6
Precarious Partnerships
The Fine Line Between
Harmony and Friction
Given the propensity of tortured artists to clash with one another, it’s easy to imagine what happens when the careers of two artists become immutably tied together. Such ventures often result in the kind of friction that, despite damaging relationships, becomes the very thing that fuels the art.
While collaboration is as old as art itself, creative partnerships are a relatively new concept. In the 1890s, the vaudeville slapstickers Weber and Fields became two of the first performers to market themselves successfully as a comic duo. Such duos emerged as one of the bedrock formulas of twentieth-century comedy. Laurel and Hardy, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello—each of these teams achieved a level of success that eclipsed the performers within them. Among these interminably tied comic couplings, one Hollywood duo stands out as an exception to the paragons of longevity. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who built their careers as a comedy team in nightclubs, in movies, and on radio and television, managed to effectively break away from each other, concluding a relatively short ten-year run after vicious animosity tore them apart. In 1956, after five years at Paramount Pictures, Dean had grown tired of playing the sterile straight man to Jerry’s wacky, but far more interesting, characters. He was being outshined by Jerry’s bucktoothed buffoonery, and he knew it. However, when LOOK magazine ran a cover story on Martin and Lewis—but cropped Dean out of the picture—Dean realized he’d had enough. After telling Jerry, “To me, you’re nothing but a fucking dollar sign,” Dean ended the partnership. It was one of the most famously contentious breakups in showbiz history, and it would be another thirty-three years before the two reunited, at the Bally’s Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, for one final performance.
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
In more recent decades, the songwriting collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney has stood as one of the defining examples of creative friction and its potential to produce harmonious results. With distinctly different styles, the two songwriters often did not see eye-to-eye on the direction of a song. And yet both their styles proved to be correct. It wasn’t John’s raw edge or Paul’s melodic sensibilities that made the Beatles more than the sum of their disjointed parts. It was the combination of the two.
As we’ll see with the following case studies, Lennon-McCartney–type friction is a common element in creative partnerships, which, like marriages, exist for better or worse.
(1836–1911/1842–1900)
Abstract: The operatic odd couple
Birth names: William Schwenck Gilbert/Arthur Seymour Sullivan
Birthplace: London, England
Co-venture: The Savoy Operas
Demons: Fantasy and reality
“You say that in serious opera you must, more or less, sacrifice yourself. I say that this is just what I have been doing in all our joint pieces.”
—Sullivan in a letter to Gilbert, 1889
Musical theater, like sex, will always suffer under the weight of overanalysis. How much would we enjoy the genre if we were to stop and think about the sheer absurdity of finger-snapping gang members in New York City, or singing Mormons in northern Uganda, or twirling hippies at a war protest? (Okay, the hippie one is believable.) The fact is, the success of musical theater is rooted in our ability to accept the ridiculous, and our familiarity with that ridiculousness is rooted in the contemptuous relationship between W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose anomalous mixture of logic and whimsy helped lay the groundwork for the conventions of the format.
Back in the 1850s, British theater was about as well respected as British cuisine. Although Blighty audiences did have a few sophisticated options—overproduced Shakespeare tragedies, for instance—most of what took place on West End stages was the lower ends of the low brow. There were racy burlesques, raunchy farces, and poorly translated French operettas galore, but there was not a whole lot of middle ground, to say nothing of family-friendly fare. W. S. Gilbert, a former barrister who got his start writing illustrated comic poems for humor magazines, thought stage comedy should aim higher. His methodical mind, pounded into submission by years of legal training, did not take kindly to the kind of anarchistic, pie-in-the-face-style wackiness that ruled the day. Comic characters, he thought, should not be aware of their own absurdity, but rather they should be bound by the absurd as if it were completely logical. His views on naturalistic theater were particularly progressive considering that, at the time, Ibsen had yet to establish himself and G. B. Shaw was still a schoolboy. When he began working on comic operas at John Hollingshead’s Gaiety Theatre, Gilbert quickly established himself as one of the top librettists in the country. The problem was that his middlebrow aims were too highbrow. He was too intellectual for his own good.
Fortunately, fate intervened. When Hollingshead needed an operatic extravaganza for the Christmas season of 1871, he teamed up Gilbert with the young songsmith Arthur Sullivan, a rising star among orchestral composers. That first collaboration, Thespis, would be billed as Sullivan and Gilbert, a credit order that would soon switch. Sullivan may have been the bigger name, but Gilbert was the bigger personality. A tall, perpetually scowling control freak, he was already thirty-five years old when he met the twenty-nine-year-old Sullivan, who, for the most part, avoided conflict. If all signs pointed to the fact that the duo would be better off without each other, Gilbert and Sullivan were nevertheless pulled together by a shared hope: They both wanted to use comic opera as a stepping stone to more serious work. Sullivan had dreams of writing a weighty spectacle in the vein of Verdi or Wagner. Gilbert looked forward to the day when he would be considered a master dramatist. Still, with commercial concerns to consider, they were willing to collaborate—for the time being—on fluffy material that each felt was beneath his potential.
What neither expected, however, was to hit upon a theatrical formula that would make them international sensations, promulgated by the runaway success of their fourth musical collaboration, H.M.S. Pinafore, a boy-meets-girl satire of the British Navy under Queen Victoria. Despite The Daily Telegraph’s assessment that the play was “a frothy production destined soon to subside into nothingness,” Pinafore was a smash. Within six months, it made its way stateside, premiering in Boston and then spreading to cities across the country. Gilbert and Sullivan staged their first authorized production in November 1879, but by then some 150 pirated productions had already been mounted. It was so popular that some cities had multiple productions, by multiple theater companies, running in tandem. The widespread unauthorized productions of the operetta inspired the team’s next collaboration, The Pirates of Penzance.
Pirates was another monster hit for Gilbert and Sullivan, but behind the scenes, theater’s newest dynamic duo were two bickering opponents who watched in frustration as their names became inexorably intertwined. The now-famous Savoy Theatre was built around their successful partnership, and before long, hundreds of jobs depended on the continued solvency of the Gilbert and Sullivan brand. And yet the two of them could not even agree on subject matter. Sullivan, a monocle-wearing fop, enjoyed the finer things in life, and he resented Gilbert’s middlebrow story lines, which essentially centered on poking fun at the upper classes. The duo had such trouble getting along that they often needed third-party mediation to work out their differences. It’s all one can do to imagine that they wrote their famous “What never? Well, hardly ever” bit while ripping out each other’s mutton chops.
For the most part, the partnership was kept functional by Gilbert’s dominating personality, which is to say that Gilbert usually got his way. It was the kind of working relationship that hinged upon one man’s ability to take another man’s crap. In later years, though, Sullivan became more determined to throw off the yoke and pursue his dream of writing a serious opera.
“I have lost the liking for writing comic opera,” he wrote to Gilbert. What he really lost was the liking for being subservient to his partner, who, despite his obtuseness, understood that his words needed Sullivan’s music. In a rare display of humility, Gilbert attempted to appease Sullivan, assuring him that the two could collaborate “as master and master—not master and servant.” But in 1894, when Gilbert readied his latest story, His Excellency, Sullivan refused to score it after the two men disagreed over casting. The partnership, after twenty-five years and fourteen comic operas, came to an end. His Excellency, for what it’s worth, later opened to mixed reviews. Critics loved Gilbert’s libretto but hated F. Osmond Carr’s score.
In 1904, four years after Arthur Sullivan passed away, the London Times wrote an article that criticized the deteriorating quality of the operas being produced at the Savoy Theatre. W. S. Gilbert, now in his mid-sixties, quickly fired off a letter to the editor, stating what he believed to be the true cause of the decline. “Savoy Opera was snuffed out by the deplorable death of my distinguished collaborator, Sir Arthur Sullivan,” he wrote. “When that event occurred, I saw no one with whom I felt that I could work with satisfaction and success.” Perhaps the famously stubborn librettist was just being diplomatic, or maybe he had finally accepted that his legacy would be forever tied to that of his late associate. Either way, the blustery partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan lives on in the belting and gamboling of modern musical theater. For escapists who still gush in excitement over the latest Broadway extravaganza, musical theater offers an irresistible marriage of logic and absurdity. For the duo who started it all, however, it was just a marriage of convenience. 
(1911–1989/1917–1986)
Abstract: The out-of-touch-with-reality show
Birth names: Lucille Désirée Ball/Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III
Birthplaces: Jamestown, New York, USA/Santiago de Cuba, Cuba
Co-venture: I Love Lucy
Demons: Marriage and infidelity
“Friends gave our marriage six months; me, I gave it a week.”
—Lucille Ball, from her autobiography, 1996
Sometimes the chocolates tumble down the conveyor belt faster than we can wrap them. That famous scene in which Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, decked out in baker hats, botch their first day of work in a candy factory stands as the perfect metaphor for those times when we have simply bitten off more than we can chew. It’s also an apt analogy for the mutually abusive relationship between Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the power couple behind Desilu Studios and the landmark sitcom I Love Lucy. For two dominating personalities, the task of trying to tame each other ultimately became more than they could handle.
Lucille Ball never envisioned that she would one day become America’s screwball sweetheart. Back in the 1930s, the former Hattie Carnegie fashion model aspired to Hollywood glamour under the old studio system, sporting platinum-blonde locks as a would-be Harlow for RKO Pictures. It was on the set of the 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance that she met Desi Arnaz, a Cuban-born bandleader and Broadway actor who had just arrived in Hollywood.
On their first date, Lucille and Desi instantly connected over parallel stories of family tragedy. Desi told Lucille about how his father was once the mayor of Santiago, in Cuba. After the Cuban revolution of 1933, the government collapsed, and the elder Arnaz went into exile in the United States. Desi followed when he was seventeen, only to find his father living in a rat-infested warehouse. As it happened, Lucille experienced an eerily similar incident in her past. When she was fifteen, her grandfather Fred, who raised her, was supervising a target-shooting game at Lucille’s childhood home near Jamestown, New York. A neighborhood boy was accidentally shot and paralyzed on the property, and Fred was sued for negligence by the boy’s family. The Balls were wiped out. If ever there were a bittersweet first-date bonding moment, it was this one.
Lucille and Desi were kindred victims, refugees of familial ruin who had seen their father figures reduced to nothing through external circumstances. Both were angry at the unjust world that let it happen, and both were determined to vindicate their family names through a career in Hollywood.
But it was more than just bitterness that ignited the couple’s passions. A spark-inducing physical attraction was apparent from the beginning, when Lucille fell in love with Desi “wham, bang!” as she put it. Lucille and Desi, in their first few months together, were joined at the hip and everywhere else, making out at nightclubs and generally pushing the bounds of acceptable PDA. Yes, they were that couple.
And when that couple eloped in 1940, it was a personal turning point for Lucille. Driven and ambitious, the fiery ginger had spent her youth courting powerful, usually much older men who could help her career. Desi was six years her junior and lower on the showbiz ladder—not her usual type to say the least. But he was such a commanding and charismatic force that Lucille resolved, for the first time in her life, to play second fiddle. Their plan was simple: Desi was going to take over Hollywood, and Lucille would help.
Unfortunately, life had other plans for the couple. By the end of the 1940s, Lucille was still the breadwinner, with a lucrative career as a B-movie queen. She had also begun to find her comedic chops, working as a voice actress on the CBS radio program My Favorite Husband. Desi, meanwhile, continued to struggle as a part-time nightclub performer and full-time hedonist. He drank heavily, gambled compulsively, and philandered like a postapocalyptic survivor trying to repopulate the species. Desi hated being second best. He had come to Hollywood to conquer but found himself in the shadow of a more successful wife. As for the love-blinded Lucille, she convinced herself that Desi’s transgressions were not a symptom of character flaws but a consequence of his profession. His gigs as a bandleader kept him on the road for months at a time, gallivanting with, of all people, musicians. If she could just keep the guy at home, she knew he would behave himself.
By the beginning of the 1950s, the studio system that had been Lucille’s primary source of revenue was under threat. Fewer Americans were going to the theater, and the movie industry was growing increasingly anxious over its new competition: television. So when CBS executives approached Lucille with an offer to star in a TV version of My Favorite Husband, the actress was understandably hesitant. Television was the enemy, after all, and if the show failed, her movie career might not recover. That was when it struck her that she could parlay the series into an opportunity to domesticate her promiscuous consort. Of course, she knew executives would be reluctant to cast Desi as her TV husband—his broken English did not exactly scream all-American man—but Lucille stood her ground. She was tired of watching her marriage decay at the seams, and her only hope was to merge Desi’s professional world with hers. She told producers flat out: Cast Desi or no deal.
After the requisite hemming and hawing, CBS agreed, and the show was retooled as I Love Lucy, a comedy about the all-American couple with a Latin twist. The Ricardos, however, were less a fictionalized version of Lucille and Desi than an act of Bizzaro World wish fulfillment. In the show, Ricky was the successful showman while his wife, Lucy, was the antic-prone screwball with dreams of breaking into the business. This was Lucille and Desi as they had always wanted to be.
Of course, if you’ve seen one wacky couple, you’ve seen them all, and the real innovation of I Love Lucy was not its premise but its execution. Lucille and Desi used their combined experience on radio, Broadway, and in movies to create a completely novel format for a medium that was still trying to figure out its potential. In the days before video, TV was largely a point-and-shoot business. Episodes were broadcast live, one time, and never seen again. But Desi had the idea to shoot Lucy on 35 mm film, in sequence, from multiple angles—staging the show like a play, in front of a live audience, and broadcasting it later. CBS balked at the idea. Film was expensive, and what would the network have to gain from it? It was only after Lucy and Desi agreed to a take a reduced salary that the network gave in. For evidence of just how tremendously Desi’s gamble paid off, watch old footage of I Love Lucy in comparison to other fuzzy-pictured specimens of early television. Lucy is crisp, dynamic, and not all that different from sitcoms today. Moreover, its film-based genesis gave it a shelf life that lasted far beyond its original airdate, making Lucy and Desi pioneers of a concept that proved endlessly lucrative—the rerun.
I Love Lucy, with its three-camera, live-audience setup, turned sitcoms into a television mainstay. Admittedly, viewing habits have changed since Lucy and Ethel got bombarded at that chocolate factory. Audiences today might be more likely to watch a reality show set in the high-stakes world of candy manufacturing. But listen carefully and you will still hear the familiar sound of laugh tracks under the obnoxious din of such unscripted fare. Sitcoms are here to stay, even if the real-life relationship between Lucille and Desi was not so durable. In the end, the Ricardos were a fantasy, created by two dominant personalities who wanted, more than anything, to be the Ricardos. When they finally went off the air, in 1957, the fantasy ended. Lucille and Desi divorced less than three years later.
(1948–2004/1951–2001)
Abstract: Gabba gabba hate
Birth names: John William Cummings/Jeffry Ross Hyman
Birthplace: Queens, New York, USA
Co-venture: The Ramones
Demons: Order and chaos
“We didn’t agree on anything. Joey was a thorn in my side.”
—Johnny Ramone in his final interview, Spin magazine, 2004
In the spring of 1974, Richard Nixon’s presidency wasn’t the only thing that needed saving. Rock music was in some serious trouble as well. The genre was pushing twenty, and the peppy simplicity championed by early practitioners such as Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly had given way to self-indulgent excess. Guitar solos could last into the night. Concept albums were overproduced to the point of psychedelic futility. Even Don McLean lamented Holly’s death as the end of a simpler era, but then he didn’t seem to notice that “American Pie” was almost nine minutes long. Something had to be done.
Enter John Cummings, a cranky, aggressive, bowl-haired delinquent from the Forest Hills section of Queens. Born in 1948, John was part of the first generation to grow up with rock ’n’ roll, and he had come to believe that the meandering jams of Deep Purple and the Grateful Dead had strayed too far from the straightforward sound he loved as a child. John had heard enough. At the age of twenty-five, he “stopped listening to everything,” bought a $50 guitar, and vowed to start his own band, one that would adopt the stripped-down style of the 1950s. He couldn’t play very well, but he had the laser-sharp focus of a pit bull on ginkgo, and he could down-stroke like nobody’s business. He knew three chords, and that was enough.
But something was missing from John’s new musical venture. It had plenty of heart, but not much soul. That’s where a neighborhood friend named Jeffry Hyman, a.k.a. Joey, came in. Joey and John inhabited opposite ends of the crazy meter. Whereas John could stare into the barrel of a gun without flinching, Joey saw the world as an intensely frightening place. Shortly after birth, he had a baseball-sized growth removed from his spine—the result of a phantom twin—and the crescent-shaped scar it left on his back stood as a terrifying reminder that death could strike at any time. His lanky, 66 frame marked him as the very embodiment of gracelessness and frailty.
The teenager Joey’s home life was a sideshow of bizarre habits. When he was not twiddling his hair or tapping his fingers, he was opening and closing doors or switching lights on and off until the wee hours of the morning. His behavior was seen as nothing more than a harmless annoyance until the night he pulled a knife on his mother in an unprovoked fit of paranoia, resulting in a trip to the psychiatric wing of St. Vincent’s Hospital for evaluation. The verdict? Paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. There was no getting around it. Joey was certifiable, with the papers to prove it, but his introversion and wandering mind equipped him with a childlike sensibility. In short, he was a natural dreamer who understood the abstract sensitivity that John’s band was missing. As luck would have it, the kid could also croon like a fuzzy-voiced Bobby Darin.
In August 1974, the Ramones played their first gig with Joey on vocals. It was at a tiny club on the Bowery, a hole in the wall called CBGB, which had opened a few months earlier as a platform for country, bluegrass, and blues. The crude combo from Queens fell into none of those categories. In fact, there was no genre to describe them at all.
The Ramones were a retro retread of fifties rock ’n’ roll, bolstered by the wattage of seventies amps, turbocharged with John’s natural aggression, and finessed with Joey’s ear for bubblegum melodies.
Outwardly, the Ramones presented a united front, donning identical leather jackets, long hair, and stone-faced expressions. Internally, however, they were four squabbling spouses whose domestic strife was exacerbated by the fact that the militant John could not get the unstable Joey to bend to his dictates. From the beginning of their collaborative partnership, Joey and John felt an almost constant animosity toward each other. What neither of them had counted on, however, was getting caught up in a burgeoning underground scene whose very ethos was built around the kind of antipathetic feelings they harbored toward each other. Disaffected young music fans, fed up with corporate-sanctioned rock, flocked to CBGB in search of a more aggressive sound. They found it in the ever-infighting Ramones, who quickly developed a devoted following along with fellow noisemakers such as Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Blondie. In January 1976, the local music fanzine Punk published its first issue, and suddenly the scene had a name. For Joey and John, there was no going back.
Mutual dislike aside, the final nail in the coffin of Joey and John’s relationship was yet to come. In 1978, Joey started dating Linda Danielle, a high-maintenance lovely who preferred expensive clothes and jewelry to ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors. For a while, it looked as though Linda could be the stabilizing presence that Joey had long needed, but the couple was ill matched, and Linda knew it. When she dumped him, Joey was devastated; when she started dating Johnny, he was permanently wounded. In Johnny’s defense, he and Linda eventually got married and stayed together until his death, but the Ramones were never the same. Joey and Johnny, once mere antagonists, became bitter enemies. And yet, as if locked in a game of chicken, neither member would quit the band. What choice did they have? It was stay in the Ramones, or get real jobs.
After that incident, Joey and Johnny’s best collaborating days were behind them, and yet they had already planted the seeds that would radically, if indirectly, change the face of rock music. After playing a few gigs in London, in 1976, the Ramones caught the attention of a handful of disaffected young musicians. Within a year, British punk rock exploded, fronted by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and other spiky-haired sneersters. The punk sound ricocheted back to the United States, seeping its way into underground clubs, from D.C. to San Francisco. A host of 1980s genres followed: new wave, heavy metal, hardcore, ska. But the Ramones’ influence didn’t end there. In the 1990s, the group’s blend of melodic aggression was slowed down, repackaged as grunge, and taken into the mainstream by groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Throughout, the Ramones continued to tour—with Joey and Johnny barely speaking—until finally breaking up in 1996. By then, the punk mindset had become an institution within music circles, a raw and resistant philosophy that would not see its official demise until 2010, when Green Day’s American Idiot premiered on Broadway. Punk rock was fashioned out of a conflict between two polar opposites: a restless fighter and a hopeless dreamer. As for the band that started it all, despite having propelled the direction of rock music for the better part of thirty years, the Ramones never had a single chart-topping hit.
(1931–2007/b. 1939)
Abstract: Who needs a heart?
Birth names: Ike Wister Turner/Anna Mae Bullock
Birthplaces: Clarksdale, Mississippi/Nutbush, Tennessee, USA
Co-venture: The Ike and Tina Turner Revue
Demons: Power and submission
“I didn’t know how to get out of the whole situation. There were many times when I picked up the gun when he was sleeping.”
—Interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2005
In 1956, Ike Turner was closer to music stardom than most musicians will ever get. The front man for a spunky blues band called Kings of Rhythm, he had achieved local-celebrity status around the bustling environs of greater St. Louis, where he drew eager crowds and played to small but packed houses. Much to his own frustration, however, Ike seemed to have hit a celebrity ceiling. The national prominence he hopelessly sought continued to elude him, and despite having recorded the 1951 chart-topper “Rocket 88,” he was living in constant fear that he would one day vanish in a flicker of one-hit-wonder oblivion. For the wayward aspirant who wanted desperately to be a star, Ike Turner was missing one key ingredient: star quality.
But Ike’s fate would change with the arrival of Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage transplant from the rustic hills of western Tennessee who had taken to girls’ nights out in East St. Louis, where Ike was headlining at Club Manhattan. At first glance, Anna Mae found the gold-chain-wearing slickster repulsive. (“His teeth seemed all wrong, and his hairstyle, too,” she balked.) But when he played his guitar, the young girl lapsed into a trance. It wasn’t a sexual attraction, mind you. Rather it was girlish awe for a dedicated showman who commanded both his instrument and the crowd. In any case, Ike’s flat-bodied presence was enough to rope her in. One night, in between sets, Anna Mae grabbed the microphone, showed off her raspy pipes to the tune of B. B. King’s “You Know I Love You,” and roped Ike right back.
Blown away by her singing, Ike saw in the young girl the true star potential that he secretly knew he lacked. To top it off, Ike was a leg man, and Anna Mae had a set that seemed to go on forever.
Within a year, Anna Mae and her legs were fronting Ike’s group. Ike dressed her up in sequins, rechristened her Tina—a name she despised—and soon the duo was touring the country as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. With Anna Mae’s peppery vocals and energetic moves on display, the group rose to fame as one of the most adventurous rhythm-and-blues acts in the country, starting with their 1960 hit, “A Fool in Love.” Ike and Tina had extraordinary longevity, peaking between 1964 and 1974, and culminating with their biggest hit, the Grammy-winning “Proud Mary,” in 1971. The song is a ceremonious epic, fleshed out by Anna Mae’s sultry opening, which builds at a leisurely pace only to explode with the orchestral blast of Ike’s rhythmic authority. And yet, underlying Ike and Tina’s dynamic stage chemistry—an irresistible blend of soul and sass—lived a cruel tension, fueled by Ike’s physical and mental abuse. Anna Mae, the wild woman of soul, who would flood the stage, screeching and flailing like a trapped animal, was secretly channeling the torment of emotional imprisonment.
Ike’s power-wielding personality was not initially apparent to the naive Anna Mae. At first they were more like brother and sister; however, those boundaries quickly dissolved one night on the road, when Ike got frisky and Anna Mae was too intimidated to resist his pushy advances. “I had never thought of having sex with him,” she later recalled. “I thought, ‘God, this is horrible.’” That dubious consummation set into motion a pattern of power and control that would last for sixteen years, growing incrementally more brutal and continuing through marriage, a child, and the group’s eventual decline. During that time, Ike allegedly beat Anna Mae with anything that wasn’t nailed down, including shoes, telephones, wire hangers, and his bare knuckles. He broke her ribs, arm, and jaw, and once even threw hot coffee in her face. When she protested, he questioned her loyalty. And when she tried to leave him, he would track her down. In a veritable Dark Ages for abused spouses—predating the widespread accessibility of battered women’s shelters—Anna Mae was cornered, helpless under the dominating force of an incurable showman who would not give up his golden goose.
Ike, for his part, always maintained that allegations of his abuse were overblown. (In his autobiography, he admits to slapping and punching Tina but seems to deny that such behavior constitutes “beating.”) Nevertheless, his years of beating Anna Mae were ultimately undone by his beating himself. As the mid-seventies rolled on, and he drowned himself in a glut of cocaine, prescription pills, and other women, Anna Mae turned to Buddhism and got in touch with her inner strength. She continued, meanwhile, to act as the face of Ike and Tina, often making solo TV appearances while Ike was too drugged to join her.
Portrait of a Vicious Cycle
The violent details of Ike Turner’s childhood practically scream “future abuser.” When he was eight years old, he witnessed his father beaten to near death by a white mob. Ike’s father was denied admission into a whites-only hospital and subsequently lived as an invalid in a tent in the family’s backyard, finally succumbing to his injuries three years later. Ike later tried to bludgeon his new stepfather to death after the man whipped him with barbed wire. By the age of eighteen, Ike was sporting two gunshot wounds and had earned the nickname Pistol Whippin’ Turner.
In 1976, Ike and Anna Mae had one final physical confrontation, on the road in Dallas. Ike backhanded her in a limousine, and Anna Mae thought, “Today I’m fighting back.” Later that day, when her husband predictably passed out in their hotel room, Anna Mae seized the opportunity and fled the scene, thirty-six cents and a gas card to her name. The couple’s divorce was finalized some two years later, with Anna Mae agreeing to give Ike all the group’s monetary assets. It was a concession she made only on the condition that she be allowed the continued use of her stage name, Tina Turner, a star persona created for her by a wannabe star who kept her in emotional bondage.
(b. 1942/1926–1991)
Abstract: The frenemy within
Birth names: Werner Herzog Stipetic´/Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski
Birthplaces: Munich, Germany/Sopot, Danzig (now Poland)
Co-venture: New German Cinema
Demons: Each other
“Every grey hair on my head I call Kinski.”
—From Herzog on Herzog, 2003
Modern cinema is built around successful director/actor partnerships
—Scorsese and De Niro; Burton and Depp; Apatow and goofy guys with curly hair; the list goes on. Of course, the success of such partnerships hinges on an often-delicate balancing act between actors who know how to take direction and directors who know how to give it. And yet some of the most influential movements in cinema history came about through the complete dissolution of the kind of egg-shell-walking niceties that most of us expect from a workplace. Case in point: the feud-filled relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Over the strained course of their fifteen-year, five-film collaboration, this combustible pair of love-hate antagonists discovered they had two choices: They could capture the volatility between them on screen, or they could kill each other. They managed the former only by coming dangerously close to the latter.
Long before Werner Herzog rose to art-house glory as one of the quintessential auteurs of the New German Cinema, he knew he was destined to make movies. A sternly intelligent and obsessive youth, he began sending scripts to German film producers when he was still in his early teens. He financed his first film, a nine-minute short called Herakles, while working as a welder in a steel factory in 1961. The next year, he joined twenty-five other filmmakers in signing the Oberhausen Manifesto, a bold call to arms by disillusioned young directors who vowed to end the creative stagnation of Germany’s movie industry.
To Werner, the vow was more than lip service; it was the solemn mission of an impulsive director who preferred to shoot first and ask questions later—a man who so detested wasteful introspection that he claimed not to know the color of his own eyes. But to realize such a dense singular vision, the kind only a manifesto could communicate, Herzog would need a leading man whose denseness matched his own. The young director found his equal in Klaus Kinski, a self-taught actor who had such a difficult time working with others that he mostly made do as a monologist.
Werner first met the unpredictable actor when the two were both living at a Munich boarding house, where Kinski would terrorize the other residents by trashing assorted pieces of furniture. Those early days, however unsettling to the teenage Werner, encumbered the director with indelible memories of a raving madman who foamed at the mouth and threw tantrums at the drop of a hat. In 1971, when it came time to cast the lead in his fourth film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Werner had only one choice in mind to play the title character, a delusional conquistador who leads his men on a quest to find the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.
During the five-week shoot on location in the Peruvian rainforest, Kinski lived up to his reputation, with a surplus of lunacy to spare. He lambasted crewmembers, frightened the locals, and threw tantrums over everything from Herzog’s directing style to the wet Peruvian weather. In one instance, he became annoyed by the carryings on of some of the crew and wound up shooting off an extra’s fingertip with a rifle. Werner, in turn, threw Klaus’s tempestuous behavior right back in his face. When he wasn’t threatening his leading man with gunfire, he was deliberately egging him on in whatever manner necessary to aid the project, a means of “domesticating the beast,” as he put it. If Werner needed a quieter performance from the actor, he would purposely push Klaus’s buttons, wait for him to explode, and capture his posttantrum exhaustion for the scene.
Whatever he did worked. When it was released in 1972, Aguirre, the Wrath of God emerged as a career-defining cult hit, securing Werner’s place as an early pioneer of the coming independent film movement. (It may also be one of the most successful movies ever shot with a stolen camera.) Meanwhile, Werner and Klaus’s relationship remained gravely intractable throughout their fifteen-year collaboration. At the climax of their association, they were simultaneously plotting to kill each other, with Herzog at one point attempting to firebomb Kinski’s house. And yet, like alchemic serendipity, their combustible interactions always managed to serve the greater good of Herzog’s films.
For all their frenzied exchanges, Werner and Klaus shared the same deep sense of self-sacrifice, willing to put themselves in personal jeopardy for the sake of the project at hand. When Klaus was filming a scene for 1979’s Woyzeck—in which his character gets kicked to the ground by a drill major—the actor was not satisfied with his scene partner’s simulated assault. “He’s not doing it right,” Klaus insisted to Werner. “He has to really kick me.” The other actor reluctantly obliged, kicking Klaus so hard into the cobblestone street that his face began to puff up, and Werner wasted no time capturing the damage. (Watch the film’s opening-credit sequence, in which half of Klaus’s face looks like a Pillsbury muffin.)
Werner and Klaus’s relationship finally became irreconcilable on the set of the 1987 film Cobra Verde, when Klaus’s outbursts had gotten so out of hand that neither Werner nor his crew could bear them. Cobra was the duo’s final collaboration before Klaus’s fatal heart attack in 1991. Eight years later, Werner released a documentary about his relationship with the actor. Aptly titled My Best Fiend, the film presents with surprising warmth a man who had been at once the filmmaker’s best friend and greatest foe—a personal demon personified. “We had a mutual respect for each other,” Werner admitted, “even as we planned each other’s murders.”
That mutual respect, though buried beneath the raving-mad mannerisms of two thickheaded souls, was nevertheless evident from both parties. Publicly, Kinski claimed to despise the films he made with Werner. (In his autobiography, he castigated the filmmaker as a no-talent megalomaniac.) And yet he knew, deep down, that only Werner could do his performances justice. Kinski often complained about the scant salaries he made on low-budget films. He had no compunction about turning down a role if the price wasn’t right, and one time he even shunned an offer from Fellini, whom he dismissed as low-paying “vermin.” But for Werner Herzog’s micro-budget efforts, he always made an exception. The pay may not have been great, but the fights were a nice perk.