Lillian Gish, Ike Turner, and me
The enjoyment of playing the fame-name game and the memories it brings to life.
One for the paying customers while we wait for the Oscar nominations to land tomorrow morning.
Twitter, as I’ve learned over the years, is good for three things: Stoking unnecessary rage, bragging about your Wordle score, and playing viral games about pop culture. The last can be mindless fun, with one person throwing out a burning question or topic, your answer to which will presumably explain everything about you. Examples include Four Romantic Comedies to Get to Know Me, or The Last Celebrity in Your Photo Roll is Your New Substitute Teacher, or What Was the Greatest Performance You Had Ever Seen on Screen When You Were 10 Years Old? (My answer to that one was a tie between Cliff Robertson in “Charly” and the Chief Blue Meanie from “Yellow Submarine.”)
A fun one popped up over the weekend, and I thought I’d invite you to play. It’s simple: Name five encounters you’ve had with famous people, four of whom you’ve met, spoken with, or been within a few feet of, and one of which is a lie. It’s an excuse to A) boast, B) tell some great stories, and C) hear some even greater stories. In my case, it was a reminder to freshly appreciate some of the extraordinary people I’ve had the fortune to meet while wandering through the world.
Here’s my list – which encounter didn’t happen?
1) Barack Obama
2) Lillian Gish
3) Ike Turner
4) Douglas Sirk
5) Meryl Streep
I’ll give you the answer below, but, first, write up your own list, add it to the comments, and try to stump the Watch List. (An enjoyable variant I’ve seen asks for five musical acts you’ve seen in concert, one of which is a lie.)
When I posted this on Twitter, a number of people guessed Douglas Sirk, the director of classic 1950s melodramas – “All That Heaven Allows,” “Imitation of Life,” etc. – that are a lot more subversive than they seemed at the time. But, no, sometime in the early 1980s, as Sirk’s newly rehabilitated reputation among movie lovers was soaring, I went to a screening of “The Tarnished Angels” (1957) at Manhattan’s beloved, eccentric Thalia theater at which the director and his wife were present. He answered questions after the movie and on his way out I buttonholed him to gabble about “Written on the Wind” (1956), still one of my all-time favorite films.
Obama? If you worked for a newspaper with medium-to-large circulation during the first campaign in 2008, it was hard not to have a run-in with Barry. Mine came as I was cutting through the Globe newsroom on my way to a screening, and here’s this skinny guy with a smile wanting to shake my hand. Knowing now that he’s a serious movie freak, I wish I’d stayed to chat longer.
Lillian Gish – oh, that’s a good one. In 1979, my college, Dartmouth, established a lifetime achievement award as a way to get some press and alumni support for the film department – and, okay, to pay tribute to a lifetime of achievement – and the first honoree was Gish, arguably the First Lady of the movies themselves. She was 86 years into a full century of living then and as gracious and kind as a legend can be, telling anecdotes she had told a thousand times as if they were new and giving glimpses of the steel spine that had allowed her to remain the conscience of American cinema from the earliest days of the silents to our fallen modern era. The film students, of whom I was one, clustered around her like bees, and the high point was accompanying Miss Gish (as if you would call her anything else) to the banks of the nearby Connecticut River where she had filmed the ice floe sequence in “Way Down East” (1920) almost 60 years before. It was spring now, but she pointed through the reeds to the spots where “Mr. Griffith” had her go downriver on a sheet of ice over and over, her hand trailing in the frozen water and bothering her, she always said, for the rest of her life. It isn’t often you get to meet someone who was there at the very beginning – who was the beginning – and it’s a memory I’ll warm myself with for the rest of my days.
To cut to the chase, the person I didn’t meet, haven’t met, is Meryl Streep. You’d think I would have in 35 years of covering movies, but it hasn’t happened. There’s time yet. But that leaves Ike Turner, whom I did meet – spent three days hanging out with the man in 2001 for a feature in Entertainment Weekly. Turner was ten years out of prison by then, and twelve years clean and sober; he had a new album that represented a return to the deep barrelhouse R&B with which he’d started his career. The rage had long since been spent, leaving only regret. I liked the man while understanding, as he did, that he would go to his grave as the best-known domestic abuser in the history of rock ’n’ roll. (Trust me, there’s competition.) It was an interesting few days.
The EW article is online, but only the first third, since the magazine’s digital archives are a pitiable mess after the 2018 sale of Time Inc. properties to the Meredith Corporation and a subsequent 2021 merger with Dotdash. Since you can’t read it online, I’m reprinting it here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy or feel free to skip, but don’t forget to play the name game in the comments and see if you can fool me and other readers. (I wish I could include the magnificent Anton Corbijn Photos that accompanied and are referenced in the following article; they’re not available for online licensing but can be viewed here.)
WHY LIKE IKE
Years after his reputation was iced as a wife beater, forgotten rock pioneer Ike Turner would now like to be remembered for more than that string of hits
(published in Entertainment Weekly, June 1, 2001)
“You ask him one question for me. You ask Ike Turner how it feels to know that every black woman in America thinks he’s the Anti-Christ.”
That was Vanessa speaking. She works in the administrative section of this magazine, and her response to the news that I was flying to San Diego to spend some time with Ike Turner was typical, if more precisely phrased than most. Two days later, her question—which I promised that I would, in fact, ask the man—is hanging in the back of my mind as I watch the former Mr. Tina Turner give the giggles to his neighbor’s toddler.
We’re in the backyard of his small ranch house, in a verdant suburban byroad north of San Diego. It is a long, long way from the places he has been: from the Mississippi delta town where Izear Turner was born in 1931; from St. Louis, where he helped codify the DNA of rock and roll, met a singer named Anna Mae Bullock, and turned her into a star named Tina; from the world tours with the Rolling Stones; from the endless hotel rooms where a marriage and a musical partnership unraveled at the back of his hand; from L.A.’s Bolic Studios, where he reigned as a cokehead rajah; from the California State Penitentiary, where he was imprisoned for two years.
Today, Ike Turner is a member of his neighborhood watch (“Best-rated in North County!” he crows). He has been clean for twelve years—no drugs, no booze, no cigarettes—and his stocky frame doesn’t begin to suggest the lean, tensile switchblade of the past. He has a new album out too, and it’s good—a throwback to the blistering roadhouse R&B with which he started his career and a showcase for the barrelhouse piano playing he always kept under wraps. He hit the stage at Austin’s SxSW music festival last March and converted a roomful of rubberneckers into a cheering squad. He’s lined up to play Conan, maybe Leno. And, yes, his current singing girlfriend, Audrey Madison, looks too much like a certain ex-wife for some people’s comfort.
At 69 years old, Ike is as ready for his comeback as he’ll ever be. But are we ready to modify our image of him as the demon husband of rock and roll—the man whose name still serves as pop-culture shorthand for “wife beater”? Especially since he shows no interest in repenting the way we like our villains to repent: on TV, in close-up, with plenty of tears?
“Don’t make me black,” Ike tells the photographer as he poses affably in his back yard. He means “Please set your camera exposure so that my face is not unnecessarily darkened” but the comment dovetails with what he says next, as the first cut from the new CD by Ike Turner and The Kings of Rhythm, “Here and Now,” storms out of the open patio doors and into the spring morning. “See, most black people, they hear a song, they feel the beat on the two and the four”—he stomps his feet to illustrate. “And white people, they feel it on the one and the three. I feel it on the one, the two, the three, and the four!” He claps it out—bap bap bap bap— demonstrating the unstoppable rhythmic motor that has powered his music from day one. “I am a white man trapped in the body of a black man!” he laughs. The song, a pile-driving slab of primordial R&B called “I’m Tore Up,” rips the air apart. He first recorded it in 1956, with Billy Gales singing the words. Forty-five years later, he’s finally singing it himself—and playing hellacious guitar on top. “Hey Roseanne,” he yells to the neighbor who has reappeared beyond the wooden fence. “This is my new CD! Want a copy?” Of course she does, and she wants it signed too.
Why should you even care about Ike Turner in 2001? Didn’t Tina Turner literally write the book (“I, Tina,” Harper Collins, 1986) on her sorry existence with the husband who created her star persona only to beat her bloody before she fled in 1976? Don’t we know the dirt from the 1993 film version of that book, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” Isn’t it enough that when Ike Turner entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, he was inducted in absentia because he was serving hard time for transporting cocaine?
Of those three items, Ike only disputes the film, which he feels distorts some events and invents others. “They took what she said and totally exaggerated it,” he scoffs. “People don’t even stop to say when something was based on a true story, it had to be fictionalized.” (While Tina is, according to her management, “taking a year off” and was not available for comment, she has indicated in past interviews that she does not disagree with that assessment). He doesn’t argue over chapter and verse details of “I, Tina,” in part because he can’t and in part because he feels it’s none of your damn business. As for prison, he insists that the years from 1989 to 1992 were the best thing that happened to him. “If I hadn’t gone to jail, I’d probably be dead now,” he says, and there is no reason to doubt him.
No, the reason you should care about Ike Turner is that he is one of the secret fathers of rock and roll. Sam Phillips, for one, is convinced that Ike cut the very first rock and roll record: in 1951, three years before he discovered Elvis Presley, Phillips captured Turner’s Kings of Rhythm in a raw, gutbucket squall called “Rocket 88,” a #1 R&B hit for Chess Records. Saxophonist Jackie Brenston took the vocals—and credit on the record label—when Phillips decided Ike couldn’t sing well enough, but the future Sun Records guru recognized who the king of the Kings was. “Ike’s always been a person I thought had an unusual talent for making people sound like they really belonged to each other,” says Phillips. “Ike was just excellent at putting people together.”
When his band temporarily split in the early 50s, Turner hooked up with the Bihari brothers of L.A.’s Modern Records, becoming their talent scout and field producer in the deep south. In so doing, he helped discover—and produced, arranged, and played on the records of—such major postwar blues gods as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Elmore James. He reformed the Kings in 1956, moved to St. Louis, and set about creating a streamlined R&B stage revue second to none, masterminding everything from horn charts to dance steps and creating a tremolo-heavy guitar style that some pop historians feel was the first to challenge the singer as the primary emotional center of early rock.
And he still had yet to meet Tina. That happened in 1957; their first hit as Ike and Tina Turner was 1960’s “A Fool in Love,” created by accident when singer Art Lassiter didn’t show up for a recording date and Anna Mae took a shot at the lead. Ike created her stage name after the fact and modelled her persona on the kind of brazen wild woman he had had a thing for ever since watching movie serials about Nyoka the Jungle Woman as a kid in Clarksville, Miss. “Ike and Tina was one of the definitive rhythm-and-blues soul acts,” says rock historian Jim O’Neal. “The whole showmanship aspect of it was spectacular, and Ike was able to orchestrate all that: the music, the arrangements, the song writing, the musicians. I think he’s one of the great musical masterminds of the modern era.”
The flip side of “mastermind,” of course, is “control freak.” As Ike remembers it, though, he wasn’t the only one putting on a show. “Here she comes…,” he recalls his wife and partner murmuring before hitting the stage. “Tina used to talk like that in the dressing room, converting over from Anna Mae to Tina. She’d be looking in the mirror, saying ‘Here she comes…’ talking like she was somebody else. It was all an act.” His eyes cloud momentarily with the things he has learned not to say.
“I was real, real careful with this project,” says Rob Johnson. “Ike as a curiosity object basically gets one shot. But how long do you let a man’s past get in the way of his artistry?” Johnson, 44, a former financial director with billionaire George Soros, is currently the gentleman owner of Bottled Majic Music and the guy in charge of spearheading the I Like Ike movement. He talked the bandleader into revisiting his R&B roots when Turner’s inclinations were more in the direction of disco novelty tunes called “I Want Sex.” He hooked him up in the recording studio with the Memphis Horns and legendary producer Willie Mitchell. And he forced Ike to do the one thing he’s been resisting his entire career: take center stage and be the star.
This took more work than you might imagine, because the really dark secret about Ike Turner is that he is painfully shy. Which sounds ridiculous until you realize that his long career has consisted of putting other people in the spotlight. In person, it’s easier to see: Someone will pay Ike a compliment and his happy bluster will vanish, leaving him stammering and staring abashed at the ground. “A lot of what’s brilliant about Ike,” says Johnson, “is that his genius comes from insecurity. But he has to overcome his insecurity to demonstrate his genius.”
We’re speaking at a rehearsal for the Kings of Rhythm at a bar thirty minutes down the road from Turner’s house. Part of Johnson’s program has been to get Ike to focus on his piano playing, and right now waves of classic riffs are pouring from the man: barrelhouse stomps, Meade Lux Lewis-derived boogie-woogie, insanely inventive stride that seems channeled from Ike’s childhood teacher, Pinetop Perkins. “Ike has a great right hand,” exults Johnson, “but he’s got one of the best left hands in the world.” He mentions that Ike has already recorded a piano-oriented follow-up to “Here and Now” and has additional hopes to make an “Ike and friends” CD of duets with fellow bluesmen and big-name rock stars—like a certain rhythm guitarist for a long-running rock act and a certain white blues-guitar god. I don’t mention that both of these musicians have turned down my requests to talk about Ike’s musical legacy.
Suddenly, the groove grinds to a halt; Turner’s not happy with the guitar part. The guitarist, a young New York City session kid named Seth Blumberg who has just joined the band, asks how the chord changes went on the record. “F--k the record,” Ike roars in response. “I’m interested in the feeling!” After the rehearsal, Blumberg shrugs the moment off. “We have carte blanche as long as it’s grooving,” he says. “Very rarely does he say, ‘This is what you should play.’ He’ll tell me if he doesn’t like something; he’ll tell me if it’s not there.” And when friends ask him what it’s like to work for the infamous Ike Turner? “Well, I always say first of all that he’s a fantastic musician. And then I say he’s always good to me, treats me honestly. I’m 26 years old and I just met the man, so I’m not about to put him in any kind of box that some TV show or Laurence Fishburne puts him in. I don’t know anything about that.”
Ike does. After the rehearsal, we retire to the quiet of his house. For the first time, I notice on the mantel a framed photo of a lovely young woman, signed “Love has everything to do with it—your daughter Twanna”. (Twanna Melby, a singer, is his child by one of his many girlfriends from the St. Louis days).
I put to Ike Vanessa’s question: How does it feels to know that every black woman in America thinks you’re the Anti-Christ? He sighs; he saw it coming. And he answers with his patented mixture of honesty and denial. “I can’t help what people think. If you know me, you love me. If you don’t know me, then you go by what you were told. I’m not going to try and defend myself, because the more you try to say you didn’t, the more they believe you did.” He stammers, insecurity peeking through. “Believe me, man, I have nothing against Tina. I don’t wish her well, I don’t not wish her well. To me, it’s like you’re talking about the Rolling Stones or Rod Stewart—it’s just another act. I’m totally disconnected with that. Only in other people’s minds it’s connected.”
Still, I ask, don’t those other people—the assumptions of an entire record-buying public—represent a pretty serious hill to climb? “I don’t see no hill,” Turner insists. “I don’t see no hill. The only worry I have is how can I get the right guys so I can sound good onstage. My worries aren’t about bills or money. Used to be. But I don’t have any of those problems.
“I’m just free.”
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