Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  But not long ago her accountant called her and told her, “You’ve been having a good time.” If she wanted to keep the perfumed bubble bath filled to overflowing, it was time to turn on the faucet again—go out and strut her stuff for millions of dollars while the movie was playing and the sound track was being released. Not that she feels particularly like singing onstage—doing that every night with her extraordinary, God-given talent is all wrapped up in her mind with hideous memories of beatings and indentured servitude. She’d rather act. “I think it’s more classy to be an actress than to be a rock singer. But you don’t make as much money. I ain’t no dummy. I know that.”

  So this year Tina Turner has moved from Europe and rented a furnished house in Beverly Hills, in Benedict Canyon, a Mediterranean-style house that’s all white stucco, beamed ceilings, and bleached wooden floors, with hillsides of daisies. She greets me at the door in a long tan sleeveless knit shift and brown suede Chanel ballet slippers. We go on a tour of the house, which is lovely, low-key and tasteful. The most interesting part is an enormous walk-in closet the size of a bedroom, filled with 10 pieces of Vuitton luggage, about 60 pairs of shoes, and racks and racks of designer clothes, mostly in neutral colors, which she coordinates and tends herself. Inside that closet is a smaller, cedar closet, in which a wig identical to the auburn layered short cut she has on is suspended from a wire hanger, like a spider hanging from a thread.

  The house is quiet, and filled with fragrant white roses and tuberoses. It’s a place where Tina Turner can be a lady. Refinement is something she has always aspired to. “I patterned myself from classy ladies. I take as much from them as I can, but I take it naturally, because I’m not going to be phony about it. I’m not going to walk around in Chanel suits or Gucci suits—that’s a little bit too much, because that’s not my nature. But watching my manners, caring about not being overdressed at the wrong time—it matters how I carry myself—that’s what I’m concerned about as far as being a lady. Nobody would ever think that Tina Turner is a lady. I am.”

  Even in her bleakest years, when life was defined by driving up to 600 or 700 miles a day 365 days a year—when she might be up singing with black eyes and blood “whooshing into my mouth”—she dreamed of her idol, Jackie O. “The first time I met her, I was nearly in tears,” Tina recalls. “In those days I wasn’t thinking about anybody in my circle or the clubs where I was. I was thinking that nobody was at the level of what I wanted in my life—you understand?” Even stardom, when it came, did not make much difference. “It was not my priority.” Not at all. “Music life was not attractive,” she says. “It was dirty. It was a chitlin circuit—eating on your lap. And that’s why I say I was always above it. Why I don’t know, but I knew I didn’t want it. I’d rather go and clean a white person’s house, where it is nice, than sing in dirty old places and deal with Ike and his low life.”

  Today, of course, it’s different. Tina Turner speaks of “classy ladies” acknowledging her. “I see a lot of ladies these days in places like Armani, and even those ladies come over and say, ‘You look so good.’” Does that make her feel good? “To be accepted by another class of people? I am going to say yes, absolutely.”

  But love also does have something to do with it. Erwin Bach, the “very private, conservative” 37-year-old managing director of the giant E.M.I. recording company in Germany, with whom she shares a house in Cologne, has been Tina’s boyfriend for 6 years. “He doesn’t like to be discussed, because he’s a businessman,” she says. “It took three years for us to get together—it wasn’t one of those run-and-jump-in-bed situations.” They met when he was sent by the record company to give her a jeep to drive around Germany in. She didn’t even know his name, and for two and a half years he had no idea, when their paths crossed occasionally, that she was smitten. “Oh yeah, first sight. It’s an electrical charge, really, in the body. The body responds to something,” Tina explains. “Heart boom-bama-boom. Hands are wet. But I said no.” Then again, she thought, why not?

  “Something happens to you when you’re secure as a woman. I began to feel, Well, I’m fine. If I don’t really find anybody, I’m O.K. It’s just those times when you start running the streets, and seeing couples and loving, and watching those movies where there’s a lot of love, you miss being cuddled.” It wasn’t until Bach went to Los Angeles for a visit while Tina was at her house in Sherman Oaks that she included him in a friend’s birthday party at Spago. “Afterwards everyone came to my house, and something magic started to happen. Of course, I was attracted. By then I’m sure he knew that I was. . . . I made sure I sat next to him. Because I was also analyzing him, too.” She wanted to know that he wasn’t into drugs, or heavy drinking. “After everyone left, I think we exchanged a few kisses. We started to talk, and I asked him about what his record company is like.” Then he pulled away, saying, “‘Private life is private life.’ So I didn’t really push.

  “What I did do, to actually get him, was I stayed in Switzerland. I rented a house in Gstaad.” She had a house party at Christmastime in 1987 and invited Bach and some mutual friends. That did it, although since then, because of their work, they tend to be apart more than they are together. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a real comfortable relationship. I’m not threatened. He’s not jealous.” There are no marriage plans, but she is friendly with Bach’s parents, who have retired to the country and don’t speak English. (She has struggled to learn German, to no avail.) [The couple wed in 2013.] “I believe they would prefer if Erwin had a German girl or a white woman. But when they met me, well, it’s the usual. Everybody likes Tina.”

  For good reason. There’s a warmth and utter guilelessness to Tina Turner, plus an awesomely strong constitution—though her independence and sense of security have been won at a very high price. Physically, at 53, she is in superb condition. And just because “in California everyone goes under the knife,” that doesn’t mean Tina does. She was terribly hurt when the director of the movie implied that she must have had work done on her face. “I pulled my hair back. I showed them there were no scars. I pulled my ears. I said, ‘Look, this is me.’ . . .

  “I almost wish I wasn’t wearing a wig, because then you can see there are no scars,” she tells me. “They don’t take into consideration that I’ve been singing and dancing—and that’s exercise—35 years. It’s got to do something. I have muscle. From control.” To prove her point. Tina Turner leaps off the sofa where we’ve been chatting and begins to pull her knit shift up, up, up those fabulous tawny legs, up past the knees, the thighs—“I still have little-girl legs”—up past her old-fashioned white panties to the just slightly thicker waist, up, up over the taut breasts. She’s wearing no bra. With her shift now around her shoulders, she turns to the side to show off the profile of her high, rounded bottom. At that moment Roger Davies, her Australian manager, strides into the room. “Oh, Roger!” she gasps, and quickly lets the dress fall.

  What’s really remarkable about Tina Turner’s face is how few scars it bears from the years of beatings she took. The one operation she did have to have was for a deviated septum in her nose, to open one nostril because it had been punched in so much. Ike Turner struck her on a regular basis for 16 years with everything from shoes to coat hangers to walking canes, plus he once put a burning cigarette to her lips and also threw boiling-hot coffee on her face. He cracked her ribs. He made her perform with jaundice, with tuberculosis, nine months pregnant, and three days after having a baby. Following her one suicide attempt, in 1968, when she thought she had timed her overdose of Valium to take effect after a performance so that Ike wouldn’t lose the night’s receipts, he tried to revive her, saying, “You wanna die, motherfucker, die!”

  “She was scared to death of him—everybody around him was, in his own little cult,” says Ike and Tina’s longtime road manager, Rhonda Graam, who is today Tina’s assistant. “It was almost like a hold he had on people.”

  “T
his was always just bruised,” Tina Turner tells me, pointing to her jaw. “This was always just torn apart, because it hits the teeth,” she says, showing me the inside of her lower lip. “So the mouth was always distorted, and the eyes were always black. If you look at some of the earlier pictures, my eyes were always dark. I couldn’t get them clear. I thought it was the smoke or whatever. But Ike always banged me against the head.” She is kneeling on the sofa now, clutching a pillow, leaning her face in close to mine. When she pushes up the bangs of her wig, you can see a tiny part of her fuzzy white hairline. “I said the same thing—how could I have survived? Only once I got knocked out. Only once. And that was when I got this,” she says, and runs her finger along the outer tip of her right eye, where there is a scar about a half-inch long. “Yeah, black eyes, busted lips—somehow I just ignored it, but people knew. I thought that they thought it was a car accident. I made something up in my head in terms of the public.”

  Tina rarely went to the doctor after her beatings—“just those major things.” The medical people who treated her were of no help. “In those days, believe me, a doctor asked you what happened and you say, ‘I had a fight with my husband,’ that was it. Black people fight. They didn’t care about black people.”

  Along the way there were many people who witnessed Ike’s mistreatment of Tina, but no one ever intervened. “I felt great responsibility for Tina, and I’d be there while it was going on,” admits Bob Krasnow. “I was young, and I hero-worshiped Ike in a perverted way. Had I been more liberated or more experienced, I would have spoken up. I didn’t.” Krasnow says the horror really began after Ike discovered cocaine, in the late 60s. “The whole thing took this huge turn for ugliness. Tina was the focus for a lot of this horror, but the whole world suffered. In those days there was no Oprah Winfrey, no publicity dealing with abuse, no abuse hot lines. She was out there by herself in a man’s world—she was on the road with B.B. King and Chubby Checker. She was the only woman in this world . . . a demeaning man’s world.”

  Tina Turner hates talking about being beaten, and she can’t stand the idea that people consider her a victim. In an era in which victimization is venerated and loudly proclaimed, she rejects the label and wants nobody’s sympathy. She says she wrote the book to stop talking about it. “It’s like going back into time, when you are trying to understand how prehistoric people lived. I am saying it one last time, and I hope people don’t even think about talking to me about it anymore. If they don’t understand, fine.”

  The problem is, Tina Turner herself is still struggling to come to grips with why exactly she stayed around a man who brought her so much misery. We spend hours discussing why she tolerated not only the physical and psychological torture but also the scores of other women Ike flaunted under her nose—Ikettes, groupies, employees, nannies for the four children in their house: his two and her two, one by a musician in Ike’s band before she became involved with Ike, and one they reluctantly had together.

  One minute she’s defiant on the subject: “I tried to explain it to Disney [for the movie].” Lost cause. She says they see “a deep need—a woman who was a victim to a con man. How weak! How shallow! How dare you think that was what I was? I was in control every minute there. I was there because I wanted to be, because I had promised.” The next minute she says, “O.K., so if I was a victim, fine. Maybe I was a victim for a short while. But give me credit for thinking the whole time I was there. See, I do have pride.” In fact, she’s stymied. “I’ve got to get somebody else to say, ‘Yes, Tina, I do understand, and there are no buts.’” Finally, there is a moment when Tina begins to pace, and her eyes fill with tears. “What’s reality sometimes is not exactly real. Because you keep saying, ‘What did I do?’ You get on your knees every night and you say the Lord’s Prayer, and you say, ‘Somebody must send some help to me, because I’ve never done a thing in my life to deserve this.’ And that’s when I started to chant.”

  * * *

  —

  Anna Mae Bullock never knew anything but domestic strife. She was the result of an angry, unwanted pregnancy, and by the time she arrived on November 26, 1939, her mother and father, the majordomo of a cotton plantation in Nutbush, Tennessee, were fighting constantly. One day her mother just took off, and for years never even bothered to contact her two little girls.

  “My mother was not a woman who wanted children,” Tina says. “She wasn’t a mother mother. She was a woman who bore children.” Her father tried to cope for a while, but then he too split. “I was always shifted. I was always going from one relative to another. So I didn’t have any stability.”

  “Ann” considered herself too gawky to be desirable. “I was very skinny when I was growing up. Long, long legs and nothing like what black people really like. I must say that black people in the class where I was at the time liked heavier women.” She was living part-time with a white family, doing cleaning for her board and going to high school—just singing along to the radio—when her mother appeared to take her to St. Louis, where she was working as a maid. Ann first laid eyes on Ike Turner when she was a junior in high school and went out to a club one night with her sister. She was 17, he was 25 and a badass star in East St. Louis. Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were the biggest deal around, but, Tina says, “he had a bad reputation. He was known as ‘pistol-whipping Ike Turner.’” She knew he had “an uncontrollable temper,” but he was also very exciting. After months of begging him to let her sing, she finally grabbed the mike one night during a break and blew his mind with her voice. “I wanted to get up there with those guys,” Tina remembers. “They had people on their feet. That place was rocking. I needed to get up there with that energy, and when I got there, Ike was shocked, and he never let go.”

  Ike Turner, a preacher’s son whose father was shot by whites who accused him of playing around with a white woman, had already walked from Mississippi to Tennessee and been recorded by Sam Phillips of Sun Records—the first company to record Elvis Presley—when he met Ann Bullock. Today, Ike Turner is credited with recording one of the first rock ’n’ roll songs, “Rocket ’88,” in 1951, but he never got anything for it. He was a great rhythm-and-blues musician who played the piano in the boogie-woogie style that Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis later adopted, as well as the guitar.

  At first Ike and Tina were just friends, and he confided to her that he felt small and unattractive, that in school girls would sneak out to cars with him but not be seen with him, that he was constantly being left and being ripped off of his songwriting and publishing rights. “My problem, little Ann, is people always took my songs.” Wide-eyed, Tina—who was well aware that he had women, both black and white, in every neighborhood in St. Louis, that he beat those he was closest to, and that he kept guns and bragged about having robbed a bank—promised that she would never leave him like that; she would help him make it to the top. “I was his vehicle to get him to being a star. That’s why I had no say.” she declares. “He was being a star through me. I even saw it then.” She would deeply regret her promise to stay, but she kept it for nearly two decades.

  “Ike had some kind of innate quality about him that you really loved him,” Tina says. “And if he liked you, he would take the clothes from his back, so to speak.” Tina makes it clear that “I was there because I wanted to be. Ike Turner was allowing me the chance to sing. I was a little country girl from Tennessee. This man had a big house in St. Louis, and he had a Cadillac, money, diamonds, shoes—all of the stuff that a different class of blacks would look up to.”

  Tina got pregnant by one of Ike’s musicians and had a baby boy, Craig, in 1958. The musician left before the baby was born, and Tina worked in a hospital during the day to earn more money, while continuing to sing at night. After club dates, she would sometimes spend the weekends at Ike’s house, where she had her own room. “Then he offered me more money, because one of his singers had left. That’s when the relationship started. I cann
ot tell you how wrong it felt.”

  Sex with Ike and shame, it seems, were always linked in Tina’s mind. She says the first time he touched her felt like “child abuse.” The second time, she was seeking refuge in his room because two musicians had threatened to rape her. “Something was going on—maybe the feeling he could protect me.” Ann was hooked. “That’s the kind of girl I am. If I go to bed with you, then you’re my boyfriend.” She hastens to add, however, “It wasn’t love in the beginning; it was someone else who I found to give love to.” Ike had a common-law wife named Lorraine Taylor, who was pregnant at the time, but he took care of Ann too. “He was giving me money for singing. He went out and bought me clothes. I was having a dental problem, and my mother didn’t have money at that point for dental work. He corrected all that. And then I was a little star around him. I was loyal to this man. He was good to me.” But she was never very attracted to him physically.

  “I really didn’t like Ike’s body. I don’t give a damn how big his member was,” Tina says blithely. “He really was blessed, I must say, in that area. . . . Was he a good lover? What can you do except go up and down, or sideways, or whatever it is that you do with sex?”

  Well, you can get pregnant, and a year later Tina was pregnant by Ike. Lorraine—who had previously threatened Tina with a gun, then shot herself instead—was still around. By then Ike and Tina’s first hit, “A Fool in Love,” was climbing the R&B charts. Along the way “Ike did pull a few strings that would make it difficult for me to leave.” He changed Ann’s name to Tina—she says it reminded him of Sheena the jungle queen from the TV series—without consulting her, and she hated it. Worse, out on the road everyone thought the two were married. From the beginning, she never really felt good about him or herself, and looking back today, she can enumerate six or seven reasons why she eventually knew in her heart that one day she would have to leave him.