Dionne Warwick looks back on career in ‘Don’t Make Me Over’
The singer and activist’s life and music are the subject of a new documentary.
The moment you wake up – before you put on your makeup – say a little thank you to Dionne Warwick.
Why? As new documentary “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over“details, the singer did more than just fill countless eardrums with 1960s earworms. The 80-year-old star is a mother, activist, cousin and friend – with a boisterous Twitter account to boot.
Over a Zoom call, Warwick reminisces about her music career that transcended racial lines, at a time when music was as segregated as the rest of the country. “Didn’t (all artists) do this?” she laughs.
The idea for the documentary, which premiered at the Toronto International
Film Festival Saturday, grew out of working on Warwick’s 2010 autobiography “My Life, as I See It,” which she co-wrote with Dave Wooley. Wooley wrote the documentary screenplay and co-directed with David Heilbroner.
The film covers everything from her upbringing in East Orange, New Jersey, to performing at New York’s Apollo Theater in Harlem, to the European tour that sent her career soaring.
But before it could soar, people had to know who she was – which was a problem, given the record cover of her “Don’t Make Me Over” EP in Paris featured a picture of a white woman. When she stepped onto the stage at the Olympia in Paris, no one knew it was her until she opened her mouth.
“Once I started singing, they said, ‘Oh my god, it is her!’ ” Warwick says.
Following that tour – and after her hits written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David including “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “I Say a Little Prayer” dropped – Warwick appeared on such programs as “The Ed Sullivan Show,” unaware of barrier-breaking tectonic plates shifting for the entire music industry.
“I never looked at it as being anything extraordinary,” she says.
Warwick became the first Black solo female artist to win a pop category at the Grammys, in 1969 for “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” – though she refused to be pigeonholed.
“I fortunately from the very onset of my recording was never able to be put into a box. Because I couldn’t be categorized. They didn’t know what I was.” Was she R&B? Opera? Pop? Jazz? “She is music,” Warwick says. “That’s what she is.”
Warwick was – and is – never afraid to speak her mind. Even when dealing with discrimination in the segregated Jim Crow southeastern U.S. while on tour with Sam Cooke in the early 1960s, “I was taught nobody’s going to stand up for you but yourself,” Warwick says, noting she hadn’t experienced that level of discrimination before.
Warwick was an early voice and advocate for AIDS research and went on to serve as a government-appointed health ambassador. Friends at the time thought she had lost her mind.
But “our industry was losing so many people,” she says, including a member of her staff. “I felt that it was time to figure out why we’re losing them.”
Her 1985 cover of “That’s What Friends Are For” raised more than $3 million for AIDS research. Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder and Elton John joined her on the tune.
Perhaps she could round up the group again if Lorne Michaels invited her to be a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” (she loved Ego Nwodim’s portrayal of her last season).
“Sure! Why not?” Warwick says. Time to say a little prayer.