* * *
—
My mom always seemed to have a relationship going on, but she was never a chameleon, never an extension of her boyfriends—she never compromised herself,” says Chynna Phillips Baldwin, sitting at a café near the Westchester County, New York, home where she lived with Billy (whom she’s been with for 16 years), their daughters Brooke (known as Chay Chay) and Jameson, and their son, Vance, before they moved to California for his role in TV’s Dirty Sexy Money. “Growing up, I always saw her as Wonder Woman, as a tough cookie. I had respect for her—and fear! She was very passionate and emotional, and I didn’t want to rock the boat.” Chynna’s early childhood was “hard,” she admits with a sigh, “because I didn’t have strong, positive connections with either of my parents.” Her absent father (whom she idolized) was largely on drugs and alcohol, and, though mother and daughter loved each other, Chynna feels she didn’t get all the one-on-one attention she wanted. As a result, she says, “being a mom is challenging for me—my perspective is warped. How much time is enough to spend with your kids? How much is too little? Do they feel intimate with me, and I with them? Are my feelings real?”
In the 90s, Chynna was the most glamorous member of Wilson Phillips, the second-generation-rock-royalty group (Brian Wilson’s daughters Carnie and Wendy were her group-mates); they had four hit songs. But she left the family business for a sensibility foreign to her parents: she’s a fervent born-again Christian. She was baptized in brother-in-law Stephen Baldwin’s bathtub, and she’d love to share “the power of God” with Michelle. “When Mom says she’s coming to town, I say, ‘I’m filling the bathtub.’ We have a good giggle over that.”
Michelle was with Bob Burch for two years. Then, 26 years ago, yearning for another child, she got her beau of six months, the handsome, easygoing actor Grainger Hines, “absolutely smashed on martinis,” she recalls, and proposed a deal: if he fathered a baby for her, she would take full responsibility for it. “The minute you tell a guy that he doesn’t have to parent, he becomes the best parent,” she says of the father of her son, Austin Hines, who is 25. “Grainger has been the greatest!” Michelle purchased her house in Cheviot Hills, and in 1986 she was cast as Nicolette Sheridan’s mother on Knot’s Landing, a role that put her back in the public eye through the beginning of the 90s. Sheridan says, of their “deep and caring” friendship, “I admire Michelle’s zest for life and fearless nature, and I feel blessed to be part of her intoxicating world.” During these years Michelle was involved in a serious relationship with singer-songwriter Geoff Tozer.
After the relationship ended, Michelle accepted, in 1999, a dinner date with Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Steven Zax. “The little hippie chick and the surgeon don’t seem like a real match, but we’ve been able to bring each other closer to the center,” she says. They spend weekends together, and they travel frequently. Lou, Ann, and Genevieve say it’s her best relationship ever. (“She’ll want to slug me for [saying] this,” says Chynna, “but it’s her first truly mature, grown-up relationship.”)
* * *
—
In the end, the romantic statistics of Michelle Phillips’s last 30 years don’t tell the story of what she has become. Something else does: “Michelle grew into her name,” says Owen Elliot-Kugell. “She became everyone’s Mama Michelle.” As the others flamed out, her character expanded to fill the Mama/Papa role—the parent to the whole burgeoning brood.
First step: rescuing John and Genevieve’s son, Tamerlane. In March 1977, Chynna came home from a visit to her father and Genevieve (who lived on the East Coast) with some pretty heavy memories. “It was your typical heroin scene,” Chynna recalls. “A lot of needles and a lot of blood and very sick people. Genevieve asked me to please not tell my mom what I just saw.” Chynna recalls asking Michelle, “Mommy, can drugs kill people?” Alarmed, Michelle flew out to see John and Genevieve. “I told them, ‘I’d like to take care of Tam.’ They put up a little bit of a fight, but not too great of a one.” (Genevieve concedes that what Chynna says she saw “was right,” and “I knew it would be better for Tam because John was pretty bad off.” However, in her mother’s heart, she says, she believes “Michelle stole Tam.”) A court granted legal custody to John’s sister, Rosie, with the understanding that Tam would remain in Michelle’s care. Tam moved in with Michelle, Chynna, and Bob Burch, and for two years he thrived. “I was in therapy with a really nice therapist in Beverly Hills,” says Tamerlane, a former mortgage broker and now a musician (his upcoming pop-rock album has three tracks produced by Sean Lennon). “His teachers were telling me how great he was doing,” Michelle says. She loved the little boy, and Chynna was happily bonded with her half-brother.
But, for Genevieve, losing her child was painful. “I spent hours and days talking John into kidnapping Tam,” she says. “I said, ‘John, if we do, people will think you have normal feelings.’” Genevieve (who was then pregnant with Bijou) flew out to L.A. and, on a ruse to take Tam to Disneyland, spirited him to Las Vegas, where they met up with John. Then they all drove across the country. Child-stealing charges were filed against John and Genevieve in California, and an anguished Michelle flew east with Rosie to try to reclaim Tam. In the Connecticut courtroom, the tension between Michelle and Tam’s parents “was thick enough to cut,” Michelle recalls. “John and Genevieve convinced the judge that I was just a disgruntled ex-wife.” They won custody of Tam. “I left feeling Tam was in a lot of danger. I cried on the plane the whole way home, and, partly because Bob wanted me to get over it and I couldn’t get over it, we divorced soon after.” (Genevieve says a psychiatrist told her that “kidnapping Tam was the best thing we could do, because otherwise he would have felt that we didn’t love him.”) About eight months after John regained custody, he was arrested by federal agents for narcotics trafficking. (He disclosed in his book that he had had an illegal deal with a pharmacy to buy drugs without prescriptions.) Using the promise of anti-drug media outreach, he bargained his maximum-15-year sentence down to a mere 30 days.
Michelle’s next project was less fraught. At some point in the mid-80s, when Owen Elliot was in her late teens, she called Michelle and said, “You have to help me find my father!” Michelle spent a year running down leads through musician friends. Once she had pried loose the name Cass had kept so close to her vest, she placed an ad in a musicians’ publication, urging the man to call an “accountant” (hers), implying a royalty windfall. Like clockwork, Cass’s long-ago secret lover took the bait. When Michelle phoned him, she recalls, “he wasn’t all that shocked,” and, the next day, Owen says, “Michelle gave me a plane ticket and said, ‘Go meet him.’” (Owen and Michelle will not reveal the name. Owen says only, “I had envisioned this Norwegian prince.”) The meeting “answered a lot of questions,” says Owen, who is now married to record producer Jack Kugell and has two children. Since then, she says, “there have been times when I’ve been devastatingly upset about things in my personal life, and I’ve really leaned on Michelle. She’s been a mother to me in a way that would make my mom definitely chuckle.”
In the late 80s, Michelle took in a boy, Aron Wilson, and became his foster mother, thereby in effect giving Austin a “twin.” From that day on, Michelle regarded both boys as her sons. There were hairy times (“When the cops come to your door and say, ‘Hello, again, Mrs. Phillips’—after the boys skateboarded after 10 p.m. and put a firecracker in the neighbor’s mailbox—you think you’re all going to jail”), but mostly good ones. And there were many baseball, soccer, and football games that Michelle—who would rather have been shopping or lunching—rooted them through. Michelle adopted Aron when he was 24. Today he is a budding chef, and Austin is an actor and a college student.
* * *
—
Why do you do this every weekend?” Steven Zax asked Michelle as she made her sandwiches to take to the homeless. Her answer was immediate: “To be a good citizen.” The man who had instilled tha
t motto in her, her father, died 11 years ago. He was true to form until the end. “He was a dog,” Michelle says, laughing. “I’d say, ‘Dad, why are you going to A.A. meetings to pick up women? You drink!’ He’d say, ‘So?’”
Nevertheless, Gil had given her a great foundation—as, in a different way, had another man. And so, on the night of March 17, 2001, she entered the intensive-care unit of U.C.L.A. Medical Center. “There was a blue light on, and he was lying there with his eyes closed, breathing very heavily. I knew he was dying.” But he couldn’t die yet, not until he saw her again. So, just as he had roused her from sleep on that long-ago night in the Hotel Earl, she says, “I woke him up. I looked him in the eye and I said, ‘You made me the woman I am today.’” It was not untrue, but if she gave him a little too much credit—well, she let that be her gift.
And John Phillips smiled and closed his eyes and the next day drifted off to his final California dream.
TINA TURNER
THE LADY HAS LEGS!
By Maureen Orth | May 1993
The Rainforest Foundation benefit at Carnegie Hall on March 2 [1993] started out to be one of those preachy-hip, politically correct, dead-in-the-tundra New York evenings. The stage was littered with stars—Dustin Hoffman, James Taylor, Sting, George Michael, Ian McKellen, Herb Alpert, Canadian rocker Bryan Adams—but even though Tom Jones woke up the audience by belting out “It’s Not Unusual” Vegas-style, the white boys were mostly in the tepid zone.
Then came the hurricane. “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tina Turner.” Yes. The audience immediately jolted forward in their seats. The queen mother of rock ’n’ roll, 53 years old, with the body of a vamp, came running out in a tight black leather cat suit with tails and high platform boots. Her hair (piece) was a flying wedge of layered copper, and her powerful voice pierced the darkness like lightning: “When I was a little girl . . . I had a rag doll.” Tina Turner was singing her classic “River Deep, Mountain High,” which the legendary Phil Spector had produced for her in 1966. Those trademark legs swathed in leather, the sinuous moves, those little Pony steps that allowed her to coochie-coochie up to the guys—none of her bountiful energy had dissipated in the 27 years since she first sang it. There wasn’t the slightest hint of the horror she had lived with for so long as a battered wife, or of the dark memories that still cling to her.
James Taylor leapt to his feet and started shaking a tambourine, singing backup. Dustin Hoffman and Ian McKellen joined him. Pretty soon Tina Turner had relegated all the superstar males to an adoring chorus, like cross-dressed ghosts of the Ikettes, part of the R&B roots of rock ’n’ roll in the old Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Talk about stealing the show. Afterward, Dustin Hoffman told her, “You’ve added 10 years to my life.”
“The first time you see Tina is mind-boggling,” Keith Richards tells me. Adds Mick Jagger, “She’s so gutsy and dynamic.” Tina Turner has always been an icon-mascot to the British supergroups, and even today she is revered more in Europe, where she makes her home with her younger German boyfriend, than in the States. The Rolling Stones, particularly, were pivotal in her career. Tina Turner got her first wide exposure to young white audiences in the 60s, when she and her former husband, Ike Turner, toured with the baby Rolling Stones in England. “Tina was great-looking, plus she could move and she had that voice. Usually you can have a voice but you can’t move, or you’re good-looking but you can’t sing. How can anybody have that much?” marvels Richards. “With Tina, there it all is—it’s all there.”
Richards remembers that watching Ike and Tina, whom the Stones had idolized from records, was “kind of like school for us.” At that point, he says, “we were one little blues band,” playing bars and tiny clubs with no room to move. “Mick’s stage center was a 12-inch square.” Suddenly they were surrounded by “all these beautiful black chicks in sequins running around backstage, and these fantastic musicians to learn from.” Every night, he says, “we’d do our little bit and then we’d watch Ike and Tina and the Ikettes, and we said, ‘Wow, this is show business!’ They made us realize you got to do more than just stand there and play the guitar.” He adds, “To me it was all just Tina Turner. Ike didn’t see it that way. To him he was a Svengali, who wrote the songs; he was the producer and Tina was his ticket. He saw himself as Phil Spector, as the driving force behind the star. I saw him as the driving force behind a lot of things. It was the first time I saw a guy pistol-whip another guy in his own band.” Keith Richards concludes, “Ike acted like a goddamned pimp.”
* * *
—
To the outside world, however, Tina Turner appeared oblivious. “That was when I was just being led blindly, because I didn’t care about anything,” she says a few days after the Rainforest Foundation benefit. “I was just getting through this period.” She was so under the control of Ike and immersed in his reality that she didn’t have any idea who Mick Jagger was. “I saw this very white-faced boy in the corner with big lips, and I had never seen a white person with lips that big anyway, so I didn’t know who he was or what race he was.”
The one thing she did realize was that “he liked black women, liked to play around with them.” Then she found out that he was the songwriter. “Of course, my hero. He says, ‘I like how you girls dance. How are you doing that stuff?’ We would all get up with Mick, and we would do things, and we would laugh, because his rhythm and his hips and how he was doing it was totally off. It wasn’t teaching him; it wasn’t dance classes. This is what we did backstage—we played around, because onstage he was just doing the tambourine. He wasn’t even dancing. This was 1966. Afterwards Mick came to America doing the Pony. And all of us thought we had done it backstage. Well, I didn’t tell people I taught him. I said we would just sit around during intermissions and have a good time.”
“Later on, when Tina finally got real big, and she still looked incredible, guys would talk about her image sexually, just as a woman,” Keith Richards says. “But the Tina I knew was different. Tina was somebody to take care of you. Out on the road somebody would always be sick, and she would say, ‘Take care of yourself, you have a cold, here’s the VapoRub, keep your scarf on, do your coat up.’ I saw her like a favorite aunt or a fairy godmother. I always had other visions of Tina—of a mother-earth thing.”
“I am a fun person, and when I’m onstage I act,” Turner says. “I like to tease to a point. I’m not teasing men. I am playing with the girls—you know, when all the girls get together and everybody gets up and they get a little cigarette and champagne and they do little things. That’s the same thing I do onstage when I’m performing for the girls and then for the guys.” She is insulted that people would ever assume otherwise. “I am not a vulgar, sexy person onstage. I think that’s how people perceive me, because I have a lot of vulgar videos where they want me to do the garter-belt thing.”
It’s more than that. Who can ever forget Tina Turner doing dirty things to a microphone when she sang “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” a song she now hates, or the immortal words in her version of “Proud Mary”: “We nevah, evah, do nothin’ nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough.”
“She has this sensual persona, but her private mores are so old-fashioned, so traditional,” says Bob Krasnow, the Elektra Entertainment chairman. “Tina could be your girlfriend, your sister, your best friend—she can fulfill all these emotional niches. Yet when she gets up onstage, she has the power to stimulate you and bring words to life in a way that’s uniquely her own.” Krasnow has never forgotten the time in the 60s when he first walked into the Turners’ house in Baldwin Hills, in Los Angeles, expecting Tina to be a hot number. “She was in the kitchen with a wet rag, down on her hands and knees wiping the floor, wearing a do-rag on her head.”
Today, Tina Turner is nervously steeling herself for the Hollywood portrayal of her rise and fall and triumphant comeback. In June, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures is releasing the film based on her 1986 b
estselling autobiography, I, Tina, written with Kurt Loder. The movie, which Tina worries takes too much liberty with actual facts, is titled What’s Love Got to Do with It? and stars Angela Bassett (the wife of Malcolm in Malcolm X) as Tina, and Laurence Fishburne (of Boyz N the Hood) as Ike. The film’s sound track—Tina’s old standards plus three new songs—will come out this month, just in time for her grand concert tour of America and Canada this summer, the first time she’s toured the U.S. in six years.
Tina Turner is clearly testing the waters. “I don’t believe that I can go and stand and sing for the people,” she tells me. “I can’t stand the idea of just standing there like Barbra Streisand or Ella Fitzgerald or Diana Ross. I have never been that kind of performer. I have been in rock ’n’ roll all my life. You can’t be a rock ’n’ roll old woman. You can be a rock ’n’ roll old man.” “If there’s anybody around who can grow up and still be a rock ’n’ roll woman, it’s got to be Tina,” says Keith Richards, now 49 himself. “She’s in the same position I and the Stones are. It’s out there to find out. The area’s open.”
* * *
—
Tina Turner likes to spend money—oodles of it. She doesn’t look at price tags. She often buys duplicates of her designer clothes in case the cleaners wreck something. She collects antique furniture, owns a house in Germany and is renovating another in the South of France, drinks Cristal champagne, drives a Mercedes jeep, and indulges herself with massages, facials, psychic readings, and holistic cures. She’s sold 30 million records since 1984, when “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” soared to No. 1 on the pop charts and her Private Dancer album spawned three additional hit singles and swept the Grammys. Although she hasn’t had a hit record in the U.S. in seven years, on her last European tour, in 1990, she filled stadiums and played to 3.5 million people, outdrawing both Madonna and the Rolling Stones. So she’s hardly hurting.
Vanity Fair's Women on Women Page 27