Author: Isaac Stanley-Becker / Source: Washington Post
Aretha Franklin hadn’t ventured far from her hometown of Detroit for three years. But in the final weeks of 1988, the “Queen of Soul” boarded a custom-made bus, foregoing more traditional modes of transport, and set off for Atlantic City.
On short notice, and with little fanfare, she had been booked to perform at Trump’s Castle, a casino opened three years earlier by Donald Trump in the garish Xanadu of sun and slot machines on the Jersey Shore.
“We’ve got twenty-two people with us on the bus, plus all of the new exquisite, lavish gowns I’m wearing in the show,” she said, according to a 1989 biography by Mark Bego, “Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul.”
A particularly prized outfit, she said, was a gold coat in which she would take her final bow and indulge her audience with an encore. “It has four feet of white fox cuffs that drop all the way from my wrists to my knees!”
The real estate tycoon had opened the casino — his second in Atlantic City — in 1985, the same year that Franklin released “Who’s Zoomin’ Who,” the album that powered her resurgence in the 1980s — a flashy decade of perms and washed jean jackets that buzzed with the music of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Duran Duran.
“It’s got action, it’s got nightlife — the whole deal,” Trump said in a commercial for his casino and resort.
Three decades later, Trump’s Castle is defunct. He’s president of the United States. And Aretha Franklin has died. She passed away Thursday from pancreatic cancer at the age of 76.
Trump reacted to news of the singer’s death during a Cabinet meeting the same day, offering his condolences to her family.
“She worked for me on numerous occasions,” he said.
He also celebrated the “extraordinary legacy” of the soul, pop and R&B virtuoso, calling her “terrific.”Trump’s comments proved, as ever, controversial, and not simply because her appearances at his properties hardly amounted to a sustained employment relationship. More pointedly, even if she had worked for him, some asked, what was the relevance of that fact on the day of her death?
“I find it disturbing and sad, and a reflection of his endless narcissism,” said David Ritz, who spent years with Franklin seeking to understand the guarded performer for his 2014 biography, “Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin.” He also worked with Franklin on her 1999 autobiography, “Aretha: From These Roots.”
The curious announcement that the singer had worked for him set Trump’s comments apart from other tributes. Barack Obama called Franklin “a glimpse of the divine.” She performed at his inauguration in 2009, and was a frequent guest of his at the White House. In 2015, her performance of “Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors brought the nation’s first black president to tears.
Franklin also performed at pre-inauguration concerts for Bill Clinton in 1993 and Jimmy Carter in 1977.
“Like people all around the world, Hillary and I are thinking about Aretha Franklin tonight,” Clinton said in a statement, adding that the pair was “listening to her music that has been such an important part of our lives the last 50 years.” Two years ago, Franklin serenaded donors to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in a suburb of Detroit.
Ritz asked why Trump couldn’t have simply joined legions…
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