'Black eyes, busted lips, broken ribs - life was hell, so I took 50 sleeping pills': Tina Turner says sex with her brutal husband was akin to 'rape' but when he moved two mistresses in to their 'whorehouse' home, it was the final straw

When Ike Turner proposed, there was nothing romantic about it. ‘You want to marry me?’ he said. Gruff, terse, no niceties.

Marriage to me, he thought, was a good manoeuvre. It would help him out of a tricky situation with one of his former wives, who wanted to extract some money from him.

Who knows which wife it was. By 1962, Ike had been married so many times, I’d lost track — and all those wives were in addition to the countless girlfriends who came and went with dizzying speed.

Tina with Ike Turner, above. The first time I saw him on stage, I couldn¿t help thinking: ¿God, he¿s ugly.¿ I was definitely in the minority. Most women, black or white, found Ike irresistible because there was something dangerous about him

Tina with Ike Turner, above. The first time I saw him on stage, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘God, he’s ugly.’ I was definitely in the minority. Most women, black or white, found Ike irresistible because there was something dangerous about him

So, no, I didn’t want to marry him, but I didn’t have much choice. By the time he proposed, we had four children between us and a shared career as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Our wedding, he decided, would take place in Tijuana, Mexico, because they weren’t fussy about little things like having a marriage licence. There was no point objecting — that would just make him mad, and might lead to a beating. I definitely didn’t want a black eye on my wedding day.

Tijuana was seedy and honky-tonk in those days. Once we crossed over the border, we found the Mexican version of a justice of the peace in a small, dirty office.

He pushed some papers across a desk for me to sign, and that was it. But as bad as that was, what came next was even worse.

You see, so long as Ike was in down-and-dirty Tijuana, he wanted to have fun, his kind of fun.

So he took me to a whorehouse. On my wedding night.

I’ve never, ever, told anyone this story before. I was too embarrassed. What kind of bridegroom takes his brand-new wife to a live pornographic sex show, right after their marriage ceremony?

There I sat, in this filthy place, watching Ike out of the corner of my eye, wondering: ‘Does he really like this? How could he?’

It was all so ugly. The male performer was unattractive and seemingly impotent, and the girl — well, let’s just say that what was on display was more gynaecological than erotic.

I was miserable, on the verge of tears, but there was no escape. We couldn’t leave until Ike was ready, and he was having a fine old time.

The experience was so disturbing that I just scratched it out. By the time we got back to Los Angeles, I’d created a completely different scenario in my head — a romantic elopement. 

The following day, I was bragging to people: ‘Guess what? Oh, Ike took me to Tijuana. We got married yesterday!’

It was my elder sister who took me to the Club Manhattan in St. Louis, Missouri. The band that filled the place every night was Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. Of course, I’d heard of them, everybody had. Ike’s Rocket 88, one of the very first rock ’n’ roll songs ever, had been a big hit.

The first time I saw him on stage, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘God, he’s ugly.’ I was definitely in the minority. Most women, black or white, found Ike irresistible because there was something dangerous about him.

And he didn’t just look dangerous: there were endless rumours about his bad temper, his flare-ups with his musicians, his fights with jealous women (and sometimes their angry husbands).

When he picked up his guitar or played the piano, though, he just lit up. People went crazy — even me. Back then, I was a skinny 17-year-old schoolgirl called Anna Mae Bullock.

Although I started attending the club regularly, I doubt that Ike ever noticed me at all.

One night, I grabbed a mike that was floating round the audience and joined Ike in a song.

He was visibly shocked when he heard my big voice; it didn’t seem possible it could come from such a slip of a girl.

That was the start. Soon, Ike and I had become fast friends. The best part was that he taught me all about music and paid me to sing onstage.

When I wanted romance, I found it with a handsome young man who played saxophone in the band. Unfortunately, I became pregnant and my boyfriend moved home to Mississippi, which was the last I ever saw of him.

In 1958, at 18, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. I was strong and quick to recover, and I wanted to make a good life for my son.

When I wasn’t singing, I was working as a hospital aide, and flirting with the idea of studying to be a nurse. Who was I kidding? I liked dressing up in the fancy clothes Ike bought me — long gloves, sparkly earrings and pretty dresses — and I wanted to sing. That meant more time spent practising at his house.

And then one night we crossed the line. I think we were both surprised, even uncomfortable, but it seemed easier to remain lovers than struggle to recapture our friendship.

Ike & Tina Turner pose for a portrait with their son and step-sons. We rehearsed constantly ¿ even in the car travelling from one show to another ¿ and worked hard on our choreography, making up steps

Ike & Tina Turner pose for a portrait with their son and step-sons. We rehearsed constantly — even in the car travelling from one show to another — and worked hard on our choreography, making up steps

Then, in 1960, I discovered that I was expecting Ike’s child. That’s not what doomed me, though. The real trouble started when his record company told him to make ‘that girl’ the star of his act.

Ike had a brainstorm: he turned the Kings of Rhythm into the Ike and Tina Turner Revue and announced we were going on tour. Why Tina? Because it rhymed with Sheena, a name he remembered from some TV series.

I dug in my high heels, telling him I didn’t want to change my name.

That was the first time Ike hit me. He picked up a wooden shoe stretcher and struck me on the head — always the head, I learned through experience — and it really hurt. I was so shocked that I started to cry.

Ike’s response was to order me to get on the bed. I really hated him at that moment; the very last thing I wanted to do was make love, if you could call it that.

When he’d finished, I lay there with a swollen head, thinking: ‘You’re pregnant, Anna, and you have no place to go.’ So I left my son with a babysitter, tucked my pregnancy bump behind a maternity girdle and hit the road.

In the early days, it was Ike who behaved like the star. I was the Cinderella, the slave girl who was no longer paid for her performances.

Our three dancers — The Ikettes — and I spent so much time together on the road that we were like sisters. Dancing with them was sometimes my only pleasure.

We rehearsed constantly — even in the car travelling from one show to another — and worked hard on our choreography, making up steps (‘Sham, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Freeze, Freeze, Turn! You go up, I come back.’)

Tina pictured with Ike Turner in 1977. In the early days, it was Ike who behaved like the star. I was the Cinderella, the slave girl who was no longer paid for her performances.

Tina pictured with Ike Turner in 1977. In the early days, it was Ike who behaved like the star. I was the Cinderella, the slave girl who was no longer paid for her performances.

Ike controlled the music, but I didn’t like the way he wanted me to sing. I wanted to be more expressive, more melodic, but he wouldn’t permit that. One night, he actually spat at me when I dared to express my opinion.

After I gave birth to my second child, he expected me to bounce back straight away. So two days later, I was onstage, singing and dancing as if nothing had happened.

Why, I often wondered, didn’t Ike treat me better? He couldn’t have been thinking rationally. If he’d been kind to me, I could have loved him — but Ike was always his own worst enemy, destroying anything that was good.

As a boy, he’d watched his father die a slow, painful death after he was beaten mercilessly by white men who wanted to teach him a lesson for fooling around with a white woman.

'After I gave birth to my second child, he expected me to bounce back straight away. So two days later, I was onstage, singing and dancing as if nothing had happened,' Turner wrote

'After I gave birth to my second child, he expected me to bounce back straight away. So two days later, I was onstage, singing and dancing as if nothing had happened,' Turner wrote

Ike held that hate deep inside him and never let it go.

Our life together was defined by abuse and fear. Oh, we went through the motions of doing all the things normal couples did: he rented a house in LA, where we lived with my two boys and his two by a previous wife.

But there was no peace in Ike’s world. I had to tread carefully, watching what I said, or how I looked at him. He was always on edge, ready to fight.

To Ike, everyone was the enemy. Even at the airport, he’d climb across the counter and threaten to hit the woman selling tickets because she’d said something he didn’t like.

In a perverse way, the bruises he gave me — the black eye, the busted lip or rib, the swollen nose — were markings, a sign of ownership, a way of saying: ‘She’s mine and I can do whatever I want with her.’

I knew I should leave, but I had no money and didn’t know how to take the first step. At my lowest, I convinced myself that death was my only way out.

Why did I snap on an ordinary day in 1968? For starters, there were three women at the house at the time, and Ike was having sex with all of them. Three of us were named Ann — which meant he only had to remember one name.

One of the Anns, Ann Thomas, was pregnant with his child — another insult to me.

Everything was diminishing — my status, my confidence, my world. One night, just before a gig, I simply couldn’t take any more and swallowed 50 sleeping pills.

I knew they’d take time to work, so I calculated that I’d get through the opening number — which meant Ike would still get paid for the booking. I was so well trained that even my suicide had to be convenient for him. The pills, however, kicked in just as I started to put on my make-up, and I ended up being rushed to hospital. As the doctors pumped my stomach, I was fading fast.

That’s when Ike moved closer and started speaking to me, probably doing his best imitation of a concerned husband. In my subconscious, I heard the voice of my tormentor, cursing me softly.

Immediately, my heart started racing. ‘Keep talking,’ the doctors told Ike. ‘We have a pulse.’

The next thing I remember is waking up and a nurse asking my name. Then, just to make sure, she added: ‘Can you sing?’

I belted out: ‘When I was a little girl . . .’ the opening line from River Deep, Mountain High, which I’d recorded two years before.

The following day, I woke up, turned my head and there was Ike. ‘You should die, you motherf****r,’ he said.

On the very day I was discharged, feeling weak and suffering from terrible stomach cramps, he forced me to go back to work. As terrible as the whole experience had been — and I felt sick for a long time — it helped me face the future.

I knew my suicide attempt hadn’t been a classic cry for help: I’d chosen death.

Yet I never tried killing myself again, because I came out of the darkness believing that I was meant to survive. I was here for a reason.

In the meantime, I was still as much a prisoner as I’d ever been. In fact, I’d spend the next seven years trying to figure out how to get out of my marriage.

As time passed, we had more and more success, even supporting The Rolling Stones on a couple of tours.

Privately, however, I was experiencing several levels of hell.

In 1969, when we joined the Stones on tour, I was so sick that I could barely hold up my head.

I had TB, it turned out — but the only flowers I received in hospital were from the Stones. Ike was merely furious about having to cancel our dates.

While I was recuperating, he redecorated our house in red and gold, turning it into a hipster whorehouse. Where did he even find such awful furniture, I wondered? The sofas had ugly metal prongs that looked suspiciously like penises. The coffee table was shaped like an oversized guitar, and he’d installed a mirror on the ceiling over our bed.

Once we started performing again, he forced me to sing in a cheap and sexual way. I was embarrassed by the gestures I had to make at the microphone.

If I did something he didn’t want me to do — like turning to look at him on stage — he’d say: ‘Turn around, motherf****r.’

In 1971, our recording of Proud Mary climbed to No 4 and won a Grammy. It was exactly the kind of mainstream success that Ike had always longed for.

So what did he do? He ploughed all the money we made into building his own sound studio, a five-minute drive from the house.

There was rarely anything good going on there, especially late at night, when Ike and his friends gathered to party.

Sometimes, he’d stay awake for five nights at a time. When he collapsed, his mistress of the moment (one Ann or another) would help me cart him to bed.

He’d sleep for about three days, then have his hair and nails done (usually by me), eat and listen to the radio.

Invariably, other people’s hits would make him so envious that he’d drive straight back to the studio. For days on end, he’d obsess over a new song, but it usually turned into nonsense.

In this business, you have to evolve to succeed, and Ike didn’t know how.

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American pop and soul singer Tina Turner with English singer-songwriter David Bowie, 1985

American pop and soul singer Tina Turner with English singer-songwriter David Bowie, 1985

In the early Seventies, he started doing cocaine — because someone had told him it would give him more stamina for sex. As if Ike Turner needed to spend another minute on his love life! He was well-endowed, and having sex was practically his full-time job.

For me, though, sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility — a kind of rape — especially when it began or ended with a beating. What had been ugly and hateful between us before became worse with every snort of cocaine. He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns.

He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang.

He broke my jaw. And I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye.

The people closest to us saw what was happening, but they couldn’t stop him: any attempt to help me would make him more violent.

I was a frequent visitor to Emergency, although most of the time I just pulled myself together, applied make-up to the bruises and showed up at the next performance.

If the doctors thought it was unusual that I had so many ‘accidents,’ they didn’t say anything. They probably thought that was just the way black people were, always fighting.

I longed, oh how I longed, for one of Ike’s mistresses to take my place so I could get out of there. But, behind my back, he referred to me as ‘my million dollars’.

He was depending on me to bring in the money; I knew he’d never let me go.

Totally out of control, he was ruled by demons he couldn’t begin to understand. I fed him soup, massaged his feet, listened to his irrational rants and took his blows. And I became really good at hiding my innermost thoughts.

In July 1976, we flew into Dallas, Texas, with the band for a show. Ike was recovering from one of his five-day cocaine benders and in a horrible mood.

It got worse after we landed. In the car that picked us up, he pulled out a melting chocolate bar and tried to give me some — but I recoiled because I was wearing a white Yves Saint Laurent trouser suit.

‘F*** you’, he said. I threw the same words back at him. It was as if a voice that had been hiding deep inside me was emerging for the first time.

That was a surprise to Ike: he turned to one of his musicians and said: ‘Man, this woman never talked to me like that.’

Then he started punching me. All the way to the Statler Hilton hotel. By the time we reached it, my face was swollen and my suit was splattered with blood.

Ike told the employees that we’d been in an accident, but I knew that — yet again — I looked like a woman who’d been broken and silenced. In our room, I pretended to be the same old Tina, the wife who was understanding and forgiving. 

I went through the motions of preparing him for our show that night — ordering his dinner, massaging his temples and urging him to take a nap.

The whole time, I was thinking: ‘What would happen if I just grabbed a bag and ran?’

Well, that’s exactly what I did. As soon as Ike fell asleep, I reached for a small toiletries case, tied a scarf around my throbbing head and tossed a cape around my shoulders.

Then I raced to the ground floor and slipped through the hotel kitchen into an alley. It was dark outside and the landscape was unfamiliar, so I hid at first among the garbage cans.

After that, I ran and ran until I came to the busy Interstate highway. I could see an inn on the other side, so I decided to scramble down an embankment and cross several lanes of speeding traffic.

I’m not sure what was more frightening — the whooshing sound the trucks made as they came speeding toward me, or the thunderous vibrations I felt with my entire body as they passed.

I just missed getting hit by a big truck. Somehow, I made it to the inn, only for it to dawn on me that I had just 36 cents in my pocket, my face was battered and my clothes were filthy and stained with blood. And I was black. In Dallas.

Under the circumstances, I thought, any sensible innkeeper would probably turn me away. But I walked up to the desk anyway, and introduced myself, explaining that I’d run away from my husband and didn’t have any money.

I swore I’d pay the manager back if he gave me a room for the night. And lucky for me, he had a big heart: he took me to a suite and promised to send up hot soup.

When I closed the door, the thought of what I’d done hit me so hard that I became weak at the knees, almost faint. I was terrified but I was also excited. I wasn’t just running away from Ike. I was running towards a new life.

David Bowie, whom I got to know later, used to call me a ‘phoenix rising from the ashes’.

I know it sounds corny, but his words truly expressed the feelings I had inside.

For anyone who’s in an abusive relationship, I say this: nothing can be worse than where you are now. Nothing.

If you get up and leave, if you rise from the ashes, life will open up for you again.

This extract was adapted by Corinna Honan from My Love Story by Tina Turner, to be published by Century on October 18 at £20.  

To buy it for £16 (20 per cent discount and free p&p), call 0844 571 0640 or go to mailshop.co.uk/books. 

Offer valid until October 16. Spend £30 on books and get FREE premium delivery.

©Tina Turner 2018. 

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