Sonny Bono

Sonny Bono was a Generator — built with the stamina to grind through decades of rejection in one field before pivoting into another entirely and grinding through that one too. Before the fur vests and the TV cameras, he was a Detroit-born kid who moved to Inglewood with his family and spent his twenties hauling meat, driving trucks, and writing songs on the side, trying to get anyone at a record label to listen. He eventually talked his way into a job as a promo man and gofer for Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios, where he sang backup on "Be My Baby" and absorbed the Wall of Sound from the floor up.

He met Cherilyn Sarkisian in a coffee shop in 1962. She was 16, he was 27, and within a couple of years they were married, broke, and recording as a duo. "I Got You Babe" hit number one in 1965, and Sonny — who wrote it — suddenly had everything he'd been chasing. His 4/6 profile read all over the partnership: the warm, relationship-anchored 4 who built his career inside one deep collaboration, and the 6 who spent his messy first act experimenting his way toward the role model he'd later become. He had a nose for what was worth preserving and what to let die, and he kept betting on Cher's voice long after the industry had decided novelty folk-pop was over.

When the hits dried up at the end of the '60s, the Bonos nearly went bankrupt. Sonny's response was to turn the constraint into a format — he reinvented them as a Vegas lounge act, bantering on stage, letting Cher land the punchlines at his expense. CBS picked it up as The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour in 1971. He produced, wrote, and played the mild, doofy foil, but behind the camera he ran the operation with the kind of grinding follow-through that outlasts collaborators and a feel for packaging what was new in a way mainstream audiences could swallow.

The marriage collapsed on-air and off. Cher left in 1974, the show ended, and Sonny — who had never been the vocalist of the pair — watched his solo career fail to materialize. He opened a restaurant in West Hollywood, then another in Palm Springs, and seemed, for a stretch, like a man whose main act was over. He had an appetite for the next experience that didn't quiet down just because the spotlight had moved on, and he kept moving.

In 1988 he ran for Mayor of Palm Springs — reportedly after getting fed up with the city's sign-permitting bureaucracy for his restaurant — and won. The move surprised nearly everyone except him. He governed from a plainspoken, invited-in style of leadership that wore well on constituents, and in 1994 he was elected to Congress as the Republican representative from California's 44th district. He was blunt about not being a policy wonk; he said openly that he relied on gut-level reads that didn't require a position paper and the habit of showing up and waiting to see what actually needed doing. He died in a skiing accident at Heavenly in January 1998, mid-term, 62 years old, having lived at least three complete lives.