Farewell to the Queen of Rock & Roll

ΤΙΝΑ TURNER 1939-2023 | A FIERY, UNDENIABLE TALENT, THE LEGENDARY SINGER ESCAPED AN ABUSIVE MARRIAGE AND SOARED TO SUPERSTARDOM

- TOM GLIATTO

Tina Turner was a woman of many appetites. “She loved to shop, and she loved clothes,” says her friend Bob Mackie, the designer who for decades created dresses that shaped the singer’s image as a sizzling priestess of pleasure. “She loved to eat. She loved to cook. She loved to have a nice cocktail or a glass of champagne.” At one point, he recalls, “she was rehearsing and nervous—she had put on just a few pounds. She said, ‘Well, I’ve got to stop eating those Butterfingers.’ I told her, ‘Oh, Tina, you look like you’ve lost weight.’ And she looked over to her assistant. ‘Rhonda,’ she said, ‘bring me another Butterfinger.’”

But Turner’s extraordinary life was driven by far greater hungers—for music, adulation, survival, love, reinvention, respect—and audiences in turn craved the excitement, joy and sense of authenticity she generated as the Queen of Rock and Roll. “I didn’t act my life, I lived it,” she told Rolling Stone in 1986. “I am Tina Turner.”