“Forget the jewelry. Forget everything. It’s just blood money. I do not want anything”. This is what Tina Turner told the judge when she divorced Ike Turner in the summer of 1976. She was 39 years old and had endured all manner of harassment and beatings from her artistic and affectionate partner for almost two decades: on their wedding night in 1962, he took her to a brothel. He even went so far as to throw boiling coffee in his face, resulting in second-degree burns. «He used my nose as a punching bag so many times I could taste blood in my throat. He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not having black eyes.writes in the run-up to his new memoir that The Chron is progressing chapter by chapter, a volume due out on October 18 entitled My Love Story.
Although the artist had already recounted part of this abuse hell in her 1986 autobiography Yo, Tina, in this new publication she details new assaults and assaults how she was silenced and ignored by the industry for filing for divorce from Ike Turner after a severe beating in Las Vegas which resulted in 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. He only had 36 cents in his pocket. Thanks to initial help from Cher in 1977 and her “David Bowie Cinderella moment” in 1983, it would be seven years before she got her career back on track and sold millions of records. “Every door I knock on I say Tina and everyone answers Ike.”would regret who his manager, Roger Davies, was during this period of “cabaret performances”.
Tina Turner and Ike Turner in a file photo. Photo: Getty
Through the divorce, Tina Turner managed to keep her name and two cars (Jaguars) that had been gifted to her in the past. Ike’s four children – two by the couple and two by Ike’s previous wife – initially stayed with their father. “I had no home and spent two months away from home with friends. While the owners were gone, he cleaned their home from top to bottom. She’d rather be someone’s maid than Ike Turner’s wife. that was my attitude“, he points out in the text. When she finally got a house to live in with her children, according to her account, she was molested by Ike Turner’s “thugs” and more than once had to “sleep in a closet”, afraid of being killed – they shot your car – or calling the police to clear their property.For a while he carried a gun everywhere.It was like a constant threat like he was telling me : ‘See you soon, you’ll beg for your old life’.”
“No one wanted to bet on Tina without Ike”recalled in his memoirs. Everyone except Cher. Tina appeared several times on Cher’s variety show on television. The artist, who gave her the nickname “Hurricane Tina,” had also divorced her artist partner Sonny and saw herself reflected in her. After having to cancel scheduled concerts, both faced debt from the losses from the canceled shows as they were the ones who left their respective groups (“in the end we would both pay every penny we owed”).
It was thanks to David Bowie that his career finally took off. The few television appearances and “cabaret concerts” he was able to organize barely kept him alive (“They covered my rent and my expenses, but I made about $10 a month”). Everything changed one night in 1983 when David Bowie decided to cancel the release party for his new album Let’s Dance and to tell all the bosses of his record company that he would 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 backstage with Keith Richards. The three of us were having so much fun 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 over, David started playing the piano and we jammed all night. For the artist it was a turning point in her career. “That night at the Ritz changed my life dramatically. Capitol have signed an agreement with me and I have done the same with EMI in England ». Its start was meteoric.
Ike Turner would not forgive him for disclosing the abuse in his bio. «Yes, he hit Tina, but he didn’t do it more times than any other guy would half-hit his wife.. “The truth is, our lives weren’t that different from the next-door neighbor’s,” he confirmed in a controversial interview with Spin, in which he tried to normalize the abuse. Tina was able to recover without much help. the popular producer Phil Spector used Ike Turner’s funeral to ignore Tina Turner and try to lighten her figure: «I have an ambivalence towards Oprah Winfrey. She turned Tina Turner’s book into a bestseller, demonizing Ike. The book would not have sold more than 10 copies. It was badly written. It was bullshit, and just because Oprah idolized Tina, it didn’t seem wrong to belittle a brother. Spector is currently serving a sentence for the murder of a woman, Lana Clarkson, at his home.
Tina Turner and David Bowie in 1985.
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