Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  “We were all certain,” said Erma, “that Aretha’s opera success would move her career in a new and exciting direction.”

  “Offers from classical-music venues started rolling in,” said Vaughn. “They wanted Aretha to sing some of those arias in famous concert halls across the country—and Europe as well. It opened up a whole new world, and for a while it looked like Aretha would go down that path. But it never really happened. She likes to be in complete control of her concerts, down to the last detail. I understand that. I understand why, coming in to Boston or Cleveland to sing with their symphony orchestras, she’s not comfortable being under the direction of some distinguished conductor or famous maestro. She wants to be the director and the maestro. She wants to run the show, and, after all these years in the business, isn’t she entitled to?”

  “There’s a precedent for the career redirection that Aretha might have adopted after her Grammys triumph,” said Jerry Wexler. “Sarah Vaughan had played symphony dates for years. The New York Philharmonic, for example, might play Mahler for the first half, then after intermission, Sarah would come out and, with the strings soaring behind her, she’d sing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime,’ Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns,’ and another half dozen classic melodies. Aretha was perfectly positioned to play this circuit. The opening was there.”

  “Everyone was excited about the idea of Aretha performing with classical symphonies,” said Ruth Bowen. “It was the obvious next move. And it also suited her style. She could become an even greater diva. She could wear fabulous jewels and fabulous furs and gain even greater status. She could go where no other rhythm-and-blues singer had ever gone and conquer a whole new world. What’s more, the audience was affluent, and the fees would be large. And yet I knew it wouldn’t happen—at least not on a grand scale. These dates are locked in long in advance—often more than a year. Aretha doesn’t like to plan that far away. She’s also been known to cancel at the last minute. In the classical world, that’s a no-no. But what ultimately made it unworkable was the fact that Aretha would not be entirely in charge. Maybe it’s true of all of us aging dames, but the older Aretha gets, the greater her fear that she won’t be in charge—and the greater her need that she has to be in charge.”

  There was, in fact, a period when Aretha discussed a new paradigm of performing. Vaughn and Ruth Bowen weren’t entirely wrong that her controlling nature interfered with the plans. But it was more than that; it was the success of “A Rose Is Still a Rose” that convinced Aretha that she could compete with the Janet Jacksons and the Madonnas. She spoke of an even more elaborate self-contained show, with dancers and rappers and a full gospel choir. She vowed to lose at least sixty pounds and realize her dream of not only studying classical piano at Juilliard but getting in shape and performing her own form of ballet.

  Aretha proudly gave me a copy of the March 21 issue of Billboard in which statistician Fred Bronson’s article gave her something to smile about:

  “ ‘Rose’ is Franklin’s 96th r&b chart entry, the second-highest total in history (James Brown has 118). It’s also her 52nd top 10 hit. The only artists with more are Brown (58) and Louis Jordan (54).”

  In the spring, Aretha kept her visibility high by appearing on VH1’s Divas Live concert in New York that raised more than $750,000 for the network’s campaign to restore school-music programs. An energized Aretha sang “Chain of Fools” with Mariah Carey, and then, with the choir—consisting of Mariah, Carole King, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, and Shania Twain—she did “Natural Woman.” Aretha sang the first and last choruses, and although she finally shared the mic, she was adamant on doing the long and extended last vamps alone. Carole King, the song’s composer, failed to get any solo time, but that seemed to be okay with Carole. Long ago, it had become Aretha’s song, and on this night, Aretha was reestablishing that fact.

  In May she was back on the cover of Jet. She complained about the lack of offers of movie roles. In other areas, she was upbeat: she’d committed to losing weight; she was thrilled with the success of “Rose” and Divas Live; and she was in love. When asked for specifics, she called him her Mystery Man. “[He’s] a cutie,” said Aretha. “He’s not in the industry. It doesn’t matter what age he is.”

  When I read the article to Ruth Bowen at the time, she said, “It doesn’t matter what age he is because he doesn’t exist. If he were real, she’d let us know. She was hardly shy talking about Ted White or Dennis Edwards or Glynn Turman or Willie Wilkerson. Why suddenly is she getting so secretive about naming some man she’s dating? Who is she protecting? Most men would be proud of the fact that they’re dating the Queen of Soul. They’d want the world to know. But, mind you, for a long time now, this was when Aretha started getting strange. In order to have something to say, she just made up shit.”

  In June, Time listed her as one of the most influential people of the twentieth century.

  In July, Billboard reported the Rose album had sold 292,000 units and the single—“A Rose Is Still a Rose”—had gone gold.

  In August, Ebony ran another major profile on Aretha, a puff piece. “These days she is radiant with the glow of love,” the reporter wrote, “but she is reluctant to identify the object of her affection.”

  She was not at all hesitant, though, to identify herself once again with the Mrs. Murphy role in Blues Brothers. She revived that character from the original film, this time singing “Respect” in the sequel that starred Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman, who took Belushi’s place.

  Her profile remained high and her career news remained positive. But then, at the start of the new year, Aretha suffered a major public relations setback in her hometown that sent her into a rage.

  35. DAMAGE CONTROL

  During my long conversations with Erma, she told me she was concerned that her sister’s charitable heart was not fully understood or appreciated.

  “Most people don’t realize how much she’s done, not merely for her family but for people in need,” Erma said. “I can’t tell you how many times over the years there’d be stories about families who lost everything due to a storm or illness. Aretha would ask me to get money to them anonymously. She just wanted to help. She didn’t care about the attention or the credit.”

  At the same time, she invited Jet magazine to a holiday party she hosted in the auditorium of Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital that, according to the magazine, “had hundreds of patients and staffers dancing in their seats.”

  “For the next twenty minutes or so,” Aretha told the patients, “nobody here is going to be sick.”

  That was Christmas. Two months later, in February 1999, a published report revealed another side of her character. The front-page story from the Detroit Free Press carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Aretha Pay Her Bills?” The exposé went deep into Aretha’s finances, claiming that in the past ten years, more than thirty lawsuits had been filed against her for nonpayment of bills. Virtually all her creditors were Detroit merchants and professionals. One of the more critical accusations came from Dean Pitcairn, owner of a limousine service. He insisted that Aretha tried to burn him. “I think it was the type of thing where [Franklin and her lawyers] felt if they prolonged it long enough, we would forget about them. It just made me mad because everyone thinks she’s a big hero, and she doesn’t think twice about stepping on little people.” Pitcairn won a settlement of $1,500.

  The list of other creditors—plumbers, florists, caterers—was long.

  Harvey Tennen, a former judge and attorney who had represented Aretha in the past, explained that her economic woes were linked to her personal woes, especially the passing of her father and brother. Tennen also said that Aretha struggled with trusting others, thus taking on the burden of self-management.

  “The truth of the matter,” said Erma in response to the story, “is that this was pure karma. For years we’d been telling Aretha to get an accountant or a bookkeeper and give him or her the authority to pay bills. We’ve been telling her that she ne
eds to be put on a budget because she never balances what she spends against what she earns. But every time we’d make suggestions, she’d fly into a fury and stop talking to us. We’d be frozen out for months at a time, simply for saying what was evidently true—that she requires help in the all-important area of money management.”

  Aretha’s reaction to the Free Press article was immediate. She was infuriated and indignant. She told Erma that she planned to organize a boycott against the paper. Within a few days, she issued a statement and was quick to say that it was written by her and her alone.

  “With respect to a front-page story that ran in a local paper, it is clearly, in my opinion and in the opinion of many others, a malicious and vicious attempt to discredit me by reprinting old, warmed-over news that local people knew about 15 years ago to have a cumulative effect with the general public. There was nothing new about it. It certainly didn’t deserve front-page or national attention, but I take responsibility for the handful of suits brought by a small fraction out of the 99.9% of people who are paid responsibly and in a timely way. There are many happy creditors who have my business accounts. As reported in the said article, not one is owed anything today and I have no knowledge nor do my representatives have any knowledge of any suits with the state of Michigan. And liens are not suits and cannot be construed as suits. They are demands for payment with which we are all familiar. Due to my travel and performance schedule and a lack of a secretary in place during that period of time, that small fraction of people, less than 0.1% of the people with whom I do business, who were not paid, utilized their option to sue. That is not uncommon. Celebrities are sued every day for a number of reasons. And sometimes, some people just want their 15 minutes of fame and some people resent having to wait for payment. Others are legitimate. I am very sorry that it had to come to the suit status, however, this was not intentional. I intended no malice, no disrespect, and no lack of concern for the working people and small businesses of Detroit. I have never purchased any goods or services without the intention of paying my bills in a timely and responsible manner.”

  Undaunted by the bad press, Aretha threw herself a gala fifty-seventh birthday party in March at the Atrium Gardens in Southfield, Michigan. Mayor Dennis Archer attended, along with a slew of local celebrities. Chaka Khan and Nnenna Freelon performed.

  “We were all excited when Aretha told us that Prince Rainier had personally invited her to a command performance in Monaco,” Erma remembered. “It was going to be a gala occasion in the springtime, and my sister had her heart set on performing. After Monaco, she was planning to spend time in Paris, a city she loved dearly and hadn’t visited for nearly thirty years. We were all hoping that the lure of such a glamorous trip would finally motivate her to come to terms with her fear of flying. She tried her best, just as she had tried in the past. But, just like the past, when it came time to step on the plane, Aretha was nowhere to be found.”

  She did step on the private bus—the only means of transportation in which she could control the schedule—to go down to Washington, DC, in May, where she sang at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner and, according to the New York Times, was paid $55,000. On the way to the event, she talked about a new album she was planning. She was going to call it The Queen of Duets and model it after Sinatra’s successful duet ventures. Soon after that, she told Billboard that the record was in the works, but, like so many other Aretha-proclaimed projects, it was never realized.

  Despite all the starts and stops that had characterized her recent career, her iconic status in American music never faltered. In fact, it grew. When, for example, VH1 listed the one hundred greatest women in rock and roll, Aretha was in the number-one position.

  “I didn’t even know that Aretha sang rock and roll,” said Ruth Bowen. “I thought she was an R-and-B singer, or a jazz singer, or a gospel singer. When did the world start seeing her as a rock-and-roller?”

  Her private bus carried her to the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, for a two-week summer vacation. During her stay, she cohosted a fund-raiser for the Children’s Academy of Harlem and also threw a party at a grand mansion that once belonged to Henry Ford. Guests included Christie Brinkley, Lloyd Price, Geoffrey Holder, Freddie Jackson, and Star Jones.

  The honors were unceasing. In September, she was back at the White House, where President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts.

  She viewed the publication of her autobiography on which we had worked as another laudatory moment. Aretha: From These Roots was finally published in the fall of 1999, some five years after we had started it. Although she barred me—and everyone else—from the final editing process, my name appeared on the cover as her collaborator.

  Aretha was invited to be the only guest on a segment of Oprah Winfrey’s hour-long TV show. Before she accepted the invitation, though, she had two demands—that the women in the audience wear fancy dresses or gowns, and that the men wear suits or tuxes.

  During the interview, Aretha was defensive about what she had not included in her book. She was anything but open and at times even combative. It was an awkward exchange. Afterward, the publisher’s publicist said to me, “Aretha came off as so protective and private that the average reader is not going to want to read the book.”

  From These Roots appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for one week and then fell off. Sales were so weak that plans for a paperback reprint were scrapped. Reviews were largely negative, and there were no foreign editions. The main complaint was that Aretha revealed little.

  “Why bother to write a book,” said Ruth Bowen, “if you’re not going to give it up? Aretha’s book read like one long press release. To those who know her well, her lack of candor was nothing new. But why broadcast that kind of self-serving puff piece to the world? By trying to protect her image, all she did was damage it.”

  Yet as time went on, Aretha characterized her book as a commercial and critical triumph. In all our many encounters after its publication, she spoke of the work and its reception in glowing terms and considered it the one and only true chronicle of her life.

  Part Five

  THE LIONESS IN WINTER

  36. WHAT ARETHA WANTS

  As the twentieth century came to an end, Aretha Franklin, approaching sixty, had established herself as one of America’s most profoundly admired and influential singers. She had forged a trajectory that had carried her from gospel to jazz to pop to rhythm and blues and then back again. Having mastered each of these genres, she had learned to effectively bend and blend them with unforced naturalness. She was a jazzy gospel singer and a gospel-like jazz singer, a pop-wise soul singer and a soulful pop singer. Somewhere along the way, she was labeled a pioneer rock-and-roller, and, for good measure, she began performing operatic arias.

  Her early years at Columbia had been hit or miss. At Atlantic she gained superstardom. For the rest of her career she tenaciously fought to retain that status. The struggle was great. A weaker artist would have wilted, and after a historic run of R&B, pop, and gospel hits in the late sixties and early seventies, she faced a drought. She came back with Sparkle, only to face another drought during the age of disco. She came back again in the eighties with her hits on Arista, and then faced a deeper drought in the nineties. Yet by the end of that decade, she was on the charts once again, and, with her triumphant “Nessun Dorma” performance at the Grammys, she returned to the spotlight and stood at the very center of our musical culture.

  “You may not like all the stuff she did to stay popular,” said her old producer Jerry Wexler. “You may be bothered by cracks in her voice and the lapses of taste when it came to material. There was a lot of cheesy shit. But in the end, you got to give it to her. The woman is fuckin’ fierce. In a half dozen different epochs of music, she managed to stay in the middle of the mix. She isn’t a Miles Davis, who kept breaking through barriers and never stopped innovating. And she isn’t a Duke Ellington or a Marvin Gaye, who never stopped wr
iting brilliantly. She chiefly became an interpreter and an adapter of very diverse material. She studied the Billboard charts and, for over forty years, found a way to stay on those charts. That’s one hell of an accomplishment.”

  But beginning in 2000 and continuing for the next thirteen years, she would not realize another commercial success of any consequence. Her public appearances would be less frequent and her recordings far fewer. According to her closest relatives, her moods would darken as her emotional volatility intensified.

  Her family would also observe her falling into a long one-sided fantasy affair with Tavis Smiley, the well-respected broadcast journalist who, while friendly with Aretha, had not the slightest interest in a romantic relationship. Yet Aretha spoke of their having a major love affair, had even titled an album after the imagined affair’s demise.

  “When it comes to men,” Ruth Bowen told me, “Aretha’s always been able to delude herself. But these days she’s so far over the top, it’s crazy.”

  The one project that hardly seemed delusional—her duets album—kept coming up whenever I spoke with her. During one of our conversations, she asked me to write liner notes and promised that a track listing would be forthcoming.

  In March 2000, Billboard reported, “Aretha’s long-awaited ‘Duets’ LP is set to drop June 20. Final song lineup is still being determined but one confirmed track is the Grammy-nominated duet with Mary J. Blige, ‘Don’t Waste Your Time.’ ”

  That song had been included on Blige’s 1999 Mary album, a project that in some ways took its marketing cue from Aretha. Moving to the right of hard-core hip-hop, Mary J., like Aretha, collaborated with Elton John and Lauryn Hill in addition to doing a Diane Warren ballad, “Give Me You,” featuring Eric Clapton.