Karen

“Nearly every Aretha gig that I booked,” said Dick Alen of the William Morris Agency, “required that of her total fee, she had to have twenty-five thousand in cash before she went onstage. That was the money she used to make her payroll. She deducted no taxes and made no records. I’d beg her to implement some system of documentation, but she refused. I knew that eventually there’d be hell to pay from the IRS.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“In 1996 the Queen traveled to Toronto to catch Diahann Carroll playing the lead in a new staging of Sunset Boulevard. “She didn’t realize it wasn’t going to be freezing,” said Erma, “so she ordered up a mink coat from one of the better department stores. Because the coat was so enormous, she decided it required a ticket of its own. She and her coat sat together on the front row. It was hysterical.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin

“The public didn’t seem to care much for What You See Is What You Sweat—it was her weakest-selling album for Arista. Even her duet with Luther Vandross, “Doctor’s Orders,” their final collaboration, failed to make a dent in the marketplace. “By then I had lost track of all the times Aretha had promised never to speak to me again,” said Luther. “She was always imagining insults that I had inflicted on her. If I came to perform in Detroit, she would demand tickets for twenty-four of her best friends, and if I provided twelve, I was suddenly in the doghouse. It was a draining friendship, to say the least. In the end, though, I couldn’t stay mad at Aretha because she is, after all, Aretha. So when she asked for another ‘Jump to It’–style jam, ‘Doctor’s Orders’ was what I came up with. It isn’t among the favorite things I’ve done. I consider it trifling. And of course it wasn’t helped by the fact that Aretha refused to leave Detroit to let me produce her vocal where I wanted to produce it—in a studio in LA or New York, where I could do the best job. Her voice was beginning to show signs of age. All voices fray. Recording older voices requires extra-special care. With Aretha, though, that care can’t be applied because she won’t recognize that there’s been even the slightest bit of deterioration.”
― David Ritz, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin