Tina Turner shared this about her abusive marriage.
The “Private Dancer” hitmaker attempted suicide to escape her marriage. She snapped “on an ordinary day in 1968” (seven years after she married the late Ike Turner) she took 50 sleeping pills before a concert in a bid to take her own life because she felt “diminished,” as her spouse was sleeping with multiple other women.
Turner, whose real name is Anna Mae Bullock, recalled: “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 anymore and swallowed 50 sleeping pills.”
Turner knew the pills would “take time to work” and hoped they wouldn’t “kick in” until she got on stage that night so Ike would “still get paid,” but instead she was rushed to a hospital while getting ready for the show.
Doctors were able to bring her back to consciousness and one of the first things Tina, now 78, heard was Ike telling her to “die” before ordering her back to work.
Writing in her new book My Love Story, which is being serialized by the Daily Mail newspaper, she recalled: “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.”
The “Simply the Best” singer, who filed for divorce from Ike in 1976 and is now married to Erwin Bach, insisted her suicide attempt was more than just a cry for help, but the fact that she survived made her vow never to try again.
She wrote: “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.”
She also recalled how she and Ike spent their wedding night in a “whorehouse,” but she blocked out the memory and pretended their nuptials in Mexico had been romantic.
She revealed: “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?’
“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.”
