Gaudy Reign of the Disco Queen

By JAY COCKS

Listen here. Donna Summer has something to tell you: "You . . . are beautiful. Each . . . and . . . every . . . one . . . of . . . you . . . is . . . beautiful! That's right! And if you got it, then . . . I say . . . you ought to flaunt it!"

That doesn't sound like the old Donna Summer talking. But then, she's singing a different tune too. Back in 1976, on her first hit, Love to Love You Baby, she got a gold record by simulating orgasm 22 times and cajoling, in her best jailbait voice, "Do it to me again and again." Her latest hit, taken from her platinum album, Live and More, is a discofied rendering of Jimmy L. Webb's Mac Arthur Park, in which Donna can rise above the hot-pants reveries of her earlier work into the headier regions of post-psychedelic poesy. Try this: "Someone left the cake out in the rain/ I don't think that I can take it/ 'Cause it took so long to make it/ And I'll never have the recipe again, oh no."

Flaunt it, Donna. While you got it.

What she's got, most prominently, is a first-rate set of pipes, a ringing, theatrical voice that is locked in continual combat with the layered sound and dunce-cap lyrics of disco. With one platinum and five gold albums, Summer, 29, is the one incontestable star to emerge from the disco demimonde. Love to Love You Baby became a hit in the days when discos were not sprouting on every block, but were stashed in the closet along with the gay subculture from which they sprang.

The song's smash success coincided with disco's coming-out party, and became a kind of marching song for the disco revolution. Donna continues to ride high and handsome as the craze vaults all class barriers, from blue-collar to cafe society. Still big in the clubs, she has worked up a concert act that she is currently taking through 14 cities before invading the citadel, Las Vegas. Eager to wade into the musical mainstream, Donna dusts off The Man I Love and Some of These Days and presses them into a stage extravaganza that doesn't yield an inch to good taste.

Arms flung wide, blowing kisses like confetti, Donna sashays around the stage in glittering costumes, exhorting the audience ("You are beautiful"), joshing the band, trading a little prefabricated bitchiness with her backup singers who undulate at sharp angles like clockwork Nefertitis when Donna wraps herself around a lyric. "I do not consider myself a disco artist," Donna insists, against all contrary evidence. "I consider myself a singer who does disco songs. What I like to do is expose my market to other parts of music."

Donna's market is as broad as her expectations. After an appearance in a disco showcase quickie called Thank God It's Friday, she is primed to act. As she told TIME'S Edward Adler, "I don't have to take coaching. I can act. All I have to do is be myself playing someone else. I could be a Bette Davis-type actress. Catty, cold, precise and domineering."

And flaky, if her ex-manager, Jeff Wald, is to be credited. Discharged from Summer's service at the end of last year, Wald announced in the rock press that Donna was more trouble than she was worth, once even canceled a chartered flight because her astrologer counseled against it. Says Donna: "Jeff Wald earned over $200,000 through me and never saw me perform. He was just running around Hawaii with his wife [Singer Helen Reddy] having a great time, thinking he was above being a manager." Tending to Donna's needs now are both a former publicist for Donna's record company, Casablanca, and the wife of the Casablanca president.

She also rings up her astrologer for consultations, keeps a sharp watch on the configurations of the heavens, and divines that Capricorns like herself "are aggressive and workaholics. I am certainly a workaholic. Capricorn women also display an incredibly cold sexuality." She is quick to add, how ever, "I can't have an affair of the body without one of the mind. It's not in my morals."

Morals were so strict around the Boston home of Andrew Gaines that when eldest Daughter Donna told him she was flying off to Europe to be in a production of Hair, she got her face slapped soundly. "Daddy," she pleaded, "this is my big chance. Shirley Temple was a little kid. Did her mother stop her?" Dad's riposte, or his reaction to 1) her marriage to an Austrian actor from Hair, 2) her divorce in 1974 or 3) his first hearing of Love to Love You Baby are not a matter of public record. But snapshots of Mom and Dad enclosed in a heart-shaped frame peer out of every copy of the Summer concert program, surrounded by pictures of Donna's daughter Mimi, 5. Three other Gaines daughters have followed their sister down the show biz path, and they sing back-up vocals for Donna.

She lives in Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe, keeps constant company with Singer-Guitarist Bruce Sudano.

He will open her act in Tahoe, but she bristles at queries, about their private life. "Of course he lives with me. We eat at the same table." A body guard is close by for those occasions when crowds become "too pushy. You cannot imagine how people forget their manners. I've had fans trap me in elevators."

Such pressures have given Donna an ulcer and a penchant for philosophy. "The furor over Love to Love You Baby was certainly good for my bank account," she remarks, "but it gave me a one-sided image as a sex queen. But a person is not one thing." One person Donna would like to resemble is Diana Ross. "I've always admired her," says Donna. "Since I was a young girl Ross has been working her behind off, getting her credits and paying her dues. She has been through a lot and attained a great level." And of course Donna would like Diana's Oscar nomination. But, she says firmly, "if I was nominated, I'd want to win."

-- Jay Cocks

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