Aretha Franklin (40 page)

By moving to Detroit in the eighties, did Aretha miss the so-called fast lane of the show-business whirl in Los Angeles? According to her at the time, “I guess what I miss the most about L.A. is the convenience of running over to
The Tonight Show
or to
Merv Griffin
or to
Solid Gold
, and
the convenience of doing those [television] shows—and Fat Burgers!” she exclaimed, plugging L.A.'s most famous hamburger joint.

She was quite happy with her uncomplicated life in the Detroit suburbs. Her white, six-bedroom Colonial house stands on a three-acre lot with a swimming pool and a vegetable garden. “I'm the lady next door, I'm a neighborly type of person,” she explained. “I have a garden, and we're eating fresh out of the garden with no additives and preservatives, and all of that sort of thing. I had greens a couple of weeks ago, just prior to going to see Luther Vandross' show, and I must tell you, between the greens and Vandross, I had a great evening! What one of my friends would call ‘a leading evening.' In the garden I've got mustards [mustard greens] and turnips mixed, and I have green tomatoes … green tomatoes? What other color would they be before they get red?” she laughed. “I have corn on the cob, I have squash, I have string beans, I have almost everything that any good garden should have, and I have a bit of a green thumb.”

Although this statement might sound as though she has cut down on her favorite high-calorie food to concentrate on fresh vegetables, that is hardly the case. The second half of the 1980s witnessed Aretha at one of her heaviest phases. While she grows her own greens and tomatoes, they merely garnish plates of spareribs, ham hocks, and her butter-rich Chicken Italiano.

What was her life like in the suburbs, circa 1985? “I get up about 11:00, 11:30 a.m. Then it's the soaps:
The Young and the Restless
first. Soap operas until three-o'clock and what I call ‘kitchen talk.' I'm in the living room and my housekeeper, Katherine, is in the kitchen, and we're screaming back and forth, ‘Did you see that?' I like the nighttime soaps too.”

“[I] play tennis—I've got a mean backhand, a two-fisted one like Chris Evert's. I swim a little. I like to go to the driving range. I crochet. I've made a number of skirts, berets, various articles. I like to cook and I like to boogie down at L'Esprit or Club Taboo here in town. I love ballet, studied it in New York and in L.A. And I love the fights. I used to watch them as a child, with my dad. I go way back with them,” she says.

In spite of her constantly remaining overweight, Aretha keeps socially active. She has become known around town as quite a hostess, and she
enjoys giving elaborate parties at her home. “I have some pretty good ones,” she admitted. “One of the last ones was a Hawaiian luau. We had white sand shipped in—put it everywhere, three, four feet deep around the pool, so it felt like you were actually on the beach. And we had Hawaiian dancers, the pig on the spit.”

In addition to parties, soap operas, gardening, and French lessons, fashion is high on Aretha's list of interests. Ever since she moved to New York City in 1960, she has always been crazy for clothes. “When I first started, I wore Ceil Chapman gowns,” she recalls. “I've been wondering for years what happened to the Ceil Chapman line of clothing. My manager took me to her place on Park Avenue right at the beginning, to pick out things that I liked, or that she thought I looked well in. So I was wearing designers right in the beginning.”

Although she was still in love with the current fashion scene, she was also frustrated that the major designers only cut their lines up to size twelve, when she—at the time—wore a 14. Calvin Klein especially frustrated her, because she would love to wear his designs. “Valentino is another one who will only cut up to 12, I guess,” she sighed, exhaling a lungful of smoke from her Kool cigarette. “And Valentino has some of the most chic clothing that I have ever laid eyes on. I became enraged every time I see the Valentino line. Every once in a while I can get a De La Renta, depending on how it's cut. Then again, he's like Valentino.”

Her fashion dilemma frustrated her so much that she made a public plea, in the mid-eighties, in the fashion bible
Women's Wear Daily
, addressed to Calvin Klein. “Please,” she implored, “if you won't do a 14—and you're making the girls who wear 14 very unhappy—please do a special order!”

One fashion industry insider reveals that Aretha has gone so far as to contact Calvin Klein to try to place a personal order to her specifications. Often celebrities will do that, and then negotiate a special rate of payment for wearing a designer's fashions. Unfortunately, Aretha's request was met with a crisp refusal.

According to this inside source, “She contacted Paul Wilmot, who is the vice president in charge of public relations at Calvin Klein. He's the one who handles all the personal orders for people like Joan Rivers and Bianca Jagger and [socialite] Mercedes Kellogg. Well, Aretha called
twice, like two seasons—once in the fall, and once in the spring. She was interested in looking at the collection and possibly buying things from it. Calvin doesn't do personal ‘custom orders,' but people will call and he'll have them in, and they'll look at the collection, and they'll pick things out, and then they work it out. Paul Wilmot decided that Aretha was
not
the Calvin Klein image, so they were not interested in dressing her.

“The two things that Aretha was interested in—one of them was a shearling miniskirt that made the
W
[magazine] ‘Fashion Disasters' section, and the other was a stretch lace, floor-length evening gown. I don't know if she wanted it in black or white, but either was totally inappropriate—stretch lace that Paulina [Porzikova—a svelte fashion model] could barely get into—let alone Aretha! He just said [to her], ‘We're sorry, but I don't think we're gonna have time.'”

Throughout her entire career, Aretha's fashion sense has paralleled the tale of
The Emperor's New Clothes
. Like the Emperor's subjects, who were afraid to inform their leader that he was stark naked, the Queen of Soul's confidantes are either unaware of her status as a “fashion victim,” or they are afraid to hurt her feelings. Someone that she trusts ought to have nerve enough to tell her that she looks foolish squeezed into outfits designed for women half her size.

In the early 1980s, fascinated with the idea of creating her own line of clothes, Aretha went so far as to design several outfits. Before her fear of flying occurred, she set up meetings with a couple of top designers in the business, and planned to discuss marketing ideas. The designers were not impressed. “I was supposed to come out with a line of clothing, and I made a couple of trips to New York to talk to various designers and their managers there. I talked to Willi Smith. I put in calls to Stephen Burrows, but nothing really came of the meeting. I don't quite understand—in a way I do, and in a way I don't. They rather seem to be apprehensive about the coupling for some reason. Didn't sound very secure in who they were. I'm really not sure, so I'd really rather not say. But I have these illustrations drawn up. I had a young lady in Los Angeles do them for me, and of course they're dated now. But I might do some new sketches. I designed a T-shirt dress, long before Norma Kamali came out with it. And I saw a number of other things in
Vogue
and
Bazaar
that I had sketched, and they
had no way of seeing my sketches, but I know, prior to their coming out with them, my sketches were first. So I think I would have been in front of them. And, hey—a second career? Why not design?” she laughs.

Regardless of her confidence in her own fashion sense, the press continues to question her taste in clothes. Showing a photo of Tina Turner wearing a miniskirt and Aretha in a minidress,
USA Today
ran an article on the 1987 mini-craze. While the article claimed that Turner could wear anything she wanted and still look fantastic, underneath Aretha's photo the caption read, “Would the first lady of soul flunk our mini test?” Apparently, the answer was “yes.”

Another of her passions is horses. When she was married to Glynn Turman, some of his equestrian enthusiasm rubbed off on her. He had enjoyed raising and riding Arabian horses. When she was asked at the time if she was a horseback rider, she quipped, “I ride, all right—limos, my Alfa Romeo, anything with four wheels!”

When she moved to Detroit, she found that she had the time to develop an interest in horses. The only other person in show business that Aretha knew who was really into horses was Wayne Newton. According to her, “I was interested in buying some thoroughbred horses to run. Not for the big stakes like Belmont or anything, but to run at DRC (Detroit Race Course) or Hazel Park. I knew he had horses, so I called him about that.” Aretha and Wayne became quite good friends due to their shared interest in horses.

Aretha's stable was started with a male, whom she named Don Juan. “He is a beautiful horse, Don Juan,” she explained, “Very well-mannered; he struts his stuff, he sidesteps, he curtseys, and he prances backwards. He is an equestrian horse. So now I'm buying a female brood mare, Arabian, and a couple of little foals, boy and girl. A couple of thoroughbreds too. I'm into siring horses now.”

In addition to recording all of her post-1983 albums in Detroit, Aretha does all of her television tapings there as well. In 1986, when Dick Clark wanted Aretha to appear on his annual
American Music Awards
telecast, he had to arrange for a special satellite hookup to present her live from her hometown. Between the single and video versions of “Freeway of Love,” Franklin was nominated for four of the awards, and
she ultimately won in two different categories: “Favorite Soul / R&B Video, Female” and “Favorite Soul / R&B Single, Female.” Accepting the first award, she was shown on camera in Detroit, in a dressing room at the Premier Center, wearing a minidress and a sculptured New Wave hairdo. “I'd like to thank the record buyers and all of you for getting out on the ‘Freeway of Love' with me. I love you—you know I do!” she said accepting the first award. The second time around, she was fighting back tears when she said, “I would like to accept it in memory of my dad, Reverend C. L. Franklin.”

Also live from the Premier Center, Aretha performed her hit “Another Night,” wearing one of her more bizarre outfits. She began the number wrapped in a full-length black velvet coat with half-sleeves and an enormous collar that came up from behind her, forming a glittering shell of rhinestones that surrounded her entire head. It looked like something that Darth Vader would wear to Mardi Gras. When she removed the coat mid-song, she revealed a backless, bare-shouldered dress with an elaborately designed pattern of silver, copper, and brown sequins. Jumping around on-stage during the bouncy up-tempo song, she gave the satellite audience of millions of rock and soul fans an ample view of the Queen of Soul in action. Aretha's performance was wonderful. She was animated and alive, and her outfit only added to the outrageous quality of the production number.

The show was produced the year that “We Are the World” was eligible for awards, and it was used to close the telecast. For the finale of the show, hostess Diana Ross invited members of the Los Angeles Shrine Theater audience to join her on-stage, to sing a mega-version of the all-star choral song. On-stage with Ross were Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Kim Carnes, Harry Belafonte, Julian Lennon, Huey Lewis, and a sea of singing superstars. Also on-stage with her was Michael Jackson (and his date of the evening, Elizabeth Taylor). Since there were several simultaneous satellite hookups around the world, the song “We Are the World” was also sung by Aretha in Detroit, by Johnny Cash in Tucson, and by Paul McCartney in London. It was quite a feat to mount this global sing-along. Unfortunately, because of the several seconds of satellite delay, Aretha, Cash and McCartney were all singing out of sync—but the
very idea of Aretha harmonizing with Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor made for the most amazing television appearances of her entire career.

In January 1987, TV cameras captured a historic and soulful event, when Aretha Franklin and James Brown appeared together for the very first time in their long and glorious careers. The event was a television salute to Brown with several glittering superstars of soul, titled
A Soul Session: James Brown and Friends
, and it was shown on the Cinemax cable network. Although the resulting special is an awesome display of several soulful legends in action, the taping was not without its problems—namely a rift between Aretha and James.

When Tisha Fein was asked by Cinemax to produce the special, she was thrilled by the prospect of fashioning a tribute to James Brown. The most “special” guest she could think of having on the program was Aretha. Fein had been friendly with Aretha and her brother Cecil since she had produced the
Midnight Special
tribute to her in the 1970s. Tisha had subsequently worked with Aretha on several of
The Grammy Awards
telecasts.

“
The Soul Session
was something I was hired to produce with James Brown,” Fein explains, “but it was my idea, putting Aretha in it and moving it to Detroit. It seemed like a good way to combine soul with the place it came from, with a couple of people who had never worked together before.”

The taping took place at Club Taboo in downtown Detroit, which Aretha reportedly co-owns with a group of local friends. “She suggested it,” says Fein of the location, “and it was a great club. Since she is part-owner of it, she was like the queen of the club. The audiences just went crazy for her. I used her club, and all of her sisters as background singers.” Also on the bill for the taping were Wilson Pickett, Joe Cocker, Billy Vera, and Robert Palmer.

Fein's only comment about the reported battle between the Queen of Soul and the Godfather or Soul was: “James and Aretha had never sung together, and I don't think they'd ever sing together again. She was terrific, and wonderful, but there was no love lost between them. He wasn't really the gentleman that he could have been.”