Sharing Sonny

“Can you spell opportunistic?” asks Cher, getting on the phone from Malibu.

Apparently, it’s not a rhetorical question. She’s writing a letter to a friend about how the media are firing these impertinent questions at her about “Sonny & Me: Cher Remembers,” the ode to her late ex-husband that airs on CBS at 8 tonight.

“They’re all asking me, ‘Isn’t this self-serving?’ ” Cher says. “All I tried to do was present a picture of what our relationship was like.”

On the other hand, at least some skepticism is in order. This is Cher, after all, who if nothing else has a keen sense of how to get the media to pay attention to her mercurial self, whether by wearing strange things on her head to the Oscars or by revealing that she’s been in touch with the late Bono through best-selling medium James Van Praagh.

Coincidentally enough, “Sonny & Me” airs on Cher’s 52nd birthday, amid a mini-PR blitz. Not seen on the big screen since “Faithful” (1995), Cher this summer goes to work on “Tea With Mussolini,” directed by Franco Zeffirelli and co-starring Judi Dench and Joan Plowright, and follows that up with a comedy called “Breakers” with Cameron Diaz.

Ideally, the special and the films and the new People magazine cover interview (“I hate my 50s,” she declares. “They suck.”) will help erase the memory of the hair product infomercial phase of her career, a 1990s preoccupation that Cher says she now regrets.

“I didn’t read the public right on that one,” she says. “I lost all my credibility, whatever that means.”

Seen in that context, her emotional, tear-choked eulogy at Bono’s Palm Springs funeral in January could be construed as something of a coming-out performance. But in the special, Cher is engaging and heartfelt as she presents a more contained tribute--a visual scrapbook of the Sonny and Cher years, including scenes of the duo performing on the TV show “Shindig” in 1964 and reuniting to sing “I Got You, Babe” on “Late Night With David Letterman” in 1987.

But most of the show focuses on clips from “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” (1971-74), which took the couple to the height of their popularity.

“Younger people don’t remember that for four or five years they were the hottest couple in America,” says Don Mischer, executive producer of the special.

Wearing a surprisingly modest, scaled-down range of outfits, Cher narrates the hour and only occasionally strays from the topic of Sonny and Cher and onto herself. For all of its supposedly self-serving undertones, the program does function as an interesting timepiece--a window onto the kooky outfits and strange appeal of a couple who, side by side, looked more like mismatched strangers than husband and wife.

They met when Cher was 16, Bono, 28.

“In the beginning, he just saw me as this stupid kid,” Cher says of their early arrangement, during which she says the two lived together in Los Angeles but slept in separate twin beds.

The special comes complete with still photos of those early years, in addition to rare footage of the New York nightclub gig that prompted then-CBS programming chief Fred Silverman to give them a variety show, and plenty of the better comic moments between them on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

It was an act they’d worked up in the early 1960s, playing to empty clubs.

“I started making these certain kind of jokes, and we just started to build on it,” Cher says. “Freddy Silverman came to see us do our act, and so the whole [variety] show was built around the premise of Cher being the sarcastic, snooty one and [Bono] being the small, lovable, dumb one. Sonny didn’t mind because he knew it wasn’t who he really was.”

Months removed now from the shock of Bono’s death in a skiing accident at Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly mountains, Cher in conversation is wittily candid about aspects of Bono’s life, including his foray into Republican politics.

“He changed from the person that I knew,” she says, asked how she felt about Bono’s stints as mayor of Palm Springs and later a California congressman. “I went to his house [in Palm Springs] and there were pictures of him with Dan Quayle and George Bush, and I thought, ‘Maybe this is a sickness he’s going through.’ I asked him, ‘If you have to be in politics, why do you have to be a Republican?’ He said that I had to grow up sometime.”

In the end, Bono, like Cher, proved himself adept at self-reinvention. In that sense, their post-”Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” careers took similar arcs--periods of public absence followed by high-profile success.

“We made a great team, at least professionally,” she says. Without him, “I was lost for a really long time.”

* “Sonny & Me: Cher Remembers” airs at 8 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).