“There is the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. King, get ripped off,” a close friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. “It’s the era she grew up in-she saw so many people, like Ray Charles and B. The cash goes into her handbag and the handbag either stays with her security team or goes out onstage and resides, within eyeshot, on the piano. She collects on the spot or she does not sing. On the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush, were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. “For a time up there, I just couldn’t hear myself right,” she said. Miss Franklin, as nearly everyone in her circle tends to call her, was distinctly, if politely, displeased. Lowery” to fix the levels once and for all. Feedback had pierced a verse of “My Funny Valentine,” and before she sat down at the piano to play “Inseparable,” a tribute to the late Natalie Cole, she narrowed her gaze and called on a “Mr.

“What was with the sound?” she said, in a tone somewhere between perplexity and irritation. She did not wear the expression of someone who has just brought boundless joy to a few thousand souls.

Late on a winter night, Aretha Franklin sat in the dressing room of Caesars Windsor Hotel and Casino, in Ontario.

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