Cher has revealed that Tina Turner once asked her for advice on how to leave abusive husband Ike.
In her new memoir Cher: The Memoir, Part One, Cher recounted how she met the late rock’n’roll star on the Sonny & Cher Show, as she appeared twice with Ike.
Cher said that Turner once asked for her to help cover a bruise on her arm, and also shared her own experience of leaving abusive relationship with Sonny Bono with Turner. Cher was married to Bono from 1964 to 1975.
“I looked at her and told her, ‘I just walked out and kept on going,'” Cher wrote in the memoir.
She went on to recall that during their rehearsal, Ike “didn’t smile one time” and played his guitar “without any emotion.” “I just knew whatever he was feeling wasn’t good,” Cher remarked.
Cher has also opened up about her marriage to Bono in the same memoir, claiming that he “seriously thought” about killing her by throwing her off a balcony.
Bono apparently made the admission to Cher after she revealed she wanted to sleep with their guitarist, referred to as “Bill” in the memoir.
Cher wrote: “He laughed a little at that and so did I. It was crazy that he was telling me. He went on: ‘I figured I’d plead insanity like Spade Cooley and get seven years in jail before they released me. Then I’d get a book deal and my own show.’”
Cher responded by telling Bono that “there would have been no need to push” her because she was “gonna jump” anyway.
She called it the “darkest moment” of their marriage and added: “I don’t think for a minute that Sonny would have actually pushed me off the balcony, but I’m sure it crossed his mind, and he knew that jumping off had also crossed mine. What else could we do but laugh?”
Cher and Bono first met in 1962, when Cher was 16 and Bono was 11 years her senior, and they worked as backing singers for Phil Spector, before finding fame as a duo under the name Sonny & Cher. They married in 1964, and had one child, son Chaz. Four days after finalising her divorce from Bono, Cher married Gregg Allman of The Allman Brothers Band, and they had another son, Elijah.
Bono eventually passed away in 1998 following a skiing accident in California.