Why Tina Turner was the Queen of Midlife Reinvention

Turner achieved her chrysalis-like breakout as a solo artist with the landmark Private Dancer album in 1984 at the age of 44, when most women usually find themselves in the show-businesses dumpster. Her transformation — personally, professionally, physically and spiritually — dwarfed anything she had achieved in her younger years, and as she subverted the concepts of growing older, she emerged as one of the sexiest and most vital people on the scene.

She might as well have retitled her 1984 chart-topper “What’s Age Got to Do with It?”

Seeing her live in Cincinnati on her Private Dancer tour of 1985 was nothing short of jaw-dropping.  She was nearly 46 years old, fit as any Olympic athlete, and dancing like a hellcat in heels, no less, tearing up the stage with the energy and abandon of a woman half her age. She was the dancing, glowing, roof-shaking definition of what healthy maturity could look like, and she sang songs that spoke to her own story — a woman reinventing herself, realizing her own power, and making no apologies about any of it.

 “Once in a great while, a special champion comes along, a Joe Louis, a Jose Capablanca, a Joe DiMaggio, someone in whose hands the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself … the only one in his class,” Chris Chase of the New York Times wrote when Elvis Presley played Madison Square Garden in 1972.

Turner performing at The Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 22, 1985.

Ron Pownall/Getty Images

That’s what it was like to witness the majesty of Tina Turner at the height of her reign. And yet she was not elusive, not towering over her audience. I was a bit more than a decade younger, and filled with clammy dread about what I saw as my descent into middle-age. Like most of the enthralled audience, I was awed by her vocal and personal power, and watching her strut that amphitheater stage with hard-won confidence and the authority of a mama lion — that wild, defiant and wiggy mane adding to the image — I thought, “Damn! If this woman is hitting on 50, why am I worried about 40?” And when she laughed that delicious, glorious cackle of pure joy, the joke was on everybody who said she couldn’t do it. She had recharged her soul, and also our own.

Her glory was part of her making peace with her past, cutting the chains of negativity with Ike, with her mother, and herself. As she wrote in her Happiness book, “Even though I eventually became nearly as famous for my legs as for my talent, I still couldn’t see my own beauty.” It was Buddhism that helped her find herself, and recognize that “adversity isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” as she told me. It also helped her define her mission: “Giving hope to others so they can become happy, too. Happy people are strong, but strong people aren’t necessarily happy. From the spiritual view, I say that I’ve ‘changed poison into medicine’ and transformed the difficulties in my life to realize my dreams.”

Practicing that philosophy “allowed me to find a way around every obstacle.” she continued. And she didn’t shy away from celebrating her 80th birthday.

“I’ve definitely grown happier as I’ve aged,” she said. “Age and experience are priceless. There is a change in perception, a broadening, that comes with aging, a greater appreciation for simple things. As I’ve matured, age has helped me to put things in perspective, and to have even greater patience and compassion for others.”

As she faced her own mortality, Turner said she cherished “every moment of my life,” and looked at her health challenges as valuable reminders that “some of the most important lessons in life come to us through difficult times, not through ease, and are what make us stronger, wiser and happier.”

That’s advice worth remembering from “The Best,” at any stage of life.