Tina Turner fans always knew she was a survivor. But Turner’s new memoir “My Love Story” (Atria, $28) reveals the extent of the ordeals the 78-year-old singer faced, from new details about her abusive marriage to Ike Turner to previously undisclosed health issues that nearly killed her. Among the revelations:
1. She attempted suicide while married to Ike Turner.
The first half of the book is dominated by her abusive marriage to Ike Turner, who died in 2007.
“He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns,” she writes. “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.”
At one point, Turner took 50 sleeping pills the night before a show. She survived, waking up in a hospital with her husband telling her, “You should die, [expletive].”
2. Ike Turner forced her to go to a brothel on their wedding night.
Ike Turner took her to Tijuana, Mexico, for a quickie wedding ceremony, then decided they’d spend that night at a brothel. “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,” Turner writes.
3. After she left him, his goons shot up her house.
After Turner filed for divorce, she moved to a house with her sons and longtime assistant and friend Rhonda Graam.
“One night … we heard this loud ‘bang, bang, bang’ coming from outside. When we looked, we saw that the back window of Rhonda’s car had been blown out with bullets,” she writes. “Another night, they actually shot into the house.”
4. Tina Turner had a stroke and a secret kidney transplant.
Fast forward four decades. Turner has just married German music producer Erwin Bach after 27 years together.
Three months after their wedding, Turner suffered a stroke, then learned she had kidney failure and vertigo.
After excruciating-but-successful vertigo treatments and beginning to stabilize her kidneys, Turner was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in January 2016.
Doctors removed part of her intestine, but her kidneys worsened to where she signed up for an assisted-suicide program. Then, Bach gave her one of his kidneys in a successful transplant.
5. Tina Turner reveals her last conversation with her son Craig.
Turner’s eldest son Craig — adopted as a child by Ike Turner — committed suicide in July at 59.
She recalls their final phone conversation. “Mother, I’m really happy,” he said. “You know you give me courage.”
Weeks later, she got the news of his suicide while in Paris to celebrate her fifth wedding anniversary in Paris.
Read more at USA Today.
