Tina Turner Page 4

  Yet, as fate would have it, some sort of divine intervention took place. During this time, her father, Richard Bullock, had been sending cousin Ella Vera some support money for Anna and Alline. The money stopped coming suddenly, and Anna and Alline had to move back to the Nutbush area, where they moved in with Grandma Roxanna and Uncle Gill.

  This move took them out of Lauderdale County and put them back in Haywood County, and a totally different school district. Suddenly, Anna found herself a student at Carver High—where Harry went to school! How perfect was that?

  Being transplanted to Carver High signaled several positive changes in Anna’s young life. First of all, there was a principal there who took a liking to Anna. His name was Roy Bond. One day, Anna got into some sort of minor misbehavior at school, and she was sent to the principal’s office. Mr. Bond took one look at Anna Mae Bullock and told her that he expected “better” of her. He told her that such unbecoming behavior in school was something he would have expected from one of the other students—but not from her. This statement made Anna take a good hard look at herself. In her visit to Mr. Bond’s office, he gave told her that he realized she wasn’t like the other students—that he spotted something special in her. Maybe being different wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Instead of feeling that the principal had just punished her, she actually felt enlightened. She had always felt that she was awkward and didn’t fit in everywhere. Maybe that was actually a good thing, like having a special quality that others could see.

  It was common knowledge amongst the teaching staff that Anna was without parents at home. One by one, Anna sensed her teachers somehow looking out for her and giving her guid ance along the way. One day, the school librarian saw Anna walk by and stopped her. She told Anna that no young lady should go around with such bad posture, as to stick her stomach out. She informed her that she needed to hold her stomach in, and not to let people—especially boys—see her stomach protruding out. From that time on, Anna was always conscious of her posture and how she carried herself.

  Transplanted to Carver High School, Anna soon got involved in other activities as well. She not only joined the cheer-leading team, she also played girls’ basketball for the varsity team. She was so involved in her after-school activities that occasionally, instead of riding the bus home to Grandma Rox-anna’s house, she would stay in town and sleep over at the home of one of the other cheerleaders—Carolyn Bond (no direct relation of Mr. Bond—the principal). Anna also got involved in the school’s track team, where she was a fast and competitive runner. Anna might have lamented that her legs were so thin, but they were sure strong, and she was good on her feet.

  Carolyn Bond later recalled how energetic and well-liked Anna was in high school at Carver. She got involved in the school plays and all of the talent shows. At halftime during the basketball games, Anna would come out on the court as an entertainer and dance and sing along with recorded music.

  Anna and Carolyn were also in the school choir together. Tina loved to sing, and all of her classmates were startled to find what a great voice she possessed—even then. There weren’t many places for young black teenagers to hang out in those days. To give the students something organized to do, the school would host Saturday afternoon dance parties. Anna loved to attend these too.

  On the nights when Anna would come to stay with Carolyn, she noticed that Anna never had any clothes to change into after the events they would attend. Often Carolyn would loan Anna her own clothes. Anna was particularly in love with a certain pair of Carolyn’s jeans—because when she wore them she felt that they made her legs and hips look bigger.

  It was the weekend before school was about to start its next session when Anna and Alline went into Brownsville to walk around and check things out. They weren’t going to see or do anything special, so Anna wore one of her dresses, which she never particularly liked. According to her, the black guys in Brownsville would wear white shirts, skin-tight blue jeans, and the black girls they hung out with wore skirts and blouses, in the popular sort of 1950s’ rock & roll fashion.

  Sure enough, that was the night she ran straight into the man of her dreams—Harry Taylor. He was hanging out in downtown Brownsville with a bunch of his friends—in an area that was also nicknamed “The Hole.” Anna was overcome by a sense of shyness, and she just hung out for a while, hoping that she would catch his eye. Sure enough, he spotted her, came over to her, and started up a conversation. Sparks flew, and that was the beginning of Anna’s first love affair.

  When school went back into session, Anna and Harry became quite an item. With Anna’s arrival on the scene, Harry stopped seeing his former girlfriend, Antonia Stubbs. Skinny little Anna Mae had won his heart.

  On Wednesday nights, Harry would come over to the house with a friend of his named John Thankster. Harry and John would “officially” be coming over to pick up Anna and Alline to take them to the movies. That would appease Grandma Rox-anna. However, more times than not, they never had any intention of going to the movies at all. John and Alline would often go off to a local juke joint—a one-room club that served liquor and had a jukebox. Since neither of them was into drinking and smoking, Anna and Harry would stay in the car.

  On one of their late nights in John’s car, Anna and Harry made love in the backseat. Like her 1980s hit song, “Steamy Windows,” Anna Mae lost her virginity in a steamed up automobile, with Harry.

  As she was later to recount, “It hurt so bad, I think my earlobes were hurting. I was just dying, God. And, he wanted to do it two or three times! It was like poking an open wound. I could hardly walk afterwards.” (4)

  The dress that Anna wore that night in the backseat of the car was a mess. She thought she was being clever when she wadded it up and stuck it at the bottom of a trunk that was under her bed. It was just her luck that Grandma Roxanna decided it was time to do some spring cleaning the very next day. She confronted Anna with the dress, and Anna tried to tell her that she had just gotten her period, and that was what stained the garment. Grandma was far too wise for that tale. She told her granddaughter that if she wanted to get pregnant, that was her affair, since she had no mother or father to watch out for her. That was the last time for quite a while that Harry was allowed to come over and pick up Anna for a trip to “the movies.”

  Anna soon found out that Harry was not that interested in her, now that she had become one of his sexual conquests. He was a very popular young man in school, and not long afterwards, he began dating Anna’s friend Carolyn. However, that did not last long either. Soon, Harry graduated and joined the Air Force. Anna would still see him from time to time. One day she got on the school bus, and a friend informed her that Harry had suddenly been married. When he had gotten one of his other girlfriends, Theresa, pregnant, Theresa had pressured him into marrying her.

  Anna was heartbroken to hear this news. She had harbored the idea in her heart that she and Harry were going to end up together. However, it was not to be. Her entire life seemed to be falling apart around her. Her mother left her. Her father left her. Evelyn and cousin Margaret had been killed in a car crash. Alline was about to graduate from high school and she had plans to move up to Detroit to be with their father. Soon she would be gone too. Anna was sick of living with her grandmother, and now Harry was suddenly gone from her life. What was she going to do? She felt deserted and alone.

  Suddenly, she had an idea. She did have another grandmother who lived nearby. Anna would simply move in with her. As she recalls, she went over to Grandma Georgie’s, on the Poindexter farmland. Grandma Georgie already had her hands full, as she was raising the little girl that Evelyn had left behind after the car accident that killed her and Margaret. However, with resignation, she allowed Anna move into her house.

  Anna found that her old friends, the Poindexters, weren’t too happy about her living on their property and not working for them in some capacity. To elevate this problem, Anna went back to work for Connie and Guy Poindexter as a house
keeper and babysitter.

  In the summer of 1956, the Poindexters were going on a little vacation to Dallas, Texas. They took Anna along with them to take care of their child. While Anna was in Texas, Grandma Georgie suddenly died. When Anna went home for the funeral, she saw someone whom she hadn’t seen in ages—her mother.

  Recently, Zelma Bullock had been sending a little support money and clothing to her daughter. Slowly, the hurt and resentment that Anna felt toward her mother was subsiding. When she arrived at her grandmother’s funeral, she was startled at what she saw.

  There was Zelma, looking smart and sophisticated in a white suit with stylish shoulder pads and a pair of two-toned brown and white high heels. Zelma and her daughter had a long talk at Grandma Georgie’s funeral. Zelma told her that she wanted Anna to move to St. Louis with her.

  By this time, Alline had gone to Detroit to live with their father and hadn’t been happy with that situation. So, Alline was currently living in St. Louis with her Zelma. To Anna, moving to St. Louis to live with her mother and sister seemed like the perfect solution.

  Looking back at these times, Tina was later to recall, “I always wanted to leave the fields. Tennessee was fine. I loved sitting under a tree at the end of the day. But I knew there was more. That’s why I joined my mother in St. Louis. To me, that was the big city” (1).

  With that, Anna Mae Bullock packed her few belongings and off to St. Louis she went. It was “goodbye” to Nutbush, Henderson, and western Tennessee all together. She left there and never looked back.

  3

  ENTER IKE TURNER

  In 1956, sixteen-year-old Anna Mae Bullock arrived in St. Louis, Missouri. This truly was the biggest city she had ever lived in. St. Louis back then was a pretty sedate place, situated on the Mississippi River. However, across the river and the state line, lies East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis had a wild reputation for raucous clubs and nightlife.

  After living all of her life in a rural area, the move to St. Louis really opened up Anna’s eyes about a whole different way of life, where the music and the party seemed to never stop. According to Tina, she liked the Midwestern sophistication of St. Louis, but East St. Louis was rougher territory and reminded her of the South.

  Anna’s mother, Zelma, didn’t live all that wild a life in St. Louis. She worked as a maid, and she was living with a man named Alex Jupiter, who was a truck driver. Alline had landed a job working for a well-to-do black nightclub owner by the name of Leroy Tyus. She was making good money at his club, The Tail of the Cock.

  Alline would work during the week, and after work, she would often go out on dates with the men she met. However, on the weekends after work, Alline would go out with her girlfriends—nightclub hopping.

  Anna enrolled in Sumner High School in St. Louis. It was an all-black school, but her classmates were a different class of people than she was used to being with. They were the sons and daughters of doctors and other professional black people. She felt conspicuously lower class than them, like a backwoods country cousin who suddenly arrived in the big city.

  Little Anna was amazed at the transformation that had occurred in Alline since she had last seen her. Her older sister now dressed in a classy and stylish fashion. She wore high heels and nylons, and Tina recalls one particular wool coat with velvet stripes down it that Alline owned. Alline didn’t so much wear the coat—she draped it over shoulders, so that she could make sweeping entrances wherever she went.

  One particular Saturday night, Alline invited Anna to accompany she and her girlfriends on one of their club-hopping excursions. Zelma consented, even though it was kind of doubtful as to whether or not sixteen-year-old Anna could successfully masquerade as a twenty-one-year-old woman to even be admitted to the clubs.

  Anna dressed up in some of Alline’s clothes and applied lipstick and make-up to her young face, in an attempt to look more womanly. Alline announced to Anna that on that particular evening, they were going to go see a popular local band that had a reputation for creating the hottest sound in all of St. Louis. The band was called Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm. In Anna’s mind, it sounded like an exciting evening, whatever was on the agenda.

  The Kings of Rhythm were so successful in the area, in fact, that they would play at Club D’Lisa in St. Louis, Missouri, until that place closed for the evening, and then they would go across the river to East St. Louis, and from 2 A.M. they would play at the Club Manhattan—late into the night.

  Alline announced to her little sister Anna that this particular evening, the plan was to head straight across the Mississippi River to Club Manhattan. It sounded exciting, and slightly taboo. Well, as planned, Anna’s make-up job, and Alline’s more womanly clothes on her, made her look old enough to be admitted to the nightclub.

  The Club Manhattan was every bit the hot spot it was reputed to be, and it reminded Anna of some of the clubs she had seen in “The Hole” areas of Ripley or Brownsville. The club seated about 250 people, and the performing stage was in the center of the room surrounded by tables and chairs. Tina remembers, on one wall of the club was a painting of Ike Turner & the Kings of Rhythm.

  Anna wasn’t all that impressed so far. The Kings of Rhythm were already on stage, playing a warm-up set before the celebrity bandleader made his entrance. She quietly sat with Alline and her friends and waited for something to happen. And, happen it did. In walked the popular Ike Turner, and there seemed to be instant waves of excitement throughout the club.

  “Hey, Ike,” someone in the crowd would call out to him. He would shake several hands and take another few steps. “Ike, how you doing?” someone else would holler out. Anna was witnessing for the first time what it was like when a celebrity enters the room. Somehow, all eyes seemed to be on Ike Turner.

  Anna also noted that the audience was filled with women who obviously came to see this local “sex symbol.” Right then and there, Anna recalls noting to herself that although she found Ike interesting to watch, he was decidedly not the kind of man she was attracted to—in the least.

  She later recounted, “What an immaculate-looking black man. He wasn’t my type, though—not at all. His teeth seemed wrong, and his hairstyle, too—a process thing with waves that lay right down on his forehead. It looked like a wig that had been glued on. When he came closer, I thought, ‘God, he’s ugly’ ” (4).

  However, once he hit the stage and started playing his guitar, he somehow turned on the charisma. Suddenly the whole club seemed to be on its feet, dancing and swaying and partying along to the music. Tina recalls that she nearly went into a trance listening to the music that night. Although she didn’t like him physically, there was something about the way he moved on stage and the energy he exuded that was mesmerizing.

  Ike Turner was someone who had been working on his music and his sexual charisma for a long time. He had scored some minor successes in the record business, but he was having trouble keeping featured singers in his band. It seemed that every time he had a hit recording on the market, the singer would up and leave with dreams of solo stardom. Up to this point, his biggest hit was a song called “Rocket 88,” but the song was released under the name of Jackie Brenston & The Delta Cats. However, Ike Turner had his eye on the big time. One of these days he was going to find a singer to stick with the band and the chemistry would click. However, for the time being, he was a huge star on the St. Louis nightclub circuit.

  Born Izear Luster Turner Jr. on November 5, 1931, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, his father was a Baptist minister, and his mother, Beatrice, was a seamstress. Beatrice nicknamed him “Sonny,” and it was a name that she called him all of his life. His only sibling was his sister, Lee Ethel, who was ten years older than him.

  When he was a young boy, Ike too was left fatherless. Unlike Anna’s father, who just up and moved away, Ike’s dad died following a severe beating. It seemed that Ike Sr. had been doing more than “ministering” to the wife of a local white resident. Ike still recalls the day an angry gang
of white men—led by the woman’s husband—came to the Turner house and dragged Ike Sr. out of his house in front of his wife and children. Hours later he was dumped back onto his property, beaten and full of holes. When a local white hospital would not admit him to their facility, he was treated in a special tent that was put up in the Turner front yard. Although his father lived another three years, he never left the bed on which he was treated.

  Ike Turner started his musical career at an early age. He started his sex life even earlier. According to him, “I started [having] sex when I was six years old. Yes, I did. The woman was forty-five or fifty years old; her name was Miss Boozie. She used to put me on top of her and show me how to move. . . . Well, today they call it ‘child molesting.’ To me, I was just having fun” (13).

  His first job was in the Alcazar Hotel, in downtown Clarksdale. He went from operating the elevator in the hotel to working at radio station WROX, which was located in that same building. Ike recalls, “I got a job driving the elevator in the Alcazar, and the radio station was on the second floor. It was very exciting to me, a radio station. I’d run up to the second floor and look through the window at the guy spinning records. He saw me and told me to come in and showed me how to ‘hold a record.’ I’d sit there and hold it until the one playing stopped, then I’d turn a knob and the one I was holding would play. Next thing I know, he was going across the street for coffee and leaving me in there alone. I was only eight. That was the beginning of my thing with music” (14).

  As a kid, he was able to hang out in one of the local nightspots because the mother of his friend Raymond Hill owned it. Regular entertainers at the club included guitarist Robert Nighthawk and harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson.

  Ike’s love affair with music continued when he suddenly became fascinated with the idea of learning to play the piano. “When you’re a kid, seeing a piano in church, you don’t notice it. I didn’t,” says Ike. “Then one day I was on my way home out of school, and we passed by [childhood friend] Ernest Lane’s daddy’s house. I heard this music! Pinetop Perkins was banging the heck out of a piano! Me and Lane started looking through the window at him, and next thing you know, we’re inside the house at the end of the piano looking at him. I ran home and told my mama ‘Mama, I want a piano!’ She told me, ‘Pass the third grade and bring me a good report card—I’ll get you one.’ When I came home from school with that report card, there was that durn piano” (14).