Cher started out as a backing singer in the 1960s and sang on many of the most famous records of super-producer Phil Spector of the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Righteous Brothers, including You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. Spector and the “silly, wise teenager” who always answered hit it off, although Sonny warned her that Spector “had eleven sides and you have to know them all.” Cher says of Spector, “His moods were erratic. You could joke with him until you couldn’t anymore.”

Ten years later, Cher and Harry Nilsson arrived at the A&M studios to sing background vocals for John Lennon. “We heard a crash. Then John came storming out very angry as a chair sailed after him. As John ran past us, he shouted, “I’m never going to work with that fool again. He’s fucking crazy!’” Spector asked Cher and Nilsson to sing a demo of a song called A Love Like Yours, then released it as a duet single behind their backs. Cher drove to Spector’s “dark and creepy” mansion to confront him.

“It felt like a haunted house. Phillip stood next to a pool table. He started acting strange. He got irritated and got a little smart with me, like he was trying to intimidate me. He told me he could do whatever he wanted. Then he took out a revolver. I stared at him as he twisted it around his fingers and said, “You can’t do that to me, you son of a bitch. You’ve known me since I was 16!’” Spector apologized. Cher left, trying to convince herself that the gun “probably wasn’t even loaded…but there was something about him that night that worried me.” It was the same mansion where Spector shot and killed Lana Clarkson in 2003.

She contemplated suicide at the height of her success

Sonny was so insanely jealous of Cher that he forbade their band and crew from speaking to her, while being blatantly disloyal to a succession of assistants, “dancers, actresses, waitresses, even whores… I couldn’t imagine where he got the time from got!” He controlled her so tightly that when she started taking tennis lessons, he made a bonfire of her equipment. He secretly rewrote contracts so that Cher became his unpaid employee.

In 1972, while they were performing together at a residency at the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas, she says, “I stepped barefoot onto the balcony of our suite and stared down. I became dizzy with loneliness. 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.” She talked herself down, but returned to the balcony “five or six times” over the next few nights until she had the epiphany: “I don’t have to jump off, I can just leave it.”