The brave moment in 1976 when Tina Turner left Ike: “I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a black eye”
“Ike wasn’t someone you could forgive and allow him back in.” After so many years, so many struggles, and so much suffering, these were perhaps the most important words Tina Turner ever could have said.
Her marriage to Ike Turner was prolific and irreplaceable – without it, she frankly wouldn’t have had her career or her children. But by the same token, this by no means meant that Turner was indebted to Ike or should have been in any way grateful to him. The only thing she was rightly thankful for was her sense to leave him.
As a musical duo, the pair created hits throughout the 1960s that would not only stand the test of time but also go on to be so iconic that they were embedded into the very fabric of music… These were songs like ‘River Deep Mountain High’, or their cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary’. On the outside, everything was glitzy and dazzling.
However, that shining veneer played into exactly what Ike wanted. Outwardly, he was the devoted husband and sonic hero of all. Behind closed doors, he was an abuser of disgusting and terrifying levels, taking Turner’s life in his hands as his wife, musical product, and punching bag all in one.
The violence and the injuries were truly sickening. As Turner later recalled in her memoir, “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.”
Naturally, there came a point where Turner couldn’t bear any more, knowing that if she didn’t leave Ike, she would be risking her life. As such, on July 1st, 1976, she did the most vital thing she would ever do, and in the dead of night, while her husband was asleep in a hotel room in Texas, she left.
Running for her life with no more than 36 cents in cash and a petrol station credit card to her name, she managed to get to a local motel and beg for shelter. By the end of the same month, Turner had filed for divorce from Ike, citing irreconcilable differences. But although she was now on her own, this was the key to the rest of her life.
It wasn’t like the clouds instantly lifted for Turner in the space of one night. Although she retained some assets in her divorce agreement with Ike, her fragile financial standing meant that she relied on food stamps and playing small clubs and hotels to even keep herself above water for the next two years.
But looking back, decades later, it was without a shadow of a doubt that she had won… It may have taken time, but she was the ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’, she was the icon, she was the star. Who was Ike? The washed-up former tyrant, the disgraced abuser, the cast-out bully. Nothing about him could ever take away Turner’s power.
