Honor Thy Brother-In-Law: A Visit With Marvin Gaye
This used to be Berry Gordy’s house, the Motown man says, sitting on the main couch in the sunken parlor. Then Berry solidified his R&B kingdom, found his own castles, and sold the place to his brother-in-law, Marvin Gaye. We sit in an area of town near the Wayne County line, to the north of downtown Detroit. Driving out here, the Motown man had taken his right hand off the steering wheel to indicate the division . . . “the rich white folks over on that side . . . the rich black folks on this side of the street.” We turned this way, to the ranch-level home, all snow outside, all gold (the walls, the furnishings) and green (the plants) inside.
Up from the parlor area, around the corner, we hear music, stopping/rewinding/restarting. Marvin is at work. Soon enough, however, he glides into view, picks a spot on the hallway, stops, and smiles. Dressed and exuding casual . . . cozy . . . loafy. He’s been doing some things on his next album, he says, and he looks happy and hungry. It’s 1:30.
“Can I offer you gentlemen something? Scotch? Grass? Gimlet?” and he slides out of view.
He returns, sits down to wait for lunch, and immediately begins chattering. He went out the other night and saw Smokey Robinson in the local segment of the Miracles’ farewell tour. “I never seen him perform quite like that before,” says Marvin, who once drummed for the Miracles on the road. He pokes fun at a teenager who runs around the house acting like a second servant. “He couldn’t figure out what to call me,” says Marvin. “Started with ‘Mr. Gaye,’ and I said ‘no’; then he called me ‘Sir,’ and I said to never call me ‘sir.’ ‘Marvin?’ ‘Absolutely not!'”
He talks to one of the three children who are constantly nearby (one his own, two adopted), playing and screeching at each other. “‘We ain’t doin’ nothin’,'” he repeats, in his high velvet voice, eyes laughing. “That’s great, the way we talk. That’s our birthright. Our own ethnic thing.”
He chuckles at himself, at the coaster on the table, a miniaturized, laminated Marvin Gaye Hello Broadway album cover. He fingers his silk shirt, as if searching for something. “I never understood people who leave cleaners’ tags on their clothes,” he finally observes, and he breaks into another tight, light laugh, crinkling his eyes. And, of course, it stoned me.
100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Marvin Gaye
The Motown man had cautioned, on the way from downtown, “Don’t expect him to be too open at first,” and in fact our meeting was an uncertainty until the last minute. “We hope Wednesday,” the beleaguered man had said from Detroit while we made flight plans. “He’s kind of a moody guy.” I had planned to meet Marvin Gaye nearly three years ago in Los Angeles; Marvin didn’t show. Now, besides “Hitch Hike” and “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and all the others in the early Sixties and “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” early in ’69, there was his personal triumph, What’s Going On, to talk about. And yet he had stopped touring shortly after “Grapevine” hit the top; and he stayed silent through the death of Tammi Terrell, with whom he’d had several hit records.
Motown biographed him as a quiet, conservative fellow, son of a Washington, D.C., minister, now “an avid television fan” who stayed at home with his wife Anne and their son, Marvin III. “Usually, we just lounge around listening to Tony Martin, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, or Harry Belafonte,” Marvin was quoted in 1966.
Early the next year, a serious-sounding Gaye defined a goal for another bio: “To realize completeness within myself,” and, in performance, to seek truth, combining “sincerity, love, duty, and a positive approach to people and audiences.”
Then, the long lull, lasting until after he’d picked off a handful of honors at the end of last year – from all the trades, from Time, from the NAACP – for his finely-woven What’s Going On. And it was announced that he would host the first Martin Luther King Birthday Commemoration concert in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 12th. At the last minute, he backed out.
Now, a month later, on a crisp, snowy afternoon at home, he is breaking his silence . . . but what a way to break. He is saying how a year ago he wanted to be a football star. Now, he runs several miles to begin each day, and he has regular training sessions with a boxing coach across town, in the ghetto.
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