During 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.