Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  She had no regrets, though, about the laudatory profile in Jet in which she exclaimed that her new beau, whom she refused to name, “is making me so damn happy.” She also discussed, without details, the upbeat careers of her sons Kecalf, Eddie, and Teddy. “Eddie is going to be recording soon and I will record him on my own label.” She also mentioned plans to open her own booking agency, Crown Booking, to handle her own dates as well as other artists’, like her sons’.

  “I knew that Crown Booking was a dig at Queen Booking, my agency that for so many years had been helping Aretha get more and more money,” said Ruth Bowen. “She was mad at me because I couldn’t get her the astronomical fees she was asking for. She thought she could get Janet Jackson or Michael Jackson or Madonna money. But of course that was ridiculous. As for starting her own booking agency, that was more of her delusional thinking. She couldn’t even balance her own checking account. How the hell was she gonna run a booking business? Naturally it never happened. She wound up going back to Dick Alen at William Morris, the only man in America patient enough to put up with her bullshit.”

  “This is a big breakthrough,” Aretha told me when we spoke in early 2004. “I’ve made up my mind to come to California this summer! Do you realize that I haven’t sung on the West Coast for over twenty years?”

  “Are you flying?”

  “I wish,” she said. “We’re going on my bus, and we’re going to take our time getting there.”

  After our pleasant conversation, I called Ruth Bowen for a reality check. Was Aretha really riding across the country? “She’s been wanting to play LA for years,” said Ruth, “but she always winds up canceling. The thought of that long bus ride is too much for her. She also hates the idea of riding through the Rockies. One time she agreed to go the southern route, through Texas and New Mexico, but then she heard weather reports about impending storms and changed her mind. But this time she sounds like she’s sticking to her guns. She’s booked for two nights at the Greek Theater. But that’s way off in September. I wouldn’t be surprised if she cancels.”

  That spring, Aretha spoke to Ebony about breaking up with her boyfriend, but, as usual, she would not name him. “I cannot believe that I was this naïve and gullible at this point in my life,” she said. “When you love somebody, it’s sometimes kind of hard to see everything that you need to see. It’s a lot easier when you’re not emotionally involved.” She went on to make three vows: “I’m going to lose weight, get more organized, and I’m going to leave these bullshit men alone.”

  In this same period she was treated for an allergic reaction to antibiotics at Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital. She made a point of telling the press that Clive Davis had sent flowers.

  “I can’t tell you all the times that Aretha had broken off communication with Clive,” said Ruth Bowen. “It was always about money demands. She wanted crazy advances that he wouldn’t pay. But ultimately, they’d always get back together because she’s got the prestige and he’s got the clout. To be frank, they’re like two aging queens basking in each other’s glory. Aretha is the Queen of Soul and Clive is the Queen of Pop Radio. They fawn over each other to where it’s sickening. They never get tired of kissing each other’s behind. If you read what Aretha says about Clive in her album acknowledgments it’s always, ‘The epitome of a great record man, the very urbane and esteemed Clive Davis.’ Clive eats that shit up. And she just loves how he escorts her to his fancy-shmancy Grammy parties.”

  The death of another old friend affected her mightily. Knowing I was close to Ray Charles, Aretha called me after he passed, on June 10, 2004. She wanted to know where to send flowers. She talked lovingly of the time she brought him to the stage of the Fillmore West to sing “Spirit in the Dark.” In her statement to the press she spoke of his courage and confidence:

  “He had a broad scope of music and could deliver it with savoir faire, no matter what genre it was in. His courage also stands out to me as much as his musicology, how he had the courage to go on after his mother died by the time he was fifteen. I’ll also remember his level of confidence. He was confident on every level as a writer, as a producer, as a singer. He also had a charitable soul.”

  Aretha’s own charitable soul was evident when she sang a benefit for the Southwest Women Working Together in Chicago, an organization formed to help women and children victimized by domestic violence.

  She also made good on the promise to take that long bus trip to California. She sold out the Greek Theater in Los Angeles on September 17 and 18. In attendance were both Clive Davis and Tavis Smiley, who the day before had interviewed her for his television show. This encounter perpetuated Aretha’s one-sided infatuation with Smiley.

  “She went around saying how they were an item,” said Earline. “She even implied that they’d get married. But everyone who knew the real story understood that Tavis respected her as an artist and that was it. He wasn’t about to be Aretha’s boy toy. He’s just not that guy. But she went on for years acting like—or, better yet, pretending like it was this torrid affair. Believe me, it wasn’t.”

  The opening-night concert itself was a disappointment. She started strong, reaching back to her Columbia days for a soaring “Try a Little Tenderness.” But from there it was downhill. There was a perfunctory medley of her hits and strangely ineffective hip-hop-ish choreography from a dance troupe. Her great weight had her looking sluggish, and the once glorious top range of her voice was gone. Teddy Richards, her talented son with Ted White, was, as he had been since 1984, her featured guitarist.

  “It took her forever to get back to Detroit,” said Ruth Bowen, “because she didn’t like driving more than a few hundred miles a day. She told me that she was so exhausted from the trip she was taking off the rest of the year. When she did get home, I think she must have had another falling-out with Clive because she started telling me about her Aretha’s Records, her own label where finally no one could tell her what to do. ‘But Aretha,’ I said, ‘no one’s been telling you what to do for the last twenty-five years. What the hell are you talking about?’ That’s when she decided she wasn’t talking to me again.”

  On March 26, 2005, Gail Mitchell reported in Billboard that Aretha was planning a June release “for her still-untitled album.” It was all set to be on Aretha’s Records with guests Faith Hill, Dennis Edwards, and gospel singer Smokie Norful. The record never came out.

  In June she appeared at Madison Square Garden, headlining a show for the twenty-second annual McDonald’s Gospelfest.

  “It’s time to renew those gospel roots,” she told me. “I’m bringing in Joe Ligon from the Mighty Clouds of Joy,” the same Ligon who sang on her self-produced One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism back in 1987.

  The highlight was her version of “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that never failed to excite her boldest creative instincts.

  Then in July, along with Alicia Keys, Patti Austin, and Patti LaBelle, Aretha sang at Luther Vandross’s funeral at New York’s Riverside Church. He had died at age fifty-three. She later wrote that “he was so earthy and down. But as down and earthy as he was, he was just as classy and elegant. And the most beautiful part was that he was real and not plastic. He was very much the gentleman. I just enjoyed him being the superb vocalist and person that he was. ‘Get It Right’ is my opening song to this day. Real friendships are rare. He was full of fun, humor, and wit. We didn’t have to spend a lot of time together to know that we were friends. We knew that.”

  “I felt the need to do more gospel,” Aretha told me after the death of Luther. “I’ve always felt that need and I always will. But losing all these beautiful people who were so close to me, well, I needed to express my feelings in the songs that had comforted me ever since I was a little girl.”

  In July, at a revival at Detroit’s Greater Emmanuel Church, Aretha did just that. Along with the Spiritual QCs, Beverly Crawford, and Candi Staton, she sang the old church songs that brought back happy memories of traveling with her dad as a teena
ger.

  “I was especially happy to see Candi,” said Aretha. “I knew her long before she had her pop hit with ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ in the seventies. I knew her when she was in the Jewel Gospel Singers and I’d go see them sing at the Apollo. Back then she was calling herself Cassietta and she was one of the best. So to share a pulpit with her again at this mature time of our lives was a beautiful blessing.”

  That sacred/secular switch, repeatedly turned off and on throughout Aretha’s career, was heavily employed in 2005. Shortly after the Detroit gospel fete, she scatted on the remix of “I Gotta Make It,” a self-determination anthem by young R&B heartthrob Trey Songz, who sang in the R. Kelly mode of seductive soul. As she had done on Lauryn Hill’s “A Rose Is Still a Rose,” Aretha played the part of the sagacious matriarch, doling out advice to a younger generation.

  Switching tracks again, she paid homage to an older generation in her soaring tribute to the great matriarch of the civil rights movement Rosa Parks, who died on October 24, 2005. She was the first woman to lie in state in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC, after which her casket was returned to Detroit, where for two days it remained in view at the city’s Museum of African American Culture. Thousands of people walked by in tribute. Then, on November 2, at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple, her funeral was held in the city where she had lived since the sixties.

  The seven-hour, twenty-eight-minute service was broadcast on CNN. The rhetoric was extravagant. Tributes were offered by, among others, then-senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and ministers Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and T. D. Jakes. The emotional high point, though, wasn’t spoken but musical—Aretha’s inspired treatment of “The Impossible Dream,” the syrupy ballad from the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha magically transformed into a sacred hymn.

  In that same month, Aretha traveled to Washington, DC, where she overlooked party differences and accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. Among the others honored were Carol Burnett, Alan Greenspan, Muhammad Ali, Andy Griffith, Paul Harvey, and Jack Nicklaus.

  Like Aretha, Lou Rawls was a singer who had followed the road from gospel to R&B to jazz and pop. When he died, in January 2006, Aretha felt that his contributions were woefully underrated. “He’d begun in the church,” she told me, “and then spread out to the world. He had his hits but he was bigger than that. He covered all the bases. He was a giant.”

  In June, upon the passing of her longtime arranger Arif Mardin, she celebrated his great talent, saying, “What arrangers Nelson Riddle and Billy May did for Sinatra, Arif did for me. He was the best of the best.”

  Learning of James Brown’s death that December, she argued that he was every bit as important as Duke Ellington, calling him “the most exciting and thrilling R-and-B male performer of all time.”

  It was a string of difficult passings, and the loss of her colleagues was taking its toll. In considering her own mortality, she began telling friends that her next major project would be producing a Broadway show from her autobiography Aretha: From These Roots. Over the next several years she would hold auditions in Detroit and Los Angeles. She’d throw out names to the press of women who might play her—everyone from Jennifer Hudson to Halle Berry—but plans never got off the drawing board. Investors were never found. At one point, she said that instead of a musical, her life story would be turned into a feature film. When she was asked about a script, she said it would be based strictly upon her book and that she would have total control over every aspect of the movie. But nothing ever materialized.

  “R&B is alive and well,” she told Jet in June 2007. In the article she listed the current artists she admired most—Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Soulchild, Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, Mary J, Trey Songz, Anthony Hamilton, Gerald Levert, and Nelly.

  She saw no reason why she couldn’t be as popular as the performers she named. She put the blame for her faltering sales on Arista. All year, she had been privately complaining that Arista was not promoting her properly and owed her money long past due. That winter she went public, telling the New York Times that Jewels in the Crown, a compilation of previously released duets, would be her last album on Arista. She and Clive Davis had fallen out. “It’s over,” she told Jon Pareles. “You might as well say it’s over.” Clive demurred: “The lawyers say that there are cuts owned. I don’t know that for a fact. I have not gotten into that. She and I, we’ve had a long relationship.”

  She announced the launching of her own label, Aretha’s Records, and said that her first album, A Woman Falling Out of Love, was already complete. All she lacked was a distributor. She also said that she had selected the title “because it happens to be true. It was based on a relationship that I had, and it just didn’t happen for a number of reasons.” Her close relatives told me that this was simply Aretha inventing high romantic drama around her platonic relationship with Tavis Smiley.

  As she had been doing for the past decade, she declared her intention to enroll at Juilliard to study classical piano, another plan that would remain unrealized.

  Jet put her on the cover to discuss her weight, which had dramatically increased. She blamed it on giving up smoking in 1992 and vowed to diet. When asked whether she was backing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, she had praise for them both and remained undecided.

  In the winter of 2008, she rode her tour bus to the West Coast, where she appeared at LA’s Nokia Theater. Then it was back on the bus to New York.

  The Radio City Music Hall show came two days before her sixty-sixth birthday on Easter Sunday. To my ears, she sounded uninspired and tentative. After singing “Respect,” she asked her musical director H. B. Barnum to help her with a strap that had come undone on one of her shoes. The result was that Barnum was literally kneeling at Aretha’s feet.

  “I didn’t mind,” he told me afterward. “After all, she is the Queen.”

  The next number was her rendition of Keyshia Cole’s “I Remember,” at the time a huge hip-hop/R&B hit. To help her with the song, she enlisted Ali Ollie Woodson. A lead singer powerful enough to be put in the same category as his Temptations predecessors David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards, Woodson told me, “When Aretha couldn’t get hold of Dennis, she’d call me. Naturally I took that as a compliment because Dennis is one of the greats, but when I asked Aretha if I might have a slot on her show and maybe sing a couple of songs on my own, she took offense. She said I should be satisfied singing the bridge of Keyshia Cole’s song. I knew better than to argue with the Queen, so I didn’t.”

  “One day out of the blue the phone rings and it’s Aretha Franklin,” Keyshia Cole told me. “I was amazed. Like every young singer, I see her as the ultimate. She told me how much she liked my ‘I Remember’ and wanted me to write a song just as good for her. I was more than willing. I told her that the reason ‘I Remember’ worked so well was because it came out of a personal experience of mine. If she wanted me to custom-tailor such a song for her, I’d have to know what she was going through—personally. That made her clam up. ‘If I tell you that, you’ll have to give me the publishing on the song.’ ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Well, I’ll have to get back to you.’ She never did. Later, someone who’s known her for years said that Aretha never reveals anything personal about herself. He called her the ice queen who never melts.”

  Aretha’s collaboration with Keyshia Cole was never realized, but she did enjoy a successful duet with Mary J. Blige. In March, Aretha and Mary won a Grammy for their gospel duet “Never Gonna Break My Faith” from Jewels in the Crown.

  But Aretha was miffed when on the Grammy telecast Beyoncé introduced Tina as “the Queen,” a title Aretha jealously guarded as her own. Her statement to the press was strangely ambiguous: “I am not sure whose toes I may have stepped on or whose ego I may have bruised between the Grammy writers and Beyoncé. However, I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy. In addition to that, I thank the Grammys and the voting academy for my twent
ieth Grammy and love to Beyoncé anyway.”

  More bad press came during that same month of March—news reports that her home in Detroit was facing foreclosure. Aretha quickly called Jet to set the matter straight.

  “This is not even the home where I live,” she said. “If you listen to the news it sounded as if I was going to lose the house and tomorrow I would be out on the street corner selling pencils and pies on the corner… I went down and paid everything. This whole thing was much ado about nothing. They got the cart way ahead of the horse. Everything is fine now.”

  That summer her friend and most important producer, Jerry Wexler, died at ninety-one. His children planned his memorial in New York City for a time when they knew Aretha would be in Manhattan. As it turned out, her hotel was less than a mile from the service. On the day before the tribute, I called her several times, leaving messages to remind her of the time and place. Yet she failed to make an appearance. A few weeks later, when I asked what happened, she claimed not to have known about the memorial

  Although she didn’t show up for Jerry, that November she showed up in a big way in Rolling Stone. The magazine ran a feature about the one hundred greatest singers of the rock era, naming Aretha number one. For the next several years, she projected that honor on a big screen at all her concerts.

  That same winter she released a lackluster and painfully overwrought Christmas album that she both produced and arranged. She used the opportunity to take a shot at her old mentors, writing in the liner notes, “I am thrilled to record the first Christmas LP of my career, and it is so unfortunate that John Hammond, Jerry Wexler, and Clive Davis never put this on the front burner because it is everything that I wanted it to be and more.”

  The album, distributed by Rhino, the Warner division responsible for her Atlantic reissues, received little notice in the press and sold poorly.