Preaching What She Practices

There is no sign out front pointing to a church, but upstairs the auditorium is overflowing. Nearly 300 congregants--a virtual rainbow coalition--are gathered in impermanent rented quarters a mile east of Beverly Hills. The audience is largely African American, but there are a substantial number of Anglos--including a female assistant minister--as well as some Latinos and Asian Americans.

Meditation against a soothing audio backdrop of chirping birds, chimes and rushing water segues on this Sunday morning to ear-pounding electronic instruments and a belting choir. Then staff minister Charles Brown, in orange-patterned African vestment, delivers opening remarks, comparing the human body to a TV screen. “When off, there is nothing to see. But when we begin to allow the light of God [in], we appear . . . activated,” like pictures on television. Soon everyone’s hugging.

The metaphor is apt, for the main attraction here is one of the stars of the CBS series “Touched by an Angel,” Della Reese. On the hit show she plays Tess, head of a small band of angels, entering the lives of people in crisis, letting them know that God loves them and helping to steer them toward a better path. Off screen, she is the Rev. Della Reese-Lett, minister of Understanding Principles for Better Living, this nondenominational Christian church.

Resplendent in red, she walks down the aisle on the arm of the Rev. William H. Knight, an assistant minister.

“Good morning, God bless you this morning,” she calls out from the pulpit. “I love you this morning.”

Her sermon is on the meaning of friendship. Reese is part preacher; part performer, with an array of voices, drawing exuberant laughter; and part psychologist, as she inveighs against gossip and separates a true friend from a mere associate.

“If you have five friends in the whole time you’re on Earth this time,” she declares, “you are very successful.

“It’s never too late or too early for a friend. I can call on Jesus any time. I can call him on the bus . . . in the bathroom . . . at table. . . . He’s not too busy.”

Understanding Principles for Better Living is “a strange name for a church,” Reese, 66, offers in an interview later. “The reason is God has left for us, from the beginning of the Bible to the end, no matter what books you have, a set of principles”--such as faith, love, strength, wisdom--that can lead to a better life.

Its abbreviated acronym--UP--suits Reese to a T. A veteran entertainer--she started performing when she was 6, got her first gold record in 1957, had her own TV talk show in 1969--and now author with her autobiography, “Angels Along the Way: My Life With Help From Above” (Putnam), Reese sums up the arc of her life: “I got up. I mean, I got up. I entered the planet Earth in the slums of Detroit. . . . I got up and got out of there and went to the top of the mountain on Bel-Air Road in Los Angeles, California.”

Which is where she has lived for nearly 30 years.

But on this particular Sunday morning, clouds surround her peak.

“I’m going to have a press conference tomorrow,” she tells the congregation, “because I’m being mistreated by CBS--and I refuse to be mistreated by anybody.” Loud applause. “Roma [Downey], whom I adore, who adores me--Roma received a 100% raise. [Co-star] John Dye received a 30% raise. They offered me 12.5%.” A hum of discontent moves through the room.

At the end, she asks for their prayers--particularly with regard to “my temper and my mouth. I don’t want to say the wrong thing tomorrow. . . . I want to be at peace; I want a calm piece of my soul to show.”

Before a battery of cameras and reporters in her church office the next morning, Reese looks tired. As she pleads for fairness and respect, her temper is under control, but she hardly seems at peace.

“Why was it that everybody else did better than me? The first year of this show, sweetheart? There was no other name known but mine. . . . When they said [the series] wasn’t going to [continue], I worked with it, I prayed with it, I told ‘em, ‘Hold on, God’s going to see us through this.’ God did see us through. . . . I’ve been in six TV shows. I’ve been working for this golden ring. Now I get the golden ring, there’s no perks?”

She calls upon her fans to “rise up. . . . I know that Les Moonves [president of CBS Entertainment] has much more power than I have. . . . Maybe he’ll listen to my audience because they support the sponsors.”

Could it be age discrimination?

“I don’t know,” she replies. “I need this gray hair for this part. . . . I’m trying not to believe it’s because I’m black, because I was black when they hired me [and] they knew what age I was.”

“I’m not angry,” she insists, just “in wonderment. . . . I don’t believe in washing your dirty laundry in public unless you have to. So I’ve taken a lot of things that I will not even bring up.”

Is this a “take it or leave it” situation?

No, she says firmly. “I have been in this business for 60 years. . . . I have never walked out on a gig.”

Later that day, CBS issues a statement saying the network is “frankly puzzled” by her remarks and her decision to make her negotiations public. “For the record,” the statement says, “we have continued to honor her requests to reduce the number of hours she works, enabling her to rest and devote more time to her ministry on the weekends.”

Reese scoffs at any idea of concessions.

“You mean to tell me because I catch a 10 o’clock plane [Friday] night, that should have something to do with my money? We go to work at 6 in the morning. We should be through at 10 anyway. We’re not doing ‘War and Peace’ over there.”

With all that has happened in Reese’s life, a pay dispute seems barely a blip on the screen. Yet the subtext of “Angels Along the Way” and 90 minutes at her office is that of a fighter and survivor. In the fifth grade, she grabbed the hair of a classmate who had insulted her mother, wrapped it around her hand and dragged her around the schoolyard. “I went C-R-A-Z-Y,” she writes, and through high school, “nobody ever messed with me.”

Here is a woman who twice came close to death. In 1970, she walked through a plate glass door in Bel-Air in the presence of her 10-year-old daughter and lost pints of blood. Then in 1979, she collapsed during a taping of “The Tonight Show” when an aneurysm in her brain burst. Surviving these incidents, she says, led her to study, teach and begin her ministry.

In her book, she tells of a first husband who beat her, a second husband who couldn’t compete with her, two miscarriages by a man she wasn’t married to, other lovers. She first heard the N-word at 6, knowing it was bad, she says, when classmates “snickered”; when she was 12, a cousin was killed in the 1943 Detroit riots; at 13, touring a segregated South with Mahalia Jackson, she had to use the bushes when “colored” bathrooms weren’t available.

Even after Reese had gold records and top club dates in the ‘50s, she writes, restaurants on the Las Vegas Strip were closed to black entertainers, but Ed Sullivan and his wife made it a point to take her with them to dine at the best tables. In swank New Rochelle, N.Y., where she and Willie Mays were the only black homeowners, she was made to feel uncomfortable by the other residents. She says she found out she was losing her 1969-70 syndicated talk show when a man from King World, using crude imagery, said that he was unable to sell it to sponsors “because my gums were blue.”

It wasn’t all grim. There was “my daughter, my angel,” little Deloreese, whom she says saved her from the party scene of drugs and alcohol. She was given the child by her half brother and his wife, who had other mouths to feed, while she was playing a Chicago theater; movingly, she tells of taking the 2-year-old girl home after the show was over “wrapped in my chinchilla coat.”

In 1979, she met Franklin Lett, an advertising executive who became her manager, the man she had prayed that God would send. They married four years later.

Behind her desk, Reese says of her book: “If I wasn’t going to tell the truth, I shouldn’t have done it. All of these things made me who I am. I would not have as much courage had I not lost seven pints of blood and survived.”

Her life also informed her music.

“I could sing to you about being in pain because I had been in pain,” she notes. “I didn’t have to imagine how it is. I could sing the truth of the pain, and if you had ever been in pain, you would feel that I knew about pain.”

It was singing that brought Reese early attention. At age 6, the steelworker’s daughter was singing as a soloist with her Baptist choir on radio, earning a few dollars a week. At 13, she was discovered by gospel great Jackson and toured with her group for three straight summers. Later Reese helped start her own gospel group, the Meditation Singers, which eventually landed in the Gospel Singers Hall of Fame.

She broadened her repertoire and worked the nightclub circuit, which led to hit records (such as “In the Still of the Night,” “And That Reminds Me” and “Don’t You Know”) and eventually to TV and films. She was the first woman to guest-host Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” she co-starred in NBC’s “Chico and the Man,” and she played a madam in Eddie Murphy’s 1989 movie “Harlem Nights.”

Reese writes--it’s on the book’s jacket--that “if I have triumphed, it is because of my faith and because of those [angels] who appeared in my life along the way.” Still, when you ask Reese what made her a success, the answer has another shading: “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Period, the end, that was it.”

What about talent?

“What about that? A lot of people I know got talent. I know a lot of voices with more range than mine. You used to see them; you don’t know where they are now.”

She knew she wanted to be a success, she says, “when I went to the movies and saw houses that were better than mine. I must have been 7 or 8. . . . I had never seen anything so wonderful.”

After her mother died in 1949, Reese quit Wayne State University and soon left home. She says she simply wanted “out of there,” out of the neighborhood. She couldn’t stand “the poverty, the doing without, seeing people sinking lower and lower, with no desire, no ambition, no anything.”

It was “my momma”--a “no-nonsense, fun, loving” and “spiritual” woman named Nellie--whom Reese calls the most influential person in her life. It’s surprising to read that Nellie was a full-blooded Cherokee. Reese, after all, considers herself black. “I am. Don’t you know that in this country, if you have one drop of black blood, you’re black?”

She never sought her mother’s roots.

“She didn’t seem to want me to,” Reese says. “We lived in my father’s house. She was not for independence, because she was already free. She didn’t have to fight my father to get her place. She was who she was, and everyone respected her.”

Her mother’s marriage to Richard Early was a third marriage--like Reese’s own today.

“Third seems to be a charm,” Reese says, smiling. “She was happy with him for 30-something years. I’ve been on a honeymoon for 18 years.”

Lett, whom she calls Daddy, says he was attracted to Della’s “naturalness.”

“I came out of advertising and marketing, where a lot of the women I dealt with were either fluff or trying to crack the glass ceiling,” he says. “So it was very nice to meet a woman who was very earthy.”

Didn’t Della have to crack ceilings?

“Yeah, but she didn’t have to assume the aggressive, male-formatted role,” Lett answers. “She did it being a woman, and that’s key.”

“Watching their love and support for each other,” says Martha Williamson, executive producer of “Touched by an Angel,” “is a true inspiration.”

After a slow start that almost led to cancellation, “Touched by an Angel” has grown into a major hit. Now in its fourth season, it is CBS’ top-rated show and ranks fifth among all programs, with an average of 22.4 million viewers a week. But don’t expect Reese to call it her career zenith.

“I’ve had many high points--musical high points, and this is not my first television show,” she says. “I had the opportunity to sing with some of the best symphonic orchestras in the world.”

The pay dispute remains unresolved. After her press conference, Reese says CBS “came back and offered me 12.5% more,” totaling a 25% raise. (CBS says that 25% was on the table all along.) She has rejected it. She wants what Downey got--100%.

“I held this show up when it was nobody holding it up but me. The first year nobody knew Roma’s name,” she says of her good friend, “and this is not a put-down of Roma.” Reese married Downey and her husband, film director David Anspaugh, two years ago in Salt Lake City, where the series is filmed, and she is godmother to their 17-month-old daughter, Reilly Marie.

“I love and support her, and I certainly hope that she gets what she wants,” Downey says. “She’s very deserving in her contribution.”

So Reese is still working for last year’s salary plus an automatic 5% bump that Lett says is required by the Screen Actors Guild. There are no current negotiations with CBS.

As for the job itself, Reese says: “I like the work I do a lot. And the people who come as guest stars, because it’s so loving and so spiritual, give us stuff they didn’t know they had in them.”

However her feelings have been colored by the salary fracas, she writes in her book that “Touched by an Angel” “dared to put God front and center and praise His name.” She gloried in having “a lead role in stories that would touch people’s lives, stories that mattered.”

There have been no conflicts--or even minor ripples--on point of view that have not been resolved.

“I will not lie on God,” Reese says. On rare occasions, the actress says, she will tell producer Williamson, “This is not correct,” and Williamson “will stretch as far as she can to correct it.”

“Della doesn’t often make a script suggestion,” says Williamson, who declines to discuss the salary issue, “but every suggestion she has made has been dead-on. I want to make sure she’s comfortable.”

While the theologies of the traditionally biblical “Touched by an Angel” and Reese’s Understanding Principles are not always a perfect fit, there is broad common ground: that God loves humans unconditionally, that humans make their own choices through free will and that the spirit of God exists within all of us.

“You know what’s right and wrong,” Reese says. “You may not want to do what you know is right. You may prefer to do wrong. A thief doesn’t steal because he doesn’t know right from wrong. There’s a thrill, a joy in him doing that.”

But she adds that if you listen, God--or Christ, or Allah, or Buddha--”will tell you’re not right. Absolutely. ‘Don’t do this.’ You’ll hear it ring in your body.”

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* “Touched by an Angel” airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).