‘I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool’: the dark days of Donna Summer

In a New York hotel room in 1976, Donna Summer stepped towards the window ledge. She had become instantly famous the previous year for her pseudo-orgasmic vocals on her single Love to Love You Baby, which had reached No 2 in the US and Top 10 across most of Europe. But, unknown to her fans, she was horribly conflicted over the sexualised performance, and also in the grip of a violently abusive relationship. She began climbing up.

“Another 10 seconds and I would have been gone,” she later said – but her foot became entangled in a curtain and at that moment a maid entered. “I felt God could never forgive me because I had failed him,” she explained. “I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool. I just decided that my life had no meaning.”

These feelings were hidden from a public who knew her as one of US pop’s most enchanting and formidably talented figures, the woman who would later sing the world-changing I Feel Love, the strutting Hot Stuff and Bad Girls, the bombastic pop of She Works Hard for the Money, and so many other effervescent hits. Even now, 11 years since she died of cancer, her producer and co-writer Pete Bellotte still regards her as “the best voice I’ve ever recorded. She’d sing with this incredible, intuitive feel. She would own a song immediately. Everything was always one take – she never struggled.”

But – as explored in a new documentary, Love to Love You, Donna Summer – behind her shiny queen-of-disco persona was a great deal of struggle. Summer was secretly racked with trauma, guilt and insecurities. “I have been changed for ever from this process,” says the film’s co-director – and Summer’s daughter – Brooklyn Sudano. “I feel grateful to be on this side of it, because it was very intense.”

When Summer sang in church as a child, she sometimes struggled to hit the high notes. Frustrated, one day she prayed: “God, please teach me how to sing better.” Church was a source of faith and hope for the young Summer. She grew up in a deeply religious household, but as a teen she was sexually abused by the pastor. “He did the devil’s work better than most,” says Summer’s brother Ricky Gaines in the film. “It became a defining moment in her life.”

This moment, which Summer didn’t detail publicly until she published her memoirs in 2003, is the thread that runs through the documentary. “You’re looking at me, but what you see is not what I am,” we hear Summer say early on in the film. “How many roles do I play in my own life?”

It is a question that Sudano set out to ask with her co-director, Roger Ross Williams (who in 2010 became the first African-American director to win an Oscar, for his documentary short Music by Prudence). “We wanted to make a very personal, honest film,” says Sudano. “To have a true understanding of the mom, sister and wife that we knew – a complex, artistic and colourful woman.”

Much of the film is made up of Summer’s own footage, as she was a keen amateur director who liked to shoot movies on the road or at home. There are films of her as a spoof fortune teller, at family Christmases, hotel-room dance parties, quietly sitting at a piano, and letting her voice ring out pristinely through the family home. Musical milestones pepper her life, including her eight US Top 5 hits in a whirlwind 18-month stretch in the late 70s.

Despite being endorsed by her family, the film is not glossy PR. “The first thing I asked Brooklyn was: are you willing to go to uncomfortable places and be brutally honest?” says Williams. The result is an intimate look at an artist who carried hidden darkness while publicly typifying glamour and sexuality.

Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, Summer was subjected to racism from an early age and was beaten by gangs of white youths; a facial scar left her feeling “ugly” and “inadequate”. She also nearly died from drowning when she was eight. The person she grew into was funny and wildly talented, but also guarded and private. When she became a mother, she kept her bedroom locked, off limits even to her own children; when she was diagnosed with lung cancer in her final years, she told nobody outside her immediate family. “That was very hard,” says Sudano. “We respected her journey, but it was difficult, because people would ask questions and we’d have to go: ‘Oh, she’s fine.’”

This duality – of private sadness while pretending publicly that everything was rosy – became the film’s core theme. “After her passing, a lot of people came up to me and did not have closure,” says Sudano. “They wanted to understand why she would make that choice [not to tell them]. I thought: we need to tell the story – but really tell it.”

After moving to New York to be in the psych-rock band Crow, Summer landed a role in the musical Hair. The production took her to Germany in 1968, where five years later she ended up marrying the Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer and having their daughter Mimi. Working as a backing singer in Munich, she met the producers Bellotte and Giorgio Moroder.

By 1975, the three of them had written Love to Love You Baby, the blueprint for sultry disco that was so literal in its performance of sexual moans and groans that the BBC banned it. But, as early as 1976, it was something Summer didn’t want to define her. “I have so much more to offer,” she told Rolling Stone.

The highly eroticised music was also fundamentally at odds with Summer’s background – as a child, her father smacked her for wearing red nail polish because, he said, “that’s what whores wore”. Bellotte recalls going to a launch party for the raunchy single, but not being introduced to Summer’s parents. “I think we were the enemies,” he says.

It created a deep inner conflict – and Summer’s rapid ascent to fame was matched by her mental decline. “The most dismal days of my existence were at the height of my career,” she said. As she struggled, Mimi was sent to live with her grandparents and Summer, now separated from her husband, endured an abusive relationship with the artist Peter Mühldorfer. One beating left her unconscious, with a black eye and broken ribs. By the end of 1976, Summer was contemplating killing herself in that hotel room.

“We were sometimes afraid going into these conversations with Brooklyn’s relatives – there were a lot of tears,” says Williams. They even tracked down Mühldorfer, who reflects: “I hit her and I never could forgive myself.”

“One of the foundational pillars of this film is that these hard conversations are necessary,” says Sudano. “I knew that my mother had forgiven him, so I felt comfortable with having the conversation, and by doing that you bring healing.”

When it is revealed that Mimi was also sexually abused as a child, in the family home by someone related to the housekeeper, the film moves even further away from traditional music documentary and into one exploring generational trauma and the complexities of that when entangled in family, faith and fame. “Mimi’s story was integral,” says Sudano. “It’s so intertwined with my mother’s life and her struggles with motherhood and how to reconcile her own trauma. There has been a lot of healing for Mimi personally, but also us as a family. Even if nothing had happened with the film, the biggest gift was to be able to help facilitate that process for her.”

Aside from being a form of family therapy it could also be seen as a posthumous collaborative project with Summer herself, given the story is told through her words and footage. “We always made a joke: that she was directing from heaven,” says Sudano.

Summer’s commercial success peaked in 1979 with the multimillion-selling Bad Girls. In 1980, she married Bruce Sudano and by 1982 had two more daughters, Brooklyn and Amanda. Another hit album landed in 1983 with She Works Hard for the Money, but family life became more of a focus. So did faith, with Summer becoming a born-again Christian.

At a 1983 concert, it was reported that she said: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” which caused significant upset among her LBGTQ+ fans – a community that had played a significant role in her breakout success. It was also reported – but strongly and tearfully refuted later by Summer in Advocate magazine – that she said Aids was God’s punishment for homosexuality.

Related: Donna Summer’s greatest songs – ranked!

Williams, who is gay, recalls that period. “I was so impacted and hurt by the ‘Adam and Steve’ comment. So I wanted to explore that in this film and know why.” Summer attempted to make amends and performed at Aids benefits, while publicly stating: “What people want to do with their own bodies is their personal preference.” While she still retains icon status for many LGBTQ+ people, Summer felt her relationship with her gay fans had been tarnished. “To have this asterisk on your legacy was devastating,” Sudano says. “That was very difficult for her to get over, because she loved people and particularly that community. Again, it’s about healing. It’s acknowledging that this was a terrible thing that was super-hurtful.”

In the film, Sudano says she is “trying to figure out the many pieces of who Mom was”. Has she? “I now have so much more understanding,” she says. “It was really new to grasp how instrumental these moments were in her life and how she felt like she couldn’t talk about so much of it just in order to survive. She did so much with not a lot of tools.”

• Love To Love You, Donna Summer is on HBO and HBO Max in the US and Sky Documentaries in the UK next month

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