Donna Summer was born LaDonna Gaines in Boston on New Year’s Eve 1948. She rose to fame with the provocative 17-minute 1975 hit “Love to Love You Baby,” but her career ranged from gospel and psychedelic rock to electronic pop. She became the first Black artist to win a Grammy in a rock category and the first Black woman to co-write a number-one country single — Dolly Parton’s 1980 “Starting Over Again.” After seven years living in Germany, Summer moved to Los Angeles in 1975. A series of photographs from the late 1970s and 1980 show how she settled into stardom, balancing a turbulent personal life with a growing family.
Back in the USA
In December 1976, Summer reclined on a snakeskin-print sofa in front of a white-brick fireplace in her Los Angeles home. That same year she had divorced Helmuth Sommer, her husband of three years, with whom she had a daughter named Mimi. She kept an anglicized version of his last name. “I’d sworn to my mother, ‘When I come back to this country I’ll be somebody.’ Until that song, there really wasn’t any reason to come back,” she reportedly said at the time.
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She first rented a house before buying property in Benedict Canyon, high above Beverly Hills. According to biographer James Haskins, her daughter Mimi lived with Summer’s parents in Massachusetts during this period. The Benedict Canyon home featured midcentury-modern design with “all the crazy slants and cantilevers of a 1959 Impala,” per a feature in Oui magazine. “It’s the kind of place that all new stars rent when they arrive in Hollywood. On a clear day, only God has a better view of Los Angeles.”
In a 1976 portrait, Summer posed with her boyfriend, German surrealist painter Peter Mühldorfer. They met while she lived in Germany; he joined her in Benedict Canyon and set up an art studio in a room lined with floor-to-ceiling windows. Mühldorfer painted Summer outside the home, capturing the property’s stunning vantage. Later in life, she became a prolific painter herself. “I don’t paint for other people. I do it to get things out of myself. I just lose myself in whatever is in front of me,” she said in a 1993 interview.
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Life changes
By April 1977, Summer was photographed with Arnold Schwarzenegger on her Los Angeles patio. Around that time, she ended her volatile relationship with Mühldorfer, who had been physically abusive. The following year she began dating musician Bruce Sudano, and in 1979 the couple moved into a house in LA’s Hancock Park neighborhood.
