Lady Business: Aretha Franklin’s financial legacy, and other role models
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fortieth (!!) issue, published August 30, 2018.
Miss Franklin’s Example
Welcome back to Lady Business, just in time for the end of what’s supposed to be a slow time of year. And yet! A lot has happened for late August! Even if I avoid the trap that is attempting to summarize two weeks in White House Time, or about 1.4 Scaramuccis, some of the notable LB-universe developments include:
--Elon Musk cried, and then said he didn't really cry, and continues to act in ways that, as others have pointed out, should rightfully get him labeled "overwhelmed" and "difficult" and all those other fun words reserved for lady leaders. (Also, haha, jk about all that taking-Tesla-private “funding secured” stuff. I mean, sure, maybe Musk kinda committed a little bit of securities fraud--but it’s not like he changed his company’s work-from-home policies or anything that monstrous.)
--Louis C.K. and Matt Lauer are ready to leave their time out, pleeeease, Mom? They’re so bored, and they’ve spent nine whole months--months!--in their rooms without anyone to listen to them, and they’ve thought long and hard about why they were in time out and they’ve learned their lessons, promise. So isn’t it time? Can’t they come back out and play?
--Serena Williams’ current existence continues to make me exhausted on her behalf, if impressed with how much she’s accomplished both in her chosen field and while navigating all the meta crap for her success. The French Open kerfuffle about her “disrespectful” catsuit--in a sport where cheerleader-length flaps of fabric are more, what, modest?--is the latest headline to make tennis overall look woefully ... well, “behind the times” is the nice way of putting it. Also “really, really racist,” as pointed out in this good Elle piece on the history of skirts in women’s sports: “From racist slurs at Indian Wells to disproportionate drug testing to comments comparing her to an animal or a man, the sport continually sends the message that Williams doesn’t belong. Her strong black body--now uncovered by a skirt--seems to be perceived as a threat to tennis’ status quo.”
--And Aretha Franklin died of pancreatic cancer at age 76, without a will, leaving behind both a huge legacy and a whole bunch of scoldy headlines about why you shouldn’t follow her example. (Genius, Grammys, Halls of Fame, iconic feminist anthems, star appearances at multiple presidential inaugurations ... but no will! Kids, don’t grow up to be like Aretha!)
Look, as a financial journalist, I get the need to find the financial news peg. And making sure to leave a will is genuinely good advice--especially if you care about your relatives, and want to save them some headaches and legal fees and, depending on how successful you were in life, potentially years of messy fighting about who gets to benefit from your success.
But. It’s not like this is a problem for Franklin! Was it selfish and/of deliberate her to avoid dealing with some of the grim paperwork of adulting, and to leave behind a mess for her heirs? Maybe! But that’s their problem, not hers. Should it affect her legacy as one of the greatest and most influential American singers--as a woman who achieved that status as a teen mother, high school dropout, and victim of alcoholism and cancer and domestic abuse? A woman who during life, even after decades of success, literally kept an eye on her money? As a 2016 New Yorker profile reported:
On the counter in front of her, next to her makeup mirror and hairbrush, were small stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She collects on the spot or she does not sing. 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. “It’s the era she grew up in—she saw so many people, like Ray Charles and B. B. King, get ripped off,” a close friend, the television host and author Tavis Smiley, told me. “There is the sense in her very often that people are out to harm you. And she won’t have it. You are not going to disrespect her.”
(Oh, Tavis. Speaking of men mounting comebacks, Franklin’s death gave him some nice non-#MeToo-related press.)
So Franklin’s decision to avoid leaving a will, like Prince’s before her, is fascinating--was it a deliberate message to her heirs? Procrastination? The very understandable reluctance to face her own mortality, with all the boring paperwork that goes along with it? Maybe all of the above. But whatever it was, it’s not her problem--and it shouldn’t be any more than a sideshow to her legacy.
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