Sonny Bono 1991 Interview: His Side of the Cher Story

In this 1991 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Sonny Bono sits down with his memoir And the Beat Goes On just out — the book he wrote to close the door on the marriage the whole world watched. He called it his swan song, and he treats the interview the same way: as the last time he intends to go through any of it.

The man behind “I Got You Babe” answers the rumour directly. He was, the story went, a Svengali who controlled Cher and let her out two weeks a year. Bono takes the accusation on rather than around, and gives his own account of who used whom — including what Cher said in response to the book, the part David Geffen played in her way out, and what he believes she knew eleven years before she walked away. It is his version, and he is the only person telling it.

The rest is a professional entertainer’s stock of good material, deployed well: an old-money New York dinner that is his favourite story, sex and drugs and rock and roll without the drugs, Sonny and Cher in England in 1965, and dinner with Salvador Dalí. Petty also gets him onto the second act — Mayor of Palm Springs, the run at Congress, half-joking about the presidency — and onto a second chance at fatherhood.

Sonny Bono went from pop stardom to Mayor of Palm Springs to the U.S. Congress, and died in a skiing accident in 1998. Cher’s own memoir, which calls their marriage loveless, publishes its second half in November 2026. This is his side, in his own words, unseen since it first aired, meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.