"Better be good to me," Tina Turner demanded on her 1984 comeback album, "Private Dancer," and ever since life has been good to her.
At 53, she maintains homes in Germany and France, has a 37-year-old German boyfriend, and still looks like she could be the fifth member of En Vogue.The face is unlined - she swears she's never had plastic surgery - and the physique lean, hardened by 30 years of dancing in high heels.
On stage, she's still a tornado, not all that far removed from the exotic, miniskirted siren who gave the nation's libido a jolt on "The Ed Sullivan Show" three decades ago. And the titanic voice?
"It's always there for me," she says. "I never had a voice lesson, I never warm up before I get on stage. I wasn't taught that I should warm up, so I never did it and I'm not gonna start."
As for bad habits, "I don't smoke, and once in a while I have a little champagne," she says. "But when I'm on tour, when I'm not on stage, there's no partying. Just a quiet room."
The room, a Chicago hotel suite, is quiet now, after a long day of making the rounds of radio stations to promote her new single, "I Don't Wanna Fight." Turner carries herself like a businesswoman, demure in a beige pantsuit and white, sleeveless blouse, as she lays the groundwork for her first American tour in six years. It began recently in Reno and is part of a multimedia blitz tied in with the new movie about her life, "What's Love Got to Do With It," and its accompanying soundtrack album.
The movie is based on Turner's best-selling 1986 autobiography, "I, Tina," written with Kurt Loder. In the book, the singer told her story in frank detail: the country girl who built a chitlin' circuit legend under the wing of Ike Turner; her abusive relationship with Ike and attempted suicide; the decision to finally flee her husband; the dog days when she seemed destined to play out her career as a Vegas oldies act; and her re-emergence in 1984 with the Grammy-winning, multiplatinum "Private Dancer."
But Turner is profoundly ambivalent about having her painful past once again examined on the big screen.
"I thought this wouldn't happen for years and years, until I was at least 90," she says with a laugh. She adds that she still hasn't seen the movie, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Larry Fishburne as Ike. Nor does she want to.
"I'm a critical person; I'm critical of myself," she says. "How would I be able to sit there and watch someone portraying me? And I know there's no way they can get it absolutely right, because it's like 20 years in two hours."
As with most rock biopics, the truth does take a few tumbles in "What's Love Got to Do With It." Turner's first child, by a member of Ike's band, is never acknowledged, and her collaboration with Phil Spector, "River Deep Mountain High," is made out to be a bigger hit than it actually was. And dramatic license is stretched to the breaking point in a final confrontation between Tina and a gun-wielding Ike backstage during her triumphant 1983 comeback at the Ritz in New York.
But Bassett and Fishburne bring an emotional honesty to their performances that is riveting. Although Bassett doesn't look anything like Tina, she has learned the singer's mannerisms and inflections and captures some of her ebullience, energy and strength.
With its graphic depictions of a rape and several beatings, the movie also doesn't sugarcoat Tina's relationship with Ike, which means the singer once again has to face questions about how she could put up for so long with such abuse.
"The feeling I have about my life is that it was a different time in the '60s," she says. "I gave my word to someone, to Ike Turner, that I would support him and his work and try to help him get to a certain level. Because that's what people are constantly asking me. `Why did you stay with him that long?' `Why did you take all that torture?' Why, why, why?
"It was about having (four) kids in school, and I wasn't gonna subject my kids to living on the streets 'cause I couldn't live with Ike Turner. I was strong enough to put up with this crap until they were out of school. I lived with that man for quite a few years, and the love was gone, but I gave my word.
"But when drugs intervened" - Ike Turner became a cocaine abuser in the 1970s - "I left. Because the man I had given the commitment to changed. A lot of that was left out in the book."
Turner pauses and sighs.
"I think, I hope, this is the last time this thing will come around. It's been hanging around a long time. I thought it had died down a bit, and now with the movie it's starting again. I thought, `Fine, if that's the destiny of my life, I can take it one last time.' But I'll be damned if I'm gonna go through the rest of my life talking about Ike. It's been 20 years and this man has remarried and has a family, and I'm living a fantastic life. I'm more happy than I've ever been. Why do I need to even talk about that unhappy time in my life? That's the hard part of the whole thing."
For the career-spanning sound-track, her first record under a new deal with Virgin Records, Turner recorded three new songs - "I Don't Wanna Fight," "Stay Awhile" and "Why Must We Wait Until Tonight" - and re-recorded some of her older hits with Ike, including "A Fool in Love," "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" and "Nut-bush City Limits," songs that stamped her as a spectacular R&B shouter more than a singer.
"It's OK to do them once in the studio, but you don't want to sing 'em every night," she says. "I'm not into these types of songs now. I wasn't into them then. I hated doing them. I made it very clear that I hated Ike's music. When I started singing I was very young, so `A Fool in Love' wasn't reality for me. All of this was Ike's life, and it was just me singing songs for him.
"The lyrics, the style I couldn't identify with. Growing up in Tennessee, I didn't know about rock 'n' roll. When I found it, that was it for me: `Honky Tonk Woman,' `Hot Legs,' ZZ Top, Ringo's `Oh My My.' I'm an energy person. I like people laughing and singing along, instead of getting depressed and thinking about being a fool in love."
The movie and soundtrack also acknowledge Turner's disco phase, in which she shreds the old Trammps' hit "Disco Inferno."
"I would've recorded that song in the '70s if I had a chance," Turner says. "It's out of my style, but it was always a good song for me, very physical, and I like that."
The soundtrack concludes with the autobiographical "I Might Have Been Queen" and her 1984 No. 1 hit, "What's Love Got to Do With It." Even now, one is struck by how dark the lyrics are in these triumphant songs.
"The writer of `I Might Have Been Queen,' Jennette Obstoj, wanted to know about my life, so I told her about the girl from Nutbush and she came up with this song," Turner says. "And I thought it was intimate . . . (singing), `I remember the girl in the fields with no name. . . .' There's a heavy meaning.
"But `What's Love Got to Do With It'? A girl from the Valley told me how to sing that by just simply yelling out of her car, `Tina Turner, what's love got to do with it? All right!' And she gave me the thumbs up. I got the message. It means `liberated woman.' Forget about being in love, get out there and be what you want to be. And I started singing it like that on stage and it just changed the whole meaning of the song and made it a little more fun."
Turner says she hated the song when it was submitted to her for the "Private Dancer" album. Again, not rock 'n' roll enough.
"I'd been singing stuff like `Jumping Jack Flash' and I didn't want this little teensie song for my hit," Turner says with a laugh.
"But (manager Roger Davies) kept saying, `Try it, try it.' My success so far, I think, has been with songs that really aren't rock 'n' roll. I turn them into rock 'n' roll on the stage, but they're not rock 'n' roll to begin with. Unfortunately, I haven't recorded that rock 'n' roll album. I'll go for it before I leave the planet."
One crucial song removed at the last minute from the soundtrack because of licensing problems was the epochal 1966 collaboration between Turner and Phil Spector, "River Deep Mountain High." It remains in the movie, however, and it represented a turning point in Turner's life - her first song without Ike.
"You know why I will always love that song? Because from the very beginning I was doing nothing but this screaming, somewhere between the singing you do in church and the blues," Turner says. "People used to call me a dancer, not a singer. So when I got with Phil, I started charging ahead and he was like, `No, no, I just want you to sing . . .'"