Okay, I’ll have to admit it, the day that the late Sonny Bono called me in my Hollywood office and said he had just completed a documentary movie on the use of marijuana, I thought he was pulling my leg.

I mean, maybe if some of those square-peg guys at Disney Studios had put their heads together and come up with a squeaky-clean version of a teenage lecture series to put on Saturday morning TV with all the kiddie shows about the evils of marijuana and the dangers young people faced who hid out behind the barn and puffed away on reefers, I could have believed it. But, Sonny Bono? Come on now, give me a break.

A guy could just look at Sonny Bono in one of those zany-looking outfits of his and watch him bounce around on stage like a Mexican jumping bean and come to the conclusion real quickly that the guy was high on something. Nobody, not even Sonny Bono, could be that weird.

Remember now, in an age when Sonny and Cher were making bizarre wise-cracks on the tube and turning out hit records, smoking pot was considered “normal” in the Hollywood music and entertainment industry. If you went on stage without a rolled up joint sticking out from under your guitar strings or hidin’ out behind your left ear, you weren’t with it, man. You weren’t cool.

I doubt seriously if there were any musicians and singers hanging out back then in Hollywood who didn’t smoke weed, unless maybe it was Pat Boone. So, when Sonny (“I Got You, Babe”) laid that one on me, I had to laugh.

“Hey, man, hear me out,” Sonny told me, “I know it’s not cool to go around Hollywood puttin’ down smoking pot, but the thing is, man, I’m not trying to win a popularity contest. I wanna do somethin’ for the kids. Over the years they’ve hung in there for me and Cher and now I think it’s time I return the favor.”

I tried to interrupt, but Sonny wouldn’t let me. He kept right on rapping about all the evils of marijuana and drug abuse, just like he was hyping a product on one of those corny commercials you hear on the radio.

“Come on Sonny,” I said, “get real. Smoking marijuana is not gonna kill you. It might make you have hallucinations, but it’s not gonna give you cancer.” It wasn’t that I was endorsing marijuana (though half the hit songs on Billboard’s charts probably wouldn’t have been written without it), I just didn’t understand Sonny’s motivation. Until he told me.

“Look, man, it’s like this,” he said. “Kids wanna be cool, so they blow grass. At first, it’s a big rush, but after awhile, nothing, man. Nothing. So what happens? Do they ‘kick the habit’ and go cold turkey and go back to being straight-laced and goody two-shoes? Hell no, man, when the thrill is gone, they look for something else. And, that’s what scares the hell out of me.

“Impressionistic kids will take any drug they can afford to get their kicks and be ‘in with the in-crowd.’ After awhile it’s as common a habit as putting on your shoes. But it’s a dangerous habit that can ruin a kid’s life forever. That’s the point I want to get across to the kids. They might not wanna listen to their parents at home or their teachers at school, but maybe they would listen to somebody in show biz like me.”

Sonny said he made the documentary movie on marijuana with his own money. He said it wasn’t “classy” by Hollywood documentary standards, but he had researched the subject thoroughly and had interviewed several key people in the medical profession as well as friends of his in the entertainment world whose lives had literally “gone to pot” because they got hooked and couldn’t get their act together.

So, I agreed to take a look at Sonny’s little film. He arranged for me to screen it in a private studio on Santa Monica Blvd. In Hollywood. I went over there one night after I left the office prepared to see a lecture, like one of those old flicks they show you in high school. Wow, was I surprised!

When Sonny called the next day to get my reaction, I told him simply I thought his movie was informative as well as entertaining and asked him what I could do to help promote it. He said he hoped that I would assign a story to one of the staff writers at ‘TEEN magazine about the dangers of drug abuse and the effect it had on the lives of teenagers.

“I betcha you’ve never seen a marijuana plant before, have you?” Sonny asked. When I agreed, he said that he could get one for me at the Narcotics Bureau down at the L.A.P.D.

So, I went down there all bright-eyed and bushy tailed and introduced myself to the guy on duty who said I’d have to sign for the plant. “I’ll have an officer escort you out to your car,” he said. “Otherwise, you might run into some problems if you just waltz out there with a marijuana plant under your arm.”

Then he warned me to be careful about how I displayed the plant in my Mustang. “You’ll be okay,” he said, “unless you get stopped for a traffic ticket or something and a cop spots that plant in the back seat of the car.”

I assured the man I’d take precautions to drive the speed limit. The last thing I wanted was to be stopped by an L.A. policeman with a huge marijuana plant blocking my vision in my rear-view mirror.

I made it halfway to Hollywood, actually, on the freeway before I saw the red light blinking and started looking for an exit. Getting off a busy California freeway is not the easiest thing in the world to do, even when you’re not illegally smuggling marijuana.

When the cop came over to my car to explain that I had a busted tail-light and spotted the marijuana plant I thought he was gonna pitch a fit. Or, as they say in Hollywood, “become un-glued.”

I gave him my best smile and assured him that I had only “borrowed” the marijuana plant from the lab down at the Narcotics Bureau to take to the office so that our staff photographer could shoot some pictures and our art staff could make some sketches.

I had no “priors” in Los Angeles, but the big guy who looked like a Rod Steiger clone was not about to let me off the hook. So, he told me to get back on the freeway and he would escort me back to the Narcotics Bureau.

Unfortunately, a coupla news guys from the local TV station were hanging around the lab when we came in and began asking questions. The next day Sonny called me and said that was an ingenious idea I had, getting the story about the marijuana plant on the six o’clock news.

It would have been, if I had planned it that way. Sitting down there for a coupla hours cooling my heels with all the perverts and derelicts in L.A. was not exactly my idea of how to spend a great afternoon.

Finally, some vice squad detective found the guy who had “signed me out” on the marijuana plant and I was released with a warning to be more careful about cavorting around in public with a marijuana plant.

The magazine staff shot the photos, the artists did some sketches for the article and then I was faced with the reality of making the return trip to the Narcotics Bureau. No way, Jose. I decided to call the guy who had signed off on the release of the plant and ask him to send someone to pick the plant up at our offices on Sunset Blvd.

Sonny came down and picked it up himself. He laughed about my mishap with the cop on the freeway. “You never know what’s gonna happen in this town, babe,” he told me. “In Hollywood, you could walk down the street in your birthday suit and nobody would give a damn.”

I couldn’t help but remember about Sonny Bono and the great marijuana caper when I heard the news on TV about his fatal accident on the ski slope near Lake Tahoe. To some folks, I guess, Sonny was known as the “straight man” for Cher, back when they first started off in show business as Caesar and Cleo.

Sonny, whose real name was Salvatore Bono, once confessed to Cher that he was a distant descendent of Napoleon, but his father had shortened the name Bonaparte to Bono when he came to this country.

Some knew Sonny as a restaurateur who opened his first Bono’s restaurant in West Hollywood in 1982. Others remembered him as the Mayor of Palm Springs, California, and still others as a Republican member of the House of Representatives.

“The guy was many things to many people, but he was my best friend,” Cher said. Speaking at his eulogy, she held back tears and told those in attendance two stories about Sonny.

“When Sonny became interested in politics, I told him one day he might be a Republican but he looked liked Mr. Magoo. He had to buy some better glasses. I told him he had to look cooler than this.”

She then recalled fondly a magazine series that once was popular in Reader’s Digest titled “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met.”

“That’s how I feel about Sonny,” she said, with a little tear in her eye. “Without a doubt, he’ll always be the most unforgettable character I’ve ever met.”

Well, that’s show biz, baby (babe).