Tumult!, page 22
She felt that magic was in the air, including the perfectly silly but romantically perfect performance staged by Bach and about fifteen of his friends dressed in Mexican sombreros serenading the crowd with surreal mariachi music. She was having the time of her life after working supernaturally hard during seriously hard times, all on her own without help from anyone. She can certainly be allowed to think in that moment that her life was blessed and even expressed her basically Buddhist notion: this must be my nirvana.
But 2013 was anything but a rosy nirvana-rama time. Three months later, she woke up suddenly with excruciating pains in her head and legs, barely able to call out to her new husband for help, caught helplessly in the midst of a serious stroke. The next thing she knew (or at least knew for sure) was that she was connected up to a lifesaving dialysis machine in the hospital in Zollikon, not far from where she lives, with only 20 percent kidney function and the need to become physically strong enough to accept a vitally needed surgical transplant.
Years of high blood pressure, possibly either misdiagnosed or ignored, had compromised her kidneys, now being further complicated by her stroke. Preciously guarding their privacy for several years, Bach had tended to his wife’s treatments and kept everything on track during her sessions to have her blood “washed.” Undergoing these rigors of course prompted Turner to do two things: look at every day through the clarifying lens of impermanence, to which her Buddhism already inclined her, and also to reflect on her good fortune in meeting the true love of her life.
The image of Tina Turner actually being photographed smiling while connected to her lifesaving medical machine and shared with the world is quite an eye-opener. Only the down-to-earth but usually terrifically glamorous Tina would have the gumption or honesty to share with so many people who care about her what she was going through at this stage in a life already incredible by anyone’s standards. The lady’s got guts, no doubt about it.
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Once she officially retired after her triumphant new millennium tours, she was often amused when people asked her “what do you do now that you’re retired?” because she always imagined that that was the whole idea: you don’t do anything anymore, you just live. But when people who loom so large on the public stage drop away into private relaxation, their admirers start to imagine they’ve already passed away, a notion that she put to rest by emerging from her seclusion in 2005 to be honored along with Cher and Tony Bennett at the Kennedy Center Awards for contributions to American culture. She even got the distinct pleasure not only of being seen and worshipped again but also of seeing Beyoncé do a spirit-lifting rendition of her signature song (or one of them anyway), “Proud Mary,” knowing full well that it was great dames like herself who made artists like Beyoncé even possible.
Her so-called seclusion was, of course, anything but lonely or immobile, first and foremost because she was traveling the world with her erstwhile Erwin and indulging in one of her favorite hobbies: decorating her houses with art and design treasures. She had spent the last couple of years peacefully planning, organizing, and preparing, confidently orchestrating the reasons for her retirement, her downsizing, and her dedication to focusing on what was truly important. She was taking full control of her own life once again. Do you know the wonderful expression, if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans? That was her wistful way of viewing it.
In retrospect, that’s what she must have felt she heard, the creator’s laughter, because “control” definitely wasn’t a word that could be applied to her current circumstances. One answer to that public question about what you do when you’re retired might just as well be that, sometimes, survival itself is a full-time job, just like being righteous is. Brought into the hospital in a wheelchair, in itself a shock for someone used to strutting so magnificently, she was gripped with the primal fear that comes with immobility.
Especially overwhelming for someone so used to commanding her stallion-like frame to do her bidding was the bizarre idea that Tina Turner could ever be paralyzed. Her physician Dr. Vetter explained how the stroke had affected her so powerfully. Her whole right side was numb, and she’d have to get physiotherapy to learn to walk again, forget about strutting.
She remained hospitalized for about ten days, during which time she did what we might expect Tina Turner to do: talk herself into believing that she would fight her way back to health.
One powerful concern was how the news and its attendant public gossip would become fodder for whisperings across the globe: Tina Turner has mystery illness, Tina Turner recovering from stroke, is Tina Turner still alive, and so on. She tried to eliminate all such thoughts and focus on her recovery, a long struggle involving acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, meditation, and chanting, her own personal form of prayer.
The physical effects of the stroke lingered for a long time. Even in 2018, five years later, she still had trouble with facial muscles, getting up, walking, and even signing her signature. That’s when her doctor told his despondent patient that her high blood pressure, perhaps causing the stroke or perhaps just latent for years, was impacting kidney function, now only risen to a still-low 35 percent. She was sent to a specialist, Dr. Jorg Bleisch, a nephrologist who needed to monitor her frequently and who also began prescribing intensive blood pressure medication.
Then the severe vertigo set in, and she was sent to Dominick Straumann, a neurologist at an acclaimed Swiss research facility who provided treatments to rectify her otoconia, a loosening of crystals in the ear canal causing the dizziness. The procedures, more physically and mentally taxing than anything she had ever experienced, were taking effect slowly but surely. As she put it in her Love Story recollections, “How did I go from being the picture of health, a cover girl and a bride, for God’s sake, to being Job?,” referencing the biblical figure who was forced to endure so many grueling tests and threatening trials sent his way.
Then, in a drastic case of just one damn thing after another, her kidneys began to totally fail her, unable to do their job of eliminating waste from the body and endangering their host, the person they ostensibly “belong” to. In this case, someone else’s kidney may have to be found for a renal transplant, where at least one fully functioning kidney can more or less do the job of two. Historically, kidney transplant recipients live much longer than those who remain on the dialysis scrubbing regimen as well as generally have much better quality of life while doing so.
Then—yes, yet another then—in January 2016 while getting used to the idea of recuperation, therapy, and transplants, and being forced to embrace, to some degree, the limits of being an invalid, Turner was stunned by the news that she had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer. She had a carcinoma with several malignant polyps, requiring a whole range of surgical interventions and further treatments. This was one of those last-straw situations it appeared, one that forced even the ebullient Tina to become despondent enough to ask her beloved Erwin if he were sorry now that he had married an old woman.
But one thing she could be fully grateful for, apart from meeting him in the first place, was the fact, as she was discovering more and more, that this was not a normal man. His optimism and love of life and his love for her seemed to shine through and lift her up and over these occasional dark times, including her surgery only a month after the diagnosis, during which part of her intestine was removed and it was hoped that the cellular growth had been arrested. But the aggression against her immune system from the cancer and the surgery was also simultaneously further weakening her renal system and her already compromised kidneys.
She was refusing her doctors’ attempts to persuade her to continue with dialysis. Being a woman then in her seventies, one with cancer, and one who had a certain strength of character, to say the least, she was also one who rejected out of hand the idea of living forever connected to a machine. Instead, she began valiantly investigating end-of-life possibilities, such as assisted dying and supportive suicide, and even joined an organization called Exit just in case. Another Swiss group called Dignitas was also available to her should she need to undertake final steps.
But it was then that her partner Erwin declared that he would give her one of his own kidneys. She tried to get him to consider his own future, given his younger age, but he announced that their future was his future, and by doing so he once more gave her the hope she so desperately needed to carry on with the full-time job of survival. His perspective, which was certainly not lost on the part of his Buddhist wife, was that giving was also a gift to the giver. If you give, he believed, you receive. There’s that surprising concept of karma rearing its hopeful head in her life one more time.
So for the next nine months, the clinic’s dialysis chair would become the center of not only her life but also pretty much of their universe. Their shared kidney transplant was scheduled for April 7, 2017. She whiled away the hours with memories, with reading her favorite spiritual books, with homeopathic remedies, and with meditation and chanting, but mostly she spent her time being three people at once: Anna Mae Bullock, Tina Turner, and Mrs. Erwin Bach.
Subsequent to what appeared, medically at least, to be a quite successful transplant, her husband also kept her busy, knowing that the best way to help his wife would be to help her continue being Tina Turner, the woman he’d fallen in love with almost thirty years before. One day, he brought about ten people into their home to discuss a creative project they had all been developing: a Broadway musical theater production called Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, the story of her life in song and dance and drama live onstage.
After some coaxing and cajoling, she must have realized that this theatrical extravaganza was something meant to be, so with her usual resignation in the face of fate (her fate, that is), she agreed to give it her blessing. Her strategy was to become healthy enough to join the theater group for the official announcement of the show’s creation on October 18, 2017, at which they would also present the talented young actress chosen to portray Tina: Adrienne Warren.
Six months after her major organ transplant surgery, her body seemed to be already threatening to reject Erwin’s gifted kidney by this stage, and she wondered if she’d be in good enough shape to do what she eventually did do, as if by sheer force of willpower: dress up as Tina Turner once again and join young Adrienne onstage at the launch reception to sing “Proud Mary” together. She was apparently still the living embodiment of a key existential principle: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
The official grand-opening show of the Tina Turner Musical took place six months later in April 2018 at the Aldwych, one of London’s oldest operating theaters. Once the show kicked off with its opening number, “Nutbush City Limits,” she realized she was in for a truly surreal experience. Both Warren and the actor chosen to play her first husband, Kogna Holdbrook-Smith, turned in inspired performances, even if it was spooky and unsettling to see someone who so captured Ike’s appearance and essence in performance.
Her closing remarks to the audience that opening night, after a hugely successful show mounted in her honor, were as wise as they were revealing. They encapsulated everything she had learned in her whole life, a life of harrowing hellish trauma and yet also a life of blissful blessings beyond her wildest dreams. She remembered an old Buddhist expression: it is possible for us to transform poison into medicine.
Sometimes it seems like that might be the entire story of her whole life right there, hiding in that one deeply spiritual sentence. Next up? The Broadway stage premiere of Tina: The Musical in New York for the fall of 2019. And like her other favorite Sinatra song once said, if she can make it there, she’ll make it anywhere. And, once again, she did just that.
9
HEAVY WEATHER IN A DRESS The Legacy of Tina Turner
“What you’ve heard about me is all true. I change the rules, to do what I wanna do.”
—Tina Turner, Rolling Stone, 1984
Apart from my own personal interpretations and lengthy listening to her whole musical arc and after speaking to so many fans, critics, journalists, and historians of both the soul and the rock styles, it becomes abundantly clear that Tina Turner is exactly as Winston Churchill once described the inscrutable East: she is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Most crucially and often overlooked, however, was his follow-up observation: perhaps there is a key. So many different perspectives on the same public persona: shy but raunchy, humble but haughty, meditative but maniacal.
Tina Turner was obviously so prismatic a personality and character that she was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy—but of the good kind. She was also that rare breed of being about whom all commentary and observation, even the ones that are totally divergent or drastically opposed to each other, are still absolutely accurate. She was, in other words, a figure whose creative shadow was so huge that almost everything contradictory one could say about her was equally true. Is there indeed a key?
Much more than a mere survivor, Tina Turner was actually a sort of alchemist, and she seemed to specialize in transformation. To paraphrase Victor Bockris, biographer of the beat writer William Burroughs, Turner’s career is counted out in transformations. There is no one single Turner. And since there’s clearly more than one of her, there must therefore logically be more than one legacy. John Corcelli expressed to me a twofold appreciation of her inherent legacy: “Her ability to embrace her own pain and to cultivate an ever expanding audience. Tina Turner should be remembered as a much beloved entertainer whose loyal audience was absolutely always rewarded with a great performance.”
Totally true, after all, we’ve already witnessed about four of five Turners, and who knows, more of them may be on their way. And that too is also a big part of her legacy: everything she ever touched seemed to turn to gold. She turned Ike Turner into gold and then proceeded to turn her own solo music into gold.
Legacy can be such a loaded word. It sometimes sounds so imperious. And yet in the case of someone as imperial as Tina Turner, it also seems ideally appropriate. Her legacy in a nutshell? Tenacity—apart from the music itself and the presence of the person who gave it to us all as a collective gift: her refusal to be repressed, suppressed, or depressed and her inability to ever give up. She didn’t give up in her difficult childhood, not in her challenging private relationship, not in the creative drought subsequent to her split, and not even in the life-threatening illness that eventually even someone as strong as she could not fully combat. But through it all and in her own words, “I stayed on course.”
Her legacy of tenacity is something lasting not only in the way it affected her many fans but also in the impact it had on the entire music industry and her fellow artists. In The Guardian in mid-2018, Daphne Brooks examined the making of a rock-and-roll revolutionary when she previewed the new live musical stage production about the sixty-year career of a singer who crossed racial lines and overcame violent oppression to revolutionize music. “With singularity, Turner merged sound and movement at a turning point in rock history, navigating and reflecting back the technological innovations of a new pop-music era in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
“She catapulted herself to the forefront of a musical revolution that had long marginalized and overlooked the pioneering contributions of African-American women, then she remade herself again when most pop musicians were hitting the oldies circuit. Turner’s character has always been a charged combination of mystery as well as light, melancholy mixed with a ferocious vitality that often flirted with danger. Perfect, for a big budget musical.”
Brooks also put Turner’s long artistic shadow into context very well by name checking the people who probably wouldn’t even exist without her influence, reminding us that way beyond Beyoncé, Turner’s legacy remain rich and varied in the diverse worlds of pop. From the dark soul of a Meshell Ndegpcello to the white funk vocalist Nikka Costa and every time Rhianna takes to the stage and even rapper Cardi B, they all owe Turner a huge debt of in-your-face female funk. Sisters, as the catchy feminist song had suggested, are doing it for themselves.
I’ve always liked the way Lucy O’Brien put it in her definitive history of women in rock, pop, and soul, She Bop, when studying the “natural woman” that Tina Turner so powerfully exemplifies. “A female assertion of identity within a male-dominated sphere is arguably an act of protest in itself, from Madonna’s populist attack on Catholicism to Tina Turner strutting her survivalist ethic in stadiums throughout the world.”
What’s appealing about that assessment is that it suggests that she is a protesting folksinger of sorts, even without realizing it, just by being herself. And as O’Brien tellingly quoted Turner from her own feminist perspective, “People like me not just because I have big hair, lips and legs. I’ve got credibility!” She does indeed, holding out for her own independence and freedom, refusing to go backward. “It wasn’t until British designer/pop producer Heaven 17 persuaded her into the studio to record a cover version of ‘Ball of Confusion’ for their 1981 nostalgia compilation album that she realized she could make the move away from oldies soul (on her cabaret circuit) to a more commercial sound, wrapping her raunch and emotional vocal style around such anthems as ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ and ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero.’”
In a great section of her book about soul and funk queens, O’Brien refers to Tina Turner as a kind of feminist pharaoh, a Hatshepsut (an Egyptian queen) taking her throne. “Turner has several weapons at her disposal; the constitution of a horse, good legs, and a solid background in raunchy r & b. Allied to this is a penchant for a lion’s mane and outrageously red lipstick. Turner knows that she’s a ham, and that this is show business. It’s a strand of r & b that went deeper than the girl-group sound, it was the gospel-derived dynamics of deep southern soul, a grainy gutsy genre spearheaded by Stax-label artists such as Carla Thomas and Mavis Staples. These artists, together with the blues belter Etta James, paved the way for full-throated stars like Tina Turner.”
