David Bowie probably came closest to summing up Tina Turner’s fiery, un-sum-up-able persona when he famously said, after joining her onstage in Birmingham, England, during the final concert of her 1985 British tour: “Standing up there next to her was the hottest place in the universe.”
Turner died Wednesday, May 24, 2023 at age 83 at her home near Zurich, Switzerland. Here LIFE.com presents a handful of rare photos taken in 1970 by Gjon Mili. The exact date of the shoot? Unknown. The location? Probably Las Vegas. The show’s set list? Unknown. The identity of the guy gazing back at Mili’s camera in the last picture in this gallery? A mystery.
But one thing these pictures do manage to impart is confirmation that, when Tina Turner took the stage—no matter where that stage was, and no matter how large or how small the crowd might be—there was no simply no restraining her talent and soulfulness.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com.
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner and band, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tina Turner, 1970.
Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
“Now in the sunny freshness of a Texas morning,” LIFE magazine wrote in its Nov. 29, 1963, issue, alongside the first photo in this gallery, “with roses in her arms and a luminous smile on her lips, Jacqueline Kennedy still had one hour to share the buoyant surge of life with the man at her side.”
It was a wonderful hour [LIFE wrote, just a week after JFK’s assassination]. Vibrant with confidence, crinkle-eyed with an all-embracing smile, John F. Kennedy swept his wife with him into the exuberance of the throng at Dallas’ Love Field. This was an act in which Jack Kennedy was superbly human. Responding to the warmth his own genuine warmth evoked in others, he met his welcomers joyously, hand to hand and heart to heart. For him this was all fun as well as politics. For his shy wife, surmounting the grief of her infant son’s recent death, this mingling demanded a grace and gallantry she would soon need again.
Then the cavalcade, fragrantly laden with roses for everyone, started into town. Eight miles on the way, in a sixth-floor window, the assassin waited. All the roses, like those abandoned in Vice President Johnson’ car [last slide in this gallery], were left to wilt. They would be long faded before a stunned nation would fully comprehend its sorrow.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos by Art Rickerby most of which never ran in LIFE made in the hours before, as well as the moments immediately after, the killing that shocked the world.
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
John and Jackie Kennedy at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Lyndon Johnson with Jackie and John Kennedy in Forth Worth on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, just hours before JFK’s assassination.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
JFK in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and others at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy delivers a brief speech outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
President John Kennedy greeted admirers in Fort Worth, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, shortly before flying to Dallas.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The scene at Dealey Plaza in Dallas in the moments after John Kennedy was shot, Nov. 22, 1963.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, where JFK was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. in the afternoon, half an hour after being shot.
Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s car at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
From Jesse James and Butch Cassidy to Scarface and Tony Soprano, outlaws have held an ambiguous place in America’s popular imagination: we fear and loathe the gangster’s appetite for violence; we envy and covet his radical freedom. In early 1965, LIFE photographer Bill Ray and writer Joe Bride spent several weeks with a gang that, to this day, serves as a living, brawling embodiment of our ambivalent relationship with the rebel: Hells Angels.
Here, along with a gallery of remarkable photographs that were shot for LIFE but never ran in the magazine, Ray and Bride recall their days and nights spent with Buzzard, Hambone, Big D and other Angels (as well as their equally tough “old ladies”) at a time when the roar of Harleys and the sight of long-haired bikers was still new and for the average, law-abiding citizen almost unfathomable. The day-to-day existence of these leather-clad hellions was as foreign to most of LIFE magazine’s millions of readers as the lives of, say, Borneo’s headhunters, or nomads of the Gobi Desert.
“This was a new breed of rebel,” Ray told LIFE.com, recalling his time with the Angels. “They didn’t have jobs. They absolutely despised everything that most Americans value and strive for stability, security. They rode their bikes, hung out in bars for days at a time, fought with anyone who messed with them. They were self-contained, with their own set of rules, their own code of behavior. It was extraordinary to be around.”
Ray spent some of the time with the Angels on a ride from San Bernardino (about 40 miles east of Los Angeles) to Bakersfield, Calif., for a major motorcycle rally. The Berdoo-Bakersfield run is a trip of only about 130 miles but in 1965, it would offer enough moments (both placid and violent) for Ray to paint a rare, revelatory portrait of the world’s most legendary motorcycle club in its early days. The way in which the story came about, meanwhile, was as dramatic and unexpected as Bill Ray’s pictures.
“I’d done a story on Big Daddy Roth,” writer Joe Bride recalled, “a genuine L.A. phenomenon and legend in the Southern California car culture. He had a lucrative business designing hot rod-themed decals and cartoon figures. While I was wrapping up the story with Big Daddy, the Angels were in the news. They were accused of terrorizing a small central California town and being major growers and distributors of pot. Big Daddy said he knew a lot of Angels, did business with them and that they were more lost nomads than real criminals. After meeting them, by the way, my take on them was a little bit closer to the prevailing opinion than to Big Daddy’s. . . .”
“I told Big Daddy Roth I’d like to meet the Angels, talk to them about doing a story,” Bride said. “It would be a chance for them to get some recognition, and explain why they did what they did. Not long after the story on Big Daddy ran, in late 1964, Roth called and said, ‘They’ll meet you with conditions.'” Bride met two Angels at Big Daddy’s store. They blindfolded him, put him in a car and drove into the mountains. At a bar “with what looked like 100 bikes parked outside,” no longer blindfolded, Bride met a stocky, long-haired Angel who asked if he shot pool. They played some nine-ball, and Bride beat the guy two out of three games. Bride then negotiated, there in the bar, a relationship where the Hells Angels agreed to allow him and Bill Ray to shadow them. Bride sat back, had a few beers, and then they drove him back to L.A. Not long after that, Ray and Bride began reporting the story.
Ray and Bride spent more than a month with the Angels in the spring of ’65, “mostly on weekends,” Ray remembers, “but the Bakersfield run was around the clock, three days and nights. In Bakersfield, I slept on the floor of the Blackboard Cafe the bar that the Angels basically lived in while they were there.”
“I got along with the Angels,” Ray says today. “I got to like some of them very much, and I think they liked me. I accepted them as they were, and they accepted me. You know, by their standards, I looked pretty funny.”
Ray vividly remembers the moment he truly felt accepted, or as accepted as he was ever going to be, by the Angels. In a confrontation reminiscent of a famous scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s classic 1966 book, Hell’s Angels, when Thompson was almost stomped to death by bikers, Ray says that “he got in a bit of trouble one day, in a bar. Some bikers guys who weren’t Angels saw me taking pictures. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t realize that I was a sort of mascot of the real tough guys. I’d been shooting the Angels for maybe a week at this point. I was about to be attacked by one of these guys when a Hells Angel standing next to me made it clear that if a hair on my head was touched, the other guy was a dead man. From that point on, I felt . . . well, not safe, because I never felt safe with those guys, but as if I’d passed a test, somehow.”
Ray stresses that while the Angels he spent time with smoked pot, and he once saw them “beat the holy hell” out of some other bikers behind a bar, he “never saw these guys involved in anything deeply illegal. Then again, they always had plenty of money for gas and beer. They lived on their bikes that is, when they weren’t hanging out in bars. Their money had to come from somewhere, but none of them ever worked.”
The FBI has contended that the Angels and other motorcycle gangs are involved in extortion, drug dealing, trafficking stolen goods and other criminal activities.
“There’s a romance to the idea of the biker on the open road,” Ray says. “It’s similar to the romance that people attach to cowboys and the West which, of course, is totally out of proportion to the reality of riding fences and punching cows. But there’s something impressive about these Harley-Davidsons and bikers heading down the highway. You see the myth played out in movies, like Easy Rider, which came out a few years after I photographed the Angels. You know, the trail never ends for the cowboy, and the open road never ends for the Angels. They just ride. Where they’re going hardly matters. It’s not an easy life, but it’s what they choose. It’s theirs. And everyone else can get out of the way or go to hell.”
—gallery by Liz Ronk
Hells Angels, California, 1965.
Bill Ray Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Big D, a member of the San Bernardino, a.k.a, “Berdoo” Hells Angels, during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Inside the Hells Angels’ San Bernardino clubhouse, 1965.
Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Little Jim” drinks beer from a waste basket at the Angels’ clubhouse in San Bernardino, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels’ “old ladies,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two “Berdoo” Hells Angels clown for Bill Ray behind a bar during a stop on their run from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angel “Hambone” posed during a ride from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels and locals outside the Blackboard Cafe in Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray— Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels, their “old ladies” and hangers-on outside the Blackboard in Bakersfield, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels cruise north from San Bernardino to Bakersfield, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A man in Bakersfield, Calif., cast what appeared to be an appraising eye over the Hells Angels’ Harley-Davidsons, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Sonny, the leader of the San Bernardino Hells Angels, needed stitches in his head after crashing his bike, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Women—including one with a bandaged nose—in a bar while male bikers gathered in a separate room, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A sheriff’s officer kept an eye on the proceedings outside a bar that the Hells Angels had made their headquarters-away-from-home during their San Bernardino-to-Bakersfield run, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two women who were riding with the Hells Angels at a bar in 1965. “This is one of my favorites from the whole shoot,” Bill Ray says. “There’s something kind of sad and at the same time defiant about the atmosphere.”
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Outside the Blackboard Cafe at night, Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A teenager seems drawn by the Angels and their machines, California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Two “reputable” motorcyclists photographing the Hells Angels, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
During their ’65 run to Bakersfield, the Angels pushed their way into a motorcycle hillclimb, in which bikers race up an often insanely steep incline. The Angels wanted to take part; organizers said no (but finally relented).
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A biker named Roseberry sported a “one percenter” patch—a badge of honor for the Angels and other motorcycle clubs whose members revel in and celebrate their outlaw status, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A biker named Roseberry getting fingerprinted, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An Angel getting frisked.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Hells Angel—with his “old lady” holding on tight—pulled a wheelie in downtown Bakersfield, Calif., 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Bikers (including Sonny, left, with a bandaged head) and their “old ladies,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Hells Angels
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Buzzard” and an “old lady,” California, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Hells Angel salute, 1965.
Bill Ray; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Buzzard” prepared to leave Bakersfield as cops and townspeople watched, 1965.
In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’s back yard. Here, in a series of photos by Nina Leen, LIFE.com chronicles the quiet, rodential adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker, the orphaned and, in 1940s America, the celebrated squirrel.
“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.” They do?
LIFE then went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”
“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”
“Tommy never seems to complain,” the LIFE article concluded, “although sometimes he bites Mrs. Bullis. Mrs. Bullis never complains about being bitten.”
It’s unlikely that any 26 seconds of celluloid have ever been discussed and dissected as thoroughly as those captured by a 58-year-old amateur-film buff named Abraham Zapruder on the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas—in a movie known ever after as “the Zapruder film.” The jittery color sequence showing JFK’s motorcade moving through the sunlit Dallas streets, leading up to the shocking instant when a rifle bullet slams into the president’s head, remains one of the 20th century’s indispensable historical records.
It was LIFE magazine editor Richard Stolley who tracked down Zapruder. Stolley’s purchasing of Zapruder’s home movie for LIFE had a profound impact on the magazine, on Zapruder, on Stolley himself, and most lastingly on the nation. Having flown in from Los Angeles within hours of the murder, Stolley was in his hotel in Dallas that afternoon, just hours after the president was shot. “I got a phone call from a LIFE freelancer in Dallas named Patsy Swank,” Stolley told TIME producer Vaughn Wallace several years ago, “and the news she had was absolutely electrifying. She said that a businessman had taken an eight-millimeter camera out to Dealey Plaza and photographed the assassination. I said, ‘What’s his name?’ She said, ‘[The reporter who told her the news] didn’t spell it out, but I’ll tell you how he pronounced it. It was Zapruder.’
“I picked up the Dallas phone book and literally ran my finger down the Z’s, and it jumped out at me the name spelled exactly the way Patsy had pronounced it. Zapruder, comma, Abraham.”
The rest is history: fraught, complex, riveting, unsettled history
Film still from Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
Hearing the term “D-Day” might bring to mind images of violence. In photos, movies snd old news reels, and usually all in grim black-and-white, we have seen what happened on the beaches of Normandy (codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) as the Allies unleashed their historic assault against German defenses on June 6, 1944.
But in color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE magazine’s Frank Scherschel captured countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the D-Day and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English towns; the French countryside, startingly lush after the spectral landscape of the beachheads; the reception GIs enjoyed en route to the capital; the jubilant liberation of Paris itself.
Scherschel’s pictures most of which were never published in LIFE are resented here in masterfully restored color and feel at-once familiar and somehow vividly new.
Scherschel, who died in 1981, was an award-winning photographer for LIFE well into the 1950s. (His younger brother Joe was a LIFE photographer, as well.) In addition to the Normandy invasion, Frank photographed the war in the Pacific, the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth, the 1956 Democratic National Convention, collective farming in Czechoslovakia, Sir Winston Churchill (many times), art collector Peggy Guggenheim, road racing at Le Mans, baseball, football, boxing, a beard-growing contest in Michigan and countless other people and events, both epic and forgotten.
Information on the specific locations or people who appear in these photographs is not always available; Scherschel and his colleagues did not have the means to provide that data for each of the countless photographs they made throughout the war. When the locale or person depicted in an image in this gallery is known, it is noted in the caption.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
American troops in England before D-Day, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American combat engineers ate a meal atop boxes of ammunition stockpiled for the impending D-Day invasion, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel;Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops and civilians passed the time on Henley Bridge, Henley-on-Thames, in the spring of 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American corporal stacked cans of gasoline in preparation for the upcoming invasion of France, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A small town in England in the spring of 1944, shortly before D-Day.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American Army chaplain knelt next to a wounded soldier, to administer the Eucharist and Last Rites, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An abandoned German machine gun, France, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Magazines scattered among the rubble of the heavily bombed town of Saint-L™, Normandy, France, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American tank crew took a breather on the way through the town of Avranches, Normandy, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t. To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” – Frank Scherschel describing his experiences photographing the Normandy invasion from the air, before he joined Allied troops heading inland. Above: GIs searched ruined homes in western France after D-Day.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
View of the ruins of the Palais de Justice in the town of St. Lo, France, summer 1944. The red metal frame in the foreground is what’s left of an obliterated fire engine.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“All the civilized world loves France and Paris. Americans share this love with a special intimacy born in the kinship of our revolutions, our ideas and our alliances in two great wars.” – LIFE on the relationship between the U.S. and its longtime European ally
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Along the coast of France, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From D-Day until Christmas 1944, German prisoners of war were shipped off to American detention facilities at a rate of 30,000 per month. Above: Captured German troops, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maintenance work on an American P-47 Thunderbolt in a makeshift airfield in the French countryside, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A French couple shared cognac with an American tank crew, northern France, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A P-38 fighter plane sat in the background as the pilot arrived in a captured German vehicle, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Church services in dappled sunlight, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
DAmerican Army trucks (note cyclist hitching a ride) paraded down the Champs-Elysees the day after the liberation of Paris by French and Allied troops, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frenchmen transported painted British and American flags for use in a parade, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tanks under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during liberation celebrations, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale – a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was last week.” – LIFE after the French capital was liberated in August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Free French General and military governor of the French capital Pierre Koenig, left, during ceremonies held the day after the liberation of Paris, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Celebrations in Paris after the liberation of the city, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American troops stood beside a World War 1 monument bedecked with French flags after the town (exact location unknown) was liberated from German occupying forces, summer 1944.
