![]() ![]() In 2016, after a barrage of health problems, Tina’s kidneys began to fail. Of him, she said, “Erwin, who is a force of nature in his own right, has never been the least bit intimidated by my career, my talents, or my fame.” Tina’s second marriage - to her, her only marriage - was to Edwin Bach, a Swiss music executive 16 years her junior. She managed this because of whatever rare stuff she was made of (this is a woman whose label gave her two weeks to record her solo debut, Private Dancer, which went five times platinum) because she decided to speak publicly about her abusive marriage and forge her own identity, and in doing so give hope and courage to countless women and also because - in a perhaps unlikely twist for a girl from Nutbush, Tennessee - she had her practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, to which she credited her survival. A middle-aged Black woman - she became a rock star at 42! - sitting atop the 1980s like it was her throne. I’m old enough to barely remember this, but if you aren’t, it was like this: The Rolling Stones would headline a stadium one day, and the next day it would be Tina Turner. ![]() What happened instead is that Tina Turner became the biggest global rock star of the 80s. And, of course, given what she had been through, she might have … not made it. She could have stayed in Vegas, where she first went to get her chops back up, and worked as a nostalgia act. She could have labored in obscurity for decades, maybe making records on small labels to be prized by vinyl connoisseurs in Portland. Things could have gone a lot of ways from there. This was the name by which the world had come to know her, and keeping it was her only chance to salvage her career. All she wanted was the stage name he gave her - Tina - and her married name - Turner. She didn’t want anything: not the song rights, not the cars, not the houses, not the money. When she filed for divorce, she made an unusual request. As soon as she decided to walk out that door, she owned nothing else. When Tina Turner left her first husband - who was also her boss, captor, and brutal tormentor - she snuck out of their Dallas hotel room with a single thought in her mind: “The way out is through the door.”įrom there she fled across the midnight freeway, semi-trucks careening past her, with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card in her pocket.
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