Aretha Franklin wore a body stocking onstage the other night. Couldn't tell if it was transparent, but you could tell she was proud of her new deep-dish streamlined body. She'd tell the world. She spread her wings, her cape fell open and the spotlights hit the spangles like the Crab Nebula. The crowd could understand.

Maybe they didn't understand her dancers, who pirouetted around in the clutches of variety-show ballet spasms. This was Harlem's Apollo Theater, you dig, one of the toughest audiences in the land. The peanut gallery can, in the right hands, change the course of mighty rivers, or they can reduce the once-proud entertainers into sniveling slagheaps.

The sign outside simply reads: ARETHA HOME AGAIN. Up and down the rainy 125th Street, hi-fi stores blare Aretha onto the street, and guys are walking into the Apollo, jamming those nosebleed platforms forward, one arm hitched back, the other arm pitching forward, you have to flow forward all dandyfine, with the poise of a three-masted schooner...fine! The families, the couples, the Superfly genre, the blood-lusting troublemakers...aching hearts beat behind their smiling lips. Aretha came out hoisted on the shoulders of these dancers, one hand touching her Blue Angel tophat, being very grown-up and sensational and are those snickers and guffaws we hear?

She used to enter to the strains of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," punching up the power-fist and the V-sign while all heads bowed reverently. Full of drama, she'd throw her voice around like a bola and her coup de grace, "Dr. Feelgood," would stretch out like an orgasmic aria, Brunhilde's Immolation, her lips flaring and the nation plunged into deep hankering. An aide would throw a white towel over her bare, wet shoulders and hustle her offstage.

But she is calming down. She's 32. Her agent is trying to book her into the Waldorf Astoria, into the richneck niteries, find movie scripts and television specials and bust her into the Midler-Minnelli-Flack racket. Classic — this is an era of classics. And even if she's now singing "Rockabye your baby with a Dixie melody," in front of the Bill Eaton Orchestra, there is no doubt that the fans still love her Queen of Betrayed Hearts image, and all she has to do to milk the crowd is get tough, brassy, heave those shoulders, and testify. She just has to snap, "Turn up the P.A., would you?" and the crowd is delighted.

But this is not the ascending road. So the thinking goes. By the end of the night, after she'd changed into mink, the Apollo peanut gallery gave the dancers a big hand.

Baby, I know...

The reporter wanted answers. Aretha is the toughest interview in town. Her life has been an unending Stations of the Cross, and her people are very protective. But the reporter wanted poignant insights, universal lessons and gallons of confessional poetry. There she was, her eyes hanging like two expectant globes. Her heart was a bruised tomato under glass. The reporter felt like Walter Winchell interviewing Joan of Arc.

If you can get next to her. These protective people...why, one heard rumors of Aretha cashing in her chips and having a nervous breakdown. All hands issued thousandfold denials of so much as a hangnail before one ladyfriend of Aretha's finally said: "She didn't have any nervous breakdown. She was dieting and took the weight off too fast, you know? Taking diet pills. So she checked in to see the doctor and some paper got the story all wrong. She didn't have any nervous breakdown."

The woman who sings to...him that she threw away her pride, that she hopes he doesn't mind if she weeps and cries for him sometime, that she's a fool for him, baby, won't you think of her sometime, baby, if you walk through that door she can get up off her knees, give her some respect...she has needs...

This woman who has sung all this and more will freeze at the sight of some reporter weaving her way with a deadly tape recorder under his arm.