Interview: Natalie Cole
Steve Martin, the comedian, has a routine in which he discusses his roots. “It wasn’t always this easy for me,” he begins. “I was actually born a poor black child….” He goes on to tell how, one day, he heard Lawrence Welk music on the radio, felt strongly that he had discovered real music, and decided to become a white person.
Natalie Cole has a similar story to tell. Only hers is true. She was born a rich white child. And she grew up in a big house in Hancock Park, near the Fairfax district of L.A., known to some as “the Jewish belt,” and she liked white music–first, the kind her daddy, Nat “King” Cole sang, and then rock & roll, the kind she heard Janis Joplin perform at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Then one day, away from home and in college, she heard about blacks–black studies and Black Panthers–and decided to become one.
At the same time she began to take drugs of all colors. And she began to sing. At first, it was white music–after all, that’s where her roots were–in white supper clubs. But in the recording studio, her singing took on black and gospel overtones. Instantly, she had a hit record, “This Will Be,” and was on her way to fame and (if her accountants are any good) fortune.
In just two years she has had five hit singles, three gold albums, three Grammy awards and a Rock Award. At age 27, she is hot with a vengeance, and she’s got Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” screaming scared. Natalie is not the “New Queen of Soul,” and she sharply reprimanded the emcee who introduced her that way a couple years back at L.A.’s Coconut Grove, right–for Chrissakes–in Aretha’s backyard. Nor is she Natalie “Queen” Cole, as she was advertised by one promoter trying to hustle her as some reincarnation of her father.
But try “Princess” on her and you get the raise of a brow, a tightening of the lips and a slight nod, as in contemplation of the possible. She may not want to be called “Queen,” but only because she considers herself too young, because she is not out to piss off Aretha Franklin any more than she already has, and because she is repelled by attempts to sell her through her late father. But by no means does she shy from the thought of becoming the outright queen someday, or from the royal rewards that have come with her success. In fact, she recently bought a house, a wide-open ranch of a house in Benedict Canyon, in the mountains overlooking Beverly Hills.
Natalie has just finished doing her guest segment of a Paul Anka television special and is home to have some dinner with her manager, Kevin Hunter, and to meet with her costume designer to go over some new ideas. She is wearing a long, blue terry cloth robe with white trim. She is tall (about 5′ 10″ in her silver sandals) and rangy. She could pass for a Pointer Sister. She doesn’t think herself particularly a looker; she even tried to get her nose fixed when she was a teenager because she thought it too broad and flat (and still thinks so; the surgeon, she says, turned out to be a fan of her father’s and was reluctant to do much altering).
There is a resemblance, in fact, to Nat Cole, but not just because of the loyal surgeon. It is beyond the physical. It’s the way Natalie conducts herself. Her walk is brisk, her manner cool and firm, and there is around her the air of business–good business. There is a detachment upon meeting a stranger, a healthy arm’s-length distance that is later balanced by a natural candor, and an inability, or an innate unwillingness, to hide the darker elements of her story.
While Natalie fixes a simple meal, the talk in the kitchen is about how Kevin Hunter drove 90 miles from Toronto to Buffalo to see her at the Executive Inn in early 1973, how they resisted the easy, daughter-of-Nat-Cole route, how she bombed in Las Vegas last year with her energetic show. Natalie turns away from the sink. “See, Las Vegas has the type of audience–and they haven’t changed since my father’s days–they’re still boring, and bored. And there’s only that handful of artists that they really enjoy and know how to respond to.”
Critics have compared her to Diana Ross–if only because Natalie, like Ross, recorded Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache”–and to Aretha Franklin. Reviewers have pointed to Cole’s reliance on numerous Franklin trademarks, the high, spirit-in-the-dark gospel wail, pointed enunciation of pointed, gritty lyrics.
The comparisons are all the more dramatic because Aretha is being characterized in the media as an aging Queen of Soul, in decline. It is an unfair characterization, and Aretha has not responded well to it. At Atlantic Records, it is said, she was jealous of Roberta Flack’s success, and of the attention she was getting from Atlantic executives. Aretha’s morale was kept up only by such token honors as Grammy Awards: she won for Best Female R&B Vocalist each year as if she owned the category. And then last year along came Natalie Cole.
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Natalie’s dinner is done. She says a silent grace, seasons her steak with Lawry’s sauce, and begins to talk about Aretha and the others:
“They’re always trying to compare me to somebody,” she begins, “and I always turn around and get their ass, ’cause it’s not fair to do that. But they have to have somebody to compare me to, so I guess they will. But I’m not doing it purposely.
“I’ve heard strains of Aretha, but I’ve never heard no Diana Ross. We don’t sound anything alike. I think that I sound a lot better than Diana Ross.” Slight smile. “You have to excuse my frankness, but I’m serious. There aren’t too many artists that I would want to put myself up against, but I’ll put myself up against Diana any day.”
When Aretha comes up, she tries to be diplomatic, but it sounds like the time for diplomacy has long since passed. “We don’t speak,” she says. “Aretha Franklin does not like me.”
When Cole first began singing, in the supper clubs back East, she sang a lot of Franklin’s songs. “All her stuff. You name it, I did it. I love that lady. I love that lady. I had almost every album she made up until about three or four years ago. And then I started singing, and I didn’t want to hear anybody else. I didn’t want to hear Aretha because I felt that I would try to really sound like her. See, I never thought that I sounded like her until people started talking about it, after my first record came out.”
Her demo tape, she says, had four songs on it: Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic,” the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and the Doris Day hit of the Fifties, “Que Sera, Sera,” in which Cole adopted Sly Stone’s stoned soul arrangement. “That,” says Cole, “was my demo. I sure didn’t sound like nobody’s Aretha! Now I do, and that is because my producers wrote the music and it came out of me with real things to say, and I think that Aretha and I feel songs the same.”
Interview: Natalie Cole, Page 1 of 4