Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (46 page)

“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 teenager.

“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 twentieth 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.

“Poor sales never bother Aretha,” Earline told me. “She’ll tell you that the record was really a big hit but the distributor, wanting
to hide her royalties, is giving out false figures. Or she’ll simply ignore the failure and move on to the next thing. Because Aretha is who she is—one of the great personalities in all American culture—the next thing keeps getting bigger and bigger. And in 2009, nothing was bigger than the inauguration of the first black president in American history.”

G
iven her unchallenged status as a singer of historic importance and as the artist whose “Respect” resonated with the generation who broke through the barriers of racial discrimination, Aretha was, unsurprisingly, invited to sing at the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. In answer to the first question any woman receiving such an invitation would ask herself—
What am I going to wear?
—she surprised her critics, who have often accused her of garish taste. She chose a tasteful gray outfit topped off by a gray felt hat that became the day’s most discussed fashion item. After perusing the websites of Europe’s storied designers, Aretha found the perfect hat in Detroit. Its creator, Luke Song, a thirty-six-year-old born in Seoul, Korea, had built a reputation among the city’s highly discriminating African American church ladies. The chapeau is built around an oversize gray bow tilted on its side.

Writing about her fashion choice for
Newsweek
, Aretha observed, “They had to work on it a little bit, because I wanted it edged in tiny rhinestones. And the bow was on the left side, but I wanted it on the right. I have a favorite side… the right. I just think
it photographs better. The mistake I made was that I was looking at famous designers worldwide for something that ended up being right down the street.”

The story was seen as another victory for downtrodden Detroit, a city that over the years Aretha had championed with relentless loyalty.

That freezing day in January she received higher marks for fashion than singing. In talking to the women on
The View,
she said she was displeased with her performance—“It was just too cold out there to sing,” she said. When, four years later at Obama’s second inauguration, Beyoncé caused a minor stir by lip-synching, Aretha was understanding, remarking, “I thought it was really funny, but she did a beautiful job with the pre-record… next time I’ll probably do the same.”

That winter, while promoting her Christmas album and discussing her upcoming new pop record,
A Woman Falling Out of Love,
she granted a series of interviews, including one to Rashod Ollison, entertainment writer for the
Virginian-Pilot
and an astute music critic. As Aretha approached her sixty-eighth birthday, I asked Ollison to explain his feelings about her.

“Besides my mother’s, Aretha’s voice is among the first I remember hearing,” he wrote me. “My parents played her records constantly. The authority of her sound, especially in the way she sang gospel, anchored me. It still does. There are never any traces of self-pity in Aretha’s music, even when the song is sad and she’s pleading for a man’s return. She always communicated a sense of transcendence, something she learned from the church, of course, but also from the salty blues of Dinah Washington.

“But in my interviews with her, and in the many I’ve read and seen on TV, Aretha’s aloofness and slight condescension were always off-putting. She came off as petty, too. The palpably insecure woman, obsessed with staying relevant despite her towering legacy, is so strikingly different from the indomitable persona she conveys in her music.

“As a culture critic, part of my job is peeling back the layers,
scraping away the glitter that sometimes deludes and mystifies fans. Aretha is gloriously complex, a musical genius, and there seems to be a lot of intriguing darkness and mystery behind the legacy. That isn’t surprising.

“Like so many artists with such huge talent, there’s often a disconnect inside. Perhaps it’s necessary. Something within must remain childlike and wide-eyed in order for the art to be pure and adventurous. Who knows? But in Aretha’s case, especially in the last 20 years or so—maybe longer—there hasn’t been much adventure musically. [She] seems to be shoehorning her enormous gift into trite productions and trends. In concerts these days, she often coasts. It’s unreasonable to expect her to sound the way she did in 1967, or perform with the same vitality. (I must note that her contemporary Gladys Knight, whom Aretha has shaded many times in interviews, holds up amazingly well onstage these days, sounding almost the way she did in 1973, if not better.) Aretha’s lack of musical engagement onstage, exacerbated by the booming Vegas-style arrangements, never fails to disappoint.”

Aretha’s longtime booking agent, adviser, and friend Ruth Bowen died in May 2009. In my last interview with her, she said, “I love that girl and always will. Never did meet anyone who needed a mother as bad as Aretha did. And maybe, at least for a while, I served that role. But only a mother could put up with Aretha’s fits and changing moods. I couldn’t. And only a mother could love those cheesy shows she kept putting on. When she asked me what I thought, I couldn’t lie. I had to tell her, ‘Get a big-time producer. Get someone who knows how to stage a show. Quit trying to control everyone and everything. Quit trying to do all this shit by yourself. Admit your limitations. We all got ’em, even a genius like you.’ But everything I said fell on deaf ears. She didn’t want to hear it, and that’s why, for all the love between us, we kept falling out.”

That summer Aretha sang at both the Hollywood Bowl, where she paid tribute to Michael Jackson, whose recent death had shocked
the world, and Radio City Music Hall. During these performances, she resorted to what Jerry Wexler used to call “over-souling”—too heavy on the melisma, overwrought emotionality, musicality overwhelmed by theatricality.

The year 2010 began quietly. She spent the winter in Detroit, drifting in and out of the studio. The recording of the
Woman Falling Out of Love
album was slow going. She took months to select songs and cultivate the tracks. She was still estranged from Clive Davis and determined to remain free of any major label. This time she would be not only her own producer, but her own record executive as well. No second opinions, no interference.

At one point she played a version of the record for executives from Rhino Records, the Warner division that controlled the Atlantic catalog and a logical candidate to distribute her album.

“The president of the label and I were called from LA,” said Cheryl Pawelski, then head of A&R for Rhino, “for a private meeting at the Trump International Hotel in New York. We were excited at the possibility of bringing out a new Aretha record. We waited downstairs in the lobby for quite a while before being ferried upstairs, where Aretha had an entire floor to herself. Her suite was sweltering. Apparently she doesn’t like air-conditioning. It was also filled with huge flower arrangements sent by Elton John and Mariah Carey for her recent birthday. She was quite cordial. As we listened to the record, she ate breakfast. I commented that the pianist on three of the tracks was superb and I suspected the player was Aretha herself. She was pleased that I had identified her correctly. As a whole, though, the record didn’t work for me. There were multiple producers and multiple genres. It was all over the map and far from remarkable. Naturally I didn’t express my opinion. Nor was my opinion sought. After the last track was played, we congratulated her, thanked her for her time, and left. When we learned that she was demanding an advance of a million dollars, we quickly passed. Even if the album had been great, the price would be high.
But for a record as disconnected as this one, I felt the price was unrealistic.”

In July, Aretha appeared in Philadelphia along with, improbably enough, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who had been trained as a concert pianist. Ms. Rice played various selections by Mozart, and, in closing the show, Aretha sang a medley of her hits.

That same summer she shot a humorous commercial for Snickers candy bar that played off her grand diva image. Of the four teenage boys riding in a car, two are ravenously hungry to the point that they transform into short-tempered divas, played by Aretha and Liza Minnelli.

Then in the fall of 2010, everything changed. Aretha fell seriously ill. Excruciating stomach pain led her to cancel all engagements. Tests were conducted. Major surgery was required. In December, the
National Enquirer
ran a headline that said “Aretha Franklin, 6 Months to Live! Her Pancreatic Cancer Battle.” Later, Aretha denied any dire diagnosis while refusing to name the ailment.

Aretha had long lived with the contradictory attitude of wanting great attention while insisting on absolute privacy. At this point, her obsession for privacy overwhelmed everything else. She insisted that not a single word about the nature of her sickness be spoken by anyone close to her. She would not entertain one question regarding her malady. Beyond saying that she was sick, her handlers were forbidden to offer even the smallest detail. When cousin Brenda suggested that Aretha might go public with her diagnosis as a way to encourage others to seek treatment, she bristled. “You are confused,” she said. “There’s nothing that wrong with me.” Once again denial set in—this time stronger than ever.

“That’s just Aretha’s way,” said her sister-in-law Earline. “She’ll never change. It doesn’t matter that many public figures afflicted with physical diseases discuss it openly and use it as an opportunity to bring awareness of these maladies. Aretha reacts the opposite way. She shuts down completely. When she was dealing with alcohol in the sixties and seventies, she wouldn’t say a word about it.
Same thing with her mysterious stomach ailments in 2010. I got the feeling that she felt if the facts about her sickness got out there, it would harm her career.”

“After her big operation that winter,” said niece Sabrina, “those closest to her spent an enormous amount of time in the hospital with her. She appreciated that—but then she didn’t. Once she got home, she became moodier than ever. If you inadvertently said the wrong word to her, she might turn on you and not speak to you for weeks. That was certainly the case with me and my cousin Brenda. She also turned on people who had worked with her for years. She was firing longtime employees for reasons no one understood. Naturally, after major surgery, you’re in a vulnerable emotional state. But with Aretha it was far more than that. It was as though she was chasing away the people who loved her most.”

“I’ve known Ree my entire life,” a longtime member of New Bethel, the church founded by Aretha’s father, told me. “When I read that article in the
National Enquirer,
I didn’t believe that cancer was going to kill her—not for a minute. If anyone’s strong enough to scare away cancer, it’s Aretha. If I were cancer, I wouldn’t mess with that girl. I’d get out of there.”

A month after the operation, Aretha’s resilience was in full evidence. She began a concentrated campaign to assure her public that she was healthy and would soon be ready to work.

Not surprisingly, her first interview was given to
Jet,
the always loyal weekly that spoke directly to the black community. In a January 2011 interview headlined “The Lord Will Bring Me Through,” Aretha sounded both determined and optimistic. She thanked her fans for their support and Stevie Wonder for being there when she emerged from surgery. She called the operation “highly successful.” “I feel great,” she said, adding, “I am putting Aretha first. We will put Ree together first. This is Aretha’s time to do whatever it is that I need to do.”

In February, looking dramatically thinner, she appeared in a videotape played after the Grammys honored her with a musical
tribute by Jennifer Hudson, Christina Aguilera, Yolanda Adams, Florence Welch, and Christina McBride singing Aretha’s hits.

In March, she appeared on the cover of
Jet.
Dressed in a long pink chiffon gown adorned with strands of cultured pearls, the Queen was back in charge. The headline read “It’s a New Chapter in My Life.” She refused to discuss the nature of her illness or operation. She spoke of her new healthy diet and her weight loss of twenty-five pounds. Included were pictures of Aretha with her sons Eddie, Teddy, and Kecalf plus niece Sabrina Owens, cousin Brenda Corbett, and Willie Wilkerson.

Later that month Aretha invited Wendy Williams to Detroit, where the talk-show host conducted an interview, decorously referring to her as “Miss Franklin,” in a hotel dining room over high tea. Again avoiding all specifics about her health history, she joked about her former weight, saying, “I was just too fat for words.” But when Williams suggested that, like most women, Aretha could be gullible and “get stupid falling in love,” Aretha took umbrage, countering that Wendy might be gullible and get stupid, but not her. They went on to discuss possible casting for the biopic based on
From These Roots.
When Aretha suggested that Wendy help finance the film, the talk-show host backed off.

A Woman Falling Out of Love,
after being rejected by Rhino, was released on May 1 under the banner of Aretha’s Records. According to Dick Alen, who was still advising Aretha on business and bookings, Walmart had advanced her the million dollars she had long sought. That gave the chain the exclusive right to sell the record in their stores and on their website for a full month before it was available on iTunes.

“Aretha got her wish,” said Alen. “She was in charge of virtually every aspect of the record. But unfortunately she wound up doing everything she could to mess up the deal. She delivered it months late and even then sent in a bad master that had to be redone. The record got no traction. The public ignored it, it didn’t
sell, and that was virtually the end of the short, unhappy life of Aretha’s Records.”

Writing for
Rolling Stone,
Will Hermes offered one of the more generous reviews: “The good news is that Aretha Franklin, who just turned 69, is recording, and that her magnificent instrument, though thinning a bit, retains plenty of its power and agility.”

I loved her rendition of B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen,” a song, she told me, “that reminded me of teen years in Detroit when my father would go see B.B. in the clubs and play his records in our home. It felt great to get back to those blues.”

But the rest of the record is sadly lacking. There’s an unsatisfying mix of saccharine ballads: “The Way We Were,” a strained duet with Ron Isley; “Theme from a Summer’s Place”; and Aretha’s self-penned overwrought “How Long I’ve Been Waiting.” There’s lightweight gospel: “Faithful,” featuring Karen Clark Sheard, and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” sung by her son Eddie. And there’s a bizarrely histrionic redo of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” the anthem she sang at the 2008 inauguration of President Barack Obama.