Aretha Franklin (28 page)

“There was this great fear when she came in. Not by Clive, or anything, but there was this fear from everybody else that she was very difficult,” Fine recalls. “The big fear was that this was going to be a diva. All I kept hearing was stories about how difficult she was—that she's going to be impossible to work with, and she doesn't do this, and she doesn't do that.”

Fine, however, was pleasantly surprised at how easy she was to deal with. “She was terrific!” he claims. “She did her interviews when she was asked to. I mean, she didn't want to do very many. She didn't feel that she should go plaster herself around, but on the first record, which was a ballad, we had a hit. She did interviews, and she was always willing to do things. She'd do television if you really asked her to do it. Everything was involved in what kind of deal it was.”

Working for Dennis at Arista at the time was a high-powered music industry publicist named Barbara Shelley. Dennis would plot out a publicity course for Franklin to pursue, and Shelley would make certain
it was implemented. According to Fine, “Aretha had this guy who was supposedly her press agent—never paid him—he was a character—maybe she did pay him, but it was one of those trade-off deals. But this guy was always around for something. My instructions to Barbara were, ‘Snowplow through this guy. Push him out of the way, and do what you have to do.' That's how she got the working relationship with Aretha, because Barbara just got right in there. Aretha did all sorts of things, she was very gracious, and she always used to send ‘Thank You' cards. She was much more of a surprise. I really liked her.

“We had funny times with her,” Dennis recalls. Citing one of his favorite visions of Aretha, he tells of one particular afternoon when Franklin taped
The Tonight Show
in Los Angeles. “Barbara and I took her to do the [Johnny] Carson show, and I remember she was heavy. Not that she's not heavy, but she was having her heavier phase, and she was rehearsing in hot pants, and a sweatshirt.”

Following her dramatic weight loss in 1974, Aretha gradually put on all the weight she had shed, and by the 1980s the words “diet” and “slim” were simply not in her vocabulary. Aretha is the first to admit that she always loved good food. According to her, dieting became a problem when she married Glynn Turman, and suddenly she found herself in the kitchen, cooking for seven hungry kids—most of them with voracious teenage appetites. In that atmosphere, Aretha simply gave up watching her weight.

Using her favorite term for cooking, Aretha admits, “Yes, I like ‘switchin' in the kitchen.' It's relaxing and it's creative. I have my own special dishes—banana pudding, homemade ice cream, barbecued ribs, hams, quiche. And we've been growing our own fresh vegetables in the garden. I've been learning the art of French cooking and I've already done some Indonesian and Viennese dishes—so I'm not doing bad. I do it all: New Orleans gumbo, greens, ham hocks, chitlins, ribs, and a great hickory-smoked barbecue sauce.

“I couldn't bear to deny myself all my life all the good foods I like to eat, just to keep a slim, bird-like figure. I love to eat fried chicken, greens, soul food. And I like banana splits, malts, plenty of ice cream. Anything fattening I seem to like. I don't want to go back to being quite as thin as
I got a few years back. It was great from some perspectives—like going to dress stores and buying exactly what I wanted off the rack—but to me, it wasn't quite the weight I wanted. However, now I'm on the other side of it and I do want to lose a few pounds!

“I remember one time when I appeared on an NAACP Image Awards show in Hollywood,” Franklin recalls. “I weighed little or nothing! But it made me feel weak, irritable, all that keeping away from food. I'll never knock off that much weight again in my life. One day I can eat anything. Everything I crave. Then the very next day I'll start out like a calorie executioner—one half grapefruit, and couple of eggs, some bran toast. I balance it off like that. Starvation diets are a sin, and deadly.”

Ever since the mid-1970s, Aretha has been talking about writing her own cookbook, which she wants to title
Switchin' in the Kitchen
. According to Dennis Fine, “Aretha Franklin's cookbook could be interesting. We tried to talk her into doing it when we were at Arista; we thought it would be kind of fun. And then Clive didn't think it was such a good idea. I think that he didn't want to keep calling attention to her size. You know Clive, he's very fussy about those things.”

Fine recalls arriving at Franklin's house one morning to accompany her to an afternoon outdoor stadium concert. “She was packing a big lunch,” he remembers. “Everybody was there—the three backup singers, the makeup people, and she was packing chicken and Aretha's famous ‘Blackout Cake,' and they were just going to town! I've got to tell you—it's delicious—it's good stuff!”

The one recipe that Franklin has shared is the one she calls “Aretha's Chicken Italiano.” According to her, “Take six or eight pieces of chicken, all types: breasts, legs, thighs, wings, whatever you like. Get a couple of sticks of butter, and melt your butter. Brown your chicken on both sides lightly. Now you have this butter base and you put about—I would say—a teaspoonful of rosemary in it and let it simmer. That's it. And you're talking about finger-lickin' good. The Colonel never had it so good!” she exclaims.

The real “proof in the pudding” in Aretha's recording career came the following January when the Grammy Award nominations were released. Franklin's version of “Can't Turn You Loose” was nominated in her signature category, “Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female.” Inspired
by such a symbol of artistic victory, Clive Davis decided that Arista would host a gala party in Aretha's honor to celebrate the Grammy she was destined to win.

It was going to be a busy evening for Aretha, as she was not only scheduled to appear on
The Grammy Awards
telecast, but also to perform a concert in New York's City Center. Her evening's itinerary was as follows: She was to be backstage at Radio City Music Hall for
The Grammy Awards
presentation. Early in the show she was to perform “Can't Turn You Loose” and stand by for the announcement of the winner of the category. Next she was to dash over to City Center on West 55th Street and give her full concert performance. Finally, she was to head five blocks down the Avenue of the Americas to the Time / Life Building, take two elevators to the Tower Suite on the forty-eighth floor, and be the guest of honor at the party Arista was throwing for her.

It was Dennis Fine's task to put together the arrangements for the party. He had heard rumors of Aretha's apprehension about heights, but he didn't realize how serious her fear was. Specifically, she was afraid of being trapped in a burning skyscraper. She had never been in a burning building; she simply had been traumatized by watching the movie
The Towering Inferno
one too many times, surmises Fine. Unsuspecting of the consequences, he proceeded to make plans for the fête.

This was the first time since 1975 that
The Grammy Awards
were presented in New York City, and all of the record companies were scurrying around to reserve the most prestigious party sites in Manhattan. According to Dennis Fine, “This was going to be a post-Grammy party, and it was geared to Aretha. Clive wanted the Tower Suite, so we took the Tower Suite. We went ahead and we made the whole deal. We got the band, the disco sound guys, and the big buffet.”

As the plans were being formulated, Dennis called Aretha and asked for her approval of their party arrangements. He recalls that her first comment should have been his clue that there were going to be problems. “Couldn't you make this in the basement?” she said to Fine when he outlined Arista's plan for the party.

“It was like, ‘Here's the party, this is what we're doing,' and she said, ‘Oh well, you know, really … well, yeah, I'll do it.' I mean, nobody
thought she wouldn't do it,” he recalls. When it came time for the big evening, things did not go exactly as planned.

The Grammy Awards
segment of the evening went without a hitch. Aretha, looking great in a bright red dress, performed her nominated song at Radio City Music Hall, while millions of television viewers watched. Also nominated for the prize were Minnie Ripperton, Roberta Flack, Diana Ross, and Stephanie Mills. After all of the attention paid to Aretha, Stephanie Mills' song “Never Know Love Like This Before” won.

“When we left
The Grammy Awards
,” recalls Barbara Shelley, “we got into the limo to rush over to City Center, to just make her curtain, and the limo driver made all the wrong turns of the one-way streets in Manhattan, so we barely got her on the stage at City Center in time. She really lost her cool. It was the first time I really ever heard Aretha scream. She absolutely yelled at the limo driver at the top of her lungs. She really was a nervous wreck. It takes a lot for Aretha Franklin to get nervous, because she is a very calm person. But she was afraid she wasn't going to make it over in time for her curtain.” She arrived in time, and the show was a huge success.

With the concert over, Aretha and her entourage got back in the limo and went down to the Time / Life Building. When she arrived at the building, the party was in full swing. There was an electric sense of excitement that night in Rockefeller Center, following
The Grammy Awards
. The fact that Aretha didn't win wasn't going to put a damper on the evening. The crowd that gathered at the Tower Suite to honor her was star-studded, and filled with anticipation of her arrival. The guests that night included Dionne Warwick, Christopher Reeve, Nicholas Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Jane Seymour, Rex Smith, Donna Summer, and Teddy Pendergrass. They all arrived at the after-midnight soirée specifically to salute the Queen of Soul. But Aretha never made it to the party, even though she made it to the building.

All of the music industry media were there too—including me—celebrity journalist Mark Bego. Speaking from personal experience, Aretha missed a great party that was thrown to celebrate her nomination. I can still remember the full buffet and the open bar that Arista and Clive had waiting for her, in her honor!

Those of us who were upstairs, waiting for the arrival of the guest of honor, kept wandering around the party with our drinks in our hands, asking each other, “Is Aretha here yet? Where is Aretha?” Finally, word spread around the party that she was in the building. What we didn't realize was that she was never going to make it up to the top of the building.

Dennis Fine remembers that Aretha made it as far as the first elevator, but when she found out she had to take a second one, she lost her courage. According to him, “The first elevator went up about twenty stories, and she had to make the crossover. When she saw there was a second elevator, she went right back down.”

The story was big news the next day. “It was in all the papers that Aretha Franklin couldn't make it up to her own party because of her fear of heights,” Fine laughs.

The following morning
The New York Daily News
ran a story about the party, headlining the fact that “she couldn't rise to the occasion.” The story ran with a photo of Teddy Pendergrass, Nick Ashford, and Clive Davis. In the story, Davis was quoted as saying, “The problem is that she has acrophobia and couldn't make it up the elevator. She's working on it.”

Clive was later to explain, “She was so upset she sent me flowers and a letter. She was very apologetic.”

The publicity generated by her “no show” at her own party only helped to build up the excitement about her week-long engagement at City Center. The press loved her performance, and found it refreshingly uncluttered. Though there were no clown outfits in this show, Aretha did make one of her entrances in a rickshaw, clad in a Japanese kimono. She kept her costume changes simple, removing the kimono to reveal a beautiful gown, or slipping on a full-length white fur coat for the encore.

Ira Mayer, in
The New York Post
, found that “Aretha's still the soul queen … giving one of the better shows of her recent performing years—heavy on the soul and light on the Las Vegas pop schlock.” Robert Palmer, in his review in
The New York Times
, claimed that while “she has often showed an unerring instinct for picking the most inappropriate material and for sabotaging the pacing of her sets with gimmicky, utterly banal stage routines … for the most part she just sang—magnificently.”

In addition to appearing on
The Grammy Awards
telecast, and on-stage at City Center, Aretha rounded out the week by appearing on TV's
Saturday Night Live
, singing “Can't Turn You Loose.” She may not have gotten a Grammy Award that week, but she certainly let New York City—and the rest of America—know that the Queen of Soul had returned to the scene.

At this same time, there was a hot Top Ten hit by the jazz / rock group Steely Dan called “Hey Nineteen.” In the lyrics of the song, lead singer Donald Fagen sings about his love affair with a nineteen-year-old girl, and their age differences. In the song he laments that he grew up in the sixties, and his teenage lover knows a different set of dances, and more distressing than that—she doesn't even know who the “Queen of Soul” is! It was a fact that Aretha hadn't had a Top Forty pop hit since 1974, and a whole generation of record buyers had arrived on the scene without an awareness of her music. Her next two Arista albums set out to solve the problem.

Because the most popular material from her
Aretha
album was produced by Arif Mardin—including “Can't Turn You Loose”—it was mutually decided that he should be the producer of her next album. The reunion resulted in one of the classiest albums of Aretha's entire recording career,
Love All the Hurt Away
. Leaving nothing to chance on this disc, the undisputed best people were brought in to work on it—from the musicians to the album cover photographer.