This, too, was part of the world C. L. inhabited. His road tours were usually not as long as those of many groups, but he often went for two weeks or more. Frequently accompanying him on these tours, beginning in 1956, was his daughter Aretha. She had already gained a reputation in church circles as a phenomenal singer, and she also had talent with the piano. In 1956, she had recorded her first gospel hymns. One can hear the powerful influence of Clara Ward in the young Aretha’s versions of “Precious Lord” and “Never Grow Old,” but there was another quality as well. Jerry Wexler, who produced some of Aretha Franklin’s greatest songs on Atlantic Records in the late 1960s, commented of those first gospel sides that the “voice was not that of a child but rather of an ecstatic hierophant,” that is, of a gifted priestess possessed of the Spirit.55
On March 25, 1956, Aretha turned fourteen and, shortly after, gave birth to her first son, whom she named Clarence, after her father. Lurid and unsubstantiated rumors as to who was the baby’s father spread almost immediately, ranging from various performers who frequented the house to C. L. himself.56 Aretha stated that her baby’s father was a local Detroit youth who was not involved after the baby’s birth, and the Franklin family, she continued, was very supportive. C. L. was not judgmental, Aretha recalled, but he did impress on her the new responsibilities she now carried. C. L.’s other decisions that spring, however, suggested a rather peculiar understanding of what those responsibilities might entail. Aretha had withdrawn from school by the sixth month of her pregnancy, and her father never insisted that she return. Instead, by early summer, he added his daughter to his gospel program, along with Sammy Bryant, the Clara Ward Singers, and Alex Bradford and his group. They drew enormous crowds at almost every performance, and young Aretha gained a new standing among her friends. Smoky Robinson was dumbfounded when “Ree” returned from one tour to announce that she had actually met Fats Domino. While Aretha was away, Rachel, “Big Mama,” cared for young Clarence.57
C. L.’s inclusion of his daughter, a vulnerable woman-child, on the tour all but demanded that she grow up fast. In that intensely emotional, sexually charged adult context, she was at once a starstruck kid, a mother still discovering the meaning of those emotions, and an attractive female with a young teenager’s profoundly uneven self-confidence. What arrangements C. L. made to shield her from the tour’s nocturnal activities are not known, but her very presence unavoidably exposed her to experiences well beyond her years. What further strained the credibility of C. L.’s pronouncements on maternal responsibilities were the persistent rumors, percolating beneath the public acclaim, indicating that Frank, too, participated in what Ruth Brown called the “final compensation.” There are few specifics, however, and no eyewitness accounts available, only numerous references to his love of nightlife and the company of women. But it seems probable that Franklin enjoyed the company of women on the road as much as he did in Detroit.58
Since C. L. and Barbara separated in 1948, Franklin probably only rarely wanted for female companionship. He never remarried but opportunities presented themselves at almost every turn. Ruth Brown, for one, always went to C. L.’s for dinner when she played Detroit, for “he had a thing for me for quite a while,” she discreetly recalled, and she was clearly taken with him. “This man’s cloth was silk, and I mean made to measure. He sported a ‘konk,’ and was tall, fine-looking, and very, very suave.” Anna Gordy, an executive in her brother’s Motown Records, had a serious relationship with C. L. some years before she married singer Marvin Gaye. Poet Al Young saw C. L. so frequently with his mother in his Detroit home that Young assumed they would marry. Lola Moore, whom Aretha called “Daddy’s lady friend,” had a somewhat different relationship: she lived for a number of years in C. L.’s home. There were undoubtedly other women as well. C. L. projected a compelling sensual presence, and he had never been particularly committed to monogamy. By 1956 it was public knowledge that C. L. was “a popular man-about-town,” the African American magazine Color reported in January 1957. He was “often seen escorting some of the city’s most attractive women. But he always tells news reporters (even in the presence of the women) that he is not altar-bound.”59
Churchwomen also reached for him. Mary Wilson, a New Bethel member between 1956 and 1963, and an original member of Motown’s most famous group, the Supremes, understood this power as a teenager. C. L.’s charisma, as she referred to it, was so vibrant “that everyone was fascinated by him. Women absolutely loved him. He was a ladies’ man! My mother adored him.” Not every woman who expressed such feelings became intimate with C. L. But some did.60
The flow of women through C. L.’s life reflected both a highly sensual nature and his decision, made after his separation, to forgo a permanent, exclusive relationship with any woman. This pattern, which led to a series of simultaneous relationships of different depth and duration, reflected something else as well. C. L.’s multiple involvements satisfied his powerful sexual appetite and he undoubtedly enjoyed the social company of these women, but the relationships had sharply defined limits. It was nearly impossible for any one of the women rotating through his life at any one time to become truly intimate with this public man. He arrived, left, and then returned, regularly, in a manner that suggested a sustained effort, if not necessarily a fully conscious one, to forestall an intimacy that might breach the barrier he had constructed around his vulnerable private self. C. L. had learned a most profound lesson about manliness about age four, in the wake of his father’s departure: men left relationships. C. L.’s protectiveness toward his mother flowed from this, an idealized response of an only son to replace his father, and from childhood on, he tried at times to explore that loss, particularly with Harry Kincaid. But the incessant stream of female partners, part of a broader pattern of living a largely public role even in his private life, suggested that much remained unresolved. In his head he understood the weight of abandonment, but in his heart he felt a fear of entanglement. Beyond the gifts of friendship and sensual pleasure, the women he dated played a role in his life not unlike his audiences throughout the country. He kept most at a distance, his most serious tensions and emotions beyond their reach, leaving them all too often able only to offer adulation.
That many at New Bethel considered sex outside of marriage a sin caused C. L. no hesitation. He rarely preached on sexual morality and freely went to whatever club featured the musician he wanted to hear. These evenings often concluded with an impromptu party with the musician and assorted friends, either at his house or at the home of Sylvia and William Penn, less than a mile north of his church. But, as before, Franklin was careful about whom he partied with. C. L. enjoyed himself largely with a set of friends who, whether they attended his services or not, lived well beyond the accepted parameters of New Bethel’s dominant culture. Some church people joined him—the Penns, Ralph Williams, Melvin Wrencher (who toured with him), Claud Young, but only a few others. C. L. “treated [church members] nice as Christians,” Sylvia Penn explained. “He treated them right but he didn’t . . . he did not get personal with [them], and he did not socialize with them. So then he kept them away from him where they couldn’t meddle in his business.” “I have to be careful,” C. L. told one of his deacons in the early 1960s. “I can stumble here and fall and the news be in California before sun go down.”61
Despite his apparent resolve to avoid permanent romantic entanglements, the spectrum of Franklin’s relationships included at least one, with Clara Ward, that was prolonged and intense. Born in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1924, the youngest of three children, Clara Ward moved with her family to Philadelphia when a child. At age eleven, together with her thirteen-year-old sister, Willa, and her mother, Gertrude, Clara began her career with the Ward Singers. Before she had barely started, however, Gertrude fell seriously ill, and the two girls stayed with relatives in Philadelphia. During this time the sisters were repeatedly sexually abused, together, by a male cousin. Eventually, Willa overcame her fear (the onset of menstr
uation scared her more than the cousin’s threats: “I was convinced I was having a baby,” she wrote) and told her mother and her aunt, the mother of the abuser. Clara, in Willa’s account at least, suffered the abuse in numbed silence. The emotional violence, however, reverberated deep in her being. Three years later, at Willa’s sixteenth birthday party, crowded with teenage friends and relatives, the often titillating game of “Post Office,” where the “mailman” delivers kisses to a member of the opposite sex, turned into a nightmare for the fourteen-year-old Clara when a boy inserted his tongue in her mouth. Her terrified screams immediately brought Gertrude, who quickly sent the friends home. Willa recalls no comforting words between mother and younger daughter concerning the horrific memories the young boy’s kiss had triggered. Rather, Gertrude proceeded to beat Willa for allowing the game in the first place, a practice the Ward parents subjected their daughters to regularly for the slightest expression of interest in boys.62
During the next decade, the Ward Singers’ fame spread widely. Gertrude’s distinctive voice lost its power, and a series of female vocalists joined the two sisters. Clara emerged as the more powerful and compelling singer, the one who could bring the crowd to its feet begging for but another sound of her voice. In 1943, the group’s career took a major leap when, at the Baptist convention, Clara’s lead vocals and piano accompaniment captivated the thousands in attendance. From that moment on, bookings for the Ward Singers came easily, as word of the performance spread across the national Baptist network. Although no longer performing, Gertrude Ward remained a central force in her children’s lives, especially that of her younger daughter. She dominated Clara’s emotional life and with a hawk’s eye sought to outwit her daughter’s efforts to form relationships with men. She also exerted control over the considerable money Clara’s talents garnered. Gertrude would approve spending for the lavish costumes, wigs, and the lavender Cadillac touring cars Clara so desired, but her reputation as a controlling, even devious, presence extended well beyond her family. C. L. ran up against her manipulations early in the tour, and Mahalia Jackson once reduced a somewhat tense photo shoot of a number of gospel groups to gales of laughter (and great pictures) when she sang out to an impassive Gertrude: “Mother Ward, do you still owe me any money?” Willa left the group in 1947, after she had managed to marry and already had children. The Ward Singers were reorganized with the addition of Henrietta Waddy and the incomparable soprano Marion Williams. But Clara remained, ever more famous and yet a captive of her mother’s commanding presence.63
C. L. met Clara in the late 1940s. It was obvious that he felt deeply for her, but whether these feelings were the final fracture that splintered his marriage remains speculative. Willa first noted a change in her sister’s relationship with C. L. in 1949, the year after Barbara returned to Buffalo. That year, the Ward Singers headlined a large gospel program that included Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Bryant, and C. L. at Philadelphia’s Metropolitan Opera House. In the wake of the enormous success of their “Surely God Is Able” record, the Ward Singers attracted thousands of adoring fans. C. L. and Clara “seemed to share the Holy Spirit intermingled with the human spirit,” Willa thought. For long after, she considered that moment “the start of my sister’s one and only heart, soul, and flesh real romance.”64
In 1949 she was a grown woman of twenty-five, but Clara Ward’s emotional life remained dominated by a childlike compulsion to heed her mother’s imperious demands, even as she regularly demeaned her adult self in order to sneak around them. The tour, in this regard, could be a nightmare, as Gertrude stalked the halls, ever alert for the slightest impropriety in her daughter’s conduct. Frustrated by what Willa called “Mom’s sensitive nose” where “the sweet aroma of amour” involved her daughter, C. L. and Clara devised a cover story in which Clara came to Detroit for a week or more to help a harried pastor and single father by babysitting C. L.’s children. Predictably, Gertrude complained that Clara sang for free at New Bethel on these visits but never seemed to have grasped, as Willa put it, “that the good Reverend was doing most of the sitting—and more—with my sister.” Even more contorted preparations went into the planning for the couple to attend the World Baptist Alliance in London in 1955. Both Ward sisters encouraged their mother not to attend, and C. L. and Clara carefully cleared their schedules to allow for an extended tour of Europe and the Holy Land after the London meeting. Surprisingly, when Clara informed her mother after all the plans were in place, Gertrude’s resistance was less than expected: “I guess it was time to bend a little,” Willa surmised, “or lose Clara completely to the rest of the world—C. L. Franklin’s world.”65
What C. L. thought of all this remains unclear. As all who knew him well might attest, he could be direct, blunt, and demanding. Yet he was very gentle with Clara. During the anxious months preparing for their European trip, Willa witnessed moments when C. L. “reinforced Clara’s spirits when she became weak and held her up when fear just about collapsed her.” In public, of course, he revealed nothing of his relationship with Clara, only noting that “it so happened” they found themselves with the same itinerary from London to Paris, Rome, Athens, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Jerusalem, “and other places of interest.” A decade later, when Clara suffered a stroke, his gentle protectiveness encouraged her again. When he visited, he sang to her of the love they had yet to experience and the places yet to see, and urged her to recover.66
As attached to Clara Ward as he was, C. L. Franklin nonetheless defined a distance. He never committed solely to her, saw other women during their long relationship, and, in all probability, expected similar conduct from Clara as well. In different ways, they were both haunted people, driven by forces they incompletely understood. By choosing so troubled a lover—Clara Ward lacked the emotional resources to match C. L.’s forceful personality—C. L. all but guaranteed there would be no breach of his inner wall of privacy. But while Clara loved him, a number of C. L.’s closest friends suggested that deep feeling was not reciprocated. Claud Young called Clara’s declaration “extremely one sided,” while Bea Buck simply stated, “Reverend Franklin was not in love with her.” Although it is possible that there was an instance when C. L. actually considered marriage to Clara, that might have reflected a moment’s particular passion.67 Emotionally drained, “whipped to shreds, completely shorn of self-control,” Clara’s main solace during the late 1950s and after, her sister said, was “singing the Gospel and slurping the booze.” Sylvia Penn thought Clara had become “more or less like a drunk” who “lived a miserable life.” Once she stayed with her tormented friend at the Gotham Hotel for two weeks, getting her sober and emotionally strong enough to leave Detroit. In all likelihood, this was the Clara that C. L. could not abide at close range for prolonged periods. Penn, one of the few churchwomen whose thirty-year friendship with C. L. encompassed his private social life, recalled C. L. upbraiding Clara in her presence “many times,” saying, “You don’t even have a life of your own. No man’s going to have you and your mother’s running your life.”68
For a man whose public standing, financial position, and sense of purpose derived from a religious calling, Franklin’s public style and rumored conduct caused particular concern among church people. How could a professed man of God so blur the distinctions between the sacred and the secular that his faith appeared to justify conduct most of the faithful would deem immoral? This was in part the issue Al Young’s mother, Mary, raised when, as C. L. left her bedroom one Sunday morning, the son asked his mother whether they would marry. “All right, you asked, so I’ll tell you. You’re old enough now,” she responded. “I couldn’t marry anybody like that,” for C. L. “would spend Saturday night with me. Then, at the crack of dawn, he would hop up out of bed, shove his little bottle of whiskey in his coat jacket and say, ‘Oh, Mary, I have to preach.’ Al, I just couldn’t marry anybody like that.”69
Undoubtedly others, even though lacking the specific knowledge Al Young’s mother possessed, felt similarl
y, perhaps even more strongly. The strain in the Afro-Baptist faith tradition that demanded an iron curtain between the sacred rituals and secular temptations remained real enough for many. The popular gospel quartet the Dixie Hummingbirds, for example, were famous for the stylish clothes they wore while performing but felt deeply that “life in the sanctified lane demanded more” of its performers. Similarly, Mahalia Jackson rebuked the Ward Singers when that group began singing gospel in Las Vegas nightclubs. Where Clara Ward insisted she was doing the Lord’s work among the unchurched, Mahalia remained dismissive: “It is blasphemous to sing the Lord’s music in taverns.”70
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