Ike made me go to a brothel on our wedding night
ASTONISHING SOUL-BARING INTERVIEW
IT IS a sultry afternoon in Tijuana, Mexico, and Tina Turner is anticipating what should be the most romantic night of her life. She is 22 and has just married blues musician Ike Turner. Dreamily, she wonders where he has chosen – some enchanted retreat, perhaps – for their wedding night. ‘Guess where we went?’ she exclaims more than half a century later in a soul-baring interview with The Irish Mail on Sunday’s More magazine. ‘To a whorehouse! On my wedding night!’
Once inside, too fearful of her violent husband to turn on her heels, she was forced to watch a live sex show. The young woman from Nutbush, Tennessee, who grew up singing in a Baptist church choir, had been married just a matter of hours.
‘The experience was so disturbing that I suppressed it, scratched it out, and created a different scenario, a fantasy of romantic elopement,’ she says.
Everyone knows something of the singer’s ensuing marital torment, which was chronicled unsparingly in a book, film and musical. Preacher’s son Ike – sexually rapacious, cocaine-addicted – physically abused her throughout their relationship, using everything from walking canes to a pot of boiling coffee. But until now Tina has never revealed what happened on the fateful day in 1962, when her notions of love were brutally upended. She never told anyone because she was ‘too embarrassed’.
Now 78, and in frail health having suffered a stroke, cancer and kidney failure in the past five years, she sits in the garden of her Swiss chateau reflecting on the Mexican wedding and her remarkable life. She also talks openly of the death of her son, Craig, who took his own life aged 59 in July. She blames this – albeit indirectly – on Ike.
Tina says: ‘People can’t imagine the kind of man he was – a man who 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 so ugly.’
She can hear the cries from those telling her she should have ended the marriage (which would last 16 years) just as soon as it began. Instead she buried the experience. She adds that the ‘ceremony’ wasn’t much better. ‘Ike always had an angle. He must have figured out that Tijuana was the best place for a quickie ceremony. It probably wasn’t even legal. But there was no point in questioning his motives.
‘It would just make him mad, and that might lead to a beating. I definitely didn’t want a black eye on my wedding day. Once we crossed over the border, we drove down a dusty road and found the Mexican version of a justice of the peace. In a small, dirty office, a man pushed some papers across a desk for me to sign, and that was it.
‘Nobody said, “You may kiss the bride.” No toasts. No congratulations. No mention of living happily ever after.
‘As bad as that was, what came next was even worse. As long as Ike was in downand-dirty Tijuana, he wanted to have fun, his kind of fun.’
After the brothel visit, the newlyweds returned to Los Angeles. ‘By the next day, I was bragging to people, “Guess what? Oh, Ike took me to Tijuana. We got married yesterday!” I convinced myself that I was happy, and I was happy for a brief time, because the idea that I was married actually held meaning for me. For Ike, it was just another transaction.’
By his own admission, Ike’s affairs ran to three figures. Tina finally left him after he hit her because she complained that he got chocolate over her white suit.
He would later say in an interview: ‘Ain’t it part the woman’s fault if she stays around and lets me hit her?’
She found it was not easy to disentangle herself. Bullets were fired into one of the houses she moved to, and a car was burned. For a while, she carried a gun.
Before he died in 2007, aged 76, Ike spent much of his time trying unsuccessfully to erase his reputation as a wife-beater.
Just a few months ago, Tina was forced to confront her past when Craig, the son she had aged 18, killed himself with a gun which had belonged to Tina’s mother, Zelma.
In her new autobiography – My Love Story – she writes of how Craig, aged two or three, would desperately want to sit with her when she returned from a tour ‘but being told by Ike to go to his room’. She says Craig grew up lonely. ‘I think he missed his mother a lot. I was always away, touring… and I blame Ike for not being able to be the mother I would have been.’
Asked how she is coping since Craig’s death, she says: ‘I handle it with acceptance. I remember all the good things and the bad.’
Tina married music producer Erwin Bach in 2013 after 27 years together. She is alive, she says, and off dialysis only because Erwin, 16 years her junior, donated a kidney.
‘We call it “the baby” because it’s like me being pregnant – it’s part of him, kind of a baby from Erwin!’
I sat in this filthy place thinking, “How could he?”