Why Tina Turner waited 23 years to marry Erwin Bach

Tina Turner is pictured here with her second husband Erwin Bach in 1999. The pair met at an airport 27 years ago. Photo / Getty Images

Tina Turner waited 23 years to accept her second husband Erwin Bach’s proposal.

The late Private Dancer singer first met the German music producer, 67, in 1985, seven years after she finalised her divorce from abusive Ike Turner, who subjected her to beatings, mental torture and sex she said felt like rape.

She said in her tell-all memoir My Love Story about the relationship leaving her so traumatised she didn’t accept Bach’s first proposal: “More than anything, I needed to feel that Erwin loved me. And he did. He really did.

“In 1989, when I was about to turn 50, he proposed. But I wasn’t certain how I felt about marriage. Marriage can change things and, in my experience, not always for the better.”

Turner added in her book she spent the next few years living with Bach in Cologne and in a house she bought in the South of France, and she followed him in 1995 when he was asked to run the EMI office in Switzerland.

She said: “We moved into an old-fashioned villa on Lake Zurich, called the Château Algonquin… I felt good. I’d never smoked or taken drugs. I was still in good shape after 50 years of intensive stage workouts. I still looked pretty good, too: in 2013, German Vogue asked me to be on its cover.

Tina Turner and her husband Erwin Bach attend the Giorgio Armani Prive Haute Couture Fall Winter 2018/2019 show as part of Paris Fashion Week. Photo / Getty Images

“I think I can safely say that, at 73, I was the oldest ‘cover girl’ in Vogue’s history at that point.”

Turner said Bach had proposed again in 2012 and this time she “answered with an empathetic ‘Yes!’”

She added: “It was a commitment that didn’t come easily to me, but I knew he was the love of my life.”

Bach was by Turner’s side when she died from natural causes on May 24 at their 10-building, $76 million (NZ$126 million) compound in Switzerland, and he nursed her through a stroke that hit her the year they married in 2013.

He also donated one of his kidneys to the What’s Love Got to Do With It star in a life-saving transplant operation after she had spent years battling kidney issues.