Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

by David Ritz

  When I recently called West to see if the matter had been resolved, he had no comment.

  In September, Aretha appeared with Tony Bennett on his Duets II CD, joining him on the song “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”

  In October, she sang “Precious Lord” at the dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington.

  That same month, the New York Times reported that Aretha was the wedding singer at a high-society marriage between same-sex couple Bill White and Bryan Eure held at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. Three months later, on January 6, 2012, came her surprise announcement to the Associated Press that she would be marrying Willie Wilkerson in the summer. She mentioned asking Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and gospel singer Karen Clark Sheard to perform at the wedding. She rejected the idea of a wedding planner, saying, “There is no way in the world anyone else could plan my wedding other than myself.”

  “The singer admits to ‘an intimate affair’ with a fellow celebrity in the past,” the AP reported, quoting Aretha as saying, “He was one of America’s late-night talk-show hosts. At this point I’m thrilled it didn’t [work], and what I was looking for was already here. We’re very compatible, and he supports me and I support him a lot, and he has given me specialized attention that I don’t think I’ve received from anyone else. I receive a lot of male attention, but Will is more special than all the rest.”

  According to sister-in-law Earline, Aretha fabricated the story. “God bless Aretha,” said Earline, “but when she feels she’s been out of the news for too long, she finds a way to get back in. This wedding story was something she just made up. When Will read about it, he was furious. He’s a great guy and has been a loyal friend, but he has other women besides Aretha. He had no intention of marrying her and never asked her. As far as that old story about her and Tavis Smiley, well, that was another Aretha invention that she couldn’t let go of.”

  Two weeks later Aretha’s publicist Tracey Jordan issued this statement:

  “Regretfully, To Our Friends and Supporters: Will and I have decided we were moving a little too fast, and there were a number of things that had not been thought through thoroughly. There will be no wedding at this time. We will not comment on it any further because of the very personal and sensitive nature of it.”

  The misunderstanding behind them, Willie and Aretha repaired their relationship, and once again he was seen at her side at a number of public events. Aretha continued to maximize her press appearances, assuring one and all that her reign, now in its sixth decade, was in no danger of ending.

  39. THE ONCE AND FUTURE QUEEN

  When Whitney Houston died in Los Angeles on February 11, 2012, Aretha issued a statement: “I just can’t talk about it now. It’s so stunning and unbelievable. I couldn’t believe what I was reading coming across the TV screen. My heart goes out to Cissy, her daughter Bobbi Kris, her family and Bobby.” Two days later, at a private concert in Charlotte, North Carolina, she called Whitney “one of the greatest singers who ever stood before a microphone.” In an interview with Al Roker shortly before Houston’s funeral, Aretha remembered meeting a ten-year-old Whitney. “I said, ‘Oh, this little girl can sing! Okay, Cissy’s baby can sing!’ ”

  Aretha played Radio City Music Hall in New York the night before Whitney’s funeral in nearby Newark, New Jersey. During the concert, Aretha sang two songs associated with Whitney—“I Will Always Love You” and “The Greatest Love of All.” There was great strain in her voice as she tried to negotiate the demanding ballads, but there was also great feeling.

  Expected to sing at Whitney’s memorial service held at the New Hope Baptist Church, Aretha failed to appear. According to Tracey Jordan, she was beset by muscle spasms and leg cramps.

  “It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Whitney,” said her cousin Brenda Corbett. “She cared deeply. But the pressure of her recent shows was taking its toll and the health concerns were real. She did all she could to honor Whitney. In every concert for the next year she’d sit at the piano and accompany herself to ‘I Will Always Love You.’ It was always a heartfelt tribute.”

  Aretha wrote generous tributes following the deaths of colleagues Etta James, Don Cornelius, Donna Summer, and Dick Clark.

  “She took these deaths hard,” said her sister-in-law Earline. “They seemed to be coming one after the other. But Ree has her own way of dealing with dark news. She goes out and creates some good news of her own.”

  She made sure the press was there when she threw herself the customary gala birthday party in March—her seventieth—this year at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan, where Clive Davis sat at her table. “I’ve re-signed with Clive,” she told a reporter, making up with the man who forged her comeback in the eighties and was now chief creative officer at Sony Records. Over the next months, reports indicated that, working with producers Kenny “Babyface” Edmunds and Nate “Danja” Hills, she would cover songs associated with the great pop divas of the past, a typically high-gloss commercial Clive Davis project. As of this writing, though, production has not begun.

  “I’ve been singing background with my cousin for some forty-two years,” Brenda told me, “and I still don’t know—record from record or concert from concert—where she’s going to hire me or fire me. Months will go by when she cuts off all communication with me. She’s furious with me and I never know why. Then she’ll call and we’re back together like nothing has happened. The same is true with her relationships with Sabrina, Earline, and Earline’s daughter, Tiffany. This isn’t just a pattern with family members. It also applies to longtime employees. She fired H. B. Barnum, her musical director for decades and a man who had been loyal to her in the most difficult situations. When I asked her why she said, ‘He didn’t visit or call me when I was in the hospital.’ ‘But Aretha,’ I said, ‘he did call and send flowers and cards and could not have been more concerned.’ She didn’t want to hear about it. H. B. Barnum was gone—and that was it.”

  In April, Aretha fired William Morris Endeavor, switching over to ICM for booking and management. In addition, she continued her pattern of firing and rehiring two separate publicists, Gwendolyn Quinn and Tracey Jordan.

  She also continued to call reporters with tidbits about her biopic, the latest one casting Audra McDonald, the celebrated Broadway singer with an operatic voice, in the lead role. Yet there was no script, no director, no studio deal.

  In June she attended a forty-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner for President Obama’s reelection campaign at the home of Sarah Jessica Parker before heading out on the bus to New Orleans to play the Essence Music Festival. “Ms. Franklin’s set was a deflation,” wrote Ben Ratliff in the New York Times, “full of awkward silences.”

  Later that month, at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, I attended her surprisingly abbreviated concert. She sounded winded and looked alarmingly unsteady. When we spoke afterward, she said she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t wait to get back to Detroit, though she was dreading the long bus ride. She also mentioned her desire to return to Hollywood and become a television personality. Reuters reported that “Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin said on Saturday that she is interested in joining ‘American Idol’ as a judge, just days after Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler declared they have ended their judging roles on the Fox show.”

  In the following weeks, she kept putting out hints in the press, describing herself as the ideal judge. The invitation, though, never arrived.

  She spent the winter at home in Detroit. In March 2013, at age seventy-one, she traveled to New York. I was in the audience at the Performing Arts Center in Newark for Aretha’s Saturday-night concert.

  The New Jersey crowd was an even mix of black and white, the average age somewhere between fifty-five and seventy. The place was packed with Aretha fans prepared to love her. Newark’s then-mayor, Corey Booker, gave a flowery, heart-warming introduction, describing how when he was a child, Aretha’s voice had connected him to t
he divine. He said her songs were the core of our collective consciousness. When he called her to the stage, it was with great emotion and high anticipation. But Aretha was nowhere to be found. Forty minutes passed before she appeared.

  She came out wearing a white mink coat that she quickly removed and dropped to the floor. Willie Wilkerson picked up the fur and carried it off to the wings. Her sleeveless glittery silver gown was far from flattering. She had regained considerable weight in the past few months. With a big band blaring behind her, she sang a medley of a few of her hits—“Baby, I Love You,” “Think,” “Natural Woman.” The top of her voice was frayed but her middle and lower range strong. Her singing lacked emotional commitment until she attacked B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen.” Early in this traditional twelve-bar blues, she caught the Holy Ghost. She performed the miracle that only the greatest of R&B artists can realize—the union of the secular and the sacred, the marriage of heaven and earth—as she broke into a little church dance, not caring that her bra straps were slipping and her gown askew. I remembered how B.B. had worshipped at the sanctuary where her dad shouted the good news. She mentioned her glory days at the Atlantic studios in midtown Manhattan during the golden age of soul before singing “Ain’t No Way,” her cousin Brenda hitting the high notes behind her. And then, after this short twenty-minute set, she left the stage, saying she’d be right back. During the ten-minute interlude, the band vamped on Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Get It Up” while the audience stirred restlessly.

  The second half of her show began with Aretha telling an interminable shaggy-dog story—a tired old joke about a talking canine—that was not in the least funny. The audience groaned. I wondered why the show included this bit of humor. But, as always, this was Aretha’s show—planned, produced, and realized according to her own lights. She sang a couple of more hits—“The House That Jack Built” and “Call Me”—before moving to the piano, where she accompanied herself to “I Will Always Love You,” the tribute to Whitney Houston. She sang the song slowly, exquisitely, turning the sentimental ballad into a gospel dirge. She dedicated “Make Them Hear You,” from the musical Ragtime, to Mayor Booker, who apparently had left the building. Her choice of a Broadway-style inspirational song reminded me that fifty-three years earlier, during her first recording session for Columbia in 1960, she had sung a similar semi-inspirational number—“Are You Sure,” from the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown. In trying to please a mainstream audience by covering mainstream genres, the seventy-one-year-old Aretha was hardly different than the eighteen-year-old Aretha.

  Before concluding with the inevitable “Respect,” she broke into “It’s About Time for a Miracle,” the kind of up-tempo church stomper her idol Clara Ward brought into jazz cabarets and Vegas lounges back in the fifties when Aretha was a preteen singing at her father’s gospel shows.

  The show was short. She sang for barely forty-five minutes. In a few instances, she was inspired. Even when her voice was tired, I marveled at the creativity of her phrasing. She read the material with her usual mixture of cunning and intelligence. The production itself took away from her singing. The slide projections on a screen in the back of the stage—showing a number of family pictures, plus the issue of Rolling Stone trumpeting her as the number-one singer of all time—looked like something out of a junior-high-school graduation party.

  And yet her fans, loyal to a fault, gave her a standing ovation. They sensed that she had done her best—and I believe she had. Later she spoke of her plans to tour extensively in the coming summer. But those plans were canceled when her medical condition deteriorated and she was forced into treatment. She remained adamant in refusing to reveal the nature of her disease to the public.

  Her adamancy never diminished. She returned to the stage at the end of 2013 to play a casino in Detroit. She sang for merely thirty minutes, but she did sing. She scheduled concerts for Radio City Music Hall the following January and spoke to the press about her new album, in which she would cover songs associated with other divas and work under the supervision of Clive Davis with producers Babyface and Don Was. One had to respect her tenacity and courage in the face of a life-threatening disease.

  As I watched these truncated appearances, I felt sadness—she was but a shadow of her former self—but also deep admiration for her sheer willpower. At the same time I kept thinking of what I wanted her to do:

  I wanted her to realize a concert with only a superb jazz trio behind her as she sings George Gershwin and Cole Porter and the blues ballads of Percy Mayfield.

  I wanted her to sit at the piano and accompany herself as she revisits her best songs and the songs of Thomas A. Dorsey and James Cleveland and Curtis Mayfield.

  I wanted her to put her performing and recording career in the hands of producers noted for impeccable taste, musical restraint, and unfettered imagination.

  I wanted her to give up the notion of having to stay current by working with music executives whose obsession for sales trumps concern for lasting quality or musical integrity.

  In short, I wanted her to be a different kind of artist—and a different kind of woman—than who she is.

  I remind myself that my job is not only to tell her story but to understand and accept her for who she is.

  And who is that?

  Who is Aretha Franklin?

  She is the third of four extraordinarily bright and gifted children born to extraordinary parents—her mother a gifted singer, her father a gifted preacher.

  She is a child who watches her mother leave the family as her father, a charismatic figure in the socially and politically progressive wing of the black church, galvanizes his power and status.

  She is a child who, while still vulnerable and young, learns of her mother’s death and seeks motherly love from a number of women who are romantically involved with her dad.

  Although all her siblings demonstrate precocious talent, she is the young woman with the golden voice, her father’s favorite, and, while barely a teen, a featured part of his gospel services that earn him—and her—a reputation among African American churchgoers.

  She is the young woman who, while still a teen, has two children of her own.

  She is the young woman who, while still a teen, is urged by her father to enter mainstream show business and sign with the world’s biggest record company.

  She is the young woman who, in her early twenties, marries a man known as a gentleman pimp and allows him to run her career and her life with a forceful hand.

  Frustrated by her semi-success on her first label, she switches labels and achieves superstardom with a series of records unparalleled in the history of American music.

  She is the superstar who becomes the musical voice of the civil rights movement, a cultural icon—all this before she turns thirty.

  In a Los Angeles church, she is the rhythm-and-blues and jazz singer who looks back to her childhood and records what is universally regarded as the greatest album in the history of gospel.

  Amid the confusion of a frenetic personal and professional life, she is crowned the Queen of Soul as she struggles with alcohol and depression.

  As Queen of Soul, she leaves her native Detroit and moves to Los Angeles, where she is frustrated by her inability to realize domestic happiness and produce or star in films.

  In the second half of the seventies, as her long run of hits comes to an end, the Queen stumbles again, this time in her effort to reinvent herself as a disco diva.

  With a new label and a new mentor, the Queen refuses to relinquish her crown, achieving commercial success with a new label and a series of dance-oriented producers in the post-disco era.

  In the eighties she suffers the tragic death of her beloved father in addition to the demise of two of her beloved siblings. She leaves Hollywood and her unrealized film career to return to the affluent suburbs of Detroit, where she will live for the rest of her life.

  In her fifties, sixties, and seventies, she focuses on staying musically current.
She seeks out younger producers as well as duet partners, and the hits that result, although not comparable to her earlier creative triumphs, are enough to keep her in the public eye.

  In her fifties, sixties, and seventies, the accolades never stop. She wins every honor and award imaginable. As her iconic status builds, her reign remains unchallenged; the Queen is a permanent fixture of our popular culture.

  In her fifties, sixties, and seventies, without the help of her father and brother—her two most trusted advisers—and without an ongoing romantic relationship, she becomes more afraid. The Queen will not step on an airplane. The Queen will not ride a bus through thunderstorms or over high mountain passes. The Queen deals with fear through control. The Queen becomes overwhelmed by fear and obsessed with control.

  When she becomes seriously sick, the Queen fears that the public will learn the nature of her disease and thus dismiss her as irrelevant. So she does her best to control the press. When she is out of the news for too long, the Queen fears that the public will forget her and so she circulates stories—about love affairs, marriages, or biopic movies—that keep her name alive.

  Afraid of losing her money, the Queen carries her purse with her onstage, where she can see it at all times.

  In her troubled mind, control is the antidote to fear. She hires, fires, and rehires a battery of publicists, booking agents, and managers because, when all is said and done, she cannot relinquish control. Thus she starts her own record label, becoming her own producer and marketing manager.

  When these operations fail, she deflects the blame. Self-scrutiny is not her way. Her methods of denial have been perfected over a lifetime. Finally, when she has no choice and turns to others for help, help is always there. She is, after all, our once and future Queen. In the annals of our magnificent music, there is only one Queen of Soul.

  The Queen is the ultimate survivor, a symbol of strength. She fights off physical ailments. She fights off depression. With steely determination, she keeps moving forward, no matter what.