Some famous friendships extend far beyond the fame that fans see, and that fame can sometimes test who shows up for each other. More than four decades after Teddy Pendergrass‘s devastating car accident, Stephanie Mills still remembers exactly who showed up, and who didn’t.
The “Never Knew Love Like This Before” singer, 69, talked about her late duet partner during a long conversation with Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay. Asked what it was like working with the soul star, she didn’t hesitate. “Wonderful. Teddy was like my big brother,” Mills said. “We would be on the road for like eight months out of a year… I loved working with Teddy. I miss him so much.”
The two were among the most beloved R&B pairings of their era. Mills sang with Pendergrass on “Feel the Fire” from his 1980 album TP, and they followed it with “Two Hearts,” released in January 1981 from her album Stephanie.
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Then came March 18, 1982. Pendergrass crashed his car in Philadelphia and suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed. Mills said the first word she got was only that he’d been in an accident. “When they told me that he was going to be paralyzed, I was sad. I was in tears,” she recalled.
She went to see him in the hospital, and what she found there stayed with her. “It was hard. And all the people that were around him and that was supposed to be his friends fled,” Mills told Sharpe. “They weren’t there.”
She said she was “the only one and a couple of the people that was still in his life when he was in the wheelchair.” When Sharpe suggested that must have broken Pendergrass’s heart, Mills agreed. “I think it did. But he was really strong with it. He didn’t give up,” she said.
Their friendship carried on well beyond the hospital. The pair later toured together in the gospel musical “Your Arm’s Too Short to Box With God.” Pendergrass returned to the stage at Live Aid in Philadelphia in July 1985 and founded the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance to help people with spinal cord injuries. In 2007, Mills performed at “Teddy 25,” a Kimmel Center tribute marking a quarter century since the crash. When he died in January 2010 at 59, she was among the mourners at his Philadelphia funeral.
Mills also offered a glimpse of the man behind the sex-symbol image. Asked what fans don’t know about him, she said, “That he was loving and kind,” adding that she doesn’t think he “necessarily liked all the women on him all the time.”
More than 16 years after his death, the bond still shapes how she speaks about him. “I really miss him because he was my brother and we talked often,” Mills said.
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