Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (10 page)

Aretha found that direction from a surprising source, combining her professional and personal life in a move that would infuriate Reverend Franklin and, for the first time, rupture the sacred father/daughter relationship.

I
n May of 1961,
Jet
magazine, the magazine with which Aretha would enjoy a warm and close relationship over the next fifty years, reported in its New York Beat column that “Marv Johnson and Aretha Franklin, the Detroit preacher’s daughter, are not telling friends of their hot romance, which could lead to the altar.”

“Ree didn’t go with Marv Johnson for more than a minute, but it was an important minute,” said Erma. “Marv had the first hit on Motown, ‘Come to Me,’ and was a good-looking guy with a Jackie Wilson/Sam Cooke voice. Marv, like Aretha, was on his way up.”

“My sister didn’t need a man who was involved in his own career,” said Carolyn. “She was looking for a career herself. Marv was way deep into cutting hits of his own. He didn’t give Aretha the kind of attention she required. On the other hand, Ted White gave her all the attention she required. He saw her potential. And he came out of the Detroit culture of music hustlers Aretha could relate to. He might not have been Berry Gordy, but in some ways he was cooler than that. He was more composed and confident than Berry, who was always a nervous little guy. There was nothing nervous ’bout Ted.”

“You can’t understand the music culture of Detroit in the early sixties,” said R&B singer Bettye LaVette, who emerged from that
culture, “without understanding the role of the pimp. Pimps and producers were often the same people. The sensibility was the same—get women working for you; get women to make you money. We demonize pimps now, but back then they were looked up to by men and sought out by women. They had power. They knew how to survive the ghetto and go beyond the ghetto. Some of my best men friends were pimps. Some of the women I admired most were working for them—classy, sophisticated, beautifully dressed women. I didn’t have what it took to be a high-class prostitute of the kind that the best pimps like to parade, but as a singer, I was certainly pimped by certain producers—and glad to be.

“Back then, women were powerless. If we wanted to get ahead in show business, we had to operate in the system. The greatest example of that system was probably Motown, where Berry Gordy’s first wife, Raynoma Singleton, claimed that Berry himself had pimped women. He wasn’t good with whores, but he was great with singers. The parallel is strong.”

Bettye LaVette was also close to Ted White, the man who, in 1961, would become Aretha’s first husband.

“I’d call Ted a gentleman pimp,” she said. “He was a cut above. The older generation of Detroit’s famous pimps who came before Ted—like Jimmy Joy, another friend of mine—were charismatic men, but they had flashy ghetto style. Ted upgraded that style. He dressed like a successful businessman—tailored suits, suede coats, custom-made suits imported from England. He was also highly educated and well read. He was well bred. Ted was the first man to take me to fancy French restaurants. He knew his wines. He knew which perfumes suited me best. When we’d be dining in some posh dining room, he’d tell me to lower my voice and act like a lady. He helped me become a lady. Beyond that, he was always there when I needed him. When I got stuck out of town because a promoter didn’t pay me for a gig, Ted would send me plane fare to come home. I had great respect for him.

“I met him in 1963 after he was married to Aretha, but that didn’t keep him from wooing me. I wasn’t physically attracted to
him. I was socially attracted to him. He represented a higher class. He always had lots of women—women who were lovers, women who were whores, and women who were singers. I was flattered that he wanted me. I was seventeen and Aretha was twenty-one. She didn’t have a lot to say back then. Those were her pre-Queen days.”

“Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha,” Etta James told me. “My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn’t surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid. They protected us. They also beat us up. Lots of chicks felt like if her man didn’t beat her, he didn’t love her. I remember my mom playing me Billie Holiday’s record where she sang, ‘I’d rather for my man to hit me than jump and quit me.’ She was saying if her pimp didn’t have no money and she said, ‘Take mine, honey,’ wasn’t no one’s fuckin’ business but her own. I think a lot of us felt that way—until the beating got so bad that we couldn’t take no more. Naturally, women’s lib came along and changed all that. I’m glad for women’s lib. I’m a women’s libber myself. But back in the fifties and early sixties, it was a different world. We were young girls looking to make it at any cost. We wanted men who could carry us to where we wanted to go.”

How did Aretha meet the man who she hoped could carry her where she wanted to go, the same man whom, as a child, she’d watched carry a drunk Dinah Washington out of her father’s living room?

Aretha claimed the introduction was made by her sister.

“I knew Ted White,” said Erma, “as did most entertainers in Detroit. He was a fixture at the clubs. He was a handsome man with a smooth manner and excellent taste. He had been to our
house during several parties. I didn’t need to introduce him to Aretha. She already knew him.”

“There had been tension between Aretha and my dad over her management even before she signed with Columbia,” Carolyn told me. “She knew that Daddy understood the gospel world, but she questioned his knowledge of the world of popular music. The break didn’t come, though, until Ted White. Ted changed the entire emotional dynamic. Daddy didn’t want her to have anything to do with him.”

“All children go through rebellious periods,” said Cecil. “Aretha’s rebellion started when she was around eighteen or so. She wanted to make it as a pop singer in the worst way. She wanted to lose her identification as a church singer. Her full ambition took hold of her, and, although our father wanted nothing more than for her to succeed, he still thought he knew best. He prided himself in being a good judge of character. In that regard, he did not have a high regard for Ted White’s character. He knew Ted was something of a shady character—and he thought the association would hurt Aretha.”

In Aretha’s book, there is not a hint of White’s shady activities.

“Anyone who didn’t see Ted White as straight-up pimp had to be deaf, dumb, and blind,” said Harvey Fuqua. “He made no effort to hide it. He was proud of it. He was proud to be one of the slickest operators in Detroit. It took someone that slick to get a great talent like Aretha in his stable.”

Before Ted White, the notion of anyone wresting control of Aretha’s career from C. L. Franklin seemed outlandish. Of all his children, she was closest to him. He had encouraged her every step of the way. When she was seventeen, he told her she was ready. When she was eighteen, he assembled the supporting cast to take to New York and lead her into the big time.

“In those years,” said Erma, “Aretha’s story was pretty much a struggle over her career by two men—our dad and Ted. Ted won because Ted could concentrate completely on Aretha while Daddy couldn’t. He was not only the preacher of a huge Detroit church but he continued to travel. Beyond that, these were the years when
the civil rights movement was gathering steam. Our father would prove to be a national leader in that movement. He and Dr. King were not only close friends but spiritual allies. They thought alike. They were both intellectuals, both liberals, and both proponents of nonviolence. There was no disagreement between them on any issues whatsoever. All this meant that, more than any time in his life, Daddy was engaged politically. He no longer had time to watch over Aretha’s career. That didn’t mean he approved of Ted taking over. He didn’t. He tried to convince Aretha to continue with Jo King or find other management, but by then Ted had made his move. In short order, he went from being her lover to her husband as well as her manager.”

“People forget,” said Cecil, “but in those first years, Aretha struggled financially. Columbia didn’t give her much of an advance. Her records were all respected but they never sold well. I’m not sure she ever saw a royalty check from Columbia.

“Ted was a diligent manager,” said Cecil. “He was responsible for getting her on a short tour with Jackie Wilson and another with Sam Cooke.”

“I think Ted White was the man who Aretha really needed,” said Bettye LaVette. “Ted had everything—sophistication, taste, and savoir faire. If she was talking too loud in a restaurant or making the wrong remarks to a booking agent, Ted would let her know in a hurry. Ted was older and knew how to mold her into a lady. He also had some money that he could put into her career. One of his working girls—a gorgeous gal—was an especially good earner. Ted told me that he used her earnings to help finance Aretha’s early career. Aretha had every reason to be grateful to Ted—and for a long while she was.”

“You could compare the Aretha/Ted situation,” said Etta James, “with Ike and Tina. Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw
him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn’t as shy as she used to be. He brought her out. He had her dressing with more pizzazz. She’d become a hipper chick, smoking a little reefer, sipping a little wine. I’m not sure that was so bad for her, since she wanted to make it in the big bad world of show biz. Ted gave her an edge she needed. And if things went bad for Aretha later on, welcome to the party. That was the story of how it went with most of us and our men. They came on to promote us at a time when we wanted help in the worst way. They hooked us up with other slick promoters and producers. They dressed us and trotted us out to the stage. At the time—and this is the part no one gets—we didn’t mind it. We fuckin’ liked it! We were hoping these cats would choose us and sell us and show us how to get over. That was the good side. The bad side was when the devil popped outta them and they thought they could control us forever. That’s when the violence started. Just like Billie and Sarah, I experienced that. Just like me, Aretha experienced that. In the meantime, though, we became stars. Could we have had one without the other—a career without the pimps selling us? Who the fuck knows?”

Two press items from August 1961 indicate Aretha’s state of mind at the time of White’s courtship. The first is the announcement in
Down Beat
magazine that she had won the new-star female vocalist award in the magazine’s ninth international jazz critics poll. She had thirty votes to Abbey Lincoln’s twenty-five. The rest of the list included LaVern Baker, Helen Humes, Nina Simone, Marjorie Hendricks (Ray Charles’s fiery backup singer), Gloria Lynne, Nancy Wilson, Etta Jones, and Carol Sloane. That was stiff competition for nineteen-year-old Aretha and an indication that Hammond’s argument—that she was a critical hit, if not a commercial one—was undeniably true.

Shortly after the August
Down Beat
issue hit the stands, Aretha wrote a guest column for the
New York Amsterdam News,
a
prominent African American publication, entitled “From Gospel to Jazz Is Not Disrespect for the Lord.”

“I don’t think that in any matter I did the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind two years ago to switch over,” she wrote. “After all, the blues is a music born out of the slavery day sufferings of my people.”

Her position mirrors the one long held by her dad—that black music at its very root, no matter how it might branch out, contains a divine spirit.

What’s interesting, though, is that the first single released from her second album,
The Electrifying Aretha Franklin,
is far more showbiz pizzazz than jazz. The arrangement for “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody” was written by Bob Mersey, soon to be an important figure in Aretha’s career at Columbia. He was the label’s musical director and a staff writer for CBS television. At the same time he began producing Aretha, he arranged “Moon River” for Andy Williams. A year later, in 1963, he would produce Barbra Streisand’s debut record, also on the Columbia label.

Al Jolson had sung “Rock-a-Bye” in blackface in the twenties. Later, it was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, and Jerry Lewis. Though an essential American song, it seemed a strange choice for Aretha, especially at the start of the civil rights movement.

Cecil explained to me C. L. Franklin’s love of Al Jolson and his reason for urging Aretha to include the tune.

“My father told me how Jolson harbored great affection for black people,” said Cecil. “His entire blackface act was a way of paying tribute to our musical genius. Dad knew the history of American entertainment and had read how Jolson had hired black writers and helped bolster the career of Cab Calloway. We forget now, but back in the day, Al Jolson and black people had a mutual-admiration society.”

In spite of Cecil’s spirited defense of Aretha’s inclusion of the song, it’s difficult for me to listen to her version without cringing. Although her vocal is enthusiastic, the strings feel anemic, the horn chart cheesy, and the rock-’em-sock-’em finale forced and false. A
more generous reading would appreciate the soul piano introduction, rendered by Aretha herself, and the slightly ironic big-band flourish at the song’s grand conclusion.

Aretha liked “Rock-a-Bye” so much that she sang it on her network television debut. On October 30, 1961, she appeared on
American Bandstand,
where the teen crowd seemed bewildered by her choice of a song associated with their fathers’ or grandfathers’ generation. Aretha’s selection might have seemed wildly inappropriate, but such choices would be part of her pattern in the years to come.