Spat Leaves Bono’s Parents Out of Work

Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono said that a “family squabble” has led to the dismissal of his mother and stepfather from their jobs at his popular restaurant in the desert tourist mecca.

“I am hurt and very upset about it,” said Bono’s stepfather, Tony Rose, 60.

Rose walked off his job as acting general manager of Bono’s restaurant last Wednesday after a dispute with another man hired to take over the management duties. Rose said he had been expecting to take another position at the restaurant until “I was insulted by the new manager.”

“I am going to try and get this straightened out with Sonny,” Rose said.

“It is a shock,” said Bono’s mother, Jean, who quit her hostess and public relations job the same day as her husband. “But I am still his mother at heart and I would rather not make him look like the big bad wolf.”

Still, she said, “if my husband doesn’t go in (to work), I don’t go in.”

But Jean Rose, who Bono said was not on the restaurant payroll, also said she is expecting to have “bladder surgery in a couple of weeks” and is worried that the loss of her husband’s job could affect her own medical insurance coverage.

“The insurance policy is a little in limbo,” said Jean Rose, who formerly worked with her husband as a hairdresser in Costa Mesa. The couple were asked to run the restaurant by Bono when the entertainer decided to run for mayor a year ago.

In a telephone interview, Bono, 53, said, “I would never let anything like that (canceled insurance) happen to her.”

Bono concurred that Rose walked off the job after having an argument with the newly hired general manager, Dick House. But he declined to elaborate.

“I think it is something of a family matter and some things have to stay in the family,” Bono said. “I just wish he would have talked to me rather than walking out.”

But a friend of the family who asked to remain anonymous said that Rose’s problems began shortly after he was named acting general manager more than a year ago.

“Sonny had been terribly patient with his stepdad over the years, even though he’d caused a lot of agitations like this,” the family friend said. “This recent problem flared over something dumb like, ‘Fold the napkins this way.’ ”

The flap only added to Bono’s concerns as newly elected mayor of Palm Springs.

“It gets to be a real hard situation in that it’s family,” he said. “Egos get inflated. . . . Hopefully, I can work it out for everybody. What the outcome will be, I don’t know.”

Bono, former singing partner and straight man to his ex-wife Cher, was elected mayor on April 12. He campaigned on a pledge to return glamour to the town and get rid of the “old-boy network” he claims has choked the local economy with overly restrictive ordinances.