Cher was so distraught over her ‘loveless marriage’ to Sonny Bono that she considered throwing herself off the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room – one of ‘five or six’ times she considered killing herself during that period, she reveals in her new memoir.

The icon was 26 years old and her weight had dropped to 98 pounds when she was worked to the bone by her husband.

Cher reached her tipping point in October 1972, while the couple – who rose to fame with their 1965 megahit “I Got You Babe” – were in Las Vegas, performing two shows a night at the Sahara Hotel’s Congo Room.

She was already exhausted when she was told that Sonny was signing a new contract to perform for them at Caesars Palace in Vegas “every summer for God knows how many years,” Cher writes, while they were still recording their hit CBS show: “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and raising their young child.

With the sudden realization that Sonny would always “put things first,” she writes in “Cher: The Memoir, Part One,” she was “pissed off, scared and feeling completely trapped.”

She remembers stepping onto the balcony of her hotel suite in bare feet and staring down.

“I felt dizzy with loneliness,” she writes. “I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear.

“For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times (during my stay in Vegas), and each time I thought about (her child) Chas, about my mother, about my sister, about everyone and how things like this could make people look up to them I feel like it’s a doable situation and I would get back in there.”

Finally, Cher recalls, one night between shows she “went out onto the balcony again and this time I thought, ‘I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave it.'”

It was a flirt with a guitarist in her band that gave her the final push to leave Sonny, the man she met when she was just 16 and he was 27.

That night she confronted her husband and told him, “I want to sleep with Bill.”

She didn’t really mean it, Cher writes, but Sonny – who she claims was so controlling that she was banned from wearing perfume – hadn’t listened to her earlier pleas to let her go.

“The silence was deafening. Then (Sonny) said, ‘How long do you think it will take?’

“Two o’clock,” she replied. Sonny left, while Cher cried on Bill’s shoulder.

The next day, she asked her husband for $500 to leave – and discovered that he had already slept with Bill’s girlfriend as revenge.

She flew with Bill to San Francisco, followed by private investigators sent by Sonny, where they checked into a hotel and had “incredible” sex.

“I knew then that I would never have sex with Sonny again,” Cher writes.

The two made a deal that she could live in their Malibu home on weekends and, because she didn’t have her own bank account, would receive a $5,000 per month stipend — but would keep their divorce a secret as they moved forward. live together during the week and star in their popular show.

Tensions in their mansion eased, and as the two became friends again, Sonny surprised her one morning over breakfast: “You know, after you left for the Sahara with Bill that night, I seriously thought about to throw you off our balcony.’

He laughed as he told her he thought he could plead insanity and “get seven years in prison before they let me out.” Then I would get a book deal and my own show.”

Cher also laughed as she admitted, “Well, there was no need to push me because I was going to jump!”

“Within seconds we were crying… What else could we do but laugh?”

That could be the motto of her life.

Cher was born to Jackie Jean Crouch, from rural Arkansas, and Johnnie Sarkisian, a con man and heroin addict.

Jackie Jean – who later changed her name to Georgia Holt – left her husband after just three months of marriage, only to discover she was pregnant. In a panic, she almost had an abortion in the street, but walked out.

The couple was so broke that Cher was left at a Catholic children’s home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to be cared for by nuns while Sarkisian raised money to get them to California.

Not even allowed to hold her daughter, Holt eventually got Cher out of the orphanage with the help of a customer at the restaurant where she worked.

“One thing is certain: my childhood was never normal,” Cher writes.

Her mother married eight times to six husbands, including Sarkisian twice.

Most of the future singer’s childhood was spent in poverty in Los Angeles, and Cher writes how her saddle shoes were held together with elastic bands and patched with cardboard.

But the family was famous because Holt played supporting roles in “Gunsmoke” and “I Love Lucy” and, Cher writes, lost a role in “Asphalt Jungle” to Marilyn Monroe.

At the age of 15, Cher had a romance with Warren Beatty, who was 25. A year later, she met Sonny – who was in the middle of a divorce – at a coffee shop and he let her move in with him in exchange for cooking and cleaning. He first told her, “I don’t find you particularly attractive.”

But that changed soon enough. When a friend told him Cher was not yet 18, she lied. “Okay… I’m not eighteen now, I’m seventeen. But my birthday is in May, so in two months I will be eighteen.”

It was Sonny who convinced his boss, music producer Phil Spector, to let Cher sing with the Ronettes one day when Darlene Love’s car broke down.

From then on, the duo began recording together, first as Caesar & Cleo, then as Sonny & Cher, and achieved great fame with their TV show.

Cher writes about how they had their own non-legal wedding ceremony in their home bathroom in 1963, weeks after she had suffered a miscarriage.

By the time she was 21, Cher had suffered three miscarriages.

She also walked in one night when Sonny was cheating on him with his assistant. He told her it was her fault for not having enough sex with him.

“I wouldn’t have had to look outside our marriage if I was sexually satisfied,” he insisted.

Cher writes: “That was such bullshit. but by the time he’s done. found myself apologizing.

They officially married in 1964 when Cher became pregnant with Chas (who is trans and legally changed his name to Chaz in 2010).

She writes that fame changed Sonny, who founded the “Benevolent Army of El Primo,” in which everyone around him was given a rank. Sonny, of course, was El Primo.

Even though she was called his “Prima Donna,” Cher was not allowed to interact with their bandmates, or even attend a Tupperware party hosted by Brian Wilson’s wife. The couple stopped going to dinners, concerts and movies, and Sonny was so jealous that he burned her tennis clothes in the backyard.

But it wasn’t until they broke up and she started dating music executive David Geffen that Cher discovered the true extent of Sonny’s duplicity.

Geffen read Cher’s contract and discovered that she worked for Sonny as an underpaid employee of a company called Cher Enterprises.

‘I’ve worked all my life, but apparently I didn’t have anything to show for it. “I never thought for a second that I had to protect myself from Sonny, of all people, but the contracts he made me sign were secretly designed to deprive me of my income and the rights to my own career,” she wrote. .

“For years I’ve been racking my brains over how he could do what he did, and to this day I still can’t get over it.”

She called Lucille Ball – who famously left Desi Arnaz – for advice. The sitcom star told Cher, “F–k him, you’re the one with the talent.”

Years later, Cher would give Tina Turner advice on how to leave her abusive husband, Ike Turner.

Sonny died in a skiing accident in 1998 and despite everything, the book makes it clear that Cher still felt affection for him.

After calling off a planned Aspen wedding to Geffen, who later publicly came out as gay, she married musician Gregg Allman and had son Elijah Skye Blue Allman.

That marriage was traumatic for several reasons, as Allman was addicted to heroin and was in and out of rehab.

“Looking back, I can see that I was a little crazy about Gregory,” Cher wrote. “I kept doing the same thing and hoping for different results, and therein lies madness.”

The end came when Allman had a paranoid breakdown in their backyard one evening and insisted he saw men with guns.

Cher, who is now dating 36-year-old music executive Alexander Edwards, is prepping a future installment of her memoir by revealing that it was “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola who put a new idea in her head by asking: ‘Why are ‘Don’t you make films?’