One night she was crushed to hear him on the radio with an Ikette he was passing off as Tina. Then she realized he wasn’t going to give her her own money. At the same time, she began to realize her importance: “I was the singer.” Her sullen unhappiness inevitably brought a beating. She was stung once again when their baby, Ronnie, was born in 1960 and Ike didn’t take her to the hospital—he slept through it. That was just the beginning. When Ronnie was about two, Ike and Tina moved to California. Lorraine had left Ike by then, and without warning she sent the two sons she had had by Ike to live with their father. Tina was suddenly mother to four boys under the age of six. (Until Lorraine’s boys were in their teens, they didn’t know Tina was not their real mother.)
Tina was not around very much, either. Ike was obsessive about work and had Tina and the band and various Ikettes out on the road year-round. It was a rough, cash business; Ike didn’t believe in banks. He had a safe in the house, a safe in the car, and lots of guns to protect him. When Tina was allowed to go shopping, he would peel bills off a big wad.
They put out dozens of records, and some of their songs became hits, but they never made the top 10, only the rhythm-and-blues or soul charts. Nevertheless, Ike and Tina were becoming hip, cult favorites, regularly booked into the Fillmore West. Within five years Ike himself was able to book them where few black acts like theirs had been before, including Vegas. At the International Hotel, they were in the lounge, and Elvis Presley was the headliner.
They had gotten married in 1962, in Tijuana, primarily, Tina says, because another woman who had been married to Ike before Lorraine was after him for alimony. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been married,” Tina says. “This woman was asking for money, so Ike felt he’d better marry me so she couldn’t get property.” According to Tina, Ike paid the woman $15,000 to go away. For about five years, Tina says, “I was caught in his web.” But about 1965, when she came home from touring alone to find that Ike had moved another woman into the house with the children, she felt defeated once again, and began to entertain thoughts of getting away.
“I had gotten to the stage where I started to think that I didn’t want to be Ike’s wife, and I didn’t care about the money,” Tina says. “I was thinking the whole time, how could I fulfill my promise and get out of it all right?” In 1966, Phil Spector paid Ike $20,000 to let Tina record—but mostly to stay away so that he could work with Tina alone on “River Deep, Mountain High.” Tina was thrilled to be able to really sing. “Nobody wanted me to sing in those days. They wanted me to do that screaming and yelling.” Although the song is considered a rock ’n’ roll milestone, and became a huge hit in England, it bombed here. Yet, however much Tina may have wanted to go off on her own, she didn’t, for fear that “Ike would kill” anyone who tried to wrest her away.
She was trapped. “I had to get out of there because whatever I was doing didn’t matter anymore. I had my house, I had my children, I had my own car. I had stuff. I shopped. But I had this horrible relationship I was hiding behind.”
Then she got to the stage of not caring. “I wanted him to find a woman.” She told him she wanted a business relationship. “He would really fight harder then, because he thought he was losing control.” “He was afraid she’d leave him,” says Rhonda Graam. “He would keep the fear going. He didn’t want her to talk to anyone else—to put thoughts in her mind.” Nevertheless, he kept acting like a husband, Tina says, and right up until the day she left him he expected her to massage him, give him manicures and pedicures, and have food ready for him at all times. Sometimes, after beating her, he’d force her to have sex with him. “Sex had become rape as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want Ike near me. It was more than not being turned on and having to do it without being turned on. It was the fact he was sleeping around. That was not my style.”
Nor were drugs. “I could not visualize putting something up my nose.” But Ike was becoming a heavy cocaine user, spending thousands of dollars a week on the drug. He also began to drink. The drugs only made Ike more flagrant with women, even in front of the children. “There was all kinds of sex going on at the house, and I had caught him on the sofas, and women on their knees. I said to him, ‘You can’t do this in this house.’ I really felt this house was mine. Ike was at a stage of showing off. He built a recording studio not far from the house. He wanted to let people know he had an apartment in the back of the recording studio, that he had recording-studio living quarters and the building next door as an agency, and he wanted to come up and show off the house, which was decorated like a bordello, with a coffee table in the shape of a guitar.”
Tina attempted to leave once, but Ike caught up with her at a terminal where her bus stopped. Her suicide attempt had also failed. But the following year, 1969, Ike and Tina had toured in the U.S. once again with the now humongous Rolling Stones. What really kept Tina going, she says, was her escape into believing what psychics told her: “One day you will be among the biggest of stars and you will live across the water.” In the interim, she chanted more and more every day: Nammyo-ho-renge-kyo.
In California in the late 60s and early 70s, this particular Buddhist chant, the mantra of a controversial Buddhist sect, Soka Gakkai, was touted as a way to achieve your goals as well as inner harmony. A woman Ike brought to the house one night shortly after Tina’s suicide attempt turned her on to the chant. (Tina actually made friends with a number of Ike’s women. “All of them weren’t bitches or sluts.”) She remembers, “I never let go of the Lord’s Prayer until I was sure of those words.”
Gradually Tina became convinced that chanting was her path to salvation. She was thrilled in 1974 to accept her first movie role, the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s Tommy (she did not know at the time that acid was a reference to LSD), and desperately hoped for more roles in films, but they did not come. She played Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, with Mel Gibson, but turned down a leading role in The Color Purple, saying it was too much like real life to her. Today she still says, “I feel there is a calling inside me to act.”
She also appeared on a television special with Ann-Margret and saw a different way of working. “I didn’t want to sing anymore. I had been tired of this singing and this whole image of how I looked. I hated how I looked,” Tina says of her raunchy “Proud Mary” days onstage, when she leaned back and led with her crotch and legs, and her wigs went flying. “The hair and the makeup and the sweat—I hated all of it.”
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In 1976 the day finally came when Tina Turner felt strong enough to get away. She realized Ike was never going to give her their house, which she had always wanted and felt she deserved. The children were graduating or getting ready to graduate from high school. Ike, meanwhile, was involved with “the nonsinging Ikette,” Ann Thomas, who had had his baby and was traveling everywhere with Ike and Tina. By then Ike was doing so much coke that he would stay up for three or four days at a time, and his preferred mode of travel was to sleep on airplanes with his head on Ann’s lap and his feet on Tina’s.
In early July they flew to Fort Worth to perform a date at the Dallas Hilton. Tina was wearing a white Yves Saint Laurent suit on the plane, so she refused some chocolate Ike handed her. He kicked her, and later battered her again and again with his hand and shoe in the back of the limo. This time something clicked. She understood. “I knew I would never be given my freedom. I would have to take it.”
She astounded Ike by fighting back. “When someone is really trying to kill you, it hurts. But this time it didn’t hurt. I was angry too.” Tina remembers “digging, or just hitting and kicking. By the time we got to the hotel, I had a big swollen eye. My mouth was bleeding.” She refused, however, to cover the blood, as he directed her to. Ike was in sad shape himself. He had been up for days, strung out on coke, and when they got to the room she massaged his head, as she often did, until he passed out. Tina waited for his breathing to tell
her he was asleep. “My heart was in my ears.”
She remembers thinking, Now is the time. You are headed toward dealing with what you’re going to have to deal with, with this man. “I ran down the hall, and I was afraid I was going to run into his people—his band and his bodyguards. So I went through an exit and down the steps. I was so afraid . . . because everybody was aware that Ike and Tina were supposed to be on in half an hour. Then I turned and went through a kitchen, just running. I just dashed through and went through the back door, and I remember throwing myself up onto trash cans just to rest, just to feel I had gotten away. Then I composed myself and thought, Now what? I started to run fast, just run.”
She had 36 cents and a Mobil credit card.
“I needed to call somebody with money. My family didn’t have the money for a ticket. That’s the whole thing always. I didn’t know anybody with money. They were all Ike’s people.”
Tina’s life away from Ike began with the manager of the Ramada Inn across the freeway from the Hilton giving her a suite for the night. Ike did not take her leaving passively. For two years, people who helped her were threatened, and their houses and cars were set afire or shot into. Tina was unwavering, however: she even lived on food stamps for a while. In 1978 their divorce was final. Tina took nothing, because she didn’t want to be tied to Ike in any way. What she did come away with was an astounding debt, since she had walked out on a performance. In addition, Ike always booked them solidly for months in advance, so Tina was held liable for the missed dates.
Michael Stewart, the former head of United Artists, one of the many record companies they had been under contract to, lent Tina money to get an act together, and began booking her in cabarets and hotels, where she performed in feathers and chiffon in a disco-inferno-type act. She also did guest shots on Hollywood Squares to pay the rent. “Tina never complained,” Stewart said, adding that he knew she would be O.K., because at the height of her in-the-depths period he took her to a movie premiere “and you would have thought I was with Madonna today. The paparazzi swarmed. She was a celebrity.”
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Tina was probably half a million in debt when I took her on,” says Roger Davies, her current manager. She worked it off by appearing in such places as Poland, Yugoslavia, Bahrain, and Singapore. Davies tried hard to get her a record contract, but Ike’s reputation cast a pall. “He told me, ‘I can’t get you a record now, Tina. Whenever I say Tina, they say Ike.’” In 1981 the Rolling Stones came to her rescue, and she opened a few dates of their American tour. After a magic night at the Ritz club in New York in 1983, with Keith Richards, David Bowie, and Rod Stewart in the audience, her record company, Capitol, finally agreed to proceed with plans to have her cut an album. At the end of that year, she hit it big in England with the single “Let’s Stay Together.” Then she made Private Dancer. The rosy future the psychics had predicted was coming true. Meanwhile, after 11 arrests, Ike Turner finally ended up in jail in 1990, and served 18 months for cocaine possession and transportation, among other charges.
“I never had no bad thoughts about women. I think about women just like I think about my mother. And I wouldn’t do no more to no woman than I would want them to do to my mother.” Ike Turner is giving a bravura performance on the phone from his new home base, Carlsbad, California, outside San Diego, where he is putting together an all new Ike Turner Revue with Ikettes he has scouted in local karaoke bars. He’s 61 now, “overwhelmed about how creative I’ve been lately,” and Tina is a sore subject. “Did I hit her all the time? That’s the biggest lie ever been told by her or by anybody that say that. I didn’t hit her any more than you been hit by your guy. . . . I’m not going to sit here and lie and say because I was doing dope I slapped Tina. Because it’s not the reason I slapped her. If the same thing occurred again, I’d do the same thing. It’s nothing that I’m proud of, because I just didn’t stop and think.”
Ike has been out of jail— “It was the best thing that ever happened to me”—since September 1991. According to one friend, he tried unsuccessfully to marry four different women in jail so that he could have contact visits. Today he’s off drugs, lives with a 30-year-old white singer, and says he’s getting his own TV movie together to tell his story. “Whatever happened with Ike and Tina—if we fought every day—it’s just as much her fault as it was mine. Because she stayed there and took it for whatever reason she was taking it,” he asserts. “Why would she stay there for 18 years? You know, I feel like I’ve been used. . . . Didn’t nobody else grab her and put her where I put her at.” Ike also denies that he hurt Tina as much as she and others say. “You know, if somebody throw coffee on your face and your skin rolls down your face, it should be some burns there, shouldn’t it? Well, you look at her face real good. When you talk to her, say, ‘What kind of surgery did you have on your face?’ . . . I know damn well she didn’t,” Ike maintains. “She ain’t did shit to her skin.”
All those other women, he says, were not entirely his fault, either. Ever since he was “a little nappy-headed boy” in Mississippi working in a hotel, “I would see white guys pull up with their little white girls in their father’s car with the mink stole, and I’d say, ‘Oh, boy, one of these days I’m going to be like that.’” That he succeeded with women beyond his wildest imaginings is Tina’s fault too, he says. “I blame Tina as much for that as I blame myself. Because she always acted like it didn’t bother her for me being with women, unless she seen me with this woman every night, or something like this. . . . And this is what be wrong with her. She’d be pissed off about some girl or something, and she would lie and say she wasn’t. . . . We had fights, but we was together 24 hours a day, and so, other words, she feels more like an employee than a wife, because I would tell her what words to say, what dress to wear, how to act onstage, what songs to sing. You know, it all came from me. . . . There is no Tina in reality. It’s just like the story that she’s written. The movie’s not about her. The movie’s about me!”
Ike, in fact, showed up on the movie set one day in a chauffeured white Lincoln and passed out autographed pictures of himself. He didn’t get out of the car except to show Laurence Fishburne, who plays him, how he walks. Such is his fearsome reputation that the producers would not allow Angela Bassett, who plays Tina, near him. They had security guards escort her to her trailer. “By the time I figured out how to sneak out, he’d gone,” Bassett says. Fishburne did ask Ike what he called Tina. He said, “I called her Ann.”
Ike tells me, “Tina was my buddy. I never touched her as a woman. She was just my buddy. I would send her to go get this girl for me, go get that girl for me. And if I bought my old lady a mink coat, I would buy her one. And that’s the way we were—just hope-to-die buddies. And that’s why it was never no contract between us. Because I felt we had a bond, you understand, and I never did think that nobody, white or black, could come up and brainwash her. Like, right now I feel she’s totally brainwashed.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask him.
“Because she don’t want to be black. She don’t think she’s black. She don’t even talk black. She don’t act black. Money don’t make you. You make money. Do you understand what I’m saying? And I hate stars.”
Ike Turner, who has a white manager and a white publicist, and who is accused by his old cronies, such as record producer Richard Griffin, of thinking “black people don’t have any brains,” has big plans for himself, including guest shots on Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall. The last time he talked to Tina, sometime in the 80s, he suggested doing a TV special. “Ike and Tina, Sonny and Cher—the broken pieces put together with Krazy Glue.” Now he’s thinking Vegas and beyond. “When I was with Tina, we would open up for Bill Cosby, like, in Vegas. I’m going to start by doing stuff like that. Going on tour with Elton John. Going on tour with the Stones. Going on tour with people like that.” No matter that he hasn’t talked to any of those people yet. Ike likes Ike.
“I got a lot of friends out there,” he says. “I have no shame; it took it all to make me what I am today, and I love me today.”
Tina’s two sons and Ike’s two by Lorraine Taylor, whom Tina reared, are now all in their 30s. The chaos they grew up in has taken its toll. They are estranged from their father, and two, Michael and Ronnie, have seriously battled drugs. Ike’s eldest son, Ike junior, is a musician in St. Louis. According to Tina, because of Ike junior’s legal problems, “he can’t come back to California.” Ike’s son Michael was recently living in a downtown Los Angeles shelter. Craig is learning club management. He wants his mother to open a jazz club for him. Ronnie, her son with Ike, is a bass player. One night after he was picked up for unpaid traffic tickets, he was stunned to land in the same Los Angeles jail cell as his father. “That made an impression,” says Tina. “He never went to jail again.” Ronnie auditioned for the role of Ike in the movie and also played bass in the movie’s band. Tina has bought houses for both her sons. “I used to tell them I wasn’t the Valley Bank. Now I tell them I’m not the European Bank,” she says. “They call me Mother. I know they’re trying.”
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It’s a glorious L.A. Sunday afternoon in March. Tina Turner is bouncing in and out of a chair in an upstairs den flooded with light, giving away her beauty secrets. “I do something about my life besides eating and exercising and whatever. I contact my soul. I must stay in touch with my soul. That’s my connection to the universe.”
Vanity Fair's Women on Women Page 29