Tina Turner Is Having the Time of Her Life

When Turner was with Ike, she had no space of her own. She changed the towels in the bathroom once, and he screamed at her. She hid her Buddhist prayer cabinet in a spare room, and when he discovered it, he ordered it out of the house. One day she returned home from a hospital stay to find that he had totally remodeled the place in his vulgar style. Thirty years later, Mike Wallace visited Anna Fleur, Turner’s villa in the south of France, and he asked her: “Do you feel like you deserve all this?” To which she replied: “I deserve more.”

Now she has the Chateau Algonquin, where she is in total control of her physical surroundings, and she revels in them. The only hitch is that she does not actually own the chateau. Her landlord, Kaspar, lives in her attic and controls the boathouse, which stands un-Tina-fied at the shore of the lake.

She led me on a tour of the grounds, holding my arm in hers, and as we paused beneath her covered patio, she gazed wistfully at the boathouse. “I’m looking forward to decorating that,” she said.

‘I just kept going’

Tina Turner has become a symbol of so many things — sex appeal, resilience, empowerment — that she cannot quite relate to. She was never trying to be sexy onstage; she was sweating through her clothes to sell her songs. And the idea of connecting her life to the feminist movement or recasting it through #MeToo feels alien to her. “I identify only with my life,” she said. While everyone was making her into a symbol, “I was busy doing it. Doing the work.”

The strength of her voice, and the power of her story, have seemed to build an almost invincible persona, but it’s just a persona. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she said. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.” She gestured around her. “This came.”

When Turner got tired of talking about herself, I left her. I returned the following afternoon to find her transformed: wig styled, lips painted red, eyes sparkling. “That was Anna Mae yesterday,” she told me. “Here’s Tina.”

Turner was having her photo taken that day. A makeshift studio had been erected on her lawn. She had draped herself in luxury accessories, which she listed aloud: Cartier. Bulgari. And “who’s the one with the red bottoms, darling?” Louboutin.