Obsession, one of the great themes of literature, surfaces early in a new book from Sonny Bono. He starts out by mentioning his ex-wife`s name 118 times-and that`s just in the first chapter-but he claimed, during a whirlwind tour of Chicago last week, that he`s getting over it. It hasn`t been easy.
It`s a problem that affects many famous couples. What do you do if you lose your ampersand? If your rear ”and” falls off? How do you get people to drop your spouse? To see you as a single? In a way, Romeo and Juliet had it lucky. They both died. What if they had lived-and later found that it wasn`t working? Would Romeo, years later, an old man, still be going on all the talk shows, moaning about Juliet, wondering what in Verona had split them up?
”It`s a love story-to me,” Bono was saying, hunched over microphones with host Roy Leonard on WGN radio, ignoring the jackhammers outside ripping North Michigan Avenue to shreds. Bono was talking of his own tumult, described in his memoirs, ”And the Beat Goes On” (Pocket Books, $19.95), a book crammed (according to its publisher) with ”sizzling details” of ”Sonny and Cher`s roller coaster ride to superstardom, their fast-track wild days, and their passionate, lifelong love-hate relationship.”
No, he hasn`t heard from her lately, not for about two years, but everybody-literally, everybody-still asks.
Last week, for example, Bono did 30 interviews in New York, including a bit on NBC`s ”Late Night With David Letterman.” He talked to reporters in Washington. He hopped to Chicago, for more radio and TV interviews. He signed books for an hour at a Kroch`s & Brentano`s store, then he caught a plane to Palm Springs, Calif., where he is mayor, for a City Council vote. Everybody brought up Cher.
”Hey, it`s Sonny and Cher,” yelled one patron, as Bono settled with pen in hand behind a desk on Kroch`s main floor at 29 S. Wabash Ave.
”Read fascinating anecdotes about his life with Cher-and about being mayor of Palm Springs,” urged a Kroch`s staff member, using a microphone to rally several hundred fans, many carrying Sonny and Cher record albums, into a line that snaked through the store.
”He looks just like him,” said Patricia Barron, a fan in her 20s who took time on her lunch hour to wait for an autograph. ”If you`re under 40,” boomed the Kroch`s staffer, ”you might want a copy of this book for your parents.”
Relief in a restaurant
So, what`s it like, being linked at the, well, navel, to an innocent, doe-eyed, teenage runaway who later dumped him, first for a guitarist in their band, then for a power-hungry record executive, then for blues-rocker Gregg Allman, a second marriage that faltered, he notes, after nine days.
In a quiet office at the Tribune, Bono, 56, who calls himself ”a romantic Sicilian from Detroit,” sat back and reflected about his life, his times and his 29-year relationship with Cherilyn Sarkasian LaPierre, now 45, an ”unsolvable paradox,” who, he writes, combines ”love, romance, rock and roll, spirituality” and quick wit. Yes, he said, he was obsessed with her.
”Yeah, you`re bound forever,” he said, speaking of their relationship, once tight and now conducted largely by rumor. ”It was painful for me for six or seven years. It really shook me. But after a while it dawned on me that I just had to let it go, to let that ship sail. When I was able to do that, I was able to accomplish things again.”
So, what was the turning point?
”Oddly enough, it was my restaurant,” he said, referring to Bono`s, a Los Angeles trattoria that he opened in February 1983 with a hot party that drew Tony Curtis, Bert Convy, Dick Van Patten, Valerie Perrine and Cher, who told reporters, ”When we were together, Sonny made all the food.”
”I had to give up the idea that I had to be a person in power,” Bono said. ”It wasn`t just Sonny and Cher. It was me. I had slugged my way up to the top, but I wasn`t there anymore. If you`re on the bottom floor, that`s where you have to operate from. It was kind of a Don Quixote sort of thing. Fighting windmills, not facing facts.
”When I started bussing tables, and serving, and cooking, when people complained if something wasn`t cooked just right, when there were stopped-up sewers and toilets, cooks and waiters screwing up, merchandise disappearing out the back door, it pulled me into present time. It made me realize I was living a lot in the past, that I couldn`t achieve anything that way.”
Working it out
Then, in 1985, on a cool night in late May, in his restaurant, Bono, 50, spotted this ”beautiful, dark-haired young woman,” with a bright smile, livelng out trickles of laughter, celebrating. She was Mary Whittaker, 22, a University of Southern California graduate with a degree in art history. Bono introduced himself. In a three-hour conversation they discovered, among other things, that they both liked to exercise. Following Los Angeles custom, they agreed to work out together.
That September, Bono proposed. They were window-shopping in Palm Springs. The wind was blowing. Bono asked Whittaker to close her eyes. He handed her a tiny box. She opened it, found a diamond ring and burst into tears. A crowd gathered. ”I, ah, it`s my way of asking you to marry me,” Bono remembered saying. They stood on the sidewalk, hugging and kissing. Whittaker answered him with what poets call ”a tremendous yes.”
The couple moved to Palm Springs. Bono opened another restaurant (also called Bono`s), sold his Los Angeles operation, got elected mayor, had two kids, sold his Palm Springs restaurant (though he is still host there five nights a week), and plunged into governing a city.
He rarely sings, though on New Year`s Eve 1987 he wowed a crowd at the new Palm Springs Convention Center, doing ”I Got You Babe” with his daughter Chastity, now 22. He plans to run for mayor again next year, provided he does not run for the U.S. Senate, a decision he plans to make by mid-September.
”What I love about Mary,” Bono said, before rushing off for a phone interview with WLS radio (in which he was again asked about Cher), ”is that she likes the stabilities-children, home, love, relating, communicating-more than she likes the glitz. It was so refreshing to have somebody say not, `I`ll marry you, but I want a million dollars,` but, `I want to have kids.”`
Any tips for others contemplating May-December marriages?
”I don`t think the age factor is significant,” Bono said. ”If you both have an accurate assessment of reality, you`re OK. If you try to be this young guy, and do this to inflate your ego, you`ll be in trouble. It`s tricky, but I`m very content.”
How did her parents take it?
”Initially, I think they thought maybe I was the jerk they saw on TV. But they were never discouraging to her. Or to me. As we got to know each other, they were very encouraging.”
Keeping Palm Springs afloat
Any advice for others with obsessions?
”I don`t know how you tell someone to get over an obsession,” Bono said. ”It`s like quitting smoking. You know it`s killing you, but you`re still smoking three packs a day. But then you get to a place where you go,
`I`m going to quit this.` And you do.
”Another thing: You end up talking to anyone who will listen. You`re not aware of it, not at first, but you become a pain in the neck.”
Long after Cher divorced him on June 26, 1975, Bono finally noticed that people`s eyes began to glaze when he brought up the subject of his ex-wife. Now, he feels, the book will bring about ”the real end of Sonny and Cher, button it, put a period on it and let me move on.”
It is clear, from clothing styles alone, that Bono is in, as they say, a different place. Gone are the hallmark Eskimo boots, bell-bottom pants, bobcat vests and Prince Valiant haircuts of the `60s, replaced by the gray suit, modest tie, white striped shirt, and hair clipped neatly above the neck-line, of a small-city mayor who, besides pushing books, is also trying to lure developers to a town with a tight budget.
As Bono explains, Palm Springs, despite its aura of wealth, is really a poor relation to such newer, flossier communities as Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage. The mean annual family income among its 38,000 residents is $29,885, compared with about $80,000 in nearby Indian Wells. There is history, but not as much cash as there used to be. ”Our city was built 50 years ago, as a hideaway for movie stars to be naughty,” he said. ”We`ve got a lot of small, quiet hotels, and that`s not the way the tourist industry is going.”
During his three years in office, Bono has pushed local attractions, such as a Palm Springs film festival, which now attracts about 30,000 people every January, and a Grand Prix auto race, which draws a similar crowd. He hired a public relations firm to promote the city and has been working hard to pull in a $400 million resort, now in its final planning stages.
The beat begins
Not bad for a kid who started in California as a meat-delivery man on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, four years out of high school, supporting a wife, Donna, and a baby girl, Christy, now 32. ”I wanted that route because that stretch of Sunset was loaded with independent record labels,” he said.
”It was L.A.`s version of Tin Pan Alley.” Bono would run in, sing a song in his bloody apron, get back in the truck and deliver more meat.
That led to heady days for Bono, pitching songs to Dig Records, owned by rhythm-and-blues promoter Johnny Otis, selling his first song (”Ecstasy”) to Frankie Lane, mixing with the likes of Sam Cooke, Little Richard and a chaotic rock `n` roll genius, Phil Spector. Later, after leaving his first family, whom he rarely saw again, Bono was hired as a record promoter, in scrambling times when the ethics of disc jockeys were looser. One Christmas, for Specialty Records, Bono flew to Philadelphia to give a movie projector to Dick Clark. The TV host was so popular that Bono had to stand in line to hand him a present.
Bono met Cher in 1962, on an outing with friends. She was 16, ”a tall, skinny girl with long, dark hair, a teenager`s bad complexion, and the most intense, dark eyes I`d ever encountered in a female.” Anyway, one thing led to another, though not that night, and three weeks later they were living together.
Later, it came apart. The divorce was messy.
”Cher has always described herself during our final years together as a near-suicidal, ninety-one pound hostage, and painted me as an uncaring slavedriver,” Bono writes. He denies it. ”I know why she said such lies. For as long as I`ve known her, Cher has played the part of a victim. She`s played it to the hilt. She`s needed a villain. And who better or more convenient than me? I had no means of defending myself. She was famous and beloved. I was a nobody, a has-been. No one wanted to hear my side of the story.”
These days, people are reading 274 pages of what Bono has to say about Cher, though Pocket Books declines, as a matter of company policy, to say how many copies of ”And the Beat Goes On” have been sent to bookstores.
For Mayor Bono, being on a book tour may lack the hoopla of yesteryear, but it has brought back some old friends.
In line at Kroch`s was a tall, elegant, red-haired woman who waited 20 minutes until Bono looked up from his autographing table and spotted her. He rose. They embraced. He kissed her cheek and nuzzled her hair. Their eyes went teary. Her name, she said later, was Connie Foreman. She once lived with Sonny and Cher. ”It`s all in the book,” she added.
And, indeed, it was.
