Aretha Franklin (16 page)

Although her fans still had to compare her raw, emotional singing with that of the great ladies of the past, it was clear that Aretha was someone unique and special. The British press proclaimed that she was “the new Bessie Smith,” and a soulful white girl named Janis Joplin exclaimed that Aretha was “the best chick singer since Billie Holiday.” Ray Charles ranked Aretha as “one of the greatest I've heard anytime.”

The arrival and acceptance of Aretha Franklin's music signaled that the times were definitely changing. When the Grammy Awards were created in 1958, there was only one category for R&B music: “Best Rhythm & Blues Recording.” When Aretha Franklin began to dominate the record charts in 1967, a new category had to be created: “Best Rhythm & Blues Recording, Female.” In early 1968, Aretha's “Respect” took two trophies, and began her reign as the most-awarded female singer in Grammy history.

The one concept that seemed to run through everyone's definition of the word soul seemed to be pain. Whether it was physical or emotional, everyone seemed to agree that suffering went with the territory. Although the stance of “Respect” suggested strength and confidence, it was strength gained at a high emotional price. On the record charts, Aretha was everyone's shining new musical savior, but when she was at home, was she the victim of a painful marriage? Although she never spoke of the emotional abuse she endured, there are several reports that claim she was confused and unhappy.

A cover story in
Time
magazine (June 28, 1968) zeroed in on this aspect of her life, and caused Aretha to stop giving press interviews for several years. In fact, the article proved so embarrassing to her that it made her leery of all journalists. The article spoke of pain in Aretha's life, and explained that “what one of these burdens might be, came out last year where Aretha's husband, Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta's Regency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the first such incident.” Ted was later to sue
Time
magazine over this statement.

Her friends and family were very concerned for her at the time. Her brother Cecil commented, “For the last few years, Aretha is simply not Aretha. You see flashes of her and then she's back in her shell.”

During her initial burst of international fame, several articles pointed out her gospel background. At the time, Aretha confessed, “My heart is still there in gospel music. It never left.” She even went so far as to tell Mahalia Jackson that “I'm gonna make a gospel record, and tell Jesus I cannot bare these burdens alone.” Does this sound like the kind of statement that a twenty-six-year-old woman would make right after she had become an international singing star? There was obviously something very wrong.

At the time, Mahalia Jackson said with concern, “I don't think she's happy. Somebody else is making her sing the blues.”

The
Time
cover story depicted Aretha as a sad woman who stayed at home and “wrestle[d] with her private demons. She sleeps till afternoon, then mopes in front of the television set, chain-smoking Kools and snacking compulsively.”

Letting down her guard at the time, Aretha explained, “Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't it hurts even more. And I've been hurt—hurt bad. I might be just twenty-six, but I'm an old woman in disguise— twenty-six goin' on sixty-five.”

The article painted a rather unflattering picture of Ted White, describing him as a “streetcorner wheeler dealer.” “They really did a hatchet job on us,” he proclaims twenty years later. With regard to the subject of striking Aretha, he says, “It's libelous, because it's untrue. We sued
Time
magazine, and we did win the case. Andy Fine [Andrew J. Feinman] handled that case.”

When asked how
Time
could have reached such conclusions, White says, “Well I'll tell you what it was, they talked to a lot of those little yesmen, that were hang-arounders, and I was a straightforward guy. I didn't have a lot of BS around me. It was all business with me, and lot of those people didn't care for me very much, but they all got paid, you see, so a lot of stories developed that weren't true.”

The case of
Theodore R. White v. Time, Inc
, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on July 10,
1968. The “complaint” claimed that
Time
magazine's statements were “false and defamatory.” White sued for $10 million in damages.

According to the “answer” from
Time
, filed in the same district court on September 12, 1968, the story in question was “true” and “was published in good faith, in reliance on reliable sources and reports, and the defendant had no reason to doubt the truth or accuracy of those sources and reports.”

The official court records show that the case was dismissed without prejudice and without cost,” by a stipulation dated November 3, 1971. Those records do not indicate whether any payment was made in settlement. According to
Time
magazine, the case was simply “dropped.”

In spite of her emotional problems, Aretha maintained an optimistic front. “Things can never be that bad,” she says with a shrug. “For the blind man, there is always the fellow with no feet. I've been hurt. You can't get over it all, but you can go on living and keeping on looking. You know, I like people today more than I ever did. Sometimes it takes something bad to bring you out of yourself. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems. It's nice to socialize, meet lots of people, but it's nice to stay at home with your own. There is strength in that. I'm not free yet, but I will be. I will be! It takes time, exposure, and a lot of going out to the woodshed.”

In 1968, Aretha was a vastly successful singing star with million-selling albums and sold-out concerts. After years of hard work, she had established herself as an innovative force in the music business. What was it that she wanted or needed to become “free” of? Was it Ted White?

Meanwhile, Aretha's father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, was having some problems of his own. Because he had failed to disclose his income and failed to file income tax returns, the government slapped a $25,000 fine on him. The government estimated that Reverend Franklin's annual income from 1959 to 1962 had been in excess of $76,000—which, in those days went a long way, especially when one didn't pay the taxes on the income. As reported in
Rolling Stone
, Reverend Franklin was also charged with marijuana possession during this era.

Through all of her highly publicized personal problems, one thing was never compromised in Aretha's life: her music. Owing to the overwhelming success of her records, the hottest concert ticket in 1967 and 1968 was
Aretha on-stage. In October 1967, when she appeared at New York City's Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center,
Look
magazine said that “she oiled the good grained walls of New York's Philharmonic Hall with the bleating beat of gospel rock.”

Aretha hadn't always been as confident and comfortable on-stage as she became during this era. She confessed that in the beginning of her career she wasn't certain about her material or her approach to her singing, and her uncertainty led to bouts with stage fright. “Like ‘Over the Rainbow,'” she explained, “I started out with it more like a quiet ballad. But I didn't seem to be going over, so I went back and tried
to go over
the rainbow! It's taken me a long time to get over that rainbow—a long time to get to the other side.” Ever since “Respect” had hit the top of the charts, Aretha had learned to leave her troubles behind her when she was on-stage. She was finally getting to the pot of gold that was waiting for her on the other side of the rainbow. Regarding the stage fright she felt during her jazz-club era, she claimed, “I once had this problem about actually walking out on-stage. Sometimes I still have that problem … you know? It's a thing about whether everything is hanging right, whether my hair looks okay … all those people sitting out there looking at me, checking me out from head to toe. Wow! That really used to get to me, but I've overcome it by just walking out on-stage night after night, year after year.”

She not only successfully recovered from her stage fright, but there were times when she wanted to come too close to her audiences. That was how she fell off the stage in Georgia in 1967, right before the recording sessions for
Aretha Arrives
. “I always move toward the edge of the stage to get to the audience,” she explained. “If they don't happen, I don't happen. I sing to people about what matters. I sing to the realists, people who accept it like it is. I express problems. There are tears when it's sad, and smiles when it's happy. It seems simple to me, but for some people, I guess feelin' takes courage. When I sing, I'm saying, ‘Dig it, go on and try. Ain't nobody goin' make ya. Yeah, baby, dig me—dig me if you dare.” Well the whole world was starting to “dig” Aretha, and for her hour on the stage she learned to leave her own troubles—and thoughts about Ted White— behind her.

It was as if the audience who was clamoring for her every move became a sea of personal friends who were missing from her day-to-day life. It got to the point where she would talk to them like intimates. According to
Look
magazine, at Philharmonic Hall she caught the heel of her shoe in the hem of her gown, and sang mid-verse, “I'd feel better if I got this here heel out of my dress.” On another song she asked, “Mind if I sit down? My feet sure hurt.”

In December of 1967, Aretha made her prime-time network television debut, singing on
The Kraft Music Hall
. The following month she was a guest star on
The Jonathan Winters Show
. Aretha's big production number on the Winters show was her performance of “Chain of Fools.” She stood center-stage on a circular platform, while the Sweet Inspirations danced in circles around her. Aretha wore a silver-spangled minidress that had a high neck and half sleeves. The Sweet Inspirations wore low-cut pink minidresses, white stockings, and white shoes. They looked like flamingos dancing around Aretha in this classic piece of sixties video.

On February 16, 1968, Aretha was back in Detroit to headline a concert at Cobo Hall in front of 12,000 cheering fans and to receive several of her greatest honors. First of all, Detroit's Major Cavanaugh declared the date “Aretha Franklin Day.” In addition to delivering a 90 minute musical performance with the Sweet Inspirations backing her up, Aretha was given a series of plaques and certificates from all three of the music-trade publications for her clean sweep of the previous year's music charts. Bernie Blake of
Cash Box
, Ted Williams of
Record World
, and Rodger Bass of
Billboard
each presented her with “Female Vocalist of the Year” awards.

That night, Aretha was dressed in a very sophisticated-looking dress that was a bright lime green. It was trimmed with boa-like lines of flowing, lime-green ostrich feathers at the neckline and encircling her hips. Her makeup was done in the height of 1968 fashion, with blue eye shadow and Cleopatra-style eyebrows. Her hair was coiffed in a soft-looking but high-stacked dome, and white spherical earrings danged from her earlobes. That night she was every inch the conquering heroine, triumphantly returning to her hometown.

The greatest honor of all came from Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He had flown to Detroit on that day to attend Aretha's concert, and to
bestow her with a special award from the Southern Christian Leadership Council. When Dr. King took the stage to present Aretha with her award, the crowd burst into a wild round of applause, and a complete standing ovation.

While Dr. King was the leader of the civil rights movement in America, in Aretha's first year of international fame she had become an inspiring symbol of black equality. With her own sense of pride and her dignified stance, she represented the new black woman of the late 1960s. In her own way she embodied the social and cultural change that was taking place in the country, merely by being herself without pretense. Respected by black
and
white America, she was the “natural woman” that she sang about. That evening in Detroit when King and Franklin were together on the same stage was a moment of inspiring history.

“That evening stands out in my mind,” says Rita Griffin, the managing editor of a Detroit newspaper,
The Michigan Chronicle
. “The thing that I remember most is just the feeling of the crowd. King had laryngitis that night and couldn't say a word. That was the ‘love swell' that I recall. You know, they talk about waves of emotion, well this was a ‘love wave.' Everybody just stood on their feet. He never said a word, because he couldn't. But you could just feel the impact his presence had—just him being there. It really made for a great historic evening. That's what I remember most about it—the feeling, the love that people had for him. At the time, people were said to be wishy-washy about King, that he wasn't militant enough. Well, all 12,000 people in that room cared for him—you could feel it.”

According to Jerry Wexler, Aretha was very friendly with Dr. King and supportive of the civil rights movement. She was greatly honored by King's presentation that evening. “She was very much involved with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early days,” Wexler recalls. “She wouldn't talk about it—this was private. And yet I never heard the slightest expression of animosity or anti-white anything. And God knows she would have had a reason, because of some of the experiences she went through in her early days.”

“Dr. King was a wonderful, wonderful, fine man as well as a civil rights leader,” Aretha said fondly, years later. “He and my dad were great
friends. My dad brought him to Detroit, and introduced him to the city of Detroit through the New Bethel Baptist Church. He very definitely had an appreciation for gospel music. One of his favorite songs was ‘Precious Lord,' and he would always ask me to sing that for him.” In April 1968, Aretha sang “Precious Lord” one last time for Dr. King, at his funeral in Atlanta.