You won't see many paparazzi pictures or red carpet photographs of music icon Tina Turner. For decades the 79-year-old superstar has laid low and now she lives a quiet life in Zurich, Switzerland with her husband of six years, Erwin Bach, who is 16 years her junior. Turner sat down with Gayle King for CBS News in her luxury home to discuss her life and legacy, including the tumultuous years she was with Ike Turner.
Turner told King that in her eyes, when she tied the knot with Bach, it was the first time she'd been married, even though in 1962 she wed Ike. "When Ike asked me to marry him, knew it was for a reason," Turner said. "But, I had to say yes or I knew it was gonna be a fight. And so, when we drove to marry—that wasn't my idea of my wedding." As King asked her about her mentioning Ike in her book, Turner pauses.
"I get emotional when talking about certain things," she said as her eyes teared up. "I get emotional because in the beginning, Ike was very good to me." Turner shared that when she first saw Ike, she thought he was "the ugliest person I'd ever seen." However, his presence captivated her. He dubbed Anna Mae Bullock "Tina Turner" and the two began singing together, but she quickly became the face, and the voice, that the public wanted. "He was cruel because he depended on me," she recalled of his abuse. "He didn't like that he had to depend on me, and I didn't want to start a fight. It was always a black eye, a broken nose, a busted lip, a rib."
In Turner's recently released memoir My Love Story, she details how sex with Ike was a "kind of rape" because it was done with a drug-fueled hostility. Ike's daughter has denied that her father ever raped Turner and called the What's Love Got to Do With It sexual assault scene a complete work of fiction.
