Between You and Me (31 page)

S T R E I S A N D : I’m a slow learner.

W A L L A C E : How many years have you been in psychotherapy, off and on?

S T R E I S A N D : How about in the— Why do you sound so accu-satory?

W A L L A C E : I’m not accusing—

S T R E I S A N D : Are you against psychotherapy?

Talking about psychotherapy could not have been more relevant, because in The Prince of Tides, she played a psychiatrist who helped the character played by her costar, Nick Nolte, cope with deep-seated problems that stemmed from his traumatic childhood. That was a subject—an unhappy childhood—with which Streisand was all too familiar. Her father died when she was just an infant, and the man her mother married six years later turned out to be a stepfather out of Dickens. According to Barbra, he once told her she couldn’t have any ice cream because she was too ugly. And when he wasn’t insulting her, he treated her with almost total neglect.

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S T R E I S A N D : The man never talked to me.

W A L L A C E : Why?

S T R E I S A N D : Why. You know, at the time that I was a child, I mean, I just thought that I was awful, I must be awful. I remember he . . . was a man who couldn’t give affection.

W A L L A C E : Yeah, but he must have been nuts about your mother.

S T R E I S A N D : He was—he was mean to my mother. I saw him mean to her. This was not—this was not a nice man.

Yet she was the first to admit that her ownrelationship with her mother was marked by discord. “My mother,” she recalled, “never said to me, ‘You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re anything. You could do what you want.’ She never told me anything like that. My mother was— I would say to my mother now, ‘Why didn’t you ever give me any compliments?’ She said, ‘I didn’t want you to get a swelled head.’ ”

Before my interview with Streisand, I had an on-camera conversation with her mother, during which I asked her, “Are you very proud of Barbra?”

“Who would not be? Who would not be proud of this girl?”

“Are you close?” I asked.

This was her reply: “She hasn’t got time to be close to anyone.”

I thought that remark spoke volumes, so I quoted it to Streisand during our interview. And this was her response: “She said ‘to anyone’? Or did she say to her?”

“To anyone,” I clarified. “That’s your own mom.”

Streisand began to cry, and as she wiped the tears from her eyes, she said, “You like this, that forty millionpeople have to see me, like, do this.”

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Since I knew that she had a troubled childhood and that there were serious frictions in her relationship with her mother, I thought there was a germane link between the skeletons in her family closet and the ones that her therapeutic character unearthed in The Prince of Tides. Why promote a movie celebrating psychotherapy if you don’t want to talk about your own demons?

But that wasn’t how Streisand chose to view it, and when we approached her a few years later with a proposal to do an update of the 1991 profile, she made it clear that she was totally uninterested.

T i n a T u r n e r

I M A N A G E D T O M A K E I T through the first seventy-eight years of my life without ever attending a rock concert, and I was serenely confident that I could continue to avoid that dubious pleasure. But thanks to anunexpected twist inmy karmic destiny, I was obliged to go to a rock concert in the summer of 1996 as part of a 60 Minutes story I did that year onTina Turner. It wasn’t evensupposed to be my assignment. The proposal for the profile of Turner had been submitted by one of the producers who worked with Ed Bradley, whose taste inmusic was (and still is) far more adventurous thanmine. But when word came back that Turner had opened a brief window in her busy schedule to accommodate a 60 Minutes interview, Bradley was off on another assignment halfway around the world, in Burma, as I recall. Since it would have been discourteous to ask Turner and her people to cool their heels until Ed returned from Asia, I was asked to pinch-hit for him, and thus soon found myself in her magnetic presence.

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Although I was not that conversant with Turner’s music, I did know a few things about her personal life, especially her stormy relationship with her former husband and mentor, Ike Turner. That had been the subject of a 1993 movie in which Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne played the Turners. From that film and other sources, I learned that Tina was born Annie Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee. The daughter of sharecroppers, she spent much of her childhood picking cotton and dreaming of ways to break free from the bonds of rural poverty. She moved to St. Louis in 1956, when she was sixteen, and it was there that she met Ike Turner, who was the leader of a rhythm-and-blues band that had enjoyed some success in local clubs. Turner had a keen eye and ear for talent, and when he heard Annie Mae sing in an informal audition, he promptly brought her under his wing, and she soon became his lead vocalist.

He eventually married her and changed her name, and his band was rechristened the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.

With her exuberant and earthy singing style, and her fast-paced dancing on legs hailed as the shapeliest ever to stomp and strut across a concert stage, Tina Turner became one of the most dynamic performers inthe history of rock music. But behind the scenes of her public triumphs, she was severely and repeatedly abused by her husband. Over the course of their sixteen years together, Ike Turner bashed and bruised Tina’s face so many times that she later needed corrective surgery to repair her nose and damaged sinuses. Finally she broke away from him in1976, but for the next few years, her career languished while she struggled to reshape her identity as a solo performer. The big breakthrough for Tina Turner without Ike came in1984, whenher comeback album Private Dancer sold tenmillion copies and wonthree Grammy Awards. She thenpublished a brutally candid autobiography called I, Tina, which chronicled the years

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of physical abuse inflicted by Ike, and that book provided the source material for the 1993 movie. (The title of the film, What’s Love Got to Do with It, was drawnfrom one of her biggest hits.) WhenI interviewed Turner in the summer of ’96, I asked if she regretted reveal-ing so many wretched details about her life with Ike.

T U R N E R : Now, I would have to say no, I don’t regret it. What I regretted is that it was ugly to me, and I—and I—and the people found it out.

W A L L A C E : Hmm.

T U R N E R : How can I explain that to you? I never would have let the people know. But as long as I kept that under the rug, it might have held me back as well.

W A L L A C E : You had to bring it to closure, so to speak?

T U R N E R : That’s right. Absolutely. And it— People won’t leave it alone. I’m constantly reminded. It’s been nearly twenty years. Ike has married twice since then.

At the time of our interview, Turner had been living in Europe for over a decade. I talked to her at her home in the south of France, which she shared with the current man in her life, a German-born record-company executive named Erwin Bach. He was sixteen years younger than Turner, and I asked him what it was like to be involved with an older woman who was also a world-famous rock star.

B A C H : I’m not in love with the rock act.

W A L L A C E : Yeah.

B A C H : I’m in love with the human being.

W A L L A C E : Yeah. You proposed to her, and she turned you down. Why?

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B A C H : Well, I proposed to her before her fiftieth birthday because I thought it is just the way I feel—or felt at this moment. . . . I wanted to give her my commitment. And I think we both were lucky that she said no afterwards.

By the time of our conversation, the two of them had been together for ten years. It was Tina’s first serious relationship since she left Ike, and she was quick to chime in with her own view of their romantic attachment.

T U R N E R : Erwin and I don’t feel that we need a marriage. We are as married now as if it was legal.

W A L L A C E : You’re fifty-six. He’s forty. Now, that could be trouble.

T U R N E R : But he’s really sixty, and I’m really fifteen. He’s—he’s much more mature. . . .

W A L L A C E : So you don’t push Erwin around?

T U R N E R : Oh, no. But I— I wouldn’t like it if I could.

The big event in Turner’s career that summer was the start of an ambitious fifteen-month world tour that grossed over a hundred million dollars in Europe alone. Our visit to her home came during a brief break in the tour, and we then arranged for our 60 Minutes team to accompany Tina and her entourage on a flight to Budapest, the site of her next scheduled appearance. It was there that I finally broke my rock-concert maiden, as they say at the racetracks. I was fully aware of Turner’s reputation for giving over-the-top performances in front of live audiences. But the spectacle I witnessed on that Hungarian stage was even more electrifying and sexually provocative than I had been led to anticipate, and after it was over, the two of us talked about the way she let it all hang out.

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W A L L A C E : Your public persona is wild, to a certain degree.

T U R N E R : Raunchy.

W A L L A C E : Sexy, raunchy—exactly. And yet you say that you’re—that you’re not really that way, and that you like only to pretend that you’re sexy. True?

T U R N E R : Yes. Let me just tell you how I am about that. What I give off on the stage, any man would approach me, “Hey, Tina, baby.” And I—I never like it. But I can’t correct it, because that’s what I do onstage. It’s my work. I think people don’t take singers as serious as they do actresses. Some actresses do worse things than I’ve ever done onstage, and they’re treated with respect.

I was so taken by Tina Turner’s warmth and vitality that when she launched another world tour in 2000, I suggested that we do an update of our 1996 profile. She was now sixty years old, and her latest romp across concert stages hither and yon was being billed as her farewell tour. When I interviewed Turner in the summer of 2000, most of our conversation dealt with her personal life and some of the values that had shaped it. She was still living in France with Erwin Bach, and I wanted to know why such a prominent African-American performer preferred being an expatriate.

W A L L A C E : You live in a white world. You do.

T U R N E R : Hmm.

W A L L A C E : Live in a white country with a white guy.

T U R N E R : Hmm.

W A L L A C E : Your work is mainly like those of white rock bands.

T U R N E R : Hmm.

W A L L A C E : Correct?

T U R N E R : Yeah, yeah. Mike, this might be hard for you or peo-

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ple to understand, but I don’t think about color or race. I don’t think I ever thought that much about the difference, even when I lived in the South.

W A L L A C E : You mean back in Nutbush, Tennessee, and beyond?

T U R N E R : Yeah. Going to a back door never bothered me. I don’t remember ever being— I don’t remember being called a nigger. But a few times when it happened, I just kind of feel,

“Well, yeah, I’m black. I—I am considered a nigger.” So it never bothered me.

W A L L A C E : You know, what makes me ask about this is you said to me that you felt that you, in a sense, belonged now over in Europe, more than in the United States.

T U R N E R : Yes, it’s true.

Turner’s decisionto live inEurope placed her firmly inthe tradition of prominent African-American artists who chose to become expatriates. One of them was the esteemed author Richard Wright; although his most famous novel was titled Native Son, Wright turned his back on his native land because he found the racial and political climate in Europe more tolerant than the hostile conditions he had encountered in America. That was also the case with James Baldwin, another renowned black writer who spent years living as an expatriate.

Europe has lon

g beena havenfor man

y jazz performers, whose

music—like Turner’s—is deeply rooted inthe African-Americanexpe-rience. Yet whenI put the questionto her directly, asking her if she thought it was “more comfortable for people of color to live inEurope,”

Turner’s reply was more ambiguous than the one I had anticipated.

“Mike, I’ve never bothered about my color,” she said. “I never had that thing about being black. If the whole world was like that,

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maybe there would be more harmony and love. Maybe. I don’t have a problem with being black in a white country. . . . It’s— I’m okay where I am.”

The profile of Tina Turner was my one and only plunge into the clamorous world of rock music. Though I enjoyed the experience, I was acutely conscious of being outside my natural comfort zone. By way of contrast, I felt completely at home in the company of movie stars, for I had long been acquainted with luminaries of film and theater. There were several other actresses I did stories on over a span of five decades. Among them were such grande dames of stage and screen as Tallulah Bankhead and Gloria Swanson, whom I interviewed in the 1950s, and Helen Hayes and Bette Davis, who were subjects of 60 Minutes stories in the 1980s. In the years since then, I’ve done pieces on Oprah and Julie Andrews and Candice Bergen and the seductive French actress Jeanne Moreau. (Our title for that story was, inevitably, “Femme Fatale.”) A recent newcomer to this distinguished gallery was Hilary Swank. My profile of her ran on 60 Minutes inlate January of 2005, just one month before she received an Academy Award—her second Oscar infive years—for her riveting portrayal of a female boxer inMillion Dollar Baby. In spite of her rapid rise to the pinnacle of Hollywood fame, Swank did not behave like a diva; I was utterly captivated by her casual, unassuming manner. As I said in my on-camera introduction to our story, Swank “is unlike any other movie star I’ve known. Beautiful but somehow short on glamour; unaffected, down-to-earth; she’s intelligent, articulate, yet she’s a high school dropout; sophisticated, worldly, but she grew up in a trailer park. We found her fascinating.”