Here you can read a first excerpt from DWs autobiography

[GehVorbei]

http://books.simonandschuster.com/My-Li ... 49/excerpt


It's written in fairly plain English (if I as a German may say so) and she still comes across as guarded and is very much staying on the known facts. At least in the first chapter.

But after hearing the same bits of information from her for decades (a little bit like we've heard the same monologue in her concerts) I still enjoy things being put in context. and you definitely can hear her voice, it is authentic.

[BachtoBacharach]

It is interesting that she is writing (her current business partner co-wrote the book) in a very conversational and warm style although there is little depth there. She certainly comes thorough as guarded and private in that excerpt but let's hope the rest of the book is more than a long press release! She has always been loath to reveal any details of her very interesting life and rarely discusses her feelings even with those she is close to. She has had some very interesting experiences; ups and downs, etc. I would love to see Dionne write of how she felt, for example, when she was on top of the world as the #1 female singer (always neck and neck with Aretha) in the US in 1968 through 1970 and how she felt three years later when she awoke to the cold realization that Bacharach/David were through and as a result through with her and the hits weren't coming any longer. How did she maintain her lifestyle. There were allegations in the mid 70s that she was physically abused by Bill Elliott and she remarked to the press that the pain in her marriage was emotional, never physical and that for a while she felt ugly inside and hated herself. She found herself after she divorced Elliott. Bill Elliott spent money as though it came from a faucet from all accounts, and that, coupled with Dionne's generosity, kept her working her behind off. She even paid him alimony for a time. He told the divorce judge that Warwick was earning in excess of $1 million a year (this in 1976 when her career was in low ebb and a million was an incredible sum...can you imagine the sort of money she was earning in 1969 or 1970 when she was filling arenas?) and he was entitled to at least $12,000 per month...he got less. But there seemed to be real love there between them. She also had a very strange, off and on relationship with Giovanni Russo (actor in the Godfather and Las Vegas "restauranteur") from 1978 until about 1990. Damon Elloitt said he didn't know where his mom's head was during that time, but the massively egotistical Russo was not, from all accounts, a very nice person. Dionne has even told reporters who asked her about that relationship after its demise that there are two words that are no longer in her vocabulary and those words are "Giovanni and Russo"! Apparently their parting was not amicable. Will she go there? Probably not although Russo revealed some details about his relationship with Dionne in his book published a few years ago. The book didn't sell...most folks didn't even know who he was. Dionne said that no man had ever provided for her financially since her dad but she has apparently supported quite a few!

[Dionnefan]

Yes, I really hope Dionne's book is much more in depth that what was in the first chapter, and it's not a children's book, I don't need Dionne's "List of Things I've Learned" at the end of each chapter. That would be incredibly cheesy. I didn't learn much of anything new except that her brother was called "Pookie". And is that all we are going to get about her growing up in the Drinkard family? I sure in the hell hope not!!!! I really can't imagine it would be published by Simon and Schuster if it is as unrevealing as that excerpt throughout the book. At that rate, I'll have learned more from Darlene Love's book about Dionne!

[Dionnefan]

Well my book was waiting on my doorstep when I got home from work, so I guess I know what I'll be doing tonight! I'll probably finish it tonight. It's only a little over 200 pages in very large print.

Don't get too excited---so far nothing very in-depth at all, disappointingly.

[blueonblue]

I wonder if Burt will ever write his autobiography "The Story of My Life" would be an apt title...

"blue"

[vincent.cole]

I hope Dionne sheds a 100 watt light bulb on how it was making music in the golden 60’s!

Yes that decade in the studio with Burt Bacharach and Hal David must have been off the charts!!!

All of us probably have seen that video segment with Dionne and Burt doing, “Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets!” If the book contains pearls like that, it should make for excellent reading!

Also I hope Dionne speaks about the painful break up of her musical marriage with Burt & Hal! I don’t mean the dirt! All kinds of emotions must have been running through her head, just like a typical divorce.

Working with Clive Davis and Barry Manilow on her 1st # One hit, “I Will Never Love This Way Again," gave Dionne a new musical avenue to travel on!!

Can’t leave out the highly charge reunion of Dionne & Burt, when they got together on the song, “Finders of Lost Love!!!” I am sure a few tears were shed by both parties!! Dionne & Hal David probably had come to terms before this.

What about their touring together for a numbers of years. One of the greatest shows that I saw Dionne & Burt @ was, Radio City Music Hall in 1987 in New York City. She opened up with “Promises Promises” and blew me out of my seat!!!

Well, the subjects that I made mention of, I hope are in the book!

[Dionnefan]

Don't expect anything in detail about making music with Burt. I just finished the book (didn't take long at little over 200 pages and big print). Although pleasant, it was sorely lacking. There was hardly nothing about the music. It was so very superficial. I still love Dionne, but this wasn't her shining moment. I understand her not wanting to "dish" on people, but I was more interested in learning about how she came up with her singing style, put together her shows, details of the recording process, etc. There was more time spent on her hairstyles and dresses!

She mentioned how she had received basically no vocal training. It is hard to understand how a voice so unique and complex just came seemingly by accident! All in all, I have learned much more from BachtoBacharach's posts than I did in this book!

[vincent.cole]

Bonjour Dionnefan;

Thanks very much on your review of Dionne's book. Like you and many others on this forum, was expecting much, much more!!

I wanted to know the creative process that Dionne, Burt & Hal came about on all of those great songs!

And you are right about, BachtoBacharach! What a wealth of knowledge for this forum!!!

If I have to take a guess, BachtoBacharach was very close to the action!

[BachtoBacharach]

Dionne has always maintained that she would never dish in writing. The book appears to be no more than a superficial fluff piece and I am very surprised that a major publishing house like Simon and Schuster would publish such drivel. She has always been a clothes-horse and the press often covered her gowns and her attire because they got little of substance from her other than appearance. Dionne is an extremely intelligent, witty woman but no one would ever accuse her of being a deep thinker; she avoids delving too deeply into even herself. She has always seemed to surround herself (to insulate and protect herself perhaps?) with a wall of people who seem to be rather superficial; she has seemed to gravitate to rather shallow people who then take advantage of her generousity. Perhaps she has a deep need to be needed? Enough of my dollar-store psycho-analysis. I am sorely disappointed to hear this. Dionne has always been covered by the press but when looking back at all the things she has been covered for, she doesn't reveal much and never has but she couldn't control those around her from talking and they often did. I think this is another case of Dionne being offered a book deal and she's taken the money and run...this seems to be her modus operandi in many of her dealings in the past 20 years. She disappoints her fans once again by coasting through and giving only the superficial. Maybe it's time that someone told her story, warts and all, but there would be no participation from her; that you can be sure of.

[Dionnefan]

I almost get the impression that Dionne's recording career, especially after the heyday, was really not all that important to her. She stated that she hated the "Friends can Be Lovers" album, which I thought was the one time her voice was used properly in a modern urban/R&B/pop vien. There was nothing but the most superficial mention of her many many hits. She really covered the whole Scepter era in about 2 chapters. I really think that us fans know more about her recordings than she does.

I was surprised to see that she said "it's a crock" when she tells people smoking helped to create the sound in her voice. She admitted that she smokes because she likes the way it feels. But then in the next sentence, she stated she always promised she would quit when it started to affect her singing?!?!?!? I don't get the contradiction! Surely someone must have told her that she has basically destroyed her voice with the incessant chain smoking--there is no way anyone with even a modicum of self awareness could say that her voice has not been affected by smoking. I know it is really none of my business, but I just think how much different Dionne's life might be had she not decimated her voice with the chain smoking. I bet she could have had many more hits. And most young people have no idea of her vocal ability because all they've seen since the nineties is this lady who sometimes sounds like she's got a frog in her throat and is drowning in molasses (but it is a beautiful sounding frog in molasses to me!)

I always got the impression that what set Dionne apart was her intelligence, class, and elegance. She was the singer who could be comfortable both singing for the Queen of England and also in the most down-home juke joint down South. But there was just too much of that "love, friends, inspiration" yuck. Dionne didn't get real. I mean seriously, Dionne's "lessons learned" at the end of each chapter?? That was so cheesy. Dionne, we didn't want an inspirational book--you already did that, rather cheaply and tackily, in that last book "My Point of View". I don't know why Dionne thinks we want to hear that. She is a vocal prodigy, not a motivational speaker.

Perhaps Robert Christgau, the noted music writer, got it right. Christgau has stated his admiration for Dionne's work many times. In his book that included all of his reviews of albums released in the 80's, he mentioned Dionne several times. In the Luther Vandross section, he said Dionne "cut Luther from here to Sunday and made him sound like an overpriced backup singer" in their duet. He also called Luther the male Dionne, both having voices of "mixed velvet and pewter". But he did not review any of Dionne's solo albums. In the back of the book, there was a section where he listed the artists that he did not specifically cover individually, and gave a brief reason why. This is what he said about Dionne: "Dionne Warwick--she has no regrets, a grand dame is what she always wanted to be"

Sorry to be so blunt and critical, because I ADORE Dionne! I am just disappointed because it could have been so much better. She is starting to remind me of another one of my favorite artists ever, Michael Jackson. Both of them seemed to be surrounded by yes men that don't, or in MJ's case, didn't challenge them on anything, and they just spout this "love and peace" mantra that gets tiresome. Dionne, please rest your voice and go into the studio and produce at least one more album that is NOT a retread of your old songs and doesn't have those horrible production values that sound so cheap!

[BachtoBacharach]

Sad to say, but the Grande Dame moniker is most appropriate and Darlene Love alludes to that in her book. Dionne has always seemed to care more about the material and visible trappings of success more than substance. I am not doubting her phlanthropic efforts but in my opinion she has used her celebrity to further those causes AND herself. I have often wondered why Dionne seems to be such a contradiction...she's not typically narcissistic the way Patti Labelle but like a narcissist, she seems to place more value on the lifestyle and the appearance rather than the substance. She's had an incredibly substantive recording career and is probably, aside from Aretha Franklin, the most influential female singer of the past 50 years and in her heydey was a household name but it seems that the significance of her recording career is somehow not important or even realized by her; she really doesn't seem to care about her good name. She has literally squandered all the good will her name has for the most shallow, $$$-driven activities. She seems to have little self-awareness of her contribution to music and dare I say doesn't seem to care, but seems to be seeking only the gratification of stuff and things and the physical goods that her incredible success has brought her. She has been conned before and I believe she conned each and every loyal fan out of $20 or so for that piece of crap book. She seems rather arrogant when she literally preaches to us of her "wisdom" while revealing nothing about herself and how she obtained this wisdom...it all seems so superficial to me. Is she so self-absorbed that she can't see any of this? I have always had high hopes for Dionne but somehow she always seems to be holding something back; even in her glory years. She's once again foisted off on her fans something that she didn't give 100 percent of herself to...so is it that important to her is a relevant question!

[Dionnefan]

She stated that she had no regrets for "Psychic Friends" because she needed to pay the bills. Dionne must have been a horrible money manager, considering she was awarded a multimillion dollar settlement in the Bacharach David lawsuit and was given multimillions for the Warners contracts. That is almost like hitting the lottery twice, especially considering how much money that was worth in those days. Even if she only invested 10% of it, she should have been generating several hundred thousand in interest alone, and remember the interest rates in the late 70s early 80s?

No mention was made of the tax problem, although it was interesting how she stated she wished she had made herself into more of a "brand" like the young entertainers today. She lamented the fact that so many of the black singers from her era are forced to tour constantly to earn. She also stated she was probably cheated of a lot of money by the record companies, which I don't doubt.

I just had the impression that Dionne was more shrewd as she comes across as so worldly and smart.

I really enjoyed Cissy's book, even Darlene's book much more, sad to say.

[BachtoBacharach]

Dionne made many millions during her tenure at Scepter alone. She was generous to the point of extravagance. She gifted Florence Greenberg, Scepter owner, with diamond jewelry, furs, etc. She also gifted family and friends with pricey baubles. In 1968, she purchased a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow for her husband along with a home in Beverly Hills and in 1973 she purchased the Max Factor estate on North Elm for about $370,000 and sold it in 1993 for $1.8 million) to place her aspiring actor husband Bill Elliott close to the television and film industry. She began a series of renovations on the Max Factor home that included a new pool, tennis courts, and doubled square footage. She purchased a home in Maplewood, New Jersey in 1967 and also built a new home for her parents. She has always taken care of family; on the other hand, because she was so generous, she began to attract a lot of hangers-on and folks who were there for the good times; she has a good heart and was always there to lend a hand to any of her friends who were going through hard times but she was a soft touch. She worked hard and was earning by 1968, multi-millions per year and a great deal of her income was generated by touring. Dionne appeared in many venues, large arenas, as well as halls, clubs and college campuses. She was drawing crowds in arena sized venues all over North America. In 1971, she and Elvis Presley were the only two entertainers to sell out an arena seating 8,000 in Miami, Florida...this venue had hosted Aretha Franklin, several Motown acts, and folks like Joan Baez, The Fifth Dimension, etc. She drew a crowd of estimaed at 15,000 to her appearance at the Fantasy Faire Music Festival in Marin County, CA in June of 1967. She was among a handful of popular artists who drew large crowds to the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971; Wiki describes the following: "many more fans were drawn than Festival Field could cope with. On the second night of the festival, would-be festival goers occupying the adjacent hillside crashed the fence during Dionne Warwick's performance of What The World Needs Now Is Love, initiating a major disturbance. That year's festival was halted after the stage was rushed by the intruders and equipment destroyed. The festival would not return to Newport in 1972." Her contract with Warner Brothers was for 5 albums for which she was guaranteed a minimum of $5 million, by far the largest recording contract ever given to a female singer up to that point. But the perfect storm of the Bacharach/David split and the singer-songwriter era, and the corporate atmosphere at Warners virtually halted her recording career. She was 100 % right when she remarked that Warner's didn't know what to do with her; the label was not single oriented but album oriented and Warwick, unlike many of the recording artists at Warners, produced hit singles and those singles for the most part propelled the sales of her albums. It was a complete 180 from the strategy and atmosphere at Scepter. More to come!

[Dionnefan]

Like I said BtoB, YOU should write the book! I know that Dionne isn't the type to dish on friends, family, even enemies, and I respect her for that. I won't lie, I would love to hear Dionne's "real" thoughts on certain people. But, I would have been extremely satisfied had she went into more detail on her music and stage show.

You have mentioned several times about the Patti Labelle incident from "Sisters". Dionne did mention the show and that she even enjoys watching it now and again, but she did not say a word about the tiff with LaBelle.

She mentioned very little about the lawsuit with Burt, although it was interesting when she spoke about how both she and Burt were booked on the same shows a few times after the breakup and that she had to do her best to avoid him. Another time she talked about how she and some girlfriends went to a show Bacharach was appearing at and got a seat up front so Burt could see her.

[BachtoBacharach]

I have read Dionne's book and although it's well intentioned, she doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of her interesting life. It's the usual star autobiography and is less than stafisying because the public knows so much about Dionne from years of press coverage, interviews and television appearances. It is basically no different from the fluff pieces most stars write. The chronology of her memory is sometimes faulty; nothing unusual in these type of books. She is, though, surprisingly open about Barbra Streisand (no love lost there) and Diana Ross while being deferential and almost reverential about Aretha (their friendship goes back to the fifties when Dionne, in her early teens, met Aretha at Mr. Franklin's church and hit it off and is closer than most would have guessed), Oprah and others. Of Streisand, Warwick was impressed with her voice but not her brashness and indifference to fans. Warwick, seeing la Streisand in a 1969 appearance in Las Vegas, was appalled that Streisand mostly kept her back to the audience and played to the orchestra during the entire appearance. Warwick says she declined a visit backstage, and has essentially had little interest in Streisand since. Of Ross, she simply states that although they are friends, her reputation as difficult came to the fore when Ross began to take center stage in the Supremes and then as a solo artist. She mentions Patti LaBelle frequently but does manage to avoid mentioning the word "friend" in the context of LaBelle. She mentions a few times that Gladys Knight was a friend of Patti's. Of Bacharach, she speaks admiringly but also with reservation; the hurt she received at his hands is gone but not forgotten. She glosses over other areas such as the tragic death of her brother at age 17 in 1968 in an automobile accident and she more or less raised his son Barry; it is obvious that she loved her brother very much but curiously doesn't go into the pain she felt and also doesn't delve at all into the love-hate-love relationsip she had with her sister DeeDee; her relationship with DeeDee was deep and real, as anyone who has a sibling knows that love-hate relationships with siblings are pretty universal. All in all, it was a rather sanitary retelling of her life. One item she alluded to was her divorce from Bill Elliott and his philandering; she behaved very badly in a court appearance and was almost held in contempt of court by the judge during her divorce. Instead of delving into the story, she simply alludes to that fact and then goes on to something else. Those who don't know her story well will be maddened by these fascinating little teases she sprinkles throughout the book and then never elaborates. No mention of her failed foundation and the scandal that ensued but Dionne does, ironically, pride herself on her money management skills! I could have definitely done without the "Dionne's lessons learned" at the end of each chapter. It is an interesing, quick read but if you are looking for meat, this is a salad! It is such a shame that her wonderful musical legacy has been tarnished by the PFN and those scandals. I beleive a fair, balanced look at her life would go a long way in reestablishing her music cred and repairing her image, but she would never consent to the indepth examination a biography would require.