Tragic Details About Aretha Franklin

With such a libidinous father figure, it was perhaps little surprise that Aretha Franklin became sexually active from a worryingly young age. In fact, while appearing on TV documentary Legends (via the Daily Beast), the star appeared to hint that she'd been intimate with another soul legend, Sam Cooke when she was 12 and he was a much older 23. And two months before she entered her teens, she gave birth to the first of her four children.

Yes, in January of 1955, Franklin welcomed son Clarence into the world. The choice of name did little to dispel the disturbing rumors that he'd been fathered by Franklin's very own pop. The star never answered this rather unsettling game of Who's the Daddy. However, in his biography, Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (via People), David Ritz alleges that a school friend, Donald Burke, was the mystery man.

Franklin soon returned to her school, with sister Erma later quoted in Ritz's memoir as saying, "She was an excellent student who did well in all her classes." But her education was disrupted once again, and this time for good, when she fell pregnant with her second son Edward in 1957.

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