Nearly a decade after Donna Summer’s death in 2012, her Nashville home has remained as a shrine to the Queen of Disco’s decades-long music career.
Beaded dresses she’d worn on stage remained tucked away in the upper closet along with designer pumps; ephemera such as an annotated cover art for “She Works Hard for the Money” were stored downstairs; and in the basement there was an accumulation of brightly colored paintings, awards and gold records.
Summer, who died of lung cancer at age 63, never wanted to talk about death and had given no direction on what to do with her belongings, her husband, Bruce Sudano, recently said. Only in recent years has Summer’s family been ready to fully comb through her possessions in the Nashville home, many of which will go up for sale at Christie’s next month, the auction house announced Friday.
“You would go into these spaces and it would almost be a time capsule of your life,” said Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summer’s three daughters.
One of the items for sale is a silver cup that Summer often carried on stage filled with decaffeinated Pepsi. Brooklyn Sudano recalled that when she and one of her sisters were touring with their mother in the 1990s, one of their jobs was to stir the soda in the cup to remove any air bubbles. (“While she’s singing, she can’t burp,” she explained.)
Summer, a versatile singer-songwriter whose music spanned funk, dance, rock and gospel, rose to fame in 1975 with the erotic extended version of “Love to Love You Baby,” followed by the groundbreaking electronic track “I Feel Love,” whose pulsating club beat can be heard in Beyoncé’s ‘Summer Renaissance’.
The announcement by Christie’s comes shortly before HBO’s Saturday release of a new family-backed biographical documentary directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano. Titled “Love to Love You, Donna Summer”, the film chronicles Summer’s rise from a cast member in a German production of “Hair” to an international superstar and deals with her personal life as well as her career, discussing her struggles with depression. , physical abuse by a friend and her chapter as a born-again Christian.
The auction includes glamorous possessions and others that are more mundane. At the glamorous end: a shimmering blue and green dress Summer wore in the music video for her 1983 song “Unconditional Love,” a rhinestone dress and bolero jacket she wore to a 1995 concert, and a collection of the diva’s sunglasses .
As for the mundane – but perhaps intriguing to the most devoted of fans – the sale includes unworn shoes and a dozen unused Louis Vuitton towels.
“There are people in the world who love her,” said Bruce Sudano, who is responsible for looking after her estate. “It felt like we can’t just hoard all this stuff for ourselves.”
Online sales, which Christie’s expects to raise approximately $200,000 to $300,000, will begin June 15. A portion of the proceeds from the sale will go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Save the Music Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the auction house said.
One item, a poster for a 1998 concert in support of the nonprofit Gay Men’s Health Crisis, references the history of Summer’s sometimes strained relationship with LGBTQ fans, many of whom boycotted her music in the ’80s after they had contributed to its emergence.
The documentary takes a brief look at that history, with Summer’s husband recounting how a ready-made comment on stage – “God didn’t make Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve”, he recalls her words – many gay fans deeply hurt. Summer worked to mend her relationship with the fanbase, especially after New York magazine wrote that she described the AIDS crisis as a “divine pronouncement” on gays, a report she vehemently denied and eventually denounced.
The sale also includes approximately 15 paintings and manuscripts with scribbled lyrics, including for the 1977 song “Now I Need You,” written on stationery from a Munich hotel, as well as pencil edits of the lyrics for the hit song “On the Radio .”
Brooklyn Sudano reviewed documents such as the one while putting together the HBO movie, which she says reinforced her belief that her mother was not a pop star engineered by outside forces, but rather an artist deeply involved in making the hits that her made famous.
“People just saw her as this personality,” she said. “I don’t think they really understood that she was an artist and played an active role in creating the Donna Summer that people knew.”