A soulful singer that chants Buddhist mantras,
a performer so legendary she's in the Hall of Fame twice over… and she's still
waiting on Mick Jagger to say thank you. Here's the untold truth of Tina Turner.
Tina Turner has been a superstar for so long that it's easy to forget that Tina isn't the
name she was given at birth. She was born Anna Mae Bullock — and was identified as
"Little Ann" on the first single she ever recorded, the 1958 novelty number, "Boxtop."
According to Mark Bego's 2003 biography, "Tina Turner:
Break Every Rule," the singer explained how she came to receive her now-famous name, saying -
"[Ike] had a thing for the women in movies who swing on the vines — the jungle queens."
Since the pseudonym rhymed with one of his favorites, "Sheena: Queen of the Jungle," Ike
dubbed her "Tina." From then on, the couple performed together as Ike and Tina Turner.
When Tina finally divorced Ike, Bego wrote in his book that she didn't seek any money
or property, but instead asked for only, quote, "her freedom and her stage name of 'Tina Turner.'"
Tina Turner's marriage to musical partner Ike Turner was notoriously turbulent.
In her 2018 memoir, "My Love Story," she detailed her allegations of abuse throughout her marriage,
including the time he struck her so hard that he ended up breaking her
jaw. In an excerpt published in the Daily Mail,
Tina wrote about hitting a particularly low point in 1968. At that time, she admitted -
"I convinced myself that death was my only way out. […] One night, just before a gig,
I simply couldn't take any more and swallowed 50 sleeping pills."
Fortunately, she had miscalculated the length of time it would take for the pills to take
effect and was rushed to the hospital after they kicked in while she was putting on her makeup.
"I did not make it to the stage. I remember
being in the car and him sticking his finger down my throat, trying to make me throw up."
As a result, her stomach was pumped and she survived,
coming away from the experience knowing one thing to be true:
"I knew my suicide attempt hadn't been a classic cry for help:
I'd chosen death. Yet I never tried killing myself again,
because I came out of the darkness believing that I was meant to survive. I was here for a reason."
It wasn't long after that Tina Turner discovered Buddhism.
As she revealed in a 2020 interview with USA Today -
"The more I learned about it, the more I found the philosophy helpful,
and it made perfect sense to me. Buddhism literally saved my life,
and I've been happily chanting every day for about 50 years now."
"Buddhism was a way out. And it changed your attitude towards the situation that you're in."
Speaking with Buddhist publication World Tribune in 2018,
Turner explained how chanting had bettered her life, adding -
"I've left a good body of work as a rock singer,
and I've made it very clear that it was because of my spiritual practice."
However, while she was still chanting daily at this point,
she admitted that she'd reduced her chanting time substantially.
Tina Turner was still married to Ike Turner when she put out her first solo album in 1974.
As Rolling Stone recalled, that first solo effort was a stone-cold flop that failed to
chart. In retrospect, that failure is perhaps understandable, given that the raucous soul
singer baffled her fans by putting out an album of country songs, "Tina Turns the Country On!".
Her second solo album appeared in 1975, and was also produced during the Turners' marriage. This
album was titled "Acid Queen," taken from the character Tina Turner portrayed in the movie
"Tommy," based on The Who's iconic double-album rock opera. She took another departure with
this album, putting her distinctive spin on cover versions of classic rock tunes
by the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. This time around, reviews were mixed,
but "Acid Queen," unlike its predecessor, did make it onto the charts, but by no means was it a hit.
Mick Jagger has spent decades as one of rock music's most electrifying frontmen,
renowned for his onstage dancing. In a 2012 interview Jagger gave to Rolling Stone,
he credited his mother with teaching him how to dance, while also admitting he drew
inspiration from such musical forebears as James Brown and Little Richard.
Tina Turner, however, has a different recollection. The way she remembers,
it was she who taught him how to move like Jagger, jokingly telling the Daily Mail in 2017 -
"Mick wanted to dance — and I was a dancer — but he never gave me the credit!
He said his mother taught him how to dance. But we worked with him in the dressing room,
me and the girls, and we taught him how to Pony."
Turner also insisted her relationship with the legendary lothario was never romantic,
describing both Jagger and the late David Bowie as brothers and adding -
"We never slept together; and they never came on to me,
because I think they saw me as a role model in some kind of way."
Aside from a cameo in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band it was a full decade after Tommy before
Tina Turner would return to the big screen, playing the ruthless Aunty Entity opposite Mel
Gibson in 1985's "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome." As NME recalled, not only did Turner have to shave
her head in order to accommodate her character's wig, but her costume weighed 70 pounds.
Meanwhile, she confirmed in a 1997 interview with "Larry King Live" that she turned down
the role that ultimately went to Whoopi Goldberg in 1985's "The Color Purple."
Turner understandably passed, she explained, because the character's abuse by her husband
lined up too closely with her personal life, adding -
"I had just left such a life. It was too soon to be reminded. […] I was very excited and very
flattered that I was asked by Mr. Spielberg, but it was just the wrong movie for me at that time."
"For me, I need something else. I don't need to do what I've just stepped out of."
After her divorce from Ike Turner, Tina Turner had no intention of getting married again.
However, a chance meeting in a German airport changed everything. In HBO's 2021 documentary
"Tina," the singer tells the story of how she first came to meet second husband Erwin Bach, a
Swiss music executive who'd been tasked by Tina's manager to pick her up at the Düsseldorf Airport.
"He was really so good-looking.
My heart went 'ba-boomp, bop, bop' and it means that a soul has met."
As Hello! reported, the couple had been together for 27 years when they
finally tied the knot in 2013. In a 2005 interview with O, The Oprah Magazine,
Tina revealed why she was in no hurry to get married, saying -
"People often ask me why I don't marry. I have love. I have a good
life. I don't need to interfere with that."
Tina Turner's next big-screen outing came in the following decade, with the 1993 release of
"What's Love Got to Do with It." Turner, however, didn't star — that honor went to Angela Bassett,
who received an Oscar nomination for portraying the singer in the biopic. Based on Turner's
autobiography, "I, Tina," the film proved to be both a critical and commercial winner.
But this movie isn't the only project to be based on Turner's life story. In 2018,
the stage musical, "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical," premiered on London's West End,
before coming to Broadway in 2019. Turner was there for opening night, and surprised the
Broadway audience when she took to the stage and delivered a speech. She told the crowd -
"This musical is my life but it's like poison that turned to medicine.
I can never be as happy as I am now."
The show received 12 Tony nominations, including best musical.
As Billboard recalled, it was Tina Turner's 1984 album "Private Dancer" that catapulted
her from apparent has-been to rock superstardom. That record alone was responsible for her first
handful of Top 40 hits as a solo artist, along with her first No. 1 single, "What's Love Got to
Do with It." The album also spent 39 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart.
The success of that album propelled Turner to become one of the biggest touring acts in
music history. Turner earned a Guinness World Record for selling more concert tickets than
any other solo performer in history. Turner last hit the road in the late 2000s, for her
50th Anniversary tour, a two-hour retrospective encapsulating her entire career to that point.
Weeks after the Broadway debut of "The Tina Turner Musical," Tina Turner took
to social media to celebrate her 80th birthday with fans.
"How did I think I would be at 80? Not like this- how is this? Oh wow, I look great."
Turner went on to mention her health issues, which she candidly opened up about in her 2018 memoir,
"My Love Story." She wrote about suffering a stroke in 2013, and then being diagnosed with
intestinal cancer just three years later. But as she told Oprah Winfrey in a 2018 interview,
she initially dismissed doctors' warnings that the stroke had left her unable to walk
until she tried to get out of bed and fell onto the floor.
However, she instantly dismissed any negative thoughts,
and told herself that she was going to relearn how to walk, adding to Winfrey -
"But you know, I wasn't depressed about it ever, Oprah. I was just determined to fix it."
Tina Turner's relationship with Erwin Bach has spanned decades, and in her 2018 memoir, "My Love
Story," she revealed the life-saving gift he gave her in 2016 after years of untreated high blood
pressure had severely damaged her kidney function. Her condition was so dire that, as she wrote -
"I faced two choices: either regular dialysis or a kidney transplant."
She was shocked when Bach offered to give her one
of his kidneys — an offer that Turner immediately discouraged, writing -
"He was a young man. Why should he take such a risk to give an older woman a few extra years?
What if he had a problem some day with his remaining kidney?"
Bach, however, refused to be deterred and donated one of his kidneys for what
turned out to be successful transplant surgery. He later told The New York
Times that he would do it again. Turner summed it all by writing -
"We're both still here, closer than we ever imagined — and that's cause for celebration."
Tina Turner's 1984 album, "Private Dancer," proved to be a turning point,
not just resurrecting her career but propelling her to a level of superstardom she hadn't
experienced previously. In addition, the album's success established Turner as a major touring act,
with The Richest noting that her 1996 "Wildest Dreams" tour raked in a whopping $100 million in
ticket sales, while her "Twenty Four Seven" tour in 2000 sold $80 million in tickets.
Her 2008 "50th Anniversary Tour" brought in gross revenues of more than $84 million.
After selling all those albums,
singles and tickets, it's no surprise Tina Turner is ridiculously wealthy.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, her fortune is estimated at a staggering $250 million.
Turner summed up her feelings about her wealth when "60 Minutes" correspondent
Mike Wallace asked her if she deserved that amount of wealth, she replied -
"I deserve even more."
Tina Turner has had much to say about the abuse she experienced during her marriage to Ike Turner,
something she's discussed in interviews, written about in books, and dramatized on
stage and in a big-screen biopic. However, in the 2021 HBO documentary "Tina,"
she speaks very little about what she experienced during that time in her life.
The film's directors, Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin told Vanity Fair that that was intentional,
as they didn't want to put Tina through the trauma of reliving
those painful memories. Lindsay went on to say -
"The trauma [of abuse] doesn't just go away — that's something we wanted to communicate
with this film. [...] Revisiting that time can be very traumatic for
her. [...] We were very aware that that is something that she is still dealing with."
"It's like old memories, you wanna just leave that in the past and done with and a lot of things
you don't really wanna say, but there comes a time when you do have to say it."
Tina Turner had another tragedy visit her family in July 2018 when her eldest son,
Craig, took his own life at the age of 59 at his home in California. While his birth father was
saxophone player Raymond Hill, Ike Turner had adopted Craig following his mother's marriage.
Speaking to BBC News later that year,
Turner confessed that her son's death was still a mystery to her. She reflected on how
Craig had seemed happy with his new real estate job and girlfriend and admitted -
"I still don't know what took him to the edge. [...] I have no idea what pulled him down, except
something that followed him with loneliness. I think it was something with being alone."
After scattering his ashes off the California coast alongside her loved ones,
Turner posted a photo of the moment on Twitter, writing -
"My saddest moment as a mother. [...] I said my final goodbye to
my son. [...] He was fifty-nine when he died so tragically, but he will always be my baby."
Often referred to as the "Queen of Rock and Roll," Tina Turner was first entered
into the genre's Hall of Fame in 1991, when they inducted her and
first husband Ike Turner together as a joint musical act. As Jet reported,
Tina expressed her gratitude but turned down the invitation to come and accept the honor in person.
In 2021, Tina was finally recognized as a solo performer. She was inducted by Angela Bassett,
who had famously portrayed her onscreen in the 1993 biopic "What's Love Got to Do with It."
Singers like H.E.R. and Keith Urban also paid tribute to the music star by performing "It's
Only Love," while Christina Aguilera put her own spin on "River Deep, Mountain High." Tina Turner
appeared in a video message from Switzerland, thanking everyone for the honor and quipping -
"If they are still giving me awards at 81, I must have done something right."
Over the course of her long career,
Tina Turner racked up a staggering amount of hits. And, now that she's retired,
the legendary singer has managed to sell her biggest songs to BMG for millions.
As BBC News reported in 2021, inside sources alleged that Turner would
receive a payout of more than $50 million for her catalog, saying in a statement -
"Like any artist, the protection of my life's work, my musical inheritance,
is something personal. I am confident that with BMG and Warner Music,
my work is in professional and reliable hands."
Turner may have given up her copyrights, but that doesn't mean that she won't release any new music.
It seems unlikely due to her retirement though, as she told The New York Times in 2019 -
"I don't sing. I don't dance. I don't dress up."
But she's not the only celebrity to collect a major paycheck and start taking it easy
in their golden years. Other iconic musical artists have also sold the rights to their
songs in recent years, like Bob Dylan, who famously handed his entire 600-song
catalog over to Universal in 2020 in a deal estimated to be worth more than $300 million.
Over the years, Tina Turner became known for a few trademark characteristics:
her powerful voice, her exuberant performing style, and her iconic
look. Thanks to the short stage costumes that helped her deliver those signature dance moves,
her legs became a key part of that star persona. They even landed her a Hanes hosiery campaign back
in the 1990s, and so Turner had them insured for a whopping $3.2 million, according to The Richest.
Although she later sang about her famous limbs on stage,
Turner actually used to feel self-conscious over how her long legs made her stand out,
once telling Oprah that she thought that she resembled a pony. Turner further
reflected on her childhood insecurities in an interview with The Guardian in 2020, saying -
"I didn't really care for the way I looked, especially how my legs looked,
which is funny now because I became almost as famous for my legs as for my talent!"
While there's no denying that Tina Turner is a quintessentially American musical artist,
her fans may be surprised to learn that she hasn't lived in the U.S. for
decades. She has resided in Zurich, Switzerland since 1995, and in 2013,
Turner made the big step of becoming a Swiss citizen and gave up her American citizenship.
"Basically Europe has been very supportive of my music."
"More than America?"
"Yes. Yes, hugely."
According to a 2019 profile in The New York Times, Turner and her husband live
in a spacious home on the shore of Lake Zurich. In the interview, Turner joked
about originally wanting to live in a castle, until she realized how big they actually were.
Tina Turner and her legal team made headlines in late 2021 when they sued Dorothea "Coco" Fletcher,
a professional Tina Turner impersonator. As The Times reported, Turner's lawyers argued
that the impersonator looked too much like her, so fans might be misled by the posters
for Fletcher's show in Germany, something that Fletcher's lawyer insisted was not the case.
As Fletcher herself told the UK's "This Morning," she was always a devoted fan
of Turner and had been performing as her for decades and described how much she's
enjoyed putting on the show in countries like Austria and Switzerland, saying -
"It's just so much fun performing as Tina Turner. I love the music,
I love what she presents on stage, the energy, the rawness — you know, she just gives everything."
In the end, the courts decided that the tribute act would be allowed to go ahead,
and Fletcher won the case, according to the Daily Mail. The controversy also reportedly
led to a bump in ticket sales, so it may have been good publicity for Fletcher
that the superstar's lawyers had to point out the resemblance between herself and the impersonator.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.