Lack of will may mean long wait for star’s family
Andrew Dalton says divvying up Aretha Franklin’s millions could take years
Aretha Franklin was so hard-nosed in her business dealings that she demanded to be paid in cash before performing. Her heirs won’t have it so simple.
Though she lived to 76 and was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, the Queen of Soul died without a will.
As her four sons and other family members move on from last week’s funeral in Detroit, they’re left with the potentially tall task of finding out how many millions she was worth, and divvying it up, which could take years and is likely to play out in public.
Estate law experts expressed surprise but not shock that such a wealthy person would put off making a will until it was too late. At least one of her attorneys says he urged her repeatedly over the years to draft one.
“I tried to convince her that she should do not just a will but a trust while she was still alive,” says Don Wilson, a Los Angeles lawyer who worked on entertainment matters for Franklin for nearly 30 years. “She never told me, ‘No, I don’t want to do one’. She understood the need. It just didn’t seem to be something she got around to.”
Laura Zwicker, an attorney who specialises in estate planning but is not affiliated with the Franklin estate, says: “People don’t like to face their own mortality. I had a client who had a $70 million real estate portfolio who had had end-stage diabetes. He had plenty of conversations with me about estate planning but would not sign the documents.”
Papers filed in Michigan’s Oakland County court last week by David J. Bennett, the lawyer who worked most closely with Franklin, laid out the few known basics: She was not married and left four sons, ages 48 to 63: Clarence Franklin, Edward Franklin, Kecalf Franklin and Ted White jnr. Clarence, Aretha’s eldest, is incapacitated and is represented by a guardian. And a niece of hers has accepted the role of executor.
Under Michigan law, as in most states, the sons will equally divide their mother’s assets in the absence of a will, and so far no signs of conflict have emerged among family members. Bennett did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.
Aretha Franklin’s friend Ron Moten, a Michigan businessman, gave the four sons some guidance in his speech at the funeral.
“Remember your family, and friends that have been with you for years,” Moten told the men. “Because you are about to meet a lot of people who will now want to be your new best friend. You will also meet some people that will
have the best investments in the world for you . . . go slow, be careful and be smart.”
The documents make no mention of the value of Franklin’s estate. The figure almost certainly runs into the tens of millions, but there will probably be widely varying estimates as her attorneys seek to downplay her wealth for tax purposes and the IRS tries to maximise the amount for its own reasons.
Franklin maintained ownership of the songs she wrote and did well by them, Wilson said, though, Think was
the only one of her hits that was her own composition. She also wrote some lesser hits, such as Rock Steady.
Though her records were played millions of times, she earned little in radio royalties from smashes such as 1967‘s Respect because such payments go overwhelmingly to the writer, not the artist. The royalties for Respect go to the estate of Otis Redding, even though the song owes nearly all its popularity to Franklin.
“I would imagine she probably felt she was entitled to more, but probably received
more than a lot of artists from the time, especially AfricanAmerican artists,” Wilson says.
Among Franklin’s more tangible assets are several pieces of property in the Detroit area that according to tax assessors’ estimates are worth at least US$2 million ($3m), with a market value that could easily be twice that.
Once the value is established — that could take years — the IRS will take any back taxes Franklin owed, then tax her estate at 40 per cent for assets beyond US$11.2m.