Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  Simpson traveled to her home in Detroit, where he sat beside her. Aretha was at the grand piano. When he begged her to sing “The Makings of You,” she wasn’t sure whether she knew the chords. She asked him to sing the first few notes. That was all she needed. After a few seconds spent searching for the right voicing, she found the song on piano and, accompanying herself, gave the definitive reading. The casualness of the moment made it that much more moving. Soaring high and moaning low, she located the sweet spot that defines Curtis’s genius for merging the optimism of divine faith with the poignancy of earthy love. In her divine earthiness, Aretha was the perfect instrument of Curtis’s song.

  “I don’t care what they say about Aretha,” said Billy Preston. “She can be hiding out in her house in Detroit for years. She can go decades without taking a plane or flying off to Europe. She can cancel half her gigs and infuriate every producer and promoter in the country. She can sing all kinds of jive-ass songs that are beneath her. She can go into her diva act and turn off the world. But on any given night, when that lady sits down at the piano and gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you. And you’ll know—you’ll swear—that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up country has ever produced.”

  33. A ROSE

  When I met Aretha in 1994 and we started the long collaboration that led to the publication of her autobiography From These Roots, one of the first things she showed me was an article she had clipped from Billboard. It was the Chart Beat column by Fred Bronson from May 14 of that year, and it said, “By debuting on the Hot 100 at No. 88 with ‘Willing to Forgive,’ Aretha Franklin extends her chart span to 33 years and three months. Rob Durkee of ‘America’s Top 40’ notes that hers is the longest chart span for any female artist, beating Tina Turner’s 33 years and two months.”

  For Aretha, this was evidence that her career had not, as one naysayer had hinted, peaked several years before. She was certain that her fifties would be her strongest years, and that her sixties would be stronger still.

  A high point of her fifties was certainly her appearance on the Grammy broadcast in March, where she received a lifetime achievement award. That summer, she was invited to President Bill Clinton’s party on the White House lawn. Wearing an alarmingly low-cut white dress and long white gloves, she sang a somewhat overwrought “Natural Woman” and a slightly underwhelming “Say a Little Prayer.” While in Washington, she also performed for the Black Caucus at the Kennedy Center before hosting her own black-tie affair for two hundred guests.

  When, later that summer, Jet reported that Janet Jackson had broken Aretha’s record of fourteen gold singles by a female solo artist, Vaughn told me that he was asked by his sister to double-check the figures. Aretha thought that the count had been weighted in Janet’s favor.

  “When it turned out that the count was accurate,” said Vaughn, “the topic was dropped and never brought up again. I knew this was part of Aretha’s competitive nature, something that I respect. Without that drive she would never have gotten to the top. I also respected how she was driven to rid herself of her bad habits. I saw her give up her thirty-five-year-old habit of heavy cigarette smoking. She went cold turkey and never smoked again. Back in the early seventies, she did the same thing with liquor—she simply gave it up. She’s an iron-willed woman in many areas. I know she wishes that the willpower could be applied to overeating, the one habit that’s hardest of all to break.”

  In November, she played Carnegie Hall and talked about how she had sworn off cigarettes and was managing her weight with a combination of “Slim Fast and young men.” I was bothered by her cover versions of over-the-top ballads—Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All”—but agreed with Stephen Holden’s observation in the New York Times that “Ms. Franklin’s concerts are notoriously uneven, but on Thursday she was in fine voice and high spirits.”

  Another November article, this one by Aretha scholar David Nathan in Billboard, argued that Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Patti LaBelle were continuing to appeal to new generations of record buyers. There was mention of how Aretha’s twenty-five-week chart run with “Willing to Forgive” was spurring interest in her Greatest Hits album. Jean Riggins, senior VP of black music for Arista, admitted that “breaking Franklin’s ‘Willing to Forgive’ was a major challenge. We had all the classic ingredients: a great artist, a great producer, a great song and a great time working the record. But with classic artists like Aretha, it happens on a record-by-record basis. We didn’t deliver ‘A Deeper Love’ all the way although it was a very big club record… Early on, we experienced a lot of resistance from radio. We felt that ‘Willing to Forgive’ was a take-no-prisoners record and a lot of people were surprised when it went top five.”

  That winter, along with Kirk Douglas, Morton Gould, Pete Seeger, and Harold Prince, Aretha received the Kennedy Center Honors award. Her escort to the celebratory dinner was Renauld White, high-fashion model and an actor on the daytime soap The Guiding Light, one of Aretha’s favorite programs. During the telecast, Patti LaBelle and the Four Tops sang in Aretha’s honor.

  Not everything she received was an honor. Saks Fifth Avenue served her with a lawsuit for her long overdue bills amounting to over $262,000 for purchases including sables and shoes.

  “My sister needs to turn over her money management to a professional,” said Erma, “but she won’t give up the control. She overspends and then loses track of the bills. Because she doesn’t trust anyone to pay those bills, they pile up and overwhelm her. Because she’s Aretha Franklin, she’s extended unlimited credit all the time, but when her creditors see that she’s four or five months in arrears, they lose patience. I’ve worked as an administrator in an office for years, and so has our cousin Brenda. Either one of us could have easily put Aretha’s affairs in order. But you can’t tell her that. You can’t tell her anything.”

  To counter the negative publicity and keep herself in front of her core audience, that spring Aretha invited Ebony to her home for a long interview. Once again she presented herself as a down-home diva in a cover story entitled “Aretha Talks About Men, Marriage, Music and Motherhood.” She also talked about releasing a cooking video, an upcoming Live at Carnegie Hall album, and a record she was making with her sons for a label that she was starting up—World Class Records. Those projects never materialized. She spoke of producing a black fairy tale as a feature film as well as a biopic about her own life in which she would star—two more unrealized ventures. On quitting smoking, she said, “I’d rather be overweight a few pounds and work on that than on my way to cancer.” She noted that being free of tobacco had given her her high notes back. Men were discussed, including Renauld White, with whom she said she was “close, very close.” The general thrust of the article was that she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Aretha and I planned to complete the interviews for her book by the end of 1995. I estimated that I would need no more than six months to finish the interviewing process. In the end, it took years. Dozens of interviews were postponed or canceled. When we did meet, we often spent as much time listening to music as talking. The music gave us both great pleasure. Her preferences, like mine, were always gospel, R&B, and jazz. In each genre, she celebrated the classics with deep knowledge and true passion. We spent hours listening to, among many others, Albertina Walker, Rance Allen, Nancy Wilson, Andy Bey, Candi Staton, and Betty Carter. At the same time, because she was planning her new record, she studied producers sent her way by Clive Davis. She read the trades carefully and knew who was hot and who was not. She was familiar with everyone from Aaron Hall to R. Kelly. Although highly opinionated, when it came to the current crop of writer/producers, she deferred to Clive. She talked often about receiving private lessons from an opera instructor and of her intention to begin studying classical piano at Juilliard in New York.

  Shortly thereafter she told other interviewers about her aspirations to sing bel ca
nto and learn Chopin sonatas. She had, in fact, hired an opera coach and would soon insert a couple of Italian arias into her repertoire. But Juilliard remained a distant dream. She never enrolled at the school.

  Our interviews, when they finally took place, were restricted to ninety minutes. Our collaboration agreement gave her the right to end the sessions whenever she felt the questioning was not to her liking. She would also cancel concerts at the drop of a hat. Her agent, Dick Alen, told me that once she had insisted on leaving North Carolina the day before a booking because of a forest fire some two hundred miles away. Even though weather reports had indicated otherwise, she was afraid that the fire would change course and head in her direction.

  “There’s the fearless Aretha,” said Erma, “and then there’s the fearful Aretha. The fearless Aretha will sing any material in any venue. Put her on television before a worldwide audience of millions and she doesn’t flinch. She’s as comfortable there as if she were singing in your living room. The problem is getting her there. It’s beyond a fear of flying. She canceled several bus trips to California because she doesn’t want to ride over the Rockies. She’s afraid of the mountain roads.”

  Aretha made a point, however, not to cancel her commitment to what turned out to be one of the year’s most successful record projects. Along with Whitney Houston, Brandy, Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, Faith Evans, and Toni Braxton, Aretha sang on Babyface’s soundtrack for Waiting to Exhale, a number-one Arista album that would eventually sell over nine million copies. There were several individual hits—Whitney’s “Exhale (Shoos Shoop),” Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow,” Brandy’s “Sittin’ Up in My Room,” and Mary J. Blige’s “Not Gon’ Cry.” Aretha’s reading of “It Hurts Like Hell,” a poignant Babyface ballad, was effective and eventually released as the album’s sixth single, but it never achieved hit status. Yet in the Washington Post, Geoffrey Himes wrote, “The album’s peak moment belongs to Aretha Franklin, who makes us hear in every note what the title of [the song] is talking about.”

  In 1996 the Queen traveled to Toronto to catch Diahann Carroll playing the lead in a new staging of Sunset Boulevard.

  “She didn’t realize it wasn’t going to be freezing,” said Erma, “so she ordered up a mink coat from one of the better department stores. Because the coat was so enormous, she decided it required a ticket of its own. She and her coat sat together on the front row. It was hysterical.”

  “My sister likes to go out and make a splash,” said Vaughn. “She knows how to have a good time at shows and parties and celebrations. At the same time she makes sure that the press is around to take her picture. She realizes the importance of staying in the public eye. Like most of these stars, she’s afraid if she’s out of the spotlight for too long the fans will forget her.”

  That summer she was photographed making a grand entrance to the Kennedy Center’s twenty-fifth anniversary gala in Washington, DC. Her escort was Arthur Mitchell, founding director of the Dance Theater of Harlem.

  A few weeks later, while we were working on her autobiography, she asked me to meet her in New York, where she was playing Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. I jumped at the chance. This was the twentieth Aretha concert I had attended in recent years, and, although always eager to hear her sing, I was a little skeptical. Lately her performances had been perfunctory. But on this night she was on fire. In the New York Times, Jon Pareles wrote, “If anyone had forgotten, she proved herself yet again as one of America’s greatest vocal improvisers.” Thirty years after she wrote and recorded “Dr. Feelgood,” she sang the song with almost frightening conviction. I was thrilled to hear her sounding so good. The vitality was back.

  That same vitality was evident at a free outdoor concert in Chicago’s Grant Park. The occasion was the opening of the Democratic National Convention at which Bill Clinton would be nominated for a second term.

  She kept working the press, kept up appearances, kept projecting plans, kept vowing to overcome her fear of flying. All that was evident in the October cover story of Jet in which she discussed her memoir in progress before mentioning a Julia Child–style cooking video that, alas, never materialized. She also cited the antianxiety tapes she’d been listening to and the “fearless” classes she had attended.

  “You have to admire her for trying,” said Ruth Bowen. “She’s always trying. She’s always trying to get back on planes, always trying to lose weight, always trying to manage her money and figure out how to manage a relationship with a man. It’s good to try. But if you’re gonna succeed, you have to understand yourself. You have to look deep into yourself and figure out what makes you fail. Why do I have so many fears? Why am I a compulsive eater? Why do I wind up chasing off all these men? Aretha does not want to look at herself. She doesn’t want to critique herself. She doesn’t know how to do that. She can’t take criticism either from without or from within. The result is that nothing changes for her. The world keeps knocking on her door because the world wants to hear her sing. That will never change. But neither will she, because she’s the hardest-headed woman since Eve ate the apple. What it comes down to is this: no one can tell Aretha shit.”

  “In the sixties and seventies I could tell Aretha a few things,” said Jerry Wexler, “because I was helping her put together hit records on Atlantic. When the hits stopped, she stopped listening. In the eighties and nineties, Clive could tell her a few things, because she was having hits with him. As long as the hits keep coming, you can talk to her. When the hits stop, so does the communication.”

  In 1996, communication between Aretha and Clive was excellent. He recommended a new group of hot producers, including Sean “Puffy” Combs, Jermaine Dupri, Dallas Austin, and Daryl Simmons. Aretha added Michael Powell, who had produced a slew of hits for Anita Baker, and also her old friend Narada Michael Walden.

  “When she cut her new multi-deal with Arista in the mid-nineties,” said Ruth Bowen, “she wanted the press release to emphasize how much creative freedom she was given. She wanted the public to know that she was free to sing her own songs and produce her own records. For years Aretha had been seeing herself as a great lady mogul and she insisted that now was the time. But, in truth, if you look at that album she made after signing her new Arista contract—the one called A Rose Is Still a Rose—she only produced one song: ‘The Woman,’ a song she wrote. Everything else was done by outside producers. And the one hit on the record, the title cut, didn’t come from Aretha but from Lauryn Hill. It was Lauryn’s song and Lauryn’s production. Lauryn even came to Detroit to do it.”

  Along with Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel, Hill was a member of the Fugees, a hip-hop/R&B crossover sensation. Their 1996 The Score, with the massive hit “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” a sweet echo of Roberta Flack’s 1973 version, was one of the biggest albums of the year. A couple of years before Hill’s worldwide solo smash The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she had started writing and producing independently of her fellow Fugees.

  “A Rose Is Still a Rose” works flawlessly on several levels. The twenty-two-year-old writer/producer gives the fifty-five-year-old singer/diva a text she deeply understands. Wisely, Hill also gives Aretha the role of the narrator, an older woman giving advice to the young girl wounded by love. “Listen, dear,” says Aretha in her spoken introduction, “I realize you’ve been hurt deeply… because I’ve been there.” Then unexpectedly the prelude takes a spiritual turn when the singer adds, “But regardless… we’re all precious in His sight.” The tale is told from the perspective of a believer. The villain is quickly identified as someone with whom Aretha is familiar: the two-timing man who with his “sticky game… steals her honey and forgets her.” But God’s grace is bountiful, and beauty comes from within. “Baby girl,” sings Aretha, “you hold the power.” As an anthem celebrating self-esteem, it’s the most interesting lyric Aretha has sung since “Respect.” With its Fugees-fueled track of loping funk, it’s also her best single in decades.

  Although “Rose”
was the only hit from the album—it reached number twenty-six on the pop charts—the rest of the record is relaxed and satisfying. The songs and productions are geared to make Aretha sound authentic as opposed to young. There is far less desperation—I’ll sing anything for a hit—than had characterized her earlier Arista records. She takes to the overarching theme of great loss in love with obvious sympathy. The one caveat, though, is that the top of Aretha’s voice, once a marvel, is now marred by shrillness.

  During the making of the album, Aretha invited me to write liner notes and watch her record a few of the vocals at the Vanguard Recording Complex in Oak Park in suburban Detroit. We met in the early afternoon, and Aretha, dressed in a casual tracksuit, went to work immediately. There were no live musicians. She was singing to a completed music track, her main method of recording since she had moved to Detroit some fourteen years earlier. She worked quickly and efficiently. The producer was out of town, so it was just Aretha and an engineer. She listened to the playbacks with studied scrutiny that seemed neither gratuitous nor excessive. At the same time, when the engineer asked if she wanted to sing a passage over, one in which she sounded especially shrill, she asked him what the point would be. Wisely, he retreated and withdrew the question. I thought of Erma’s observation that when Aretha looks in the mirror, she sees a different person than we do. It was obvious that when Aretha listens to her voice, she hears it differently than we do.

  “When these young guys tell me, ‘I produced Aretha,’ ” said Ruth Bowen, “I have to laugh because they didn’t really produce Aretha. They gave her a song to sing. They gave her a track and then they got the hell out of her way. Jerry Wexler and Luther Vandross were probably the last men alive who had the balls to even make suggestions about how she should sing. Clive could suggest—or even demand—that she work with a certain producer, but none of those guys would dare tell her how to sing.”