As 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.”