15

“I’m Just Coming into My Prime”

I just got married and I’m still goo, goo, ga, ga,” Vaughan told audiences on June 23, 1978, as she opened her annual concert for the Newport Jazz Festival–New York at Carnegie Hall.¹ But she hadn’t married Marshall Fisher. She’d married Waymon Reed, a trumpeter in the Count Basie band. They first met in 1970, during a cruise of the West Indies. “But it didn’t get heavy until about a year ago,” Reed explained during an interview with Jet magazine on his wedding day.

“Yeah, we met again in Disneyland last year,” said Vaughan.² Basie’s band played the amusement park for a week, beginning on August 21, 1977. “I just went down to catch the opening show down there. And every time—I used to see him off and on, and in my mind I said, mmmm-hmmm! So this time it was mm-hmm worked,” she confessed during an interview with Tonight Show guest host Sammy Davis Jr.³ Vaughan and the trio then toured with Count Basie’s band in March and April 1978. “Waymon Reed was a man who saw an opportunity and gave her what it was that she needed, what she felt she needed at that point,” pianist Carl Schroeder explained. “It was a secret for a while, and once Marshall found out, he disappeared immediately.”⁴

The romance between Fisher and Vaughan had cooled and, in recent years, evolved into a close friendship. Fisher spent more and more time on the road doing advance work for the band. He drove the truck that hauled the sound system, gear, and extra luggage between gigs and directed setup before Vaughan and the trio arrived. During performances, he worked the sound board, and when the band flew, he carried the sound system on the airplane. “He did all this work because nobody else would do it. He was devoted,” said Schroeder.⁵ But it meant that he and Vaughan spent less time together. They only saw one another during gigs and gradually grew apart. Vaughan likely wanted more attention, companionship, and focus on her daily needs while touring. Perhaps she also missed the giddy feeling that comes with a new romance, and she looked elsewhere.

Fisher was heartbroken, and broke as well. If he had married Vaughan, as she wanted, Fisher would have left the relationship with a sizeable settlement. He was proud of the work that he had done as Vaughan’s manager and believed that he facilitated her resurgence in the 1970s. (Pianist Schroeder agreed.) But, after seven years, he left with nothing. He was homeless, and Vaughan’s bassist, Walter Booker, took him in, letting him stay at his recording studio, Boogie Woogie Studio, in New York. A year and a half later, in September 1979, Fisher went to hear Booker and Jimmy Cobb play at the Tin Palace, and he met Michiyo Tanaka, a Japanese pianist who had recently moved to New York. They soon married, much to Vaughan’s surprise. Cynthia Coleman, Booker’s girlfriend, broke the news to Vaughan. Tanaka remembered Coleman saying that Vaughan was “in shock” after hearing the news of her marriage to Marshall.⁶ She also heard through the grapevine that Vaughan had removed Fisher from all of her photos. “Marshall always loved her even after breaking up with her. I was jealous,” said Tanaka. For the first seven years of Tanaka’s marriage to Fisher, he talked about Sarah Vaughan. “I was so jealous because he mentioned Sarah like it was a present tense.”⁷

On Tuesday, June 13, 1978, Vaughan, now fifty-four, married Waymon Reed, who was sixteen years her junior, at the Chicago home of a friend. Unlike her wedding to C. B. Atkins twenty years earlier, also in Chicago, she was surrounded by friends and family, including her mother and daughter. Jet magazine reported that Vaughan wore a pink chiffon gown and cried into her bouquet as the groom awkwardly placed the ring on her finger. “Waymon called me about three weeks ago from Tokushima, Japan, and asked me to marry him,” she told the magazine. He was on tour with the Basie band, days before an earthquake. “I don’t know whether the earthquake started because he proposed or because I said ‘yes,’” she joked. The couple planned to live in her Hidden Hills home, and they would honeymoon in the Bahamas when their work schedules permitted. (She would receive an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University on Saturday, June 17, and open the Newport Jazz Festival the following Friday.) And when asked what the future held, she said, “Ummh, well . . . oh honey, I don’t know! I’m just so happy I can’t even think straight yet.” Then, with her characteristic optimism and insistence on living in the present, she added: “You’ll see lots of things happening now for Sarah Vaughan Reed.”⁸

Reed quit his job with the Basie band and joined Vaughan on the road, and her trio became a quartet. “He was an adequate trumpet player, but that was the least of his many talents. His job was to keep her happy and supply her with that,” said Schroeder, adding, “Waymon, well, he was just a snake. He was just promoting himself, that’s all.”⁹ Within six months, after yet more symphony appearances, the summer festival circuit, and another tour of England and Eastern Europe, Reed wanted to become the leader of the band and persuaded Vaughan to fire bassist Walter Booker and drummer Jimmy Cobb. “I really think Waymon was jealous of Jimmy Cobb and me being so close to her,” Booker explained. “We had a pact, and he was the outsider all the time.”¹⁰ Schroeder, the group’s musical director, resigned in solidarity. He had no interest in breaking in a new rhythm section. Cobb had been with Vaughan for nine years, Schroeder seven, and Booker three. It was the end of an era. The trio that supported Vaughan during her career renaissance of the 1970s had disbanded.

“Walter and Jimmy, their level was as high as Sarah’s in some moments. I was kind of a fly on the wall going ‘Oh, this is so cool, everyone’s playing their ass off over here.’ I felt very lucky and still do,” said Schroeder. “It’s funny that something like that, something that’s extramusical, could dictate something happening to the music that was such high quality.” The men in Vaughan’s personal life wielded tremendous power and influence, and for Schroeder this was her greatest weakness, a weakness at odds with the perfection that he heard in her voice. “To see a flaw like that which wasn’t visible to the public, so the public could appreciate it like Judy Garland or Billie Holiday, whose flaws were visible on stage. [It] made her that much more human and more easy to empathize with,” he continued. She was a human soul with flaws. “I attribute it to her humanity. That’s what makes it so fantastic. [She had] a high level of ability to sing and to create and she was still a mess like you and me!”¹¹

Jimmy Cobb didn’t know that he had been let go from the band until his replacement, drummer Roy McCurdy, called him. “I called Jimmy Cobb and asked him about it because I didn’t want to just go and take a job that he had been working on,” McCurdy explained. “We talked about it and he said, ‘Yes, go ahead and take it.’”¹² Pianist Mike Wofford and bassist Andy Simpkins joined McCurdy in the new trio and began rehearsals at Vaughan’s home in Hidden Hills. “Waymon conducted those rehearsals,” Wofford said. “Sarah would be there and she would sing some and she would listen, and if she really wasn’t happy with the tempo or something she would mention it and talk about it. But for the most part, she just stayed out of the picture and let us learn the stuff on our own.”¹³

In March, after a month of rehearsals, the band went on the road. In the midst of a sixteen-stop tour with vocalist Mel Tormé and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Vaughan made three separate appearances at Carnegie Hall within the span of ten days. While it was common to program classical musicians this way, in cycles of concerts (pianist Arthur Rubinstein, for instance, played ten Carnegie Hall recitals in less than five weeks to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in 1961), this was the first time that a jazz musician received similar treatment. “I felt that for once I’d like Sarah to be acknowledged as the great artist that she is,” said impresario George Wein.¹⁴

“[It] is a nice step for jazz,” Vaughan told Mary Campbell of the Associated Press. “But I’m worried. I usually play Carnegie Hall once a year, not three times in a week. When I think about it, my stomach jumps. I always get nervous before concerts, but this is different.”¹⁵ It was an honor, a career retrospective of sorts, and an opportunity to demonstrate her breadth as a performer. On Wednesday, March 21, she shared the bill with Tormé and Mulligan in a nod to the cool jazz and pop aspects of her career. On Friday, March 23, she invited two daring, experimental vocalists, Betty Carter and Herb Jeffries, to join her in what critics viewed as a tribute to her modernist, more avant-garde roots. And a week later, on March 30, for the final concert, she performed with the Count Basie Orchestra, harking back to her days in the big bands. All of the concerts sold out, and Wein added an additional show on March 21.

The concert with Carter and Jeffries was exceptional, but the other two did not live up to expectations. Aside from her exhilarating duets with Carter and Jeffries, she did not collaborate with her fellow headliners. And instead of demonstrating her range, she sang the same repertoire, with similar arrangements, each night. Detractors worried that she was in a rut, simply going through the motions. Several critics pointed to her new trio, still struggling to gel, as the source of her problems. They missed her old trio. “Something was amiss, and expressed itself in uncertain pacing, an undercurrent of tension. Exaggeration of the less enchanting traits of her style at the expense of the felicities,” Richard Sudhalter of the New York Post wrote. “Her longtime accompanying trio, billed on the printed program, had been replaced—and from the look and sound of things, at very short notice. They were reading, watching for cues from Sarah and her husband and musical director, Waymon Reed, featured on fluegelhorn. They were coping, but cautiously.”¹⁶ Vaughan seemed strained, working overtime simply to hold things together. She relied on her trademark vocal virtuosity as a prop rather than a tool for exploration and discovery. Perhaps her unease with her new trio also contributed to the lack of variety in her programming. Regardless, her concert cycle at Carnegie Hall, a unique opportunity to shine, failed to live up to its potential.

With time, the trio improved and began to click musically. Offstage, however, the new band still struggled as tensions escalated between the trio and Waymon Reed. As musical director, Reed wanted to assert his dominance over the trio. “Sass was really close to all the musicians,” explained drummer McCurdy. “So we’d come down in the morning and we’d get breakfast sometimes in the hotel and sit there and talk and all that kind of stuff. And I remember one time [Reed] came down and told me—he came down and Sass was sitting having breakfast with the musicians, and he says, ‘You know, you’re not supposed to sit at the same table with Sass. You can’t sit at the same table with her.’ Things like that, just strange stuff. Or ‘You can’t talk with Sass. You have to talk to me first and I’ll pass things along to her.’”¹⁷ It was reminiscent of efforts by her past husbands, especially Atkins, to control and isolate her, to distance her from her musicians and support network. And it was at odds with her egalitarian approach to making music, one of the core principles of jazz. Reed also begrudged the trio their high salaries, another one of the ways that Vaughan demonstrated her respect for the musicians she worked with.

Reed’s behavior became increasingly erratic. Her trio saw him run uncontrollably, for no visible reason, down an airport concourse, then collapse. Another time, after a disagreement with Vaughan, he ran into a busy street, stopping traffic while yelling “Kill me! Kill me!” A confrontation with an airline representative over seat assignments became so heated that the desk agent challenged Reed to a boxing match. Arguments between Reed and Vaughan became more volatile. There were more concerns about physical abuse. And, according to rumors, Reed hit Vaughan’s mother.¹⁸ Friends suspected mental illness.

“I just couldn’t get along with him because his personality was just too strange and he acted too strange all the time and he just wanted you to do things that just were ridiculous,” McCurdy remembered. “So right after the Playboy Jazz Festival that was it for me. They let me go from the band, and it wasn’t a musical thing. I talked to Sass, she said it was nothing musical, it was just personal between her—she was so involved with her husband in that time and we couldn’t get along, so it was just time to move on. So I did.”¹⁹ He’d been with the band for less than six months. Pianist Mike Wofford lasted until the end of the year, but then he left too, and the trio was in transition again.

Vaughan’s insistence on involving her husband in her career, constantly supporting and advocating for him, also harmed her efforts in the recording studio. On August 13, 1979, Vaughan and Norman Granz began their second collaboration together: a two-album collection of Duke Ellington songs. As he had in 1957 when recording Ella Fitzgerald’s groundbreaking Ellington songbook on Verve, Granz backed Vaughan with a variety of combos, both big and small. But the first session got off to a bumpy start. Granz enlisted Benny Carter to write arrangements for a twenty-two-piece ensemble that included a full complement of strings, French horns, harp, reeds, guitar, and her trio. Vaughan asked that space be left in the arrangements for Reed to solo. Granz didn’t honor her request, but instead of him telling her in advance, she discovered the omission the day of the session, after the arrangements had been completed and the musicians hired. She scrapped the six tracks recorded that day, and they remained unreleased until 2013. It was an expensive decision, one that probably damaged her working relationship with Granz and, according to many, hurt the project. Two days later she returned to the studio to record three of the same songs, this time backed by a ten-piece jazz ensemble. Similar sessions with a quintet and a new ten-piece combo followed on August 16 and 27, and all included Reed. Then the production moved to New York. On September 12 she recorded four new big band arrangements by Billy Byer and four tunes backed by another octet the next day. The final two sessions took place in Los Angeles on January 22 and 23, 1980. The first was with a blues-inflected band, and the second with a duet pairing piano and guitar.

“I really love Norman; he’s done so much for jazz,” Vaughan told Leonard Feather in March 1980. “The only thing is, you just don’t argue with him. You pick up the phone and keep saying ‘Yes, Norman.’ It’s always a battle with him, because he just wants me to come in, look at a bunch of sheet music he has laid out, pick out some songs, and jam. Well, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that. . . . It’s time for a change in jazz, instrumentally and vocally. Instead of everybody just jamming for fifteen choruses, there should be music written out for a few choruses, then solos for a few, alternating. It seems to me that just jamming is beginning to go out of style.”²⁰

“Why should I hate the word jazz? That’s where I started, and that’s one of the things I still do,” she added when Feather asked her if she resented the jazz label. “What I don’t want to be called is a blues singer, although on one recent session Norman even had me doing that: I sang Duke Ellington’s ‘Rocks in My Bed’ with some old time blues musicians.”²¹ Backed by an ensemble including bluesmen Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson on saxophone and vocals, pianist Lloyd Glen, and electric guitarist PeeWee Crayton, Vaughan adopted the role and mannerisms of a blues singer, even calling out words of encouragement and approval as her new bandmates soloed. She sang dutifully, but it was completely out of character with who she was as a musician, and the track was an anomaly, out of sync with the rest of the project. In the end, it was another old-school blues jam session. It’s unclear if Vaughan was satisfied with the results. “Well, I tried so hard before Duke passed to do an album with his orchestra. But we never made it,” she said while publicizing the Duke Ellington Songbook. “So now, I um, I think it is a nice album.”²²

By the time Vaughan finished the recording session for the Duke Ellington Songbook, Reed was no longer touring or playing with Vaughan. On January 31, 1980, when Vaughan performed at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, she told audiences that Reed was back in Los Angeles awaiting a kidney operation. One week later, on February 7, her concert at the Hollywood Bowl started thirty-five minutes late due to the sudden illness of Reed after his release from the hospital. She dedicated the concert to him and, in his absence, plugged his new record, 46th and 8th.

Before returning to Los Angeles for her performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Vaughan taped two episodes of The Dick Cavett Show scheduled for broadcast March 6 and 7, 1980. She was distracted and uneasy as she answered the usual questions about her newest album, her early days on the road with Charlie Parker and the other beboppers, her childhood aspirations, and her future plans. And then suddenly, without prompting, she added: “Well, you know, my husband is in the, umm . . . ,” she paused, collecting herself. “My husband and I, we, um, he plays trumpet. Waymon. And we usually work together. He would have been here today, but he’s in the hospital. But we have combined our little things together. And he . . .” “You are known as a great team,” Cavett prompted, helping Vaughan through the moment. “The Quartet and I. It’s Waymon. . . . We had a lot of nice little things we had together,” she said, slipping into the past tense with a grim finality, before quickly correcting herself. “That we are doing together. He was taken sick.”²³

Seconds later, Vaughan giggled, and the tone of the conversation returned to lighter talk-show banter. But it was an unusually candid exchange for the publicly reserved, often evasive singer. She was vulnerable and worried about her husband’s declining health. She was also sad, almost resigned. Perhaps she realized that their working relationship, which she clearly valued, and their marriage, despite its many incompatibilities and volatility, was over. And it must have been disappointing. Marriage was still a cultural ideal and expectation, viewed by many as a prerequisite for happiness, especially for women. But Vaughan’s search for a partnership of equals living and making music together, the companionship and contentment that this represented, continued to elude her. Her quartet was once again a trio. She and Reed did not perform together again. The couple soon divorced, and Reed passed away from cancer three years later, on November 25, 1983.

“It’s been a life of laughs and tears,” Vaughan reflected in 1981, in the wake of her divorce. “The only thing I regret is that I married unhappily three times. Singing has given me my greatest pleasure. Sometimes I feel that singing is the only thing I’ve got that keeps me going. I mean there are problems and then there are problems. The only thing that allows me to forget the problems is to keep singing.” It was a strategy that she had been using for almost forty years. It got her through the ups and downs of the music industry and the death of her father, not to mention the emotional and financial devastation of her failed marriages. But the rigors of life on the road were beginning to take their toll. “I just can’t work steady night after night, anymore. I can’t get along with people if I’m tired. I turn crabby. Then I must go out on stage and smile and look happy. That’s hard. I’d rather be sick and stay home.”²⁴

It was before dawn on Thursday, January 28, 1982. Vaughan had just taken a red-eye from sunny Los Angeles to a cold and icy Philadelphia. John Schreiber, of George Wein’s Festival Productions, the same production company responsible for the many incarnations of the Newport Jazz Festival and Vaughan’s tours of Europe, waited with a limousine at the airport to take her to Wilmington, Delaware. Vaughan was singing two shows at the Grand Opera House that night. The engagement had been booked nine months earlier as part of a four-concert series celebrating the great American song composers, and Schreiber, recently promoted to producer, decided to pair Vaughan with George Gershwin.

“She gets off the plane and she’s just in a bad mood. She clearly hasn’t slept [when] she arrives in Philadelphia,” said Schreiber. He knew Vaughan and had worked as a road manager for her tours sponsored by Wein. “We have to drive forty-five minutes to Wilmington, and I’m sitting in the back of the limo with her and I go, ‘I am so excited that you’re here and I just can’t wait to hear the Gershwin program.’ And she looked at me, she’s perked up and she went, ‘Gershwin program? What do you mean?’ And I go, ‘Well, you know, it’s Sarah Vaughan sings Gershwin.’ And she said, ‘Not as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to do my show.’ And I go, ‘Didn’t Frank [Vaughan’s agent, Frank Rio] tell you?’ And it’s advertised as Sarah Vaughan sings Gershwin. She looked at me and she said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”

“I’m petrified, and I’m a kid,” recalled Schreiber, who was twenty-seven at the time. “I haven’t been producing that long.” He dropped Vaughan at her hotel and waited for the New York offices of Festival Productions to open. “What are you talking about, what do you mean Gershwin? Who said anything about Gershwin?” Marie St. Louis, Festival Production’s longtime booker, asked when Schreiber called. “Marie! Don’t you know?” he said. “No, I don’t know anything about that, that doesn’t make any sense to me,” she replied. “How could you tell those people she was going to sing Gershwin?” Nowhere in Vaughan’s contract did it stipulate that she would sing Gershwin. “My star is saying forget it, my colleagues in the office totally do not have my back, so I’m fucked,” Schreiber explained. “And Sarah’s asleep, because she has to rest up.” And both shows were sold out.²⁵

Vaughan arrived at the Grand Opera House at 5:00 P.M. for her sound check, only to discover a television crew waiting to tape the rehearsal. She wasn’t happy. “My drummer’s not here. This is gonna sound terrible without my drummer,” she complained. Vaughan wanted to control how her music was presented and disseminated. She was a perfectionist and disliked sharing performances that she considered flawed or compromised with audiences. Casually clad in a knit cap, white blouse, black boots, and bright red pants, with a cigarette in one hand and microphone in the other, Vaughan scatted a few bars accompanied by her pianist. After the rehearsal she consented to a short interview with the television crew, then learned that the segment would not air until the following week. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have done it.”²⁶

Gary Mullinax, a reporter from the Wilmington News Journal, watched all of this as he waited in the wings for his interview. According to Mullinax, she sighed and groaned her disapproval throughout, leaning her elbows on a table and occasionally putting her head down. She said that she was getting the flu. “Then she explained why she’s hated Wilmington for more than thirty years,” he wrote. “The first time I came through here in the ’40s I saw the whipping post,” Vaughan recalled. Delaware was the last state in the country to use whipping posts to punish criminals, both black and white. The state finally abolished the laws in 1972, but public floggings took place until 1952, and in 1963 a judge sentenced a man responsible for a $4 robbery to twenty lashes, though the governor overturned the sentence. It was an embarrassing episode in Delaware’s recent past, and a practice that Vaughan likely associated with racial discrimination. It was during this same 1944 stop in Wilmington that Vaughan and her bandmates encountered the racist shoeshiner at the train station, stood up for themselves, and then had to flee town. Although Wilmington tore down its whipping post in the early 1970s, the memory still haunted Vaughan in 1982. “I can still see that thing,” she told Mullinax. “I hate it.”²⁷

It was an inauspicious start to Vaughan’s interview, and she was living up to her reputation for being difficult and evasive with the press. She was grumpy and short-tempered as she answered the usual questions about her early career, life offstage, and continuing dislike of labels. Then the conversation turned to that night’s performance at the Grand Opera House, part of its Tribute to the American Popular Song series. “I don’t know about no Gershwin tonight. I wasn’t told,” she said. “It puts me in a bad position.”²⁸

Producer Schreiber visited Vaughan’s dressing room before the show. “I know you weren’t planning on singing any Gershwin, but could you do part of the set? Could part of the set be Gershwin?” he asked one last time, hoping to persuade her. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve just been singing a lot of Gershwin lately. I’m fed up with Gershwin,” she said. The day before flying to Philadelphia, Vaughan had been in rehearsals with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for another all-Gershwin program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. After her two shows in Wilmington on Thursday night she would play New York on Friday and Saturday before returning to Los Angeles for more rehearsals with Tilson Thomas. On Monday and Tuesday, February 1 and 2, she would sing Gershwin with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and this time it would be recorded. “I just want to do my show,” she told Schreiber. “Believe me, it will be fine. Don’t worry about it.”²⁹

“She gets on stage, the audience is going crazy,” Schreiber remembered. “She’s just blowing the roof off the place, and there’s no Gershwin, at all. And she’s singing ‘Alone Again, Naturally,’ and the woman who works at the Grand Opera House looks at me and goes, ‘I didn’t know that Gershwin wrote “Alone Again, Naturally.”’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, maybe he did. Who knows.’” He had decided not to tell the Grand’s management about his challenges with Vaughan.³⁰

“Are you all having a good time tonight?” Vaughan asked midway through her set. The audience answered with a resounding “Yes!” “You know, I know it was advertised that I was supposed to sing Gershwin tonight. I hope you don’t mind that I sing the songs that I like best to you,” she explained. The audience cheered, and she continued, “And for those of you who were looking for Gershwin and aren’t getting any, it’s not John Schreiber’s fault I’m not singing Gershwin tonight. Just know that, ladies and gentlemen.” Of course, no one in the audience knew who Schreiber was. Vaughan finished her show and received her usual curtain calls and sang her usual encore, “Send in the Clowns.” “Great, we did it,” Schreiber thought. “We dodged a bullet. Everybody had a ball. Who cares about the Gershwins.”³¹

Monday morning, the Grand Opera House’s marketing director called Schreiber. “I need you to read something,” she said. The Morning News had run an editorial with the unfortunate headline “Disappointed at the Grand” that charged the theater with shortchanging patrons. They had been promised Vaughan singing Gershwin and didn’t get it. The paper condemned both the faulty communications between the management and the star and Vaughan’s inflexibility. “With four decades of singing popular music behind her including a lot of Gershwin (as in four-LP sides of ‘Sarah Vaughan Sings George Gershwin’), one might feel that Miss Sassy could have interpolated at least one Gershwin song in her program without a whole lot of ‘notice,’”³² wrote the Morning News editorial team. Someone must be held responsible, they insisted. Two weeks later, in a letter to the newspaper, John Schreiber, representing Festival Productions, took full responsibility for the mix-up. “Needless to say, the contract was not renewed,” he said.³³

It was soon revealed that the Vaughan controversy was part of an ongoing feud between the Morning News and local arts organizations, who charged the paper with biased and sensational reporting in service of its own agenda. But the damage had already been done. Gary Mullinax’s unflattering, judgmental profile was syndicated and bolstered perceptions of Vaughan, who loathed interviews, as a difficult, temperamental artist. And it was yet one more incident in a series of incidents that prompted promoter and producer George Wein, whose career spanned more than sixty years, to consider Vaughan the most difficult artist he worked with. His memories of their many conflicts often overshadowed his enjoyment of her recordings, even though he adored her voice. “When she was good, she was very good,” he wrote in his memoir, “and when she was bad, it was miserable.”³⁴

“She was difficult,” agreed Darlene Chan, the Wein employee Vaughan requested to accompany her on her European tours in the late 1960s and 1970s. “Also very sweet. Sometimes I was hoping for a day when you wake up [and] it was nice Sass. I have to say, being on the road and the schedule that we kept is grueling for anybody.” After more than forty years in the business, Chan understood that all artists had good and bad days. But it was also well known that Vaughan abused her body. She drank, sometimes to excess, and used drugs, and this likely influenced her day-to-day temperament. “I think sometimes it made her a little difficult for us to deal with on a person-to-person level, but it never, to my knowledge, really affected her singing,” explained Chan. And Vaughan could be stubborn. When she didn’t want to do something, she would figure out ways to get out of it, Chan remembered. Vaughan disliked television crews recording her shows. Although the terms of her contract had already been agreed upon, Vaughan, believing she was being taken advantage of, wanted extra money for the television performances. In Spain, during the 1970s, Vaughan saw broadcast trucks outside of her venue and assumed that they planned to tape her show. They did not, but she refused to go on and reduced the Spanish promoter, the local presenter with a financial stake in the concert, to tears. During a tour of London, Festival Productions booked Vaughan into the Dorchester, a five-star luxury hotel, and she insisted that her trio stay there too. “There wasn’t any way we could afford to put the guys in the Dorchester,” Chan explained. “She wasn’t getting off the bus, she wasn’t doing anything until all the guys, all of us were in the Dorchester with her.” Vaughan wanted Chan and the trio, her guys, nearby. And in the end, they all stayed at the Dorchester.

Vaughan liked having Chan, another woman, with her on the road. Chan understood what it was like being surrounded by men for weeks at a time. “I think she thought I took care of her, which I tried to,” said Chan. Yet Vaughan disliked it when she became friendly with the guys in the band. “I think she felt I was siding with them,” Chan explained. “She wanted it to be [that] she was the boss and everybody else was her people.” Her relationship with Vaughan deteriorated further when Wein placed Vaughan and Carmen McRae on the same tour and assigned Chan to manage them both. “That didn’t sit well with her, and after that we didn’t get along so well,” Chan said.³⁵

Robert Jones, another road manager employed by Festival Productions, had a very different experience. He toured with Vaughan in the 1980s and took pride in anticipating her needs. After his first tour with Vaughan, he learned that she was concerned with the sound, in particular the sound she heard through the monitors. She wanted a good microphone, so he began packing a backup mic in his kit of supplies to use in an emergency. He also brought an extra cymbal stand in case the drum kit provided by the venue didn’t have enough. And he knew that Vaughan, who perspired profusely while onstage, must have Kleenex. “Not handy tissues, AVC tissue or something,” Jones explained. “You had to have Kleenex.” He brought those too, and every time he saw a spare box of Kleenex, he tucked that into his bag of supplies. Anything to make life as easy as possible for Vaughan and her musicians. Like Chan, he tried to shield them from the controlled chaos of touring. This could include a sudden change in venue, like the time promoters in Italy decided to move a concert, after patrons had started arriving, from a small indoor theater to a nearby park. The change in venue required a team of men to carry a grand piano, drums, and sound equipment across the grounds. Or when she couldn’t find her passport before a flight from Rome to Nice. “Don’t worry,” he told a flustered Vaughan. Jones called the hotel, and they found the passport and airmailed it to Nice the next day. In the meantime, he helped Vaughan negotiate customs, passing out publicity photos to the officials in immigration as onlookers exclaimed, “It’s Sarah Vaughan!”

“I never had an ounce of problems with Sarah,” said Jones. “I just loved being with her.” They got along well. She was kind to him and his family. During a tour of Finland, while en route to the airport in Helsinki, Jones remembered Vaughan telling him, “Well, I want to give you something when we get onto the plane.” “So, when I got on the plane, she came up and gave me two ballpoint pens, gold pens. I was stunned,” he recalled. Then she said, “You are the best person I’ve ever had to deal with, because I never had to deal with you.”³⁶

Pianist Carl Schroeder viewed conflicts between Vaughan and presenters—be it a promoter, producer, or club owner—as part of the territory. The needs and priorities of the star, the artist, did not always align with those of the presenter, who, like the talent, wanted to create good music but was also concerned about the bottom line, his profit. According to Schroeder, Vaughan’s requests were modest. To do her job well she wanted a good venue; adequate publicity; a functioning sound system so that she could hear herself; a suitable piano, drum set, and mic; and a dressing room, ideally with air conditioning. It was the presenter’s responsibility to provide these. “Nah, she wasn’t that high-demanding,” said Schroeder. “[But] Sarah was not going to get run over. . . . She was stronger than any, any anybody. She had developed that kind of strength. So she would get after George [Wein] to get what she wanted.”³⁷

“She took care of the band,” said bassist John Giannelli. He traveled with a huge, fiberglass bass trunk and remembered Vaughan tipping the airport skycaps $20 to insure that it got on the plane. “She always had a good rapport with the skycaps and everything everywhere,” he explained. “She treated people nice.” But she could become firm, very assertive when she needed to. During a gig at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago in April 1974, someone stole Giannelli’s amplifier. “So she got real strong with the club owner and got the money right away, and somebody shipped me a new amplifier from Los Angeles. Hop by bus the next day.”

Schroeder remembered a gig at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, again in Chicago, with a piano that simply would not stay in tune. Vaughan sang opening night and received her usual standing ovations. But she refused to sing Tuesday night and left a full house waiting for her arrival, even though the hotel management promised to replace the piano by Wednesday. “She locked herself in the bathroom of her suite,” said Schroeder. “The manager came knocking on the door, but she stayed in the bathroom. We left the next day. The hotel evicted her.” Then the hotel hired Carmen McRae to replace Vaughan.³⁸

“I thought things were rough in the old days, but they’re getting weirder and weirder every day,” Vaughan told Eleanor O’Sullivan of the Asbury Park Press days before her trip to Wilmington, Delaware, in 1982. “I signed this contract last year and in the rider the promoter put in, ‘We don’t supply this and we don’t supply that, only soda and beer, and if you want whiskey, bring it yourself, and if you want a towel backstage, you have to pay a $5 deposit.’ All these do’s and don’ts. He doesn’t know all I want to do is to sing and get the hell out of there. Promoters are nuts. They don’t know anything. They’re talking about towels. If I want a towel, I’ll bring a Kleenex.”³⁹

“I think she saw me as what I was, which was a promoter,” explained John Schreiber. “I often felt with Sarah like I was suffering for the sins and indignities that’d been laid on her through the decades by horrible managers. I showed up and I’m innocent, I love you, you’re the greatest. And she’s thinking back to some terrible thing that happened in 1959 based on the work of some dreadful manager.”⁴⁰

Vaughan had weathered more than her share of challenges, those inflicted by managers but also by the industry at large: Club owners who refused to pay her after she packed the house. Mobsters that insisted she continue on at their club despite other commitments or suggested that she not play a rival venue, requests all backed by implicit threats of violence. Record executives who wanted to control her creatively but not pay her royalties. White promoters who sabotaged the work of their black counterparts in an effort to enter the lucrative field of promoting black artists themselves, a tactic that sparked the controversy in Atlanta during the Biggest Show of ’51. Segregated clubs that didn’t have dressing rooms for the black talent. Lounges in segregated hotels that were happy to profit from her singing but unwilling to let her stay at their hotel.

“Prejudice is only the first step, [it’s] being black twenty-four hours a day,” explained George Wein, who married a black woman in 1959. “It isn’t that people you’re with are prejudiced against you. They may be your friends. But you’re still black and they are white. And you have to have a really mature look of things to be—to not let those things disrupt you or upset you, and I don’t think Sarah could do that.”⁴¹

Vaughan didn’t publicly discuss until the late 1970s and early 1980s the racism she experienced throughout her career. During her Dick Cavett Show appearance in 1980, the same appearance where she discussed Waymon Reed’s failing health, Cavett encouraged her to share stories of the racial intolerance she confronted during her days with the Billy Eckstine band. She told him of the white man who threw chicken bones back into the Jim Crow train car and the band’s retaliation, of rude southern whites requesting songs, and how she carried a hatpin, rather than a gun, to protect herself. The studio audience laughed as she pretended to get the hatpin from her purse and feigned a stabbing motion while saying “Ha, ha, ha.” “You’ve left your mark all over America,” said Cavett. “I’ve left my mark all over America,” she replied, then her tone became more serious and matter of fact. “You know, they really are unpleasant things to talk about, but that was the way of life then.”

The conversation turned to the prejudice she encountered as a child in New Jersey and her fascination with the segregated bathrooms and water fountains during her first tours of the South. “It’s surprising when you first see that,” Cavett observed. “Yes. I used to take pictures. I still have some pictures of those sort of things,” she explained. “It’s good that so much of that has passed,” said Cavett, a politically liberal white man. His empathy for Vaughan was genuine, but, like so many white Americans, he wanted to believe that segregation, discrimination, and the pain of racism were a thing of the past. Vaughan disagreed. “Yeah,” she replied, her voice now quiet, “It’s still here, though.” “You’re still finding it,” said Cavett, acknowledging her point of view. “It’s a little better,” she conceded.⁴²

Vaughan encountered other, more mundane slights in her day-to-day life as a professional musician. She would fly in for a gig and proceed to the designated hotel only to find that a room had not been booked. Or a promoter would forget to hire a car to pick her up after her performance, forcing Vaughan to wait an hour and half and then call a taxi herself. Decades of slights, some intentional, resulting from social customs, and others simply oversights, shaped Vaughan. They were part of her experience. She internalized them and developed a healthy skepticism for authority and institutions of power.

“My sense always was that she was mistrustful of the promoter class,” Schreiber explained. The people with the power. “She tolerated her presenters and her promoters. And yet she understood that, of course, they were the vehicle or they were the agent by which she got to do the thing that she was always struggling to get. And when she was on stage, it was otherworldly, it was magical.”⁴³

These new tunes have me a nervous wreck,” Vaughan told Down Beat’s James Liska. “I like new tunes. But they make me nervous. I can’t help it.” She and Michael Tilson Thomas were rehearsing for another set of Gershwin concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on February 1 and 2, 1982, nearly eight years after they first developed the program together in 1974.⁴⁴ Since then she had performed with dozens of symphony orchestras. PBS produced three television specials of Vaughan singing the program with symphonies, including Rhapsody and Song: A Tribute to George Gershwin, which won an Emmy in 1981. This time CBS planned to record the program for a new album, and Vaughan was excited but nervous.

“One night I got drunk just thinking about it. In my own house. I just went into the living room and drank me some cognac. Went to take a sip. Took sips,” Vaughan laughed as she told the story. “Before Sarah goes on, she’s real nervous,” Tilson Thomas confirmed. “But the minute she’s on—” “I’m so nervous right now and I’m always nervous before a show,” Vaughan interrupted. “Barbara McNair made a statement in Jet magazine that people who were nervous before they went on must be insecure. I don’t know why she said that. Carmen [McRae] says the same thing. Before I go on, I’m real nervous, and it lasts until I get the reaction from the audience.” After forty years in the business, she still cared what an audience thought, and she went out every night hoping to win them over. She believed that once an artist lost this drive to satisfy their audience, they should retire. “Of course, sometimes it gets worse,” she explained. “People sit out there and stare at you and don’t applaud. Then I start shortening up my show because I think they don’t enjoy what I’m doing and I want to get the hell off of there. And then when I come back and sign autographs, the say ‘I’ve never heard you better.’ Then I’m saying, ‘Why do you do that to me, you all? I thought you hated me out there.’”⁴⁵

“Oh, come on now, just sixteen lousy bars,” said Tilson Thomas, bringing Vaughan back to their rehearsal of their new introduction for “The Man I Love.” “That could be 16 messed-up bars,” she said as she studied the score, contemplating how she would reimagine the tune’s introduction. “I’m gonna have all this music on stage with me, you know.” “Anything you’d like on stage is fine,” Tilson Thomas assured her. “You see? No sacrifice is too great for my art.”⁴⁶

The concert began with a flourish. The orchestra played the dramatic overture from Porgy and Bess. The audience applauded and cheered, and then Vaughan seamlessly launched into a medley of favorites from the opera. At first her voice sounded strained, likely from nerves, but true to form, after more enthusiastic applause, she loosened up. Her voice became both lighter and richer, more flexible and malleable. She worked her way through seventeen Gershwin standards. On some tunes she was an operatic diva, with a sumptuous, expansive voice backed by the full forces of the orchestra; on others a swinging girl singer with a big band. Sometimes she assumed the role of musical theater songstress, especially when accompanied by the precision of the classically trained Tilson Thomas on piano. Other times, however, she improvised, relishing her role as a master of jazz. She stretched out and explored the harmonic language of a song, uncovering new, unexpected territory. She scatted with enthusiasm on up-tempo choruses. She sang wordless countermelodies she composed for the slower, contemplative ballads. And she embellished the existing melodic lines with her now-trademark vocal inflections. Sometimes she took on all of these musical personas within a single number, as she did with the new arrangement for “The Man I Love.” It became a ten-minute, through-composed tour de force that demonstrated both the genius of her musical mind and the sheer brilliance and scope of her voice. Everything about the concert was distinctly Sarah Vaughan. She was not contained by musical genres or labels, nor was she pressured to score a big hit. She was simply free to sing.

She repeated the same program the next night, February 2, and then producers from CBS entered the editing suite to choose which takes to include on the album Gershwin Live! “I knew the girl who was one of the producers on it,” explained Vaughan’s longtime friend Robert Richards. “When they all got together to listen to the [two] nights, nobody could come to any kind of agreement which one was the best. One liked night one, one liked [night two].” They reviewed each number on the program, and there were no obvious flaws in either take. Both performances were wonderful. “So they put [two] things up on the wall and threw darts,” said Richards.⁴⁷

“The Concert of the Year Is Now the Album of the Year!” CBS Records proclaimed in print ads announcing the release of Gershwin Live! three months later. “On May 15, Sarah Vaughan, The Queen of Jazz, will appear at Avery Fisher Hall celebrating her 40th anniversary as a performer,” an ad in the New York Times added. “But you can hear Sarah Vaughan anytime on her spectacular new CBS Records release, Gershwin Live!”⁴⁸ Robert Richards attended the Lincoln Center concert and visited Vaughan backstage. The dressing rooms at Avery Fisher Hall had two rooms: one for entertaining guests and a second, private space for the artist to get dressed. When Richards arrived, Vaughan took him back into the second room. “Then we locked ourselves in the bathroom,” said Richards. Vaughan held Gershwin Live! in her hands. “I’m just gonna scream I’m so excited,” she said, then screamed. “Wait till you hear this, I’m just thrilled with it.” “We played a couple tracks of it, then she had to go back to her guests out there,” Richards reminisced. “She loved that record.”⁴⁹

At last, Vaughan had recorded an album that realized her musical goals and vision. Unlike far too many of her earlier recordings, Gershwin Live!, the culmination of her work with Michael Tilson Thomas, represented a true collaboration of music equals. And performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in their symphony hall must have fulfilled many of her long-held desires for legitimacy, respect, and acceptance by the cultural elite. In January 1983, Gershwin Live! was nominated for a Grammy award. After six nominations, three of them lost to Ella Fitzgerald, she finally won her first Grammy.

I did a concert last week in Boston with Wynton Marsalis. He is an absolute genius. He’s so good, I can’t tell you in words how good he is,” said Vaughan when asked about up-and-coming jazz talent by Jay Scott.⁵⁰ She and Marsalis had performed with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall on May 1, 1984. It was her second appearance with the orchestra, Marsalis’s first, and their first time working together. Weeks earlier the twenty-two-year-old Julliard-trained trumpet player had won two Grammys, one for best jazz instrumental soloist for his album Think of One and a second for best classical soloist with an orchestra for his album of trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart. He was the first artist to win in both jazz and classical music categories in the same year. That night in Boston, Marsalis played Haydn’s Concerto for Trumpet in E-flat, then after intermission joined Vaughan for two numbers during her set. The concert placed jazz and classical music on an equal footing. It was a coming together of an established yet still very active jazz legend with one of jazz’s brilliant new voices, who would soon elevate the status of jazz within the American cultural landscape. The evening was a symbolic meeting of the past and present, with a glimpse into the future.

The days leading up to Vaughan’s appearance with the Boston Pops had been difficult. On April 28, her performance at a ball celebrating the city of Rochester’s sesquicentennial was delayed nearly an hour because the hall did not have a suitable piano. A grand piano was secured from the nearby Eastman School of Music to replace the venue’s untuned upright Everett, but the incident rekindled assertions that Vaughan was difficult and temperamental. She countered these allegations with a simple, “No, it means I don’t sing with a lousy piano.”⁵¹ On April 30, the day before her appearance in Boston, she attended funeral services for her friend of forty years and frequent collaborator Count Basie. The legendary bandleader passed away on April 24 at the age of seventy-nine. Then she flew to Boston from New York, and after she settled into her hotel room on the twenty-fifth floor, a fire alarm went off. She walked down twenty flights of stairs before learning that it had been a false alarm.⁵²

The next day, she was in good spirits and looking forward to that day’s work. The orchestra applauded when she arrived at rehearsal. Vaughan sat at the piano as Marsalis played through his encore, the flashy “Carnival of Venice.” She hugged Marsalis and conductor John Williams as her trio set up, then she ran through that night’s numbers. “Some performers give very little at a rehearsal, but Vaughan gets so caught up in the sensation of singing that even when she seems intent on doing a simple run-through, she ends up improvising and stretching her voice,” critic Gary Giddins wrote in the Village Voice.⁵³

In the evening, she strode onto the stage with her usual confidence, wearing a billowing orange gown with gold brocade. She began her set with an up-tempo “Just Friends” backed by her trio, whom she introduced, followed by her well-known icebreaker. “And in case you don’t who I am, I’m Dolly Parton!” she said, while thrusting out her chest. Then she gave her audience a survey of her forty-two year career, a lesson in jazz history. She sang “Body and Soul,” the tune that began it all on that fateful night at the Apollo Theater’s amateur night in 1942. She sang “Misty,” the Erroll Garner tune she debuted in 1958 on Vaughan and Violins and helped make a standard. “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” another gem from her live 1963 album Sassy Swings the Tivoli and her most recent album with Count Basie, followed.

Then Marsalis returned to the stage. He and Vaughan shook hands. Vaughan kissed him on the cheek and turned to the audience while shrugging her shoulders and winking as if to say, “Oooh, I just kissed this very handsome young man.” The audience laughed as John Williams eased the orchestra into the introduction to “September Song.” Marsalis noodled behind Vaughan as she sang the tune, often incorporating his motivic lines into her interpretation. An easy give-and-take, a spontaneity, developed between the artists. Vaughan finished her chorus and passed the baton to Marsalis, and it quickly became clear that his solo that night was identical to the one trumpeter Clifford Brown crafted thirty years earlier when he and Vaughan recorded the track for Mercury on the iconic album Sarah Vaughan. For Marsalis, like Dianne Reeves and so many other aspiring jazz musicians, the album had piqued his interest in jazz and played an important role in his musical education. “He kept apologizing because he was playing [Clifford’s solo] note for note,” Vaughan told Scott days later. “He said, ‘I’m not copying it or anything; I just love this solo.’ I said, ‘Relax, I don’t blame you.’”⁵⁴

Jazz artists often paid tribute to one another by quoting material, and it was common practice for jazz novices to transcribe solos that they admired. They took the solos apart, studied the riffs and harmonic language to understand how an admired master moved through musical time. It was a didactic technique that helped young musicians learn how to improvise and craft their own solos.⁵⁵ In this case, however, with the benefit of hindsight, Marsalis’s performance also symbolized a larger shift in the musical landscape and jazz’s place within it. In December 1954, when Vaughan, Brown, Herbie Mann, Paul Quinichette, Joe Benjamin, Roy Haynes, and Jimmy Jones gathered in Mercury’s studios to record their album, the session was described as an intimate after-hours session—that magical, almost mythical, space where musicians were free to create and explore unfettered by commercial constraints. Jazz was the music of jam sessions and nightclubs. Now, thirty years later, the same music was being performed in the grandeur of Symphony Hall. By recreating Clifford Brown’s solo on “September Song,” Marsalis in effect granted it the same seriousness and legitimacy as the classical music he recreated in the first half of the program. In a sense, Vaughan and her music had come full circle.

Despite her “legitimate” voice, Vaughan spent much of her career in search of legitimacy, a respect for her talent regardless of the kind of music she sang. That night in Boston, as critic Giddins sat in Vaughan’s dressing room, a reporter seeking an interview confessed that she knew nothing about jazz or Vaughan and hoped that Vaughan would help her get through. “Honey, I’m not going to be your teacher,” said Vaughan, as she politely showed the reporter to the door. Then she turned to Giddins and asked, “Do you think they’d send someone out to interview Beverly Sills with a line like that?”⁵⁶ For decades, she had been fighting the pervasive belief that classical music, and the musicians who performed it, was inherently superior to jazz and jazz artists. And while she had an unwavering belief in her talent, at times she too viewed the world of classical music with awe and reverence. It had its own unfamiliar customs, traditions, and repertoire often deemed off-limits to black artists. Her respect and admiration for Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price was a tribute to their talent, but also an acknowledgment that they had found ways to break into that world. By 1984, however, ten years after her first Gershwin concert with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, after dozens of concerts with symphony orchestras across the country, television specials with prominent orchestras, and her Grammy-winning Gershwin Live!, the symphony orchestra as an institution had lost much of its mystique. “They make it easy,” Vaughan said of her experience singing with the Boston Pops. “Those musicians wouldn’t be up there if they couldn’t read, you know, and Williams is one of the best. I used to think all symphony conductors knew what they were doing. I know better now.”⁵⁷

“I studied classical music because so many black musicians were scared of this big monster on the other side of the mountain called classical music,” said Marsalis, expressing a similar sentiment, two weeks before his performance with Vaughan and the Boston Pops. “I wanted to know what it was that scared everybody so bad. I went into it and found out it wasn’t anything but some more music. After you sit up there and play all those scores, you find out that classical musicians are just like all other musicians—most of them are mediocre and a handful are excellent.”⁵⁸ Whether they played classical music or jazz, they were all musicians.

“Sarah Vaughan is the greatest there ever was. She understands harmony and sings notes other singers don’t sing,” Marsalis told Giddins the morning after their performance in Boston. The night before, after “September Song,” Vaughan and Marsalis launched into an up-tempo “Autumn Leaves.” Vaughan scatted. Marsalis looked on, smiling, as she executed a slow, controlled swoop from the bottom of her range to the top. He smiled again when she made an unexpected chord substitution, incorporating an angular, chromatic figure into her scatting. He took a blisteringly fast solo, and then he and Vaughan traded fours, as if in a jocular banter, until the end of the tune. “She sang something on the bridge to ‘Autumn Leaves’ I couldn’t believe,” Marsalis reflected. “I thought ‘Damn!’”⁵⁹

It was just another night at work for Vaughan. As had become her custom, she finished her set with “Send in the Clowns,” her jazz aria. It was her moment to become an operatic diva. She transformed the pop song, infusing it with her gospel and jazz roots, into something extraordinary, distinctly Sarah Vaughan. And that night, as she had for the past decade, she did it in Symphony Hall. As she sang with symphony orchestras across the country during the third crossover phase of her career, she introduced jazz to new audiences, those more comfortable in the staid elegance of a concert hall than a nightclub. With these concerts, Vaughan, and others, helped jazz along on its journey toward legitimacy, its entrance into the academy. Three years later, in 1987, Marsalis cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in the subsequent years the organization presented concerts, developed education programs, and built new venues that physically and symbolically canonized jazz as a prestigious high art. In the span of Vaughan’s career, jazz had emerged as America’s classical music.

I just keep going,” Vaughan told Jay Scott, the reporter for the Globe and Mail, during her stop in Toronto the following week. She was reflecting on her career and the many changes she had weathered in the industry. “Indefinitely?” asked Scott. “Will you be touring when you’re Alberta Hunter’s age, in your late eighties?” “Nooooo. I’ll only come out for special events,” she replied, laughing. “To tell you the truth, I’m getting sick of being on the road. I want to make records, but I don’t have the pep for the stage—though once I’m out there, and they’re screaming and hollering, I love it. But I need a change. I’ve got tired of going out, singing, coming off, going to the next town, going out, singing, getting off, the same routine. For 42 years. So my 43rd year will be a change.”⁶⁰

Five weeks earlier, on March 27, 1984, Vaughan turned sixty, a milestone she joked about during her sets, and she was having a very good year. She’d just starred in one of American Express’s popular “Do you know me?” commercials with pianist Billy Taylor. She signed a contract with Quincy Jones’s record label, Qwest, and toyed with the idea of making an album of country and western music. On May 17, she would record a duet with singer Barry Manilow. The commercially successful yet often derided pop star recruited Vaughan and a handful of other jazz musicians to work with him in his own quest for greater legitimacy and respect. The jazz-inspired 2:00 A.M. Paradise Café went platinum, spawned a behind-the-scenes documentary, and earned both Manilow and Vaughan a Grammy nomination for their collaboration on “Blue.” On June 30, in Dusseldorf, Germany, she sang a cycle of philosophical poems written by Pope John Paul II, translated into English by Gene Lees and arranged by conductor Lalo Schifrin. She debuted the work in a concert billed as “One World, One Peace” and then entered the recording studio. The sessions resulted in what is perhaps one of her most eclectic albums, The Planet Is Alive . . . Let It Live!: Sarah Vaughan Sings Pope John Paul II. On Sunday, July 8, her concert with Wynton Marsalis and the Boston Pops was broadcast on PBS’s popular Evening at the Pops. And on July 22, she appeared on an all-star television tribute celebrating the upcoming Olympic Games. “This is my year,” she said. “The jobs are coming in and I’m making them. Hey, I’m just coming into my prime.”⁶¹

Despite tiring of life on the road, Vaughan kept on singing, working, and pushing herself. “As soon as you retire, you die,” she said in 1980, and it was a mantra that guided the final years of her career.⁶² In 1986, during an appearance on Marian McPartland’s popular radio program Piano Jazz, McPartland suggested that Vaughan was at her peak, and Vaughan, then sixty-two, responded, “Oh no, I’m not at the peak. I’ve got much more to do. Whatever that is, but there’s more to do, I’m sure.” This too had become a familiar refrain. In January, she recorded a new album of songs from South Pacific with opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa and actor Mandy Patinkin, which also became a television special. The following year, 1987, she stepped into the recording studio again to collaborate with producer Sergio Mendes on Brazilian Romance, which earned a Grammy nomination, her ninth. She taped the television special Sass and Brass, which aired on Cinemax in March. And she continued to tour, making her usual rounds of the nightclubs, symphony halls, and festivals at home and abroad.

“I’m slowing down because I’m getting sick of the road,” Vaughan said again in 1988. That year alone she’d toured Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and Japan, in addition to her usual gigs in the United States. But this time she seemed to mean it. “I pick my places now. It took a long time to be able to do that. Twenty years ago, I said, ‘Where’s the work?’ If anybody had told me then that I’d be off for three months, I’d have said you’ve got to be kidding, I’d starve to death. But after forty-six years, I saved my money pretty well.” She began spending more time doing things that she enjoyed, without the pressures of getting onstage night after night. “When I’m off the road, I like to travel, just go where I like. I like to ride trains,” she said. “When I can do what I want to do in this business, then I’m a star. Not the glamour part.”⁶³

Vaughan’s mind was at peace, and she seemed satisfied with what she had done and accomplished, with the career she’d had. And the outside world continued to honor her life in music. That spring she was inducted into the American Jazz Hall of Fame, and eight months later, in January 1989, the National Endowment of the Arts designated her one of their Jazz Masters. Then on February 22, 1989, she received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, alongside her friends Dizzy Gillespie, whom she had known since 1942, and opera singer Leontyne Price.

On Saturday, June 24, 1989, Vaughan began her annual tour of summer jazz festivals when she performed at the Fourth Annual Great Words Jazz and Blues Festival in Mansfield, Massachusetts. The next night, Sunday, she returned to the Hampton Jazz Festival in Newport News, Virginia, for the fourth time. But her show was a disappointment. She started fifty minutes late, played a spotty set, and she was out of sorts, repeatedly complaining about the hot lights and sound quality. On Monday night she was in Toronto to open the inaugural du Maurier Downtown Jazz Festival. She was back to her usual charming, witty self as she crafted comedy bits on the fly. She joked about her age, now sixty-five, insisting that she had no intentions of retiring. Two songs into her set she discovered that her tissue box was not in its proper place on the piano. “I don’t have my Kleenex!” she announced, feigning exasperation. Without her Kleenex, she explained, she was just like Linus without his blanket in Peanuts. “I’ll go crazy!” she said. And when her Kleenex arrived, she frantically pulled countless tissues from the box, littering the stage.⁶⁴ She toyed with the audience throughout her set, adding an element of unpredictability and spontaneity to her otherwise predictable show. And she sang wonderfully. “Be reassured,” wrote Geoff Chapman of the Toronto Star. “Those subtly smoky tones, the faultless vibrato and low-register resonance are fully intact, the vinyl victories of the past still justified.”⁶⁵

On Wednesday, June 28, she was in New York for the JVC Jazz Festival, and her mood had turned again. Promoter George Wein remembered visiting her backstage at Carnegie Hall. He wanted to offer her a hug and wish her luck. The first thing she said to Wein was “Why do you pay Ella more than you pay me?”⁶⁶ “I was so mad at her,” Wein said. “That’s all she could think of. And the fact that Sassy worked for me like twenty, thirty, forty concerts a year and Ella worked for me one concert a year. [It] never entered into her head that I was a main source of Sassy’s income, but she just heard that maybe I paid Ella on one night more money than she got.”⁶⁷ Ella Fitzgerald was the bigger star, and she could command more, and her public performances were less and less frequent. Fitzgerald, now seventy-one, diabetic, and recovering from heart bypass surgery, had to sit while performing, and doctors limited her to a single show a month. When she performed at the JVC festival the previous Sunday, she had the entire bill to herself.⁶⁸ Her ticket price was $40. The ticket price for Vaughan’s show on Wednesday was $35, and she shared the bill with the Milt Jackson Quartet.

Wein left Vaughan’s dressing room and didn’t plan to stay for the show; he was too angry. Their relationship spanned thirty-seven years since she first played his club Storyville in 1952. He booked her on the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 and almost every one since, not to mention its many domestic and international spin-offs. Perhaps Vaughan’s outburst, her seeming lack of appreciation for Wein’s efforts and loyalty, was her coming to terms with the simple fact that Ella would always be the bigger star. Or perhaps she simply did not feel well. On his way out of the hall, Wein stopped at the sound booth to make sure everything was fine. “The first number she [sang], she was absolutely terrible,” said Wein. It confirmed his fears that Vaughan was going to have a bad night. “I stayed there for a few minutes, and by the third number the magic took over, and I could forgive her for anything when the magic took over.”⁶⁹

Of course, the audience in the hall knew nothing of her argument with Wein, and critic John Wilson considered it another impressive showing. “Miss Vaughan,” he wrote, “was in charge from the moment she stepped on the stage to parade before her cheering admirers and then, finding her glass of water misplaced on a small table, she angrily wrestled the table to one side of the stage, knocking her microphone to the floor in the process.” Then she sat down and calmly began her set. She scatted on “Sweet Georgia Brown,” moved on to the languorous ballad “Island,” her Gershwin medley, and her usual encores “Misty” and “Send in the Clowns” to close. “Brilliant as she is as a singer,” Wilson concluded, “Miss Vaughan has become much more than that—a superb entertainer who keeps her audiences’ reactions in constant flux between the miracles of her voice and comedy bits that her audiences know by heart, but which they always respond to, as when she sings the male part in a ‘Misty’ duet with herself and sounds like a macho Ink Spot.”⁷⁰

Two days later she was scheduled to depart for a Wein-sponsored fifteen-engagement tour of Europe. It was the same circuit of festivals and halls that she had been doing for more than thirty years. She canceled, and no one knew why. “She just decided she didn’t care what happened,” said Wein. She left her trio musicians, the concert presenters, everyone, in the lurch. “It was a disaster; her fans in Europe were looking forward to her appearance. I had a lot of problems with various festivals in Europe who blamed me for her cancellation.”⁷¹ Wein asked for a doctor’s note to appease promoters and protect himself financially. Vaughan resisted, but finally, two weeks later, she presented Wein with a note from a doctor in Virginia with a diagnosis of arthritis in her right hand. “Even after I received it many of the promoters were unsympathetic,” he said.

That summer, Robert Richards remembered Vaughan calling him as she prepared to leave for a gig nearby. She was looking forward to the day. She hired a car to drive her, and her mother packed her a lunch. Two of Richards’s friends attended the concert. They told him that Vaughan was unbelievable, that she had the audience screaming for more. Then his friend asked, “Well, what happened to her arm?” “What do you mean?” Richards responded. “Her arm was in a sling,” his friend said. Vaughan had mentioned nothing to him. Richards called her. “My friends loved you and were wondering what happened to your arm,” he began. Then there was silence. “I could tell she wasn’t telling the truth because it was a long pause while she made something up. She said, ‘Oh, I accidentally got it caught in the door when I got out of the car, and I had a doctor come and he said I should have it in a sling.’”⁷² He knew not to push her, to let her tell him things on her terms. Only later did Wein and the rest of the world learn that in June Vaughan began treatment for a malignant tumor in her hand.⁷³ She had cancer and kept it a secret, even from her closest friends.

But she continued to work. On Tuesday, August 1, 1989, she played Ravinia to rave reviews. That weekend, she sang in Atlanta at their annual jazz festival. On Friday, September 1, she returned to the Hollywood Bowl for the first of two appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this time conducted by Marty Paich. Before the concert, Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed September 1 “Sarah Vaughan Day.” But that night Vaughan’s usually polished stage persona began to falter. Her set at the Hollywood Bowl lacked focus and continuity. She could no longer reach the soaring, lyrical soprano of her youth. And she confessed, several times, to the audience of nearly twelve thousand, that she was terribly nervous. There were moments of brilliance, flashes of the old Vaughan, but on the whole, according to Don Heckman’s review in the Los Angeles Times, “listeners at Friday’s program heard only a mild, pastel version of Vaughan’s once bold and colorful style.”⁷⁴

Days later, Vaughan was diagnosed with lung cancer.⁷⁵ The malignant tumors in her right hand, the same hand she bandaged and placed in a sling, had in fact metastasized from the cancer in her lungs. With hindsight, all of the signs had been there. Her musicians remembered her struggling to catch her breath as she walked the long concourses in airports. Sometimes she complained that her chest hurt while she sang. Yet she still sounded phenomenal. In the fall, as she began treatment, she insisted on working. On Tuesday, October 10, she opened at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. That week she sang two shows a night, at eight and ten, adding a midnight show on Friday and Saturday. Then she traveled to New York for a week at the Blue Note. She missed opening night, October 17, but sang the rest of the week through Saturday. Throughout the week, old friends like trombonist Clifton Smalls, whom she worked with in the Earl Hines band in 1943, visited her in her dressing room, but she revealed nothing. She made a flurry of phone calls, and at times seemed upset. On Sunday, she arrived at the club in the afternoon. Then she left. She couldn’t sing. Instead, she summoned Robert Richards and other close friends to her hotel room and finally told them that she had lung cancer.

Years later, vocalist Ann Hampton Callaway realized that she had attended Vaughan’s last night at the Blue Note. “What I remember,” said Callaway, “what was interesting about her presence was she was wearing an aqua gown and she was not wearing shoes. And I sat there close to the front, in the middle, right in front of the stage and I thought, ‘Oh, goddesses don’t wear shoes.’ It seemed to make perfect sense.” Callaway, then thirty-one, listened and absorbed everything she heard. “I was stunned by the intensity of her emotions and how when she sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ there was this gravitas that was quite extraordinary,” she explained. “It was as if she was trying to tell us everything she’d ever learned and express everything she’d ever felt. Like, ‘I just want you to know who I am. I don’t have much more time, but I want to say what I’ve learned.’”⁷⁶

Sarah Vaughan would never sing in public again. After her Blue Note appearances, she wanted to go on a cruise and asked Richards to join her. “It was horrible, horrible,” said Richards. “She was very sick. She ran out of medication. I was running around trying to get prescriptions filled, and they wouldn’t fill them.”⁷⁷ She was in terrible pain and never left her cabin. Her body was failing her. She had scheduled appearances at Yoshi’s in San Francisco and George’s in Chicago for November. At the end of October, as her health declined, she did not cancel them, choosing instead to postpone them until the spring. Press releases explained that she was halting her heavy touring schedule while she recovered from a recurrence of the cancer in her hand. She planned to resume live performances in February.⁷⁸

“Time is a funny thing,” Vaughan wrote in a column for USA Today published on January 26, 1990. She marveled at the passage of time. Forty-seven years ago, as a teenager just starting out, her future felt vast and unlimited. And now, months, years, and decades later, she realized that it was gone in the blink of an eye. She reflected on her career, explaining that when she won the Lifetime Achievement Grammy the previous spring, she struggled to comprehend that she had already produced an entire lifetime of work. “I just don’t think about a legacy. . . . I just take one day at a time and, when I work, I live very much in the present,” she wrote. “Today, as always, I just do what I’ve been doing: singing, recording, performing.”⁷⁹

She still considered singing, the process of making music, to be special. It represented freedom and an opportunity for self-determination and ultimately self-realization. People came together, and differences in class, race, gender, and age momentarily disappeared. The previous year, before her health deteriorated, Vaughan contributed to Quincy Jones’s album Back on the Block, which brought together three generations of musicians from jazz, pop, R & B, funk, and rap. She sang on three tracks. She collaborated with Chaka Khan on “Setembro (Brazilian Wedding Song”) and Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, James Moody, and George Benson on “Birdland,” and on “Wee B. Dooinit” she joined Fitzgerald, Siedah Garrett, Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, and Take 6. “There we were, musicians of different generations, and yet we were so gloriously in the moment, making music,” she wrote, explaining that differences in age and style disappeared during the sessions. “But that’s how it’s supposed to be, and for me, it’s always been like that.”⁸⁰

Vaughan’s ability to live in the moment, to focus on the present, especially when she sang, was the key to her longevity as an artist. Without it, the disappointments of her romantic life, the daily injustices of racism and sexism, the whims of record producers, and the ups and downs of the music industry, not to mention the daily grind of touring and performing, could have crushed her. And she approached death the same way. Taking it one day at a time, all while trying to do what she loved best: sing.