Neglected and harassed: the hell of Tina Turner for having separated from her attacker | S-Mode

“Forget the jewelry. Forget everything. It’s just blood money. I don’t want anything”. That’s what Tina Turner told the judge when she divorced Ike Turner in the summer of 1976. She was 39 and had endured all kinds of harassment and beatings from her husband for almost two decades. artistic and affectionate partner: on their wedding night in 1962, he took her to a brothel. He went so far as to throw boiling coffee in her face, which caused her second-degree burns. “He used my nose as a punching bag so many times I tasted blood in my throat. He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have black eyes.”write in the glimpse of his new memories which advances by chapters daily mail, a volume which will appear on October 18 under the title my love story.

Although the artist has already recounted some of this abuse hell in Me, Tina, his 1986 autobiography, it is in this new publication that he details new attacks and how she was silenced and ignored by the industry for filing for divorce from Ike Turner after a brutal beating in Las Vegas which led to her grabbing her bag, a scarf, and a coat and escaping through the back door of the hotel. He took advantage of the fact that Ike was sleeping to do so. He only had 36 cents in his pocket. It would take her seven years to get her career back on track and sell millions of records with initial help from Cher in 1977 and her “David Bowie Cinderella moment” in 1983. “Every door I knock on I say Tina and they all answer Ike”will regret during this lapse of “cabaret performances” who was his manager, Roger Davies.

Tina Turner and Ike Turner in a file image. Photo: Getty

With the divorce, Tina Turner managed to keep her name and keep two cars (Jaguars) that had been given to her in the past. Ike’s four children – two from the couple and two from Ike’s former wife – initially stayed with their father. “I had no house and spent two months with friends. While the owners were away, he cleaned their house from top to bottom. She’d rather be anyone’s maid than Ike Turner’s wife. it was my attitude“, he specifies in the text. When she was finally able to obtain a house to live with her children, according to her account, the “thugs” of Ike Turner harassed her and on several occasions she had to “sleep in a closet” for fear of being killed – they shot at their car – or call the police to have them evicted from their property. For a time he carried a gun everywhere. “It was like a threat constant, as if telling me ‘I will see you soon, you will come begging for your old life’.”

“No one wanted to bet on Tina without Ike”remembers in his memoirs. Everyone except Cher. Tina has performed on Cher’s variety show on television several times. The artist, who gave her the nickname “Hurricane Tina”, had also divorced her artistic partner, Sonny, and saw herself reflected in her. Having had to cancel scheduled concerts, both had to deal with debts from losses from canceled shows due to being the ones who left their respective bands (“we’d both end up paying every penny we owed” ).

It was thanks to David Bowie that his career finally took off. The few television appearances and “cabaret concerts” he managed to schedule barely kept him alive (“it covered my rent and expenses, but my income was about $10 a month” ). Everything changed one night in 1983, when David Bowie has decided to cancel the launch party for his new album, let’s dance, and tell all the bosses at his record company that he’d rather go to a concert “of his favorite singer at the Ritz, me!”. As he recalls in the book, “My manager was bombarded with calls from music executives desperate for tickets. The show went very well and then David came to the In the wings with Keith Richards. The three of us were having such a good time talking about music (and drinking bottles of Jack Daniels and champagne) that we didn’t want the evening to end. So we went to Keith’s suite at the Plaza. Ron Wood came by, David started playing the piano and we jammed all night.” For the artist, it was a turning point in his career. “That night at the Ritz, my life changed dramatically. Capitol signed a deal with me and I also did it with EMI in England”. His takeoff was dazzling.

Ike Turner would not forgive him for revealing the abuse in his biography. “Yes, he hit Tina, but he didn’t do it any more than any guy would half hit his wife.. The truth is that our life was not so different from that of the neighbor next door, ”he would confirm in a controversial interview with spin where he tried to normalize abuse. Tina managed to recover with almost no help. popular producer Phil Spector would benefit Ike Turner’s funeral ignoring Tina Turner and trying to whiten her figure: “I have an ambivalence with Oprah Winfrey. She turned Tina Turner’s book into a bestseller that demonized Ike. The book would not have sold more than 10 copies. It was badly written. That was hogwash and just because Oprah idolized Tina, it didn’t seem wrong to her to vilify a brother.” Specter currently serve his sentence accused of shooting a woman, Lana Clarkson, in her home.

Tina Turner and David Bowie in 1985.