How Tina Turner dealt with marriage hell, a sex drought and wearing wigs
SHE was born plain Anna Mae Bullock in Tennessee.
But when she strutted across the stage and started belting out the hits, she transformed into rock legend Tina Turner.
The amazing singer became a pop pin-up, an inspiration to women the world over and was respected by musical giants David Bowie and Mick Jagger.
But she struggled to form relationships with men, lived in constant fear of rejection because she wore a wig and would go a full year without having sex.
She said: “Dating was often more trouble than it was worth. I was never one of those women who had to have sex no matter what.
“There have been times when I’ve gone up to a year without it, to be honest.
“I’d always been a little nervous about starting a relationship with a new man because I didn’t know how my wig would be received.
“I always ran the risk of meeting a man who might object: A man who would have a problem becoming romantically involved with Tina, with her bountiful hair and glamorous trimmings, but waking up with unadorned Anna Mae.
“What if he was disappointed by the real me? I was always a bit nervous about taking that chance.”
Tina finally did find love with her second husband, Erwin Bach, and this week he — and the showbiz world — were left mourning her death, aged 83, after a long illness.
In her astonishingly frank autobiography My Love Story, published five years before she died, Tina admitted she seduced German EMI record executive Erwin after he picked her up from Dusseldorf Airport in 1986.
Tina, who remained “Ann” to her family and close friends, had only known him for a matter of weeks when she decided to tell him how she felt during a business dinner.
She wrote: “I looked at him — so handsome in his Lacoste shirt, jeans and loafers without socks — and whispered, ‘Erwin, when you come to America, I want you to make love to me’.
Tasted blood
“He turned his head slowly and just looked at me, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. I couldn’t believe what I had said either! Later, he told me he had never heard that from a woman.
“His first thought was, ‘Wow, those California girls are really wild’.
“But I wasn’t wild. I’d never done anything remotely like that before. I didn’t recognise myself.”
Erwin, now 67, then joined Tina and her friends for a dinner in Los Angeles.
She said: “I invited everyone back to my house after dinner and that’s when our real romance began.
“The kissing began, and we kissed all the way to the bedroom. Erwin stayed with me that night.”
Until then Tina had little experience with love. A high school romance ended in heartbreak when her boyfriend got another girl pregnant and married her.
She had a brief teenage fling with saxophonist Raymond Hill and gave birth to her first child, Craig.
Then she fell for the charms of musician Ike Turner, who she married, and also adopted his two sons Ike Junior and Michael.
They became an infamous duet and she went on to have his third son Ronnie. But Ike was abusive and cruel.
Tina lost track of the number of times he had been married and claims he “probably had 20” women on the go while they were together.
She said: “All those wives were in addition to the countless girlfriends who came and went with dizzying speed.
“Ike slept with — or tried to sleep with — every woman in our orbit, married, single, and everything in between.
“He seduced every woman in our circle. That’s what he did.
“In his mind sex was power. When a woman became his conquest, he believed he owned her.”
Tina called his women the “sisterwives” who were “ruled” and “abused” by him like “members of a cult”.
Even sex with Ike was abusive. She described it as a “kind of rape — especially when it began or ended with a beating”.
He even forced her to change her name from Anna to Tina. When she tried to refuse, he beat her with a wooden shoe stretcher — as he never used his fists in order to protect his guitar-playing hands — and then told her to get on the bed.
“That was really awful. I hated him at that moment,” she said. “The very last thing I wanted to do was make love, if you could call it that.
“Tina Turner was born that night, and ‘Little Ann’ disappeared for ever.”
Describing some of the violence, Tina wrote: “He threw hot coffee in my face, giving me third-degree burns. He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang.”
After eight years of abuse Tina tried to kill herself with sleeping pills before a show in 1968. She woke to hear Ike say, “You should die, you mother****er”.
Finally she left him, with just 36 cents to her name, and they divorced.
And because she was so well known by then, she fought to keep the name Tina.
She wrote: “I told the judge, ‘Forget the jewellery, forget everything. It’s only blood money. I want nothing’.
“Although I did have one request. I wanted to continue using ‘Tina Turner’, which Ike owned because of the trademark he had obtained when we first started performing.”
Life and death
Bowie and Jagger then took the new solo star under their wing. Tina said: “They saw something they liked — a woman who could stand up to them vocally, collaborate on stage in a rock ’n’ roll way and make it all look great fun.”
She and her backing singers even taught Jagger how to dance.
She wrote: “We’d seen him strutting with his tambourine on stage and he was a little awkward back then.
“We thought it was kind of cute that he admired our dancing, so we pulled him into our group and taught him how to do the pony. “When we watched him doing a little bit of it during his next show, we thought, ‘Well, that’s good’.
“Not that he ever gave me and the girls credit for his fancy new footwork. To this day Mick likes to say, ‘My mother taught me how to dance’.
“And I say, ‘OK. That’s fine’. But I know better.”
During Live Aid in America in 1985, Mick famously ripped Tina’s skirt off on stage.
She said: “Mick is just naughty. He’s like every bad boy you’ve ever known at school.”
But the true good boy in her life was Erwin.
In 2013, after 27 years together, they married on the banks of Lake Zurich in Switzerland, where they lived.
Tragically though, she suffered a stroke just three months after that fairytale wedding.
She was then diagnosed with intestinal cancer and kidney failure.
Tina ditched medication to control her blood pressure in favour of homeopathic remedies, unwittingly causing further damage to her kidneys as a result.
She said: “I didn’t understand that unmanaged high blood pressure could accelerate my kidney damage . . . I would have lived differently if I had known.
“The consequences of my ignorance ended up being a matter of life and death.”
With her kidneys operating at just five per cent and her prognosis bleak, she signed up to Exit, an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland.
Then Erwin matched as a donor and gave her one of his kidneys.
She said: “I could hardly believe it. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of his offer.”
But as she battled for life in 2018, her eldest son, Craig, 59, shot himself dead.
Last year she also lost son Ronnie, 62, after complications from colon cancer.
As Tina reflected on her life, she said: “Good came out of bad.
“Joy came out of pain. I lived through a hellish marriage that almost destroyed me but I went on.
“I found happiness with Erwin but I almost lost everything . . . until love saved me.”