I was using an online bootleg of Sonny & Me; Cher Remembers to finish documenting what was in that TV special and I discovered at the end of the bootleg were some Entertainment Tonight segments from 1998 tagged on, including interviews of Cher on the set of the movie Tea with Mussolini responding to news about Mary Bono helping mount a TV movie about Sonny & Cher based on Sonny’s 1991 kiss-and-tell biography. It was around this time when Mary Bono started to come across as not-a-friend-of-Cher, this biopic news coming after Sonny’s funeral bruhaha died down.

It wasn’t the first gossip of tension there. It was rumored Cher took issue with some of the things Mary Bono had been revealing around Sonny’s late-life struggles with prescription drugs. Cher, like a regular Italian mafioso, was rumored to want to keep such news in the family.

I don’t know where to put this TV movie, to be honest, for various reasons. The origin of it, Sonny’s book, like Sonny himself was “a mixed bag” (as Cher has said recently). There were some good behind-the-music stuff in the book, but then he goes and talks about his sex life with Cher. Icky but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The movie didn’t crawl into bed with the sex storyline which was good. Although I have to admit I do have a fascination with “the Sonny & Cher Bedroom” but only up to stories about them having sex. For me, Sonny &  Cher were more like my fantasy parents. And who wants to go there with their real or fantasy parents? I prefer the quaint stories of Cher reading a book all night in the master bathroom or her wanting to keep the TV on all night to sleep, bedroom stories which sounds interesting in a sort of innocent, albeit still groovy, way. The bedroom seems symbolic for Cher as the core of the house. She has for decades held court in her bedrooms over interviews and Sonny & Cher even captured their bedroom on their last album cover.

The biggest problem I have with the movie, which is the problem I have  with any Sonny & Cher re-enactment, is that it is always hella-boring. And Sonny & Cher were anything but boring characters. It all just proves how completely inimitable they both are, Sonny too. Not to mention that the re-enactments keep portraying Sonny incorrectly, like a happy-go-lucky, trod-upon, luckless, aw-shucks fellow. And that is so far off-the mark when you consider the portrayal of anyone who has ever described Sonny: his family, his friends, his colleagues, his ex-wives. It’s not even an accurate on-stage read of Sonny. And you can tell this if you just pay attention. What we continue to get are just cliched readings of Sonny, dismissive shallow looks. And it is so annoying, a disservice to both Sonny and Cher.

I also don’t know where to place the movie in the Cher-o-sphere. It’s not a TV special but it is a legitimate moment of Cher history (for good or bad). It’s not a TV appearance. A network movie has been made depicting her life. So which bucket does it live in?

I do have Sonny’s book listed on by Book page. It’s Sonny’s documented point-of-view. You can’t fully dismiss it.

Cher Universe just published an MTV Rockline interview from the early 1990s which includes Cher response to Sonny’s book when it came out. Cher maintains in the interview that she did very much want to refute much of what Sonny said in his book but decided she didn’t want to kiss-and-tell. She wasn’t going to respond in kind.

To be fair, Sonny did some great things for Cher and he did some horrible things to Cher. His evaluation of their career are valuable. But his tales of their private sex life comes across as seedy and self-serving. And since we have to go there, (like walking in on your fantasy parents having sex), I feel I have to dance around what he said. And I just want to say that when you’re considering healthy sex between two people, it stands to reason that a 16-year old in a relationship with a 27-year old might be a different sexual relationship than a twenty-something TV star will have with a rock star of approximately the same age, or a forty-something rock/movie star will have with a younger man or whatever the combinations are. Different relationships have their own energy systems.

And why are we even talking about this? Because Sonny’s comments weren’t meant to be anything but tales out of school, the jackpot gossip of “What was it like to sleep with Cher?” (at best) or designed to continue to make Cher feel bad in a public space (at worst), like a punishment for a separate success that had occurred without him. In any case, not a loving or paternal move.

Cher didn’t respond in-kind and I think that says a lot about her character. After Sonny died, she became even more protective. Since then, for years she said she wouldn’t tell her story until “everybody has died.” Well, everyone has pretty much died and she still seems to be struggling with it. She still doesn’t want to throw anyone under the bus, I think she has recently said.

Telling your story is important, but it’s tricky, no doubt. What greater purpose can your stories serve? Fans are interested in details and things we might not know, how things came to be. What were the disappointments and joys we don’t know about.

On the borderlines, maybe it would be good to stick to feelings. We truly own our feelings, after all.

On a micro-level people deal with this every day: how much should I tell my friends and family? Sharing stories creates intimacy between people. But how much intimacy do you want?  Whatever the case, we all own the story of our own lives.

Maybe it’s like talking to a therapist. You’ll get nowhere in self-discovery unless you try to be as fair to all parties involved as you can be. Maybe that’s a good rubric for public stories as well. A balance in all blame and kudos; humility in all stories.