where she and Bono was expected to perform, ultimately put out a press release saying the show was canceled because she was “suffering from exhaustion.”

However, days after leaving Bono, Cher and he returned to CBS for their variety show together. They wound up divorcing in 1975.

The first half of Cher’s two-volume memoir is filled with anecdotes from her childhood and ascent into stardom, along with stories about Gene Simmons, Warren Beatty and Salvador Dalí

Cher: The Memoir, Part One is now available for purchase wherever books are sold.