On Top Looking Back At 66, Della Reese Has Series, TV Movie, Autobiography, Ministry And Still Sings

At a time when most other singing stars of the 1950s are retired or playing the nostalgia circuit, 66-year-old Della Reese remains at the top of her game.

Consider the evidence:

“Touched by an Angel,” the CBS series in which she appears as a supervisor of angels, recently scored No. 2 in the Nielsen ratings. In the show’s three years, she has been nominated three times for Emmys as supporting actress.

She stars with Meredith Baxter, Patricia Heaton and Anna Chlumsky in a CBS movie, “Miracle in the Woods,” airing 9 p.m. Sunday.

Her autobiography, “Angels Along the Way,” is being published by Putnam this month.

She continues with her ministry at the church she founded 16 years ago in Los Angeles, flying in from the Salt Lake City locations of “Touched by an Angel” every weekend.

She still sings. Her latest album: “Some of My Best Friends Are the Blues,” based on her 27-city tour with a revue.

The only glitch in this picture is Reese’s dispute with CBS. She told a news conference earlier this month that “Touched by an Angel” costars Roma Downey and John Dye received pay raises of 100 percent and 30 percent, respectively, while she was offered only 25 percent.

The network responded that her pay was less because she was granted a lighter work load, including time off to attend to her church duties. Her husband-manager, Franklin Lett, said the problem was unresolved.

In “Angels Along the Way,” written with Lett and Mim Eichler, Reese tells of growing up in Detroit with a loving mother and a father who worked all week in a steel mill and then disappeared on weekends.

The mother - in reality, Della was later told, her grandmother - loved to go to the movies. That’s where young Deloreese Patricia Early first learned to perform. She imitated the movie stars to entertain her father.

Reese’s first experience with racial discrimination came at 13 when she toured the South with Mahalia Jackson’s singing group.

She soon learned she had to go to the rear window of a cafe to get service and to use the outdoors for a bathroom because there was none for blacks. Years later when she was a headlining singer, she encountered discrimination in Las Vegas.

“In those days, black entertainers could work on the strip, but we couldn’t go in the casino, nor could we eat or sleep in those hotels,” she writes. “The only place to stay was all the way across town at a hotel aptly named the Dust Bowl.”

One night while appearing in Vegas with an Ed Sullivan show, she wasn’t able to order a cheeseburger in her dressing room until Sullivan himself intervened. Every night thereafter, Sullivan and his wife took her to an all-white Vegas restaurant, enduring the withering stares from other diners.

Sullivan was among the many angels Della Reese has encountered along the way. They helped her through racial discrimination, an abusive first marriage, a near-fatal accident with a glass door, an aneurysm, the loss of $253,000 to a crooked lawyer and a $485,000 back-tax bill from the IRS (she settled for $100,000).

For a quarter century, Della Reese ranked among the top song stylists, along with Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington and a few others. Then musical tastes changed, and night clubs went out of vogue. Reese sought another line of work.

When did the acting take over?

“I don’t know that it took over,” she replied by phone from Salt Lake City. “I had good training for it. I was always a stylist, a lyricist. I became acquainted with the words in order to convince you I must believe in what I’m singing. That’s what acting is: believing.

“It was just like one thing flowing into another. It was finding another rhythm so you could take the music out.”

She admitted that being accepted as an actress didn’t come easy: “For a long time, I was the woman who owned the club where the star came in after he broke up with his girlfriend,” Reese recalled. “I did that for a long time.

“Then Reuben Cannon, a casting director, gave me a speaking part on a ‘Mod Squad.’ I worked my way up, step by step, bit by bit.”

Her lusty manner and sharp delivery made her a favorite on such sitcoms as “Chico and the Man” (with Jack Albertson and Freddy Prinze), “The Royal Family,” “Designing Women,” “It Takes Two” and “Night Court.”

Dramatic appearances include “Young Riders,” “MacGyver,” “L.A. Law” and “Picket Fences.”

Reese is proud of “Touched by an Angel,” which airs at 8 p.m. on Sundays.

“The corporate world thought that action and (sexuality) would make money. If they got involved in anything spiritual, they would end up offending somebody. If the Catholics liked it, the Muslims wouldn’t. If the Muslims liked it, the Jews wouldn’t. If the Baptists liked it … and so forth and so on.

“So they wanted to avoid it like the plague. What ‘Touched by an Angel’ did was show that you could have spirituality and make money. So we literally changed the face of television.”