The Reason Tina Turner Never Drank Alcohol

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Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll and reinvention, built a legendary, multi-decades career thanks to her resilience and incredible musical talent. Though she endured constant prying by the paparazzi into her private life since she first became a star in the 1960s, one lesser-known aspect of her life is that she largely avoided drinking alcohol. The reason goes back to the difficult and dangerous years she spent married to Ike Turner, a relationship that deeply shaped her career and many of her personal choices.

Turner first met Ike Turner in the late 1950s, and their first relationship was as a musical partnership called the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. After a brief relationship with Ike's bandmate, Tina and Ike got together and were married in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962. Though their band had major hits like "River Deep — Mountain High" and "Proud Mary," the relationship behind the scenes was dark and disturbing. In her 1986 memoir "I, Tina: My Life Story," Turner describes years of physical abuse, emotional manipulation, and a tense atmosphere fueled by drugs and alcohol.

That same year, she gave an excruciatingly honest interview to Rolling Stone, in which she described her survival techniques: "Psychologically, I was protecting myself, which is why I didn't do drugs and didn't drink. I had to stay in control. So I just kept searching, spiritually, for the answer." Turner certainly isn't the only celebrity who abstained from drinking — plenty of American presidents have also said "no" to alcohol.

Ike Turner struggled heavily with substance abuse, including cocaine and alcohol, so it's no wonder Tina Turner forever associated those substances with violence and losing control. After 16 years together, thanks to her newfound commitment to Buddhism, she found the strength to leave Ike, telling Rolling Stone in the same interview: "When I started practicing, something happened to me inside." Though alcohol isn't strictly taboo, Buddhism encourages mindfulness, self-control, and emotional healing — all values that affirmed her decision to avoid drinking and drugs.

Once Turner gained independence, she spent the next decade rebuilding herself and her solo career, leading to one of the most famous comebacks in musical history. Along with that comeback, she established a long and fruitful friendship with Oprah Winfrey. Coming from similar backgrounds of hardship and abuse in the American South, Winfrey and Turner bonded intensely, and many public interviews sprang out of that friendship. Later, when Turner had remarried a German music executive and moved to Switzerland, Winfrey went to visit her and had a life-changing experience with truffles. For her first breakfast as a guest, Turner offered to upgrade her scrambled eggs with the fancy ingredient, and Winfrey's mind was blown.

Turner also enjoyed regular, proletarian foods while on tour, as her private chef revealed after her death, such as cheeseburgers, watermelon, and Chinese dishes like hot and sour soup. Later in life, when reflecting on her early hardships, Turner believed her sobriety not only saved her career, but her life as well.