Tweeting, touring and taking on Trump: the second act of Dionne Warwick
In a stellar 62-year career the soul legend has sung with Stevie Wonder, partied with the Rat Pack – and become an unlikely hit on social media. As she takes to the stage in Ireland once more, she looks back on the best (and worst) of times with Nick Curtis
In her seven-decade singing career Dionne Warwick has smashed records, race barriers and social taboos, and given us the original and definitive recordings of timeless songs including ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, ‘Walk on By’ and ‘Heartbreaker’. At 83 she still has cheekbones you could slice bread with, a bold platinum crop and a reputation for always dressing like a diva (‘I get up that way, don’t you know?’). But disappointingly, when she comes on to our Zoom call from her home in Newark, New Jersey, the camera goes off after a brief, shadowy close-up of her face. ‘I’m not fit to be seen,’ she says with a throaty chuckle. ‘I’ve got a bathrobe on and I’m still in my pyjamas.’
Ah well, I’ll just have to picture the house she’s lived in for 18 years, having moved back to her hometown after a long spell in Brazil ‘when my mom and my sister both fell ill at the same time’. There’s a CD player in her living room on which she listens to music: ‘People laugh at me because I’ve still got one: I don’t use streaming services and I’m not very tech-savvy. Things have got so isolated: there’s no “going to the store to buy a record” any more.’
Lots of her designer outfits (‘Chanel, Ferragamo, Oscar de la Renta’) have been donated to the Aids charities she supports, but her six Grammys are ‘all on display in the living room’, as is the Kennedy Center Award she was given last year by President Biden.
‘I’ve known him since he was a congressman,’ says Warwick, who counted Presidents Reagan and Clinton as allies in her pioneering Aids activism. ‘He’s fun to be around, very knowledgeable and a straight-up guy. You’re only as old as you think [Biden is two years her junior] and he has a wonderful brain and is still functioning exceptionally well. I absolutely hope he’ll win again.’
Warwick appeared on Celebrity Apprentice with the pre-presidential
Donald Trump and found him charming.
‘My god, he’s changed,’ she says bleakly. ‘I don’t know who this person is now.’
Having performed in the still-segregated South on her first tour, in the very early 1960s, she’s dismayed by the rise in division once again across the globe. ‘It’s just become rampant. I can only speak for the United States because I’m watching it happen here and I still don’t understand what’s going on. It does not make sense at all to go backwards instead of forwards.’
This month Warwick is touring the UK and Ireland with a leisurely evening of renditions of her hits blended with reminiscences, inspired by the 2021 documentary about her life, Don’t Make Me Over. ‘I’ve been going for 62 years, running around this world like a crazy woman, but I’m not 21 years old any more,’ she says. ‘It’s time to slow down and have a little bit more of a choice over what I want to do and where.’
She claims she doesn’t do anything to keep herself as slim and fit as she seems, or to maintain her voice: ‘I don’t eat properly, sleep properly, and I’m lazy. I guess I’m blessed. But when it comes to the point where I feel that I am not performing the way that Dionne Warwick should be performing I will hang up my ballet slippers and say bye bye.’ Touring is taxing, though, so lockdown was a delight: a chance to sleep in her own bed, cook her own meals and ‘reflect and get to know me, which was wonderful. Because I’m OK.’
The new show will cover her upbringing in East Orange and Newark, and her first public appearance, aged six, singing in her grandfather’s church. While studying music in Connecticut she was hired to record backing vocals with her family’s gospel group at
New York recording sessions. On one song, The Drifters’ ‘Mexican Divorce’, Warwick’s extraordinary range attracted the attention of the song’s writer, Burt Bacharach.
She became a muse for him and his co-writer Hal David but when they gave the song that was supposed to launch her, ‘Make it Easy on Yourself’, to a male singer, Jerry Butler, she snapped at them, ‘Don’t make me over!’ And that became the title of her first hit in 1962.
Touring the racist American South with other artists in the 60s was a shock after relatively liberal New Jersey: ‘It was something I’d never experienced before – a lesson, for sure.’ Warwick was advised by police to flee a venue after singing Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ with the lyric ‘We’re gonna integrate Arkansas’. On another occasion their tour bus was stopped by a patrolman after Warwick and another female singer told a rude waitress in a segregated taco joint to stick their order up her butt. ‘He asked where the two “gals” were. Sam Cooke let him know that there were no “gals”, that we were ladies and gentlemen on the bus. And he asked the patrolman politely to leave and he did.’
Did the experiences shock her? ‘It never bothered me,’ she says with a silvery laugh.
Her first tour of Europe in 1964 started off in confusion, as the sleeve of her first European release came with a generic cover shot of a white woman, and her real surname, ‘Warrick’, was misspelled ‘Warwick’ (which she later adopted). ‘I came over to do a programme called
PLAYING IN THE RACIST AMERICAN SOUTH WAS A SHOCK: ‘SOMETHING I’D NEVER EXPERIENCED. A LESSON’
Ready Steady Go, then went on tour with The Searchers: it was the first time I met Dusty Springfield.’
She was less fond of Cilla Black, who covered her version of ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’, and later did the same with the title song for the film Alfie. ‘I wouldn’t call it a rivalry,’ she says, ‘just a disappointment that they had to steal my recording, basically, and give it to her verbatim.’ In Paris, Marlene Dietrich took Warwick under her wing and ruthlessly edited her wardrobe.
She received much kindness early in her career. Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne mentored her. She met Elvis in Vegas in 1969, at the height of his fame: he promised to put a picture of himself in her album in every store in town, boosting her sales. ‘He was quite a gentleman – with me anyway. Very cordial. And, boy, was he good-looking.’
Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack also took her under their wing. ‘I became their surrogate child. They embraced me in the way father figures would: gave me pointers, watched my career.’ Untrue rumours that she dated Sammy Davis Jr have their roots in a 1975