When Cher started thinking about calling it quits with Sonny Bono, she turned to Lucille Ball for support.
The 78-year-old Grammy winner recalled a conversation she had with the now-late icon in her new book, Cher: The Memoir, Part One, which was released on Tuesday, Nov. 19.
In a copy of the memoir reviewed by Today, Cher said that she “called Lucille Ball to ask for her advice” because they had been friends for some time and the multihyphenate had been through something similar when she married and then divorced her former husband and I Love Lucy co-star Desi Arnaz.
“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?’ 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. She told me, ‘F— him, you’re the one with the talent.’”
After nearly 11 years of marriage and welcoming a son, the two halves of Sonny & Cher eventually divorced in 1975.
Cher recently recalled meeting Bono in a CBS Sunday Morning special, telling the network that the singers met for the first time in a coffee shop in 1962, when she was 16 and Bono was 27. The age gap wasn’t strange for the “Believe” singer, who suggested that Bono was able to be “real” with her because she “didn’t expect anything.”
“I didn’t want money. I didn’t think about anything, you know,” Cher said during her interview with CBS News’ Anthony Mason, a clip from which the Sunday morning news program shared on social media.
She bluntly explained that it was love at first sight for her, but not so much for Bono.
“I thought it was like when Tony met Maria,” Cher said, relating her feelings to the romantic leads in West Side Story. “I mean, everybody disappeared.”
But Bono was actually first interested in her friend, according to Cher. “He didn’t like me,” she admitted. “It wasn’t love at first sight. It was something.”
