Gloria Gaynor reveals pain behind 'I Will Survive' in new doc
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Disco legend Gloria Gaynor is famous for belting out one of the most iconic survival anthems of all time — and she meant every word.
Only months before recording her classic “I Will Survive” in 1978, the two-time Grammy winner had to overcome a devastating accident that occurred while she was onstage performing at NYC’s Beacon Theatre.
“I fall backwards over a monitor onstage. I get back up, I finish with the show, went home, went to bed. Woke up the next morning paralyzed from the waist down,” the 79-year-old singer reveals in the new documentary “Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive,” which premiered at the Tribeca Festival this weekend.
“I was in the hospital for three months, and that’s where I had that first horrific spine surgery. I didn’t know if I’d ever walk again.”
Still worse, while Gaynor was “flat on my back” in the hospital, she got a letter from her record company saying the label wasn’t going to renew her contract.
“I thought it was over,” she says in the doc.
But even at her lowest point, Gaynor didn’t crumble.
Just months after her near-paralyzing accident, a back-braced Gaynor was in the studio wailing for her life on what would become her signature song.
And the rest is history.
“I Will Survive” — which, unfathomably, was originally released as the B-side to Gaynor’s cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “Substitute” — went on to become her first and only No. 1 hit and to win the first and only Grammy for Best Disco Recording in 1980.
Belted out after many a breakup, the song’s legacy was cemented for eternity when it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2016.
For Gaynor, it was also a very personal anthem of resilience and perseverance as she endured — and survived — everything from poverty and sexual abuse while growing up, to mismanagement by her ex-husband, to the death of disco, which almost killed her career.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Gaynor was raised by her mother in a one-bedroom apartment with five brothers and one sister.
“My youngest brother and I slept in the kitchen,” she recalls.
But, she adds, “we were very, very happy. Kids don’t know they’re poor as long as they’re loved.”
Still, she suffered the trauma of sexual molestation, first at the age of 12, by her mother’s boyfriend at the time.
“He came to my bed one night, and I woke up to him touching me very inappropriately,” she recalls in the documentary. “At 17, I was sexually molested again. He was my boyfriend’s cousin. He had his way with me and threatened to kill me if I screamed. And nobody would hear me anyway because no one else was in the building except the two of us.”
Gaynor suffered in silence.
“I never talked about it, and I never cried about it,” Gaynor reveals. “The sexual abuse just kind of made me feel unworthy … We internalize all that craziness.”
Indeed, for years, it haunted her — even unconsciously. “You know, you get those feelings deep inside,” she says. “These things touch you in a place where you don’t even know, and they leave scars that you’re not even aware of.”
In fact, Gaynor sees those early abuses as the reason why she accepted years of mistreatment and mismanagement by her ex-husband, Linwood Simon, whom she wed in 1979.
Those “deep scars,” she says, “allowed me to allow those things to happen.”
Simon would send her off to work in Europe at a breakneck pace while he remained in the US partying and philandering. Once when she returned home, she found Simon had installed a lock on the basement so he could have his private affairs down there. Gaynor and Simon divorced in 2005.
In 2020, Gaynor made a triumphant comeback under new management, winning her second Grammy for her gospel album “Testimony.” And the new documentary is a testament to her survival instincts.
“I have definitely survived a lot of things,” she says. “Sometimes our plans work out, but sometimes you don’t quite make it.”
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