Patti LaBelle gets down at 50

Ebony, Nov, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

UNTIL this year, Patti LaBelle thought about death often and in great detail. When it would come. How it would take her. All she would leave behind.

In fact, until she awoke in her L.A. condo on the 24th of May, Patti never really thought she would live to see that day--her 50th birthday.

"I thought I was going to die in my 40s because none of my sisters lived to see 50," she says, her voice stopping in her throat as she explains how she lost all three of them--Vivian, Barbara and Jacqueline--to cancer. "We all shared the same genes. We all had the same things to live for. And so I had no reason to believe God would spare me."

She is curled up on the sofa in the living room of her palatial, yet exquisitely understated, home just outside Philadelphia reflecting on the myriad of family photographs that fill the room and hold her history.

She is wearing shorts, a baggy T-shirt and not a trace of makeup, and it is almost impossible to believe this is the reigning queen of rock 'n' soul, the Grammy-winning superstar with the five-inch pumps and five-octave range whose legendary voice made "Lady Marmalade" the disco anthem of the '70s and turned President Clinton's $5,000-a-plate August birthday celebration into an old-fashioned house party.

As Power Washington looked on, Patti literally lay down and rolled across the stage as she sang a selection of her biggest hits to the First Couple, before launching into a rock/jazz/ gospelbased version of "Happy Birthday."

Right now, however, there is only pain in her voice, the pain of a woman who knows she can have anything in the world except the one thing she wants most--another chance.

Another chance to tell her sisters all the things she meant to, but somehow didn't: how special they were, how much she loved them, how each of them--more than her three Emmy nominations, more than her eight Grammy nominations, more than all the fame, the money and hit records combined--filled her life with joy.

And most of all, another chance to trade all that time spent schmoozing with the phony, superficial, darling-you're-so-fabulous-let's-do-lunch kind of friends for a week, a day, with them. "I was selfish with my time," she confides. "I just didn't give them the glory when they were here. It was so hard for me to say, 'I love you'. I told them, but not in the right way. I told them with gifts instead of with my time."

And there is one more thing that haunts her. "I didn't really open up to them," she says. "I didn't really talk to them the way you do with a best friend where you call each other up or stay up all night discussing everything--men, sex, love, life."

Suddenly, Patti rises from the sofa and begins to pace. At first she is just walking--across the living room, around the coffee table, back and forth in front of the fireplace. Inexplicably, she stops. When she sits back down, you can see she is crying. At first, they are just tiny sobs, whimpers really. But then she finally gives in to them and they overflow in a torrent of tears.

"If I had them back for 24 hours," she says weeping, "I would spend 23 of them saying 'I love you' and telling them all the things I felt ashamed to say before."

And what about their last hour together? What would she do then?

She closes her eyes.

Beats back her guilt and her grief.

Then: "The last hour I would cook them the most fabulous meal in the world because even though we had card parties and crab feasts, we never really had a dinner where we all sat down together."

Cooking family dinners, spending time with friends and family, "being mom to everyone" is the essence of Patti's life now. The truth is, after so much loss, she sought solace in her family, primarily her immediate family which includes her husband and manager, Armstead Edwards, their 21-year-old son, Zuri ("His name means beautiful in Swahili"), two adopted grown sons and the son and daughter of her youngest sister, Jacqueline.

It was in her music, however, that she sought absolution.

"When I'm performing, I talk about my sisters a lot," says Patti, who spent the summer on tour with Frankie Beverly & Maze and is about to embark on a solo concert tour. "Sometimes I dedicate songs to them and sometimes I just talk about how much I miss them. And I tell everyone who comes to see me the same thing: 'If you have somebody you love, go home from this show and tell them. And tell them today because tomorrow's not promised.'"

She is certainly following her own advice. She has dedicated "The Right Kind of Lover," the first single on her MCA album, Gems, to Armstead.

"He really is the right kind," says Patti of Armstead, with whom she celebrated 25 years of marriage in July. "He's strong, solid, steady. He keeps me balanced because I can go off the deep end in a second. But he's always there to chill me out. This will sound crazy, but if we divorced tomorrow, I know he would be there for me for the rest of my life."

That they didn't end up in divorce court before their first anniversary, Patti says, continues to amaze her. "When we got married, everybody said it would last two months," says Patti who flew to Maryland and exchanged wedding vows with Edwards before a justice of the peace after which she refused to even thing about commencing the honeymoon until he bought her some hard shell crabs. "I'm as romantic as anybody," she says blithely, "but do you think I was coming all the way to Maryland and not have some of those good crabs?"