Tina Turner spent a marriage of abuse and survival together with Ike Turner, but after that she experienced a loving renaissance at the hands of her future second husband Erwin Bach, with whom she began an affair in the 1980s. Bach is said to have treated the queen of Rock and Roll like a princess from the moment she met her until her sad end this Wednesday, and she even donated a kidney to save her life.
Turner and Bach were engaged for 27 years and then they were married for another decade until the sad outcome. Bach was commissioned to welcome the artist and that day marked them for the rest of their lives. The singer had a crush on this executive from the European record label EMI the day she met him in 1985, as she recounted in her documentary: “The day I met Erwin for the first time, at an airport in Germany, I should have been too tired about my flight, too preoccupied with thoughts of my concert tour, ‘but I noticed it and instantly felt an emotional connection.
The couple has been quite discreet about their relationship, but on more than one occasion they have told anecdotes and situations that show how close they have been all these years. When Turner and Bach met, he was 30 and Turner was 47. After nearly three decades together, the wedding came as a surprise. In 2000, Turner and Bach played down wedding talk and seemed content with their laid-back European lifestyle, as Turner gave up living in the United States to be with her love in Switzerland.
After 27 years together, the couple married in a civil ceremony in Switzerland, when Turner was 73. Oprah Winfrey, Giorgio Armani and David Bowie were among the meager 120 guests at the party days later that featured a traditional Buddhist water blessing ritual, a nod to the faith Turner had been practicing since the 1970s.
In Turner’s memoir My Love Story, the singer explained that she had spent very difficult years dealing with illnesses that raised fears for her health. She suffered a stroke just three weeks after her wedding to Bach, and in 2016 was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. After experiencing the unpleasant side effects of the treatment, Turner turned to homeopathic remedies, which only made her condition worse. Before long, she was faced with total kidney failure.
“The consequences of my ignorance ended up being a matter of life and death,” he wrote. “In this terrible moment of guilt and self-recrimination, I learned something wonderful about Erwin. He never held me accountable for my mistake. Instead, he was loyal, kind and understanding, and was determined to get me through it all with my life.” It was then that Bach donated one of his kidneys to his wife. The operation took place in April 2017, and while Turner still experienced mild symptoms, it gave him a lot of quality of life in his later years.
