SIFF 2024 Dispatch #1: Dawn Porter Profiles an R&B Dynamo in Luther: Never Too Much

LUTHER: NEVER TOO MUCH 

(Dawn Porter, USA, 101 minutes) 

Luther Vandross was a quadruple threat: singer, songwriter, producer, and arranger. He was also a man who never found the love he spent his life singing about, territory director Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble, The Lady Bird Diaries) handles with delicacy and restraint. 

She begins her profile in black and white as Vandross rehearses for an engagement at London's Royal Albert Hall. Everyone, including the star, is dressed casually, but they're giving it their all. She then segues to color footage of the 1994 show with everyone dressed to the sequin-bedecked nines in front of a crowd losing their shit to his version of Philly duo McFadden & Whitehead's 1979 disco hit "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now."

She then backtracks to TV interviews in which Vandross talks about his Bronx childhood. His family was hardly rich, but he felt he had everything he needed, and he had something to aspire to: Motown. Not so much the label itself, but the Black excellence groups like the Supremes represented: talent, polish, popularity. He felt the same way about Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin. His interest in male singers appears to have been minimal. 

Since Vandross passed away in 2005, Porter turns to friends and associates for recollections about the artist, like Carlos Alomar and Chic associate Fonzi Thornton who played in his first group, the Shades of Jade. "He was a boss from the beginning," Thornton remembers, sharing a story about how Vandross appealed to his cash-strapped mother to buy her son green patent leather shoes in order to live up to their unusual moniker. What mother could resist such a polite and persuasive young man? Certainly not his. And not Alomar's Puerto Rican mother either--even though she didn't speak any English. 

En route to solo success, Vandross segued to the vocal group Listen My Brother, which often performed at the Apollo Theater (Roger Ross Williams's Apollo, SIFF '19, is an excellent primer on the legendary venue). The group included his best friends Thornton, Alomar, and Robyn Clark, who also appears in the documentary. Vandross, as was often the case, was in the right place at the right time, since Jim Henson heard about the Black empowerment-oriented group and hired them for a new show set in a Harlem-inspired neighborhood: PBS's groundbreaking Sesame Street. 

To Alomar, Vandross had a voice made for success, but believes that his dark complexion and solid build went against the qualities prized in Black singers of the late-1960s. Beyond his talent, he was a bright young man, and he went off to college at Western Michigan University while his friends kept singing, but it wasn't for him, and he dropped out after the first year.

From there, he would again end up in the right place at the right time: Philadelphia during the days of the fabled Philly Sound. 

When David Bowie decided to make a decisive break from London glam, he headed to Philadelphia for 1975's Young Americans, his self-described "plastic soul" album. Exclaimed Bowie, "I love this guy!," remembers backup singer Ava Cherry. Bowie, who appears in archival footage, was at the height of his androgyny with sculpted hair, bleached brows, and eyeliner. That same year, he claimed he was bisexual. Twenty years later, he would describe himself as a "closet heterosexual." Vandross, by comparison, looked like the straight one. 

All of this would have been good enough for any young singer, but Vandross also revealed talents for songwriting and arranging, and he would receive credit for both on the album--it says a lot about Bowie that he shared writing credit with him on "Fascination." Not all superstars are as generous.  

With an introduction from Bowie, Vandross moved on to Bette Midler. Once again, he was part of a gay-coded milieu (Midler started out singing in bathhouses). Porter's speakers don't mention any of this, but you can see her building up to it. Not least because there's no mention of his relationships; just his Platonic friendships with both men and women. 

If he wasn't yet a star in his own right, Vandross became an in-demand session singer on national commercial jingles and with top-selling soul, funk, and disco acts, like Sister Sledge, Chic, and Roberta Flack. As Nile Rodgers points out, Vandross appears on every song of Chic's first two records, including 1978's immortal "Le Freak." Just as Bowie tapped Vandross's varied skills, Flack did the same. As much as she valued his contributions to her stage show, she believed he should have a spotlight of his own, and actively pushed him in that direction. 

With that boost, Vandross cut "Never Too Much," the 1981 single and title track that finally made him a foreground star. Platinum-selling albums, talk show appearances--14 with Oprah, an ardent admirer--and production work for Warwick and Franklin, the still-vital icons of his youth, would follow. This is also around the time he started wearing his signature eyeliner, a detail that goes unmentioned, even as it added to his physical allure.  

Unlike some peers, he also had a sense of humor. When Eddie Murphy marveled in his 1987 stand-up special Raw that "this Kentucky Fried Chicken-eating motherfucker" could make the ladies swoon, Vandross brought out a giant KFC bucket for a show at which he knew Murphy was in attendance and even sang a few lines of the chicken-slinger's latest jingle. 

Nonetheless, his weight fluctuated throughout his life. Vandross explained to one talk show host, "I was an emotional eater." As the title of the documentary attests, he was an all or nothing kind of guy; he was either eating or dieting. There was no healthy middle ground. When things weren't going well, he turned to food to cope, but if he kept some aspects of his life private, he was open about his struggles with his weight. 

He was also open about his desire to cross over to a wider audience, but felt that his label was holding him back. Friend and cowriter Richard Marx backs him up, claiming that Epic spent more money promoting white artists. 

It may seem like ego--the desire to be embraced by all listeners--but I believe it was also about longevity, because if Vandross was riding high in the 1980s, by the late-1990s, his record sales were slumping while hip-hop was dominating the airwaves. It's worth noting that Sony produced this documentary, and Jon Platt, CEO/Chairman of Sony Music Publishing, is among the speakers, which may be why Porter doesn't mention that Vandross sued to be released from his Epic contract. As his attorney Don Engel told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, "He feels that Sony has pigeonholed him and has not done all it could to expand his audience." 

Fortunately, his hit-making days were reignited when he signed to Clive Davis's J Records, though the documentary omits mention of the album, I Know, Virgin released after he fulfilled his Epic contract.

Porter only turns to Vandross's personal life after establishing the contours of his career. For Jamie Foxx, who co-produced the film, his love songs were a way to win ladies' hearts, but what about Vandross's heart? 

He would tell friends that he hadn't found love, but that he hadn't given up hope. No one--except Patti LaBelle in a talk show appearance that upset his friends--says he was gay. The consensus was that he would rather be alone than to act on such feelings. It was the one aspect of his life he kept to himself such that he never even denied the claim. He would simply refuse to dignify such speculation with a response--other than to sue British magazine Blues and Soul when it falsely claimed that his 1985 weight loss was due to AIDS. 

Though that sort of secrecy and protectiveness tends to suggest that a public figure is gay, that isn't always the case. Like Vandross, Tim Curry, who turned 78 this year, never married, had kids, or ever said whether he is gay or straight. Though he emerged from a subculture--London's theatrical scene in the early-1970s--when androgyny and/or the impression of bisexuality was practically de rigueur, he has always kept his private life private. From my research, while working on a paper about Curry, I came to the conclusion that he's probably straight, but I couldn't say for sure, not least because he didn't drop clues the way, say, Freddie Mercury did. What I can say is that neither man ever found the love of his life. Curry claims that he was in love once, but it didn't last. In the documentary, Vandross says he fell in love a few times, but that his affection was never returned.  

I'm not certain when Vandross was diagnosed with diabetes, but it represented an increasing threat. If he was open about his weight in the 1980s, by the 1990s, he was tired of talking about it, even as reporters  continued to ask. It wasn't just about vanity; his life was on the line. To Marx, the obsession with his weight obscured his artistry. Starting in 2003, Vandross would experience some of his biggest professional successes--and some of his worst health setbacks. He was only 54 when he died.

Though I had hoped to learn more about his personal life from Never Too Much, Dawn Porter honors his artistry from start to finish. This is also a fully authorized biography, but even if it wasn't, she may still have chosen to respect Vandross's privacy. Nowadays, the choice not to disclose one's sexual orientation isn't as respected or accepted as it once was, and some music fans view figures like Vandross as relics. They're entitled to their opinion, and I love a happy coming-out story as much as anyone, but in the end, a public figure doesn't owe us any detail whatsoever about their private life, not even a man whose voice, songs, productions, and performances set millions of mostly-female hearts aflame. 

If he never found the kind of romantic "forever, for always" love he sang about with such passion, it's clear that Luther Vandross had friends he loved dearly who loved him with equal ardor. Not everyone can be so lucky. 

Luther: Never Too Much plays the Egyptian on Fri, May 10, at 6:30pm and Pacific Place on Sun, May 19, at 1:30pm. Dawn Porter will be at the May 10 screening. For more information, click here. Images: Indiewire via Sundance Institute and Sony Music Entertainment, RCA via Smooth Radio (Vandross and David Bowie), Ebet Roberts / Getty Images (Roberta Flack and Vandross backstage at Madison Square Garden on Sept 11, 1982), Lisa Fischer's Facebook (Vandross with KFC bucket), Ron Galella/WireImage via TV One (Vandross and Patti LaBelle), and Billboard (Vandross and Richard Marx).