Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (35 page)

When “Jump to It” was released in the summer of 1982, it shot to the top of the R&B charts, her first number-one hit since her work with Curtis Mayfield five years earlier. At age forty, Aretha had emerged from her sales slump to reconfirm her commercial status.

When I first heard “Jump to It,” I reacted as most Aretha fans did. I loved it. I couldn’t stop listening to it. I found the groove irresistible. Luther had relit the fire. Over three decades later, I still rank it among her greatest confections. It’s hardly profound, but it’s sweet and funky as the devil.

“I didn’t think Aretha wanted profound,” said Luther. “Aretha was looking for airplay and single sales. Those days of ‘Respect’ and ‘Think’ were behind her. She didn’t want to be political. She wanted to be current. She wanted to sound fresh. I was fascinated to see that her focus was more on the container that the content. On a personal level, she played it very close to the vest. She’d sit down and rap with me but she kept the talk light. Before I met her, I had the wrong idea of what she might be like. Having grown up on
Ebony
and
Jet,
I remember reading all these articles about her. Seems like there was one every week. In every one, you got the idea that she lived the perfect life. Happy at home. Happy with her man. Her career going full blast. She had it all. But in person, I encountered this rather lonely woman who wasn’t happy at all. Naturally, a lot of that had to do with her daddy. Our work together all took place while he was still in a coma. But beyond that, I sensed that her marriage was also a source of anguish. Reading in between the lines, it seemed clear that her relationship to Glynn Turman was on the verge of collapse. She was also fighting with her sisters.”

“Long ago I lost track of all the times Aretha wasn’t talking to me,” said Erma, “but I do recall things being especially tense in the early eighties. She had accused me of not getting the right care for our father. We had words, and for a while we had no communication. But when she started recording with Luther, things took a turn for the better. I think she realized that she finally had found the right producer. She used Cissy Houston and Darlene Love on some tracks but invited our cousin Brenda and me to sing on others. I took note that the song she asked me to do backgrounds on was called ‘I Wanna Make It Up to You,’ the thing she’d written for her and Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops. To us, Levi has always been one of the strongest soul singers, and their duet is about the best Aretha had ever and would ever do. I also sang on her cover of the Isley Brothers’ ‘It’s Your Thing,’ and we reminisced about the time she and I had once partied with the Isleys at their home in New Jersey. It was a good reunion. I wish Carolyn had been there as well. Ironically, though, just as Aretha and I made up, she and Carolyn fell out. Can’t remember why.”

“Luther brought a lot of light back in Aretha’s career,” said Cecil, “and there’s no doubt he gave her a contemporary sound. Can’t stress enough the importance of this. We’d seen that the move from Atlantic to Arista was a good one. It was Clive who identified Luther, and it was Luther who had what the kids wanted to hear. I’d call it a born-again moment.”

Billboard
’s review from July 31 summed up the industry’s attitude about
Jump to It.

“Arista’s efforts to return the Queen of Soul to the top of the pop charts may pay off with this frisky, eight-song collection, while the title cut is already causing excitement on black radio.”

Nelson George, in
Billboard
on September 25, wrote that the highlights of her appearance at the Budweiser Superfest in Madison Square Garden were her duets with Smokey Robinson and Luther: “The contrast between her gospel shouts and Robinson’s crooning delivery on ‘I Want to Make It Up to You’ was thrilling… Vandross came out to sing a chorus of ‘Jump to It’ with Franklin and show that he too could have had a hit with this bubbly dance tune.”

After completing the
Jump to It
project, Aretha told the press that she’d never felt better. When reporters mentioned the issues she was facing—her dad’s ongoing coma and her marital difficulties—she dismissed them. She kept saying that positive people see life positively—and that’s all there was to it.

A perfect example was in the August 9 issue of
Jet
, in which she said that her dad, although he had been unable to speak for the past thirty-six months, was “a picture of health and communicates with his eyes and smiles.”

“Aretha was convinced that one day he’d come out of that coma,” said Carolyn, “and everything would be rosy. The doctors said that would never happen. Aretha saw expressions on his face—happiness in his eyes and smiles on his face—that no one else saw. She was imagining.”

That wasn’t all that was going on. On August 23,
Jet
reported that “Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin and her leading man, actor Glynn Turman, won’t talk about the threatened dissolution of their two-career marriage because they’re too proud and feel their problem is personal and private.”

“When it comes to admitting failure, no one expresses more pride than Aretha,” said Ruth Bowen. “There is no failure in her
universe—or if there is, it can never be her fault. I remember talking to her just before the breakup with Glynn became public. ‘Ruthie,’ she told me, ‘don’t believe those lies. I’m happier than any time in my life.’ ”

“Poor baby was miserable,” said Erma. “And understandably. Her marriage to Glynn was billed as the perfect Hollywood relationship. A handsome, dashing, and successful actor marries a beautiful, glamorous, and successful singer. After her fairy-tale wedding and her enormous effort to paint a perfect picture in all the magazines, the end of this relationship was especially painful.”

“If you go to any Twelve Step meetings,” said Carolyn, “they tell you not to pull a geographic. A geographic is when people pull up stakes and move rather than face their problems and pains. Move to another house, another city, or another state. Aretha did all three. I was happy to have her move back to Detroit and stay with me and Daddy on LaSalle. It was her home as much as anyone’s. She was paying the mortgage and the utility bills. I liked having my sister help me supervise Daddy’s nurses. But I knew that her move was predicated on her running from her problems in California.”

“I was surprised that Aretha decided to go home to live—and then I wasn’t surprised at all,” said Cecil. “She had been so set on living the Hollywood life. She had high hopes that California was the answer to all her domestic trouble. Like any woman, she just wanted simple happiness. Problem is, Ree is not a simple woman. She’s a genius, and geniuses are plagued by their talent. Their talent takes over their lives and overwhelms everything else. It’s almost as if their talent is too strong to be controlled. I’m not making excuses for my sister, I’m just saying that her genius gave her a sensitivity and vulnerability ordinary people can’t understand. She feels too much. She feels too deeply. She can be hurt too easily. I don’t know if she made too many demands on Glynn or whether Glynn made too many demands on her. I know that they’re both wonderful people with a creative spirit. They both live in the world of competitive backbiting show business. That world is not conducive to
long-term romance. And to be frank, I don’t think Ree was built for long-term romantic commitment. Her main commitment is to her music. That’s the one commitment that will never die. Her other unshakable commitment has to do with our dad. She felt like if she could be home by his side, a lot of her anxieties and fears would disappear. After all, of all the people in the world, it was Daddy who had the most calming effect on my sister. She wanted calmness. Aretha has always yearned for calmness. So she came home to find it.”

I
n late 1982, Aretha retreated to Detroit, and as of this writing, Detroit remains her home.

I say
retreated
because, according to her siblings, first cousin, and sister-in-law, she began to close in and build a wall around herself. Her world became far more circumscribed. Rather than dissipate, her fears increased.

“As soon as she moved into LaSalle,” said Carolyn, “she insisted on more security. Bigger bars on the windows. New locks on the door. More guards. She was definitely more uptight. I understood because I had been living there with Daddy for four years. Being in the same house with someone in a coma can make anyone uptight. Aretha thought that the proximity to Daddy would help her. She’d feel more useful. But there wasn’t really anything to do. The frustration was mind-boggling, and the frustration certainly messed with Aretha’s emotions.”

“When she flew out to Los Angeles from Detroit to start our second album together,” said Luther Vandross, “I could see she was under great strain. I knew being back in her dad’s house wasn’t easy for her, so I tried to be as sensitive as I could, but it was impossible. She bristled at any suggestion I made. Once again, these were my songs and my arrangements. These were my guys—Marcus Miller
and Nat Adderley Jr.—the same guys who worked on
Jump to It.
She had to know that we knew what we were doing since the first album had been a runaway hit. But no. Anytime I gave the slightest comment, she screamed, ‘If you think you can do it better, then you sing the damn thing.’ ‘Fine,’ I finally said. ‘I’ll see you later, Miss Franklin.’ My second album—
Forever, for Always, for Love
—had gone gold. I was doing just fine. So if Miss Franklin wanted to have her diva fits and torture another producer, that would be his problem, not mine. I washed my hands of the matter. But then she went running to Clive, complaining about my mental cruelty. I hadn’t been cruel at all. I’d been a gentleman and a complete professional. ‘Just apologize,’ said Clive. ‘That’s all she wants.’ If anyone deserved an apology, it was me. ‘You need to be bigger than that,’ said Clive. I listened to the man and apologized. Aretha came back to the sessions, but with the demand that she record a song written by her son Clarence. She also insisted that another one of her sons, Teddy, play guitar on it. Both sons were talented, so I accepted both demands. I did so knowing that, no matter how much she needed to put her two cents into the production, we already had one smash in the can. That was ‘Get It Right,’ something whipped up by me and Marcus Miller. It went straight to number one, her second top-charting R-and-B [song] in twelve months. After she saw we had another hit together, she was sweet as sugar.”

Aretha’s version of the story in
From These Roots
was the opposite: She had been both reasonable and cooperative; Luther had been a bully. After the final session in LA, she felt so disrespected that she couldn’t wait to get away. She booked herself on the first flight to Detroit. The plane encountered extreme turbulence. She had always been a nervous flier, but, for better or worse, had dealt with the anxiety. Suddenly the anxiety increased exponentially. Nonetheless, she flew back to LA that summer to be the honoree at a gala concert sponsored by the Brotherhood Crusade, a charitable organization active in the black community.

A few weeks later she flew to Atlanta, where she was to headline two shows and be honored by her friend Mayor Andrew
Young. According to Aretha, the mayor was out of town and his tribute plans went awry. The two performances went well but she missed her scheduled flight home. Eager to get back to Detroit, she decided to take a twin-engine prop plane. The weather was stormy and the ride extremely rough. Aretha was terrified and, the minute she landed safely in Detroit, swore never to fly again. She never has.

“We were all scared,” said Cecil, who was with her on the flight. “Any normal human being would have to be. Falling into those steep air pockets, it felt like we were falling out of the sky. But after a bad flight, the best thing you can do is fly again—and as soon as possible. I urged Ree to do just that. If not, I was scared that her fear would just keep growing. She’d keep remembering what happened and how it could happen again—as opposed to picking a sunny day and experiencing a smooth flight. ‘You gotta work through this fear, Ree,’ I kept saying, ‘or it’ll wind up costing you millions. Your livelihood depends on your getting to your fans, and you have fans all over the world.’ She heard me. She knew I was right. But she was just too scared to act. That’s when everything in her life started to change. She became a prisoner of her fears.”

“Money became a central fear,” said Ruth Bowen. “She claimed that Arista was extremely slow in paying royalties on her recent hits. Her cash flow had stopped. Her decision to stop flying meant the cancellation of several dates that she had asked me to book for her. That cost her a fortune. And that’s when she decided to host what she called her Artist’s Ball.

“When Aretha decides to throw a ball or a party for charitable purposes, she has the best intention. But her party planning is the same as her financial planning. It’s always a mess.”

Jet
reported the story in its November 7 issue with an item headlined “Aretha Franklin Sponsors 2nd Annual Artist’s Ball to Benefit Comatose Dad.” Family members were “optimistic” that Reverend Franklin would come out of his coma, the article noted, although the twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing care was costing the Franklin family some $2,500 a week. According to the magazine,
Aretha had been paying 98 percent of her father’s medical bills, with the remainder coming from church donations and a 1979 fund-raiser.

“The only family member optimistic about Reverend Franklin coming out of the coma was Aretha,” said Ruth. “She clung to that delusion when everyone else knew the reality. The other delusion was that the event would make money. Even if it had proven profitable, I was against it. I thought it looked tacky for an artist of Aretha’s caliber—still in demand and still commanding top dollar—to plead poverty. In fact, the event was not successful and wound up costing Aretha. That’s why she sued Arista, which, I told her, was like biting the hand that was feeding her.”

In November 1983, the same month Jesse Jackson announced his bid for the presidency of the United States, an article in
Jet
reported: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T! That’s what Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin says she wants from Arista Records. She has hired a lawyer to help her get it.”

“It didn’t turn out to be Arista’s fault at all,” said Cecil, “but a misunderstanding on Aretha’s part. She thought she hadn’t received a certain check that, in fact, had been deposited in her account months before. Being the gentleman that he is, Clive Davis understood and forgot about the accusation.”

Finance was always a great challenge, but no more so than romance.

Aretha spoke often about a man that she called one of the great loves of her life. She would not name him. In her autobiography, he is called Mr. Mystique. She said that their affair started in the sixties and went on through the eighties, overlapping her relationships with Dennis Edwards, Ken Cunningham, and Glynn Turman. She insisted that no one knew his identity, not even members of her family. She claimed their affair was rekindled shortly after her return to Detroit.

It sounded a bit like a soap opera.

“Aretha has been hooked on soap operas ever since I’ve known
her,” said Ruth Bowen. “Her days revolve around
The Young and the Restless.
At some point she started seeing her love life like a soap opera. She began writing a soap-opera script—just making up shit, fantasizing about men and relationships that never existed. I don’t care what she said in her book about some damn Mr. Mystique. I don’t think the man existed. I think she fabricated the whole thing. That became a new pattern for her—making up stories about these beautiful love affairs that happened only in her mind.”

When I asked Cecil and Erma if they knew about Mr. Mystique, they diplomatically said no.

“Anything’s possible,” said Cecil. “I didn’t tell Aretha about all the side trips in my life and she didn’t tell me about all the secrets in her life. But if there had been this one guy who kept coming round year after year, I think I would have known about him.”

“Ree has a vivid imagination,” said Erma. “Her genius as a musical storyteller has to do with her ability to imagine romantic situations. When she sings, she becomes a great actress. She places herself in those situations. That’s part of her creativity.”

“She needed to get her mind off Daddy,” added Cecil. “It wasn’t easy living in that house. And because of her unfortunate fight with Arista, there were long months when she wasn’t recording. Time weighed heavy. She was looking for some kind of relief. She was looking for romance. What woman isn’t?”

In February 1984, Aretha’s divorce from Glynn Turman was finalized.

“Another fairy tale without a happy ending,” said Erma. “Even though I never thought Ree was realistic about the chances of this relationship working out, it pained me to see her hurting. Given my sister’s tremendous need for security, this was a big blow. You also can’t imagine the terrible stress of being in the same house with Daddy. I wish Aretha hadn’t moved back in, but that was her choice. She had to follow her conscience.”

“Me and Ree in the same bedroom—our childhood bedroom—was no picnic,” said Carolyn. “We fought the same way we fought when we were kids. She accused me of snoring. I accused her of
snoring. She set up a tape recorder to prove that I was the one doing the snoring. But when she played it back, the noise I heard was her snoring, not mine! Anyway, we went from fighting to writing together to singing together and then back to fighting. Daddy was still in his coma, but I know he had to be laughing inside. His daughters were still going at it.”

That winter Jackie Wilson, the great Detroit soul singer, died at age forty-nine.

“It happened during that same time that my dad was still so deep in his coma,” said Cecil. “Our father was close to Jackie. In fact, we all were. We were shocked when he had his heart attack. I was told that it happened when he was singing that line in ‘Lonely Teardrops’ that says, ‘My heart is crying.’ After that, like Dad, he fell into a coma. I know he suffered a lonely death, and I know that Aretha wanted to visit him at the hospital where they were keeping him, in New Jersey, but she never went. With our father incapacitated, that would have been too much. The other part of the tragedy was that Jackie Wilson, one of the greatest all-around entertainers of his time, died stone broke. That news shook us up and made us even more fearful of how, in this business, you can lose everything at the drop of a hat.”

The financial challenges mounted when, in 1984, Aretha was sued for $102,000 in back taxes by the State of New York. The state claimed that she had not paid taxes on the recording work she had done in Manhattan from 1973 to 1977. Aretha claimed that because the master tapes were the property of Atlantic, not her, she should not be liable.

“This added to the tension and the money woes,” said Cecil. “We worked it out, but it cost a pretty penny.”

Then, on April Fools’ Day, the day before his forty-fifth birthday, Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father in Los Angeles.

“After Smokey,” said Cecil, “Marvin was my main man. Maybe there were more powerful singers in terms of volume or projection, but no one more sensitive or artistically advanced. That’s why Ree loved his work so deeply. Like her, he had all the big three elements mixed inside his music—gospel, jazz, and R-and-B. We talked for years about an Aretha/Marvin collaboration. I hate that it didn’t happen. I also hate that Marvin’s problems with drugs did him in. I should have read it as a cautionary tale, but I didn’t. I still had some years to go before I dealt with my own drug issues.”

In May, while Michael Jackson was being honored by Ronald Reagan at the White House, Aretha was in Detroit signing a contract to star in a musical, something she had been discussing for years. She finally agreed to play Mahalia Jackson in
Sing Mahalia!
The plan was to perform it in Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit before bringing it to Broadway. According to
Jet,
Aretha Franklin was “thrilled and honored” to appear onstage as Mahalia Jackson, whom she described as “an absolutely great lady, a devout Christian, who was warm with a great sense of humor.”

“Humor was the key,” said Cecil. “Aretha, like Mahalia, can be funny as hell. She can crack jokes with the best of them. That humor was in the script. Musically, we never had doubts. Musically, it was a match made in heaven. No one except Aretha could approach Mahalia’s majesty. But it wasn’t until we saw the writing that we knew for sure. Mahalia was portrayed as a down-home sister from New Orleans who could cook as well as she could sing. There were some great moments in the play. The thing had
hit
written all over it.”

“Because Aretha had experienced frustration with the movie industry in Hollywood,” said Erma, “she felt this Broadway offer was a godsend. It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky project. It was real. It didn’t require a screen test or an audition. The producers wanted Aretha and only Aretha. It was just the pick-me-up that she needed. Her attitude was,
The world knows I can sing; well, now the world will see that I can act!
”

Before she had a chance to take on the role of Mahalia, though,
her father’s five-year coma came to a tragic end. Reverend C. L. Franklin died on July 27, 1984.

“I knew it was coming soon,” said Cecil. “So did Erma and Carolyn. But I really believe Aretha had convinced herself that ultimately Dad would come out of this coma and be fully restored.”

“After the death of her dad,” said Ruth Bowen, “Aretha was never the same.”