Teddy Pendergrass widow seeks to keep his legacy alive

TEDDY PENDERGRASS has been gone five long years, but his widow, Joan, still tears up when she talks about how the late soul singer died in her arms.

"The past five years have been a bittersweet time," she told me yesterday. "A lot has gone on."

That's an understatement.

A judge only recently settled a years-long, bitter dispute between Teddy's son and his wife over the soul singer's estate. Both presented wills, but it took until October for a Montgomery County judge to finally rule in Joan's favor. The document his son Theodore "Ted" Pendergrass II presented was declared fraudulent.

Around that same time, the transgender woman who had been in the car with Teddy the night of the fateful accident in 1982 that left him a quadriplegic gave an interview to the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Tenika Watson, a former nightclub performer, told OWN she had been riding in a Rolls-Royce with Pendergrass on Lincoln Drive when he lost control of the vehicle. Contrary to rumor, nothing sexual had taken place, Watson said.

"I wasn't surprised at her statement," said Joan, who married Pendergrass in 2008. "It was absolutely nothing different than what my husband had told me."

Joan, who lives in Boston, was in Philadelphia yesterday talking with reporters about how she plans to keep alive her husband's tremendous musical legacy.

It really is the stuff of musical legends. Pendergrass, who grew up in Philly, dropped out of high school to pursue a music career and wound up as the lead singer of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. In 1977, after disagreements with Melvin, Pendergrass broke away from the group and became an immediate sensation, performing concerts in front of women-only crowds as he crooned sultry ballads such as "Turn Off the Lights" and "Love TKO."

Women would throw lingerie and teddy bears at the stage while he sang:

"Close the door

Let me give you what you've been waiting for

Baby, I got so much love to give

And I wanna give it all to you . . ."

He was hypermasculine and would be dripping with sweat while he performed. The man reeked of sex.

Then, at the height of his fame, tragedy struck and he was left paralyzed and having to rebuild his life and career from a wheelchair. Joan met him in 2006. She still wears her six-carat engagement ring. Their wedding album shows them smiling broadly.

"He was happy that he had met someone that he could spend the remainder of his life with," said Helen McCrary Salahuddin, Teddy's attorney. "That he could depend on, that he could be honest with and that he knew loved him for who he was, the person. Not the star. Not the sex symbol - although I'm sure she loved the sex-symbol part, too. So, he was very happy."

He wouldn't have been happy about all the ugliness that took place after his 2010 death from complications from colon cancer. At his funeral, there were two separate repasts. Later, a second "will" surfaced, supposedly made without Joan's knowledge.

"Teddy wasn't that kind of person. He wouldn't do anything like that," Salahuddin pointed out. "Teddy Pendergrass was an honest man. He was an up-front man . . . there would be no reason why he would do anything behind Joan's back."

Joan now wants to focus on reactivating her husband's foundation to help people with spinal-cord injuries. She also wants Hollywood to make a movie on Teddy's life, starring Tyrese Gibson, and hopes to put together a traveling museum exhibit of her husband's belongings.

"I want to make sure that his music stays alive," Joan said. "It's very important that young people in the next generation know who Teddy Pendergrass was."