Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (44 page)

D
uring 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 needs 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.

A
s 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 writing 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.

“Aretha had these grandiose plans to record with the great artists of our time,” said Ruth Bowen. “She was talking about everyone from Julio Iglesias to Tony Bennett to R. Kelly. I thought it was the right move, and I presume Clive Davis felt the same. But then came Aretha’s demands and her schedule changes and her cancellations and God knows what else. The record didn’t have a chance. It fell apart in the planning stage because Aretha refused to have anyone help her with the planning. Her control thing was getting worse by the day.”

If she couldn’t control the production and release of her duets album, at least she could control her birthday parties.

“She loved those parties,” said her brother Vaughn, “and loved to fuss over all the details. They were always in Detroit and she always had her choice of entertainers. She always liked having the local TV stars. That’s because she watched the news every night and got a kick out of seeing the news-anchor personalities at the party. For her fifty-eighth birthday party at the Town Center Atrium Garden in Southfield, Mayor Dennis Archer showed up and so did Lloyd Price. She had Rose Royce playing ‘Car Wash’ and Pete Escovedo playing cool Latin jazz.”

That summer she was back at the JVC Jazz Festival, where she had her problems. The
New York Times
headline was “What Aretha Wants and Needs, She Doesn’t Always Get.” Reviewer Ben Ratliff wrote, “By the third request to her band to lower its volume, Aretha Franklin wasn’t kidding around. She fixed her eyes on her bandleader and got an ovation from the crowd when she asked him, specifically, to fix the problem. But the evening had already lost so much momentum that there was virtually no way Saturday night’s concert at Avery Fisher Hall… was going to end up very satisfying.”

Whether it was the muddled sound mix or a bloated band
playing out of tune, all evening long, Aretha struggled to find her form. The tried-and-true medley of her hits—“Respect,” “Think,” “Ain’t No Way”—felt gratuitous and uninspired. She sang “Nessun Dorma,” by now part of her repertoire, with surprising indifference. For me, the only moving moment came when she went to the piano to accompany herself on Leon Russell’s “A Song for You,” sung for Johnnie Taylor, the recently deceased R&B titan whom she had known since the fifties, when they traveled the same gospel circuit.

While she generously paid tribute to the fallen colleagues from her early years, it would take little to rekindle her spirit of rivalry. That November, for example, she became enraged when Natalie Cole’s recently released autobiography,
Angel on My Shoulder,
described how Aretha had snubbed Cole: “She would get upset if I was on the same TV show with her, and she would walk out of the room if I walked in. That really hurt.” When Aretha read those words, she called me to say that she was furious. She claimed that no such thing had ever happened and wanted to write a rebuttal. I pointed out that Natalie’s next lines read “Thankfully, that’s changed. Aretha and I are now friends.” Ultimately Aretha dropped the idea of defending herself.

Some months later, when she sang on a live recording with James Carter at a famed Detroit jazz club, Natalie was in the audience cheering her on. However, Aretha’s performances were excluded from the album,
Live at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.
When I asked Ahmet Ertegun, Aretha’s great friend and executive producer of Carter’s Atlantic album, why, he said, “I was able to use my influence to get Aretha to come to the club and sing. As usual, she sang magnificently. But when it came to the business negotiations, things got complicated and I had to bow out.”

During the winter of 2000, the business of booking Aretha faced serious challenges. According to Dick Alen, her agent at William Morris, this was a period when the demand for Aretha had
slowed down considerably. “It had been three or four years since her last studio album,” said Alen. “She had no new product out there and the offers weren’t what they used to be. Fortunately, VH One came up with an idea to honor her on a
Divas Live
program. That saved the day. It kept Aretha in the spotlight during a period that otherwise was pretty dark.”

Billed as a tribute to Aretha, the show from New York’s Radio City Music Hall was broadcast in April 2001. A benefit for VH1’s Save the Music Foundation, the program featured everyone from jazz trumpeter Clark Terry to Mary J. Blige to Kid Rock to Bishop Paul Morton of the Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church Ministries. Aretha was in high spirits, especially doing her witty musical dialogue with Stevie Wonder.

“Aretha loved the
Divas Live
shows and they did her a world of good,” Erma told me. “We were getting along well when I came over to her house to congratulate her on her TV performance. The reviews were all great. I was used to seeing Aretha’s house in disorder. That was just her way. But when I got there, it was far worse than I had ever seen. It was chaos. She still hadn’t unpacked from her last trip two weeks before. Opened suitcases with clothes falling out were everywhere. Plastic bags from the dry cleaners were piled up on the floor. Dishes were piled in the sink. Aretha said she had to fire her housekeeper. I didn’t ask why. Aretha has always had problems trusting housekeepers. I wasn’t going to say a word until I looked under the coffee table in the living room and, stuck between old copies of
Vogue
magazine, spotted a royalty check for twenty thousand dollars. ‘Aretha,’ I said. ‘You need to get better organized. You’re about to lose a big check.’ ‘What check?’ she asked. When I pointed it out, she bent down, picked it up, stuffed it in her purse, and asked me who I was to criticize her. ‘I’ll have you know that I’m extremely well organized,’ she said. After that she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks.”

In August 2001, Erma was diagnosed with cancer. It was her daughter, Sabrina, and cousin Brenda who told Aretha.

“Aretha became furious,” Sabrina told me. “She flew off the
handle and said that my mother’s doctors were incompetent and didn’t know what they were talking about. She kept saying, ‘Don’t call me with bad news like this. I just don’t want to hear it. I don’t believe it, not for a minute.’ I knew that, when it came to her own life, Aretha lived in great denial. But this was different. This was a matter of applying her denial to the physical condition of someone else. It was almost as if her rejection would make the cancer diagnosis go away. Aretha had suffered the loss of her dad, her sister Carolyn, and her brother Cecil. She simply didn’t want to deal with the prospect of losing her sister Erma.

“When Aretha could no longer deny the accuracy of the prognosis, she called my mother often but was reluctant to visit. After a few months, though, she did stop by with tons of groceries. She’d stay and cook lavish dinners. By then Mom didn’t have much appetite but she appreciated Aretha’s effort. Their rift was finally healed and their disagreements and misunderstandings all behind them. They talked warmly and laughed freely. Those visits did my mother a world of good. As Mom grew sicker, Aretha showed up more frequently. She also paid Eva Greene, my mother’s neighbor and closest friend, to move in and care for Mom. Aretha would send my mother beautiful fresh flowers—Gerbera daisies—to brighten her room, along with fresh fruit baskets, CDs, magazines, and all sorts of goodies she thought would help her sister’s spirit. My view of the Erma-Aretha relationship was this: It was highly complicated. Their history had definitely been marked by intense sibling rivalry. But in the end, they loved and understood each other on the deepest level. Everyone knew not to get in the middle of their disagreements because the sisters would eventually work things out. When my mother passed on September seventh, 2002, some fourteen months after the diagnosis, she and Aretha were certainly at peace with one another, and that was beautiful.”

Aretha’s grief intensified with the death of her brother Vaughn nine weeks later. His passing was another crushing blow.

“The more people Aretha lost,” said her sister-in-law Earline, “the less people she trusted. That’s when she became more controlling.
That’s also when her weight got out of control. Fear had her wanting to control everyone and everything, but the one thing she couldn’t control was her appetite. And the more anxious she became, the more she ate.”

Her mood wasn’t helped when, in November of 2001, the
Detroit Free Press
reported that Aretha had sued the tabloid the
Star
“for a story last year describing her as an out-of-control drunk.” The report was indeed false. Aretha had not had a drink since the early seventies. According to Aretha, the tabloid settled with her out of court and issued an apology.

“That vicious and untrue article put Aretha in an understandably terrible mood,” said Ruth Bowen. “You combine that with Erma getting so sick and passing away so quickly, you can imagine how down she was. Then in November one of her big houses in the Detroit burbs burned to the ground. She hadn’t lived in that one for years, but she kept all sorts of clothes and records stored there. Everything went up in flames.”

In January 2003, the
Detroit Free Press
reported that Franklin wouldn’t cooperate with investigators looking into the fire but that she relented after being subpoenaed.

“Aretha hates any publicity that’s not completely positive, and this fire story darkened her mood,” said Ruth Bowen. “No one ever discovered the cause of the blaze, but the papers made it sound like there was funny business when there wasn’t. I told Ree to forget the whole thing and just concentrate on recording a new record. It had been six years since
A Rose Is Still a Rose.
By then L. A. Reid had taken over Arista and was hungry for some Aretha product. Given how she was struggling, though, I couldn’t imagine what kind of record she wanted to make. But count on Aretha to act like nothing was wrong. In the midst of her misery, she called her new album
So Damn Happy.
”