It started out and ended perhaps like Lucy & Desi?
It was during the mid 1960's, when the British Invasion pushed many top American
rock and roll performers off the record charts, that the unlikely joining of
Sonny & Cher plowed through Britain's music domination, eventually landing
their own network television show on CBS. That empire crumbled when workaholic
Sonny's aggressive career schedule grated on the more laid back Cher's nerves
and the couple split up, noticeably growing unfond of each other before
millions of TV viewers. Sonny's music popularity ended while Cher piled up
chart topping records solo. Sonny Bono went into politics and Cher became
a diva in the era of Madonna and Debbie Harry. Fact: while they were married,
Sonny and Cher never cheated on each other.!
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Sonny and Cher, the pop-rock hippie duo of the late 1960s and early 1970s, created a positive, non-threatening image of the American counterculture of their time. Sonny Bono in his distinctive bobcat vest, together with the tall, lean, and dark-haired Cher played the role of the misplaced hippie couple to the hilt--and to the delight of both teens and parents of that era. In 1971 Sonny and Cher, who were married in real life, hosted their own television show, the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, which was an uncontested hit until their marriage broke up in 1974. At that point the beloved couple separated, and each went on to bigger and greater stardom--an award-winning career in movies for Cher, and a budding career in national politics for Bono until his untimely death in 1998.
Salvatore "Sonny" Bono was born on February 16, 1935 in Detroit, Michigan to Jean and Santo Bono. Bono's mother was an American-born Italian who married at age 14; Bono's father, an immigrant, was born in Montelabre, Sicily. Bono was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. Bono was still in grade school when the family moved to Hawthorne, California, outside of Los Angeles, where Santo Bono found work as a truck driver. Jean Bono ran a beauty shop in the family home.
Never an exceptional student, Bono decided early in life to become an entertainer. He was fond of writing skits, cracking jokes, and pantomime. Undaunted by the reality of his grinding, granular, nasal voice, Bono loved music in particular and hoped to sing professionally. At Los Angeles's Inglewood High School he teamed up with a fellow student, a piano player, to entertain after high school football games. After graduation in 1952 however, he worked as a bagger in a grocery store, and then drove a tug in an aircraft plant, all the while writing songs in his spare time. In 1955 he recorded his first song, an abysmal flop, and continued working at odd jobs pouring cement and delivering meat. Bono married a waitress named Donna Rankin in February of 1954, with whom he fathered a child before the marriage fell into shambles and ended in divorce.
When Crystal Records offered one of his songs to Frankie Lane, Bono's rise to fame had begun. To his surprise, Crystal was impressed and asked for more songs. Soon Bono moved on to Specialty Records, and in time he veered into the production arena. When his job at Specialty was eliminated due to cutbacks, he started his own record label, Gold Records. In that venture Bono's clients were few; he spent much of his time recording his own songs under pseudonyms. Bono closed the door on Gold Records for the last time when he moved into a public relations job with Record Merchandising, promoting up-and-coming artists including Gene Pitney and Chubby Checker. Slowly he learned his way through the maze of the Southern California record business of the 1960s. Around that time Bono met Cher Sarkisian LaPiere, an underage runaway.
Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946 in El Centro, California. Her early life was very unstable. When Cher was still an infant her mother, who is most commonly known as Georgia Holt, placed the baby in the custody of a nunnery for approximately one year. Even after the child returned home, Holt and John Sarkisian, Cher's father, carried on a tempestuous love-hate relationship during much of Cher's early life. The couple divorced and remarried twice, and ventured a third romance before the relationship ended permanently.
Cher's mother, a part-time model and waitress, then married John Southall. The couple had a daughter together in 1951, but the marriage ended in divorce, as well. Holt and her two daughters lived in dismal poverty until 1961 when Holt married once more, to Gilbert LaPiere. LaPiere, a man of means, adopted the two girls and gave them a comfortable home, but by that time Cher was already rebellious. A star-struck teen-ager, she dropped out of school at age 16.
Cher and Bono met in 1963. Bono, some years older than Cher and possessed of certain show business savvy, impressed the naive teenager. Bono helped her to secure work as a backup singer for the Ronettes and other artists, and eventually conceived of the notion that the two of them should form a duo. The couple originally billed themselves as Caesar and Cleo, but that image failed, as did their first record. Eventually they came up with the Sonny and Cher act, which evoked a cute hippie persona. The couple married legally in 1964, an event which undoubtedly cemented their image as Sonny and Cher.
Soon the couple was a hit. Their first number one record, "I Got You Babe," written by Bono, was released in 1965. Sonny and Cher lasted through six albums, two movies, and a musical variety television show, before they divorced, at which point the act went by the wayside along with the marriage. The couple had one child, a daughter named Chastity, who was born on March 4, 1969. Chastity Bono continued to live her mother, but maintained a very close relationship with her father as well.
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