In 1973, Sonny and Cher were the most beloved married couple on American television. Every week, millions of families gathered in living rooms across the country to watch them trade jokes under the studio lights and close the show with the same love song, their young daughter Chastity held between them. The closing image was among the most familiar in television, the picture of a family that had made it. By the second season of that show, it was a performance in the most literal sense.
Behind the cameras, the couple had already separated, living largely separate lives while the network, the ratings, the records, and the concert bookings all depended on the country believing the opposite. The girl at the center of that strange arrangement was born Cherylyn Sarkeesian on May 20, 1946, in El Centro, California, a farming town in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border. Her mother, Georgia, had grown up poor in Arkansas and wanted to be an actress and singer. Her father, an Armenian-American truck driver, struggled with gambling and drugs and was hardly present.
The marriage collapsed almost as soon as the baby arrived, and the early years were hard. There was very little money, and Georgia moved constantly, chasing work. She later acknowledged that there was a stretch when she could not afford to care for her infant daughter and placed her for a time in a Catholic children’s home, getting her back as soon as she possibly could. The years that followed brought a series of apartments, towns, and stepfathers.
At school, the girl struggled badly with severe dyslexia that nobody identified. To her teachers, she simply looked like a girl who did not try. Reading was misery, numbers were worse, and she later described sitting in class feeling stupid and hiding in the back, getting through by memorizing what she heard rather than what she read. But she had an odd, fierce certainty that she wanted to be famous, and she was also strikingly unusual looking, tall and very dark with long straight black hair and a low voice that sounded older than she was.
She felt, she later said, like she did not look like anybody. At sixteen, she left school for good, found her way to Los Angeles with no plan and no money, and then, in a coffee shop in late 1962, a man eleven years older than her sat down and started talking. His name was Salvatore Philip Bono, and everybody called him Sonny. He had been born in Detroit in 1935 to Sicilian immigrant parents.
He was not tall, not especially handsome, and never a strong student, but he was funny, quick, endlessly confident, and completely obsessed with songwriting. By the time he met the dark-haired girl from El Centro, he was working for the powerful and eccentric producer Phil Spector, and he was also married, with a young daughter. She told him she was older than she really was. She was drawn to him because he paid attention to her, listened, made her laugh, and took her seriously when almost nobody else did.
Before long, she moved into his apartment, first as a housekeeper of sorts, then as something more. By the time the arrangement turned romantic, she was completely devoted to him. Her mother was horrified and made her feelings known. It made no difference.
Sonny began bringing her to Gold Star Studios, where she sang backup on some of the most famous songs of the era, and a pattern set in that would last more than a decade. He decided, and she followed. He chose the songs, the sound, the plan, the clothes, the next step. In 1964, the two of them held their own private ceremony.
There was no license, no officiant, no guests, just the two of them exchanging rings and making promises in the bathroom of their small apartment. From that day on, they told the world they were married. Legally, they were not, and the paperwork would not come for another five years, but in every way that mattered to the people around them, they were husband and wife from 1964 onward. Their first musical attempts went nowhere.
Then in 1965, Sonny wrote a song that changed everything. He wrote I Got You, Babe at home and was so excited that, as the story goes, he woke her up to hear it. She was not impressed at first, thinking it a little corny, but he recorded it anyway, with the two of them trading lines back and forth. In the summer of 1965, it went to number one in the United States and Britain.
Suddenly they were everywhere, two unconventional young people who dressed however they liked and sang about sticking together. Their outfits caused real trouble, including being reportedly asked to leave a fancy hotel in London because of how they looked. Back in Los Angeles, Sonny told the story of a restaurant refusing to serve them because of their clothes, and he went home angry and wrote a song about it called Laugh at Me, which became a hit. The next year, he wrote Bang Bang for her to sing alone, and it climbed almost to the top of the charts.
She was not yet twenty. Money poured in, fans mobbed them, and for a girl who had once hidden in the back of classrooms, the life she had always believed in had arrived. Every contract and every dollar went through him, and she trusted him completely. By 1967, the ground shifted.
The gentle sunny pop of the mid-sixties gave way to psychedelic rock and festivals and the growing weight of the war in Vietnam. Next to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, a sweet married couple in matching vests suddenly looked old-fashioned. Their records stopped selling. A film called Good Times, the first feature by a young director named William Friedkin, did not do well.
In 1969, their only child together, a daughter they named Chastity, was born, and that same year the couple finally made their marriage legal. Sonny’s film Chastity, which he wrote, produced, and put Cher in the lead of, flopped badly and left them in serious financial trouble. They went back on the road, not to the big arenas but to lounges and supper clubs, where audiences were often only half paying attention. She suffered from terrible stage fright, and between songs she did not know what to say, and when she did say something, it came out dry and a little cutting, usually at Sonny’s expense.
The audiences laughed. Sonny noticed, and rather than being offended, he encouraged it, making himself the target. The act that would make them television stars was born almost by accident. An appearance filling in as hosts on a talk show caught the attention of executives at CBS, who offered them a summer series.
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour premiered on August 1, 1971, and was an instant success. By the end of the year, it returned as a regular series and became one of the most popular shows on American television. Her solo career exploded at the same time, with a run of story songs that went straight to the top of the charts. The money was enormous.
They bought a grand estate in the hills of Los Angeles. On the surface, the struggling couple had become royalty. But the life she later described in her own memoir was very different from the picture on the screen. Her life was scheduled from morning to night, with very little say over what she did, where she went, or who she saw.
She was not encouraged to have friends of her own. Everything from the work she took to the way her days were structured was decided by her husband and the business he controlled. She has also written that she knew he was seeing other women. The strangest part was that the whole country thought she was the strong one, the wife who cut her husband down to size, and viewers wrote in to say they felt sorry for poor Sonny.
Nobody imagined that the woman delivering those lines had almost no control over her own life off camera. There was a low point she did not speak about publicly for decades. She has written that at one point, feeling completely trapped and unable to see any way forward, she found herself alone somewhere high up and thought seriously about not going on with her life at all. Then something in her pushed back, a stubborn feeling that she was still young and had not yet lived, and she stepped away.
She did not tell anyone at the time. She went back to work. Then she fell in love with someone else. Around 1972, she sat Sonny down and told him she was in love with another man and wanted out of the marriage.
She expected anger. What she described instead was a conversation that left her stunned. He reacted with a strange calm, then admitted to affairs of his own that had gone on for years. The marriage, it turned out, had been hollow on both sides for longer than she had allowed herself to see.
But the show was a hit because the country believed in the couple, and in the early 1970s, a divorce was still a scandal that could damage a family-friendly television show. So they made an arrangement. The marriage would end in private and continue in public. For roughly the next two years, they lived under the same roof but largely separately, each seeing other people, then walked out in front of the band, traded their jokes, and sang about how they would always have each other with their daughter in their arms.
In 1973, she began a relationship with David Geffen, one of the sharpest young executives in the music business. He was, by her account, the first person to ask her plainly how much money she actually had, and she did not know. When Geffen looked into it, the answer was shocking. Their business affairs ran through a company called Cher Enterprises.
The company bore her name, yet she owned none of it. Sonny owned the overwhelming majority, and their lawyer owned the rest. Legally, she was essentially an employee of a company named after her, working for a salary with no ownership of what she had earned. Every number one record, every season of the show, every sold-out night in Las Vegas meant nothing on paper for her.
She has described that moment as the point where everything finally came into focus. On February 20, 1974, she filed for divorce. The filing accused Sonny of holding her in what it called involuntary servitude, a legal term usually associated with forced labor, and of keeping her from the money she had earned. For a country that had watched them sing love songs every week, it was extraordinary.
Most viewers had no idea anything was wrong. Sonny fought back with legal action of his own, and while the divorce proceedings were underway, they still had to finish the season of their show. The couple at the center of one of the most publicized breakups in America kept walking out together in front of the cameras until the final episode aired in May 1974. The divorce was finalized on June 27, 1975.
Three days later, she married the rock musician Gregg Allman in Las Vegas, a decision that looked impulsive but was perhaps the first big decision of her adult life that was entirely her own. Barely a year after the divorce, the network put them back on television together. The Sonny and Cher Show premiered in February 1976. She was pregnant with her son Elijah Blue, who was not Sonny’s, and for part of that season she was performing the old routines with her ex-husband while visibly expecting a child with the man she had married three days after the divorce.
The ratings slipped, and the show ended in 1977. After the variety shows ended, she went to New York and made her Broadway debut. She appeared alongside Meryl Streep in Silkwood and received an Academy Award nomination, won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for Mask, and then came Moonstruck, which won her the Academy Award for best actress in April 1988. Sonny’s path went in a completely different direction.
He opened an Italian restaurant, married again, and then, frustrated with local bureaucracy while trying to run his restaurant, decided to run for mayor of Palm Springs. In 1988, he won. In November 1987, both of them happened to be booked on Late Night with David Letterman, and Letterman gently pushed them to sing together. They stood side by side and sang I Got You, Babe one more time.
It was a little awkward, a little emotional, and it was the last time they ever performed together. Sonny’s political career kept climbing. In 1994, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. On January 5, 1998, he was skiing at the Heavenly Resort near Lake Tahoe when he struck a tree and died from his injuries.
He was sixty-two years old. His funeral was broadcast on television, and she came and stood up and spoke. She spoke about how people had always underestimated him, how he had believed in her when nobody else did, and how he had been the funniest person she had ever known. She said she would always love him, and she broke down more than once while speaking.
That autumn, she released a single called Believe, which became the biggest hit of her entire career, topping charts around the world at the age of fifty-two. In November 2024, she published the first volume of her memoir and wrote about the marriage more openly than she ever had before. She did not write about Sonny as a villain. She wrote about him as someone she had truly loved, someone who had given her a start in life and could be charming and funny and generous, and also someone who had held on to her far too tightly and taken far more than was fair.
Sonny had spent his life insisting that he made her. There was some truth in it. But she spent the rest of her life after him proving that the talent had always been her own. And when people look back at those old clips of the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, it is hard not to watch differently.
There she is in a Bob Mackie gown, rolling her eyes at the man beside her while the audience laughs. There he is taking it with a grin. And there at the end is that little girl with the golden hair, carried out and held between them while the band plays the song that started it all. It still looks like the happiest family in Hollywood.
It always will. That was the whole point.