Aye, Tina!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Tina Turner is too sick to sing. Anemia has sapped the strength she needs to sell her raw-meat music. She can't go on. She must go on; Ike is there, all silky unspoken threat, to see that she fulfills her obligation to the man who found her, nursed her to stardom, gave her her name. He only wants her to sing the hit he has written for her, A Fool in Love ("You can't understand/ Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man"). So, as she stands mute and trembling on the stage of the Apollo Theatre in 1965, Ike walks up to her and kisses her on the cheek. Softly. It's very sweet and utterly false -- pure show biz. It is also a warning: a kiss that could be a kick. Tears rushing down her face, Tina wails the song's first word. It is "Woe," and it sounds , like a moan from beneath the earth, from any woman who can't understand why her man treats her like he does.

There are grislier scenes in What's Love Got to Do with It, the drama based on Turner's autobiography, I, Tina. Ike beating Tina. Ike kicking Tina. Ike choking Tina while he rapes her. Ike in the ambulance with Tina after her suicide attempt, whispering, "If you don't make it, I'll kill you." But none is more harrowing than the moment of Ike's killer kiss. It shows how tender a man's domination can seem and how a woman, prodded by terror and responsibility, can see no option except acceding to his abuse. The happy ending -- escape from his thrall, sanity restored, a career of her own -- comes later.

Directed by Brian Gibson and starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Laurence Fishburne as Ike, What's Love Got to Do with It is no movie masterpiece. The picture's canvas is so broad (40 years), and its depiction of Ike's brutality so encyclopedic, that it sometimes plays like a Greatest Hits package in which all the songs sound alike. But the film will be a crowd pleaser and a curative because Tina Turner has lent it the voltage of her star presence and the joltage of her awful, exemplary life. The concert stage was where she could release, through her primal art, all the anguish inside her. It was also the cage Ike kept her in, shackled by duty, love and fear. Tina had a right to sing the blues.

So, as she launches an album of old and new songs and opens a 53-city U.S. tour to an ecstatic house in Reno, Nevada, Tina is in no hurry to see the film of her life. "Do you think I want to see Ike Turner hit somebody again?" she asks. "It's not enough that I was hit. Now I have to watch him hit somebody else? I don't need to see this movie, 'cause I saw it already. I lived it."

Like many abused women, Turner was embarrassed by what she had endured. "No one knew," she says. "It was ugly. I was ashamed. Finally I wrote I, Tina to stop people from talking to me about Ike Turner." The book had a greater impact than she suspected. "People have said, 'You've inspired me. I've cleaned up my life.' Some dance-hall girls have gone back and become nurses. A man came up to me in the Atlanta airport and said, 'I want to tell you that I read your book, and I will never beat my wife again.' " But reliving the Ike years, even from the bright side, was an ordeal to this soul survivor. "And now when the noise from the book calms down," she says ruefully, "here comes the movie."

And here, like a Freddy Krueger who won't stay down, comes Ike Turner, feeling frisky after two years in jail on a cocaine rap and ready for his 15 fresh minutes of notoriety. When TIME called to request an interview with Ike, his manager immediately asked how much Ike would be paid for it. (Nothing.) Disney, Ike says later, paid him $45,000 in exchange for his signing a waiver not to sue over the film's portrayal of him.

"I hear they murdered me in the movie," says Ike, 61, from his home in Santa Monica, California. His battering of Tina was, of course, her fault. "Each time I hit her it was because of her attitude," he says without any evident irony. "She was always looking sad, and I can't stand people looking sad. Instead of telling me what was wrong, she'd ball it all up inside of her, and then she'd look right over me, and I can't stand that, so I'd slap the shit out of her." Did he ever kick her? "Hell no," he says. Choke her? "Maybe. I don't want to say I didn't." And what about cheating on Tina? "As far as the stuff with other women and partying, well, yeah, I did it. We didn't have AIDS then." Told that movie audiences cheer when Tina finally fights back at her oppressor, Ike waxes philosophical. "I understand it," he says. "When I was a kid, I loved Lena Horne. And I would have hated it if I thought somebody was abusing her."

What Ike hates now is the thought of one last career opportunity slipping by. In his way, he is as bruised by her solo success as she was by his fists. So, astonishingly and naturally, he wants to be Tina's opening act: "Just my band and hers. We wouldn't even have to see each other."

No chance, Ike. Tina is pleased to enjoy the sweet life in Cologne, Germany, with her companion, record exec Erwin Bach, who is 17 years younger than she. "He's a very strong young man," she says. "I like the force of a strong man, but it doesn't mean I'm going to allow another man to beat me up. Strength is not always ugly." And she likes showing fans like those in Reno that she is still in great, size-8 form. "They are there for me," she says, "and I am there for them." She realizes that a diva's life span is limited. "This is my 54th year. I watched Bette Davis until she almost dropped right there on the screen. But nobody can tell me that a 75-year-old woman can stand on the stage and sing Steamy Windows."

Now and forever, rock's ageless wonder declines the honor of Ike's company. "I gave all those years," she says. "Sixteen years. I fulfilled my commitment. He took all the money. He took all the property. I don't need to see Ike Turner anymore. My next years are for me. He must live his own life now. And I must live mine."

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/ Reno