AceShowbiz - Cher is still "close" to all of her ex-boyfriends. The 77-year-old pop icon, who was famously married to the late Sonny Bono when performed as a music duo in the 1960s, has dated Hollywood stars such as Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Val Kilmer over the years and explained that she has remained on good terms with them because she has to appreciate someone's personality before becoming intimate with them.

Speaking on the "Table Manners" podcast, she told hosts Jessie and Lennie Ware, "I'm close with all of my exes. I'm really close. Yeah. I have a feeling that you have to like someone a lot before you go to bed with them, because if you don't then when you break up, there's nothing. You can never be friends because you weren't friends."

The "Believe" hitmaker, who has Chaz, 54, with Sonny as well as 47-year-old Elijah with second husband Gregg Allman, is currently dating Alexander Edwards, 37, but went on to reveal how she met Sonny in the early 1960s.

She said, "I was 16. And I was with a girlfriend of mine in a restaurant underneath the radio station KFWB. There was a whole bunch of record people sitting at the tables and I wasn't paying any attention, I was talking to my friend. Then I heard people say 'Hey Son, come sit here.' So I turned around and, I swear to God, it was like when Tony and Maria saw each other at the dance [in 'West Side Story']."

Cher eventually divorced from Sonny, who died at the age of 62 in 1998 as a result of injuries sustained in a ski accident, in 1975 but went on to recall that he was "so cool" and she ended up going out dancing with him on the night they first met.

She said, "He was so cool, and he had the most beautiful hands I've ever seen on a man. He came up and one of the guys who was a promotion man was sitting next to us. They started talking and they made arrangements to go out dancing that night, so the four of us went out dancing. Sonny and I danced, we just danced."