CNN
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Although Cher and Sonny Bono’s marriage lasted less than a decade, their musical hits endured. Yet Cher indicates in her new memoir that the success of her creative partnership with her late husband was not shared equally.

This week sees the debut of Cher: The Memoir – Part One about her childhood and her years with Bono, whom she met when she was 16 and he was 27.

“It wasn’t passionate; I just loved him,” Cher recently told CBS. “He made me laugh. And we had a dream.”

That dream led Sonny & Cher to several hit songs in the 1960s, including “I’ve Got You Babe” and later the popular “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” featuring the couple’s jokes, live performances and a glamorous Cher.

“When they started realizing that people were participating because of what I was wearing, they just gave us all the money we needed,” she recalls.

Cher remembered how Bono began to change.

“He just didn’t care,” she said. “About me.”

Her husband was jealous, Cher said, and things took a turn after a guitarist she calls “Bill” kissed her and Bono found out. She wrote in her book that she told Bono she wanted to sleep with the guitarist. “It all seems crazy now. I didn’t mean it, but I thought saying those words was the only way (Bono) would let me go,” she wrote.

“I thought if I do this, it’s over,” she told CBS. ‘He won’t be able to come back. We can’t be Sonny & Cher. I just want to blow it up. But I didn’t know I wanted to blow it up until I was blowing it up.”

Cher said she was offered anything she wanted to stay with Bono and opted for “my own place in Malibu” and $5,000 a month.

Two years later, she said, she made a shocking discovery when her then-boyfriend, music executive David Geffen, got his hands on her contract.

“Sonny owned 95 percent of the company and his lawyer owned five,” she said. “And it was called Cher Enterprises, but I don’t own anything! And we had been working together for almost twelve years.”

After she confronted Bono, Cher said, he told her. “I always knew you would leave me.”

“And I said, ‘That’s no reason! Son, how could you do that? “I was there by your side, working, all those nights, all those days, through the good, through the bad,” she said. ‘He had no answer. And we were still friends after that.”

Cher and Bono divorced in 1975.

Bono later became a Republican congressman representing California’s 44th congressional district before dying in a skiing accident in 1998.