MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Tina Turner never asked for pity, unlike today’s Montecito moaners

There were two Tinas, the legend once said of itself: the goddess of rock ‘n’ roll – and the real lady, “the Tina who wears ballerinas and pearls, who believes in elegance.”

But she was also so much more than that. Tina Turner – who died of natural causes at the age of 83 – was a vivid lesson in how to be a woman. An iconoclastic. And never, never victimize anyone.

“I am a girl from a cotton field,” she once said, “who lifted myself above that which I had not been taught.”

Born Anna Mae Bullock, in abject poverty and abandoned by her parents when she was just 3 years old, Tina – for all her ferocious talent and drive – became best known as a survivor of domestic violence.

She talked about it and wrote about it in the 1980s, a time when such things were not discussed. America was pre-Oprah, pre-Internet, pre-confessional culture. Victimization has not yet been valorised.

So the idea that a rich, famous, powerful, beautiful woman could have been beaten, tortured, and raped repeatedly by her own husband—a famous one at that—was something America hadn’t known.

“You have to believe me now when I tell you something.”

This was Tina opening up to a reporter for People magazine in 1981, a worldwide exclusive that only earned her a cover line—not the actual cover—but nonetheless changed the lives of women everywhere.

“My ex-husband was a physically abusive man,” she said. “I have undergone elementary torture. I lived a life of death. I didn’t exist. But I survived. And I walked out. I walked. And I didn’t look back.’

In reality, she ran — on the run from her husband while on tour in Dallas, Texas, running down a freeway and nearly getting hit by a tractor-trailer before bursting into the lobby of a Ramada Inn with a credit card and 36 cents on it. bag.

“I felt strong,” she said of that moment. It was 1976. The term “domestic violence” had only entered the lexicon three years earlier.

Tina Turner, a star by then, went into hiding in LA and filed for divorce, demanding she take only her name.

She was a young mother of two boys, one of whom heard his mother’s screams after Ike Turner poured boiling coffee on her, giving her third-degree burns.

She lived on food stamps and played corporate gigs for McDonald’s in depressing hotel ballrooms across North America. She was left with all the unpaid bills from the canceled ‘Ike & Tina’ tour dates. She got no royalties, none of the cars, or furs, or jewelry, or the house she well deserved. But she didn’t care.

“I wanted better,” she said.

Less than a decade later, Turner churned out her defining album, “Private Dancer,” in less than three weeks.

Every song was a blast, the album itself a cri de coeur: ‘Better Be Good to Me’, ‘Show Some Respect’ and of course ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’.

It was 1984, the best year ever for American pop music, especially for women: Madonna with ‘Like a Virgin’, Cyndi Lauper at number 1 with ‘Time After Time’.

But Tina stood out and above. She was the adult in the room. She had been through some shit and came out the other side, stronger and tougher. Provocative.

No one could compare to the reborn Tina, majestic in her armor: spiky blonde wigs she’d made herself, black leather miniskirts, bold red lipstick, and legs that performed athletically in high heels for days on end.

She was 44 and—among the men who wrote the reviews and edited the magazines and produced the talk shows—she considered herself old.

But women didn’t see her that way. She blazed a revolutionary path and showed us that it’s never too late to find your strength, leave a bad marriage, have a fulfilling career. To still be considered beautiful, if not more so with age and wisdom. To stop worrying about what everyone else might think.

That’s what made Tina so rare: a true American original.

“I wasn’t worried about how guys would react to my looks,” she wrote in her memoir. “I always played for the women in my audience… there were no women who sang and danced like me – women who could be sexy without making it sexual.”

In 1985, she turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer to perform in “The Color Purple.”

“Black people can do better than that,” she said. “I’ve lived in cotton fields down south. I don’t want to do anything I’ve done.’

Instead, she did “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” in which she played a dominatrix queen in a chainmail dress cut open to her thighs, leading an army of men.

“It’s the parts of the warrior woman I want,” Turner said. Naturally.

After much consideration, she decided to publish her memoir ‘I, Tina’, written with music journalist Kurt Loder, in 1986. the opposite effect.

It became a worldwide bestseller and transformed Tina once again; this time into a feminist icon.

Domestic violence was no longer a secret in America. It was no longer the shame of women but of the men who beat them.

And here was a woman of distinction who refused to be a victim.

“I’m a happy person now,” she said. “I don’t dwell on misfortune.”

What a lesson for today’s culture and for those women – I think of a disgruntled former queen – who stir our pity, who whine and moan that “not many people have asked if I’m okay” and who look to Oprah and Gayle King running over the slightest emotional paper cut.

Such women would never have been fit to sew Tina’s sequins.

In the end, Tina got her happy ending – the love of a good man, a country house in Switzerland, the adoration and thanksgiving of millions – but that didn’t mean she didn’t suffer.

Yet we never heard her complain, not once. Not after she lost her son to suicide. Not after she was diagnosed with PTSD, then cancer, then kidney failure.

She taught generations of women to never give up, never give in, to fight for the life they wanted and deserved.

As she said of recording her only No. 1 hit, “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “They weren’t used to having a strong voice on top of the music.”

That was and still is Tina Turner, for millions of women: That strong voice that stands on top.