Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (20 page)

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon

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In September 1978 Marvin signed a seven-year deal with Motown for masses of money, and in October filed for bankruptcy with debts of almost $7 million. He toured to half-full houses and collapsed onstage in Tennessee due to “physical exhaustion,” spending his usual few days in the hospital. He made attempts but would never quite recover from what he believed to be a blasphemous lifestyle.

Here, My Dear
received malicious reviews and didn’t sell. Marvin desperately wanted to make a commercial record, but most of the songs on his next album,
Love Man,
were wrenching pleas for Janis to come back to him. There was another threadbare bus tour through the United States with Marvin going through the motions of mopping his sweaty brow and bestowing damp, silky scarves. But if he wasn’t in the mood to perform, he would instruct the driver to just keep on driving.

Back in L.A., Marvin turned up at his mother-in-law’s house to see Jan and the children and was promptly arrested and beaten up by the police when he refused to leave. His recording studio was shut down and his home in Hidden Hills repossessed. Certain that Jan was in love with Motown’s newest cock-rocker, Rick James, Marvin was devastated when another soul singer, Teddy Pendergrass, made off with his woman. When his latest prizefighter, Andy Price, was knocked out by Sugar Ray Leonard in an embarrassing three-minute fiasco, Marvin dropped out, taking his plentiful troubles to Hawaii.

Jan came to visit Marvin in exile when her relationship with Teddy Pendergrass ended, but the Gayes continued their brawling in paradise. “I nearly killed her,” he admitted. “I had a knife about an inch from her heart.” Marvin claimed to have snorted an ounce of cocaine in one hour, but even though he wanted to die, “God wasn’t ready to take me.” When Jan left, four-year-old Frankie stayed with Marvin. For a while father and son lived in a bread van. His mother, Alberta, came to Hawaii for a few weeks, paying the rent by pawning her diamonds, but during this harrowing time, Marvin never, ever heard from Father.

Brother Frankie and his wife, Irene, also spent time with Marvin in Hawaii and have some fond memories. “Marvin taught me to make lemonade,” Irene says, smiling. “He was very warm and sweet, he really cared about people. He used to tell Frankie that
he
was the rich one because he loved to walk in the garden, spend time with his family.” Frankie tries to explain Marvin’s erratic behavior: “As an artist you’re constantly giving something. It takes a lot from you. But an artist has to give. If not, it’s like a bucket of water that’s never emptied, the water will stagnate … . Or a rose that refuses to give off fragrance. It’s gonna die.” Does Frankie feel that Marvin’s immense fame kept him from having the normal life he seemed to crave? “If you can put it in its
place, it doesn‘t—which is really hard. If someone exalts you, makes you a god, you have to keep your feet on the ground. That’s what was so special about Marvin. He would say, ‘I’m a human being, I’m with you, I’m no bigger than you. God loves you as much as he loves me.’ This is what I admired about my brother more than anything—he never lost touch with the fact that his God wanted him to love his fellow man.”

After one of the many times he hit bottom, Marvin realized he still had something vital to say and sent for his musicians to begin rehearsing. The idea of imminent nuclear annihilation began to consume him, and he felt he needed to cut another record to sound a warning. But the message would have to wait for a while. Since Uncle Sam was demanding two million dollars, Marvin took his pain on a tour of Europe. The shows were chaotic and well received, but Marvin was erratic and unpredictable, once climbing out a bathroom window to escape performing. When he kept Princess Margaret waiting for hours, the British press proclaimed SOUL SINGER SNUBS ROYALTY! The drugs were rampant, as were the women. At the end of the tour Marvin couldn’t face going back to his many problems in America, and ended up spending months holed up in his London hotel room, freebasing cocaine, before moving across the North Sea to Belgium with a Dutch girlfriend, Eugenie Vis.

While he was away, Motown had released Marvin’s unfinished record,
In Our Lifetime,
without his permission, and he vowed never to record for the record label again. “How could they embarrass me like that?” Marvin asked his biographer, David Ritz. “I was humiliated. They also added guitar licks and bass lines. How dare they second-guess my artistic decisions? Can you imagine saying to an artist, say Picasso, ‘Okay, Pablo, you’ve been fooling with this picture long enough. We’ll take your unfinished canvas and add a leg here, an arm there. You might be the artist, but you’re behind schedule, so we’ll finish up this painting for you. If you don’t like the results, Pablo baby, that’s tough!’ I was heartbroken … .” The record didn’t sell.

A music devotee and longtime fan of Marvin’s, Freddy Cousaert, ran a
pension
in the fishing village of Ostend, where Marvin went to stay in the spring of 1981. Cousaert, a successful businessman, was determined to get Marvin back on his feet and back in the studio, where he belonged. Marvin soon became a local celebrity and the subject of a Belgian television special, on which he declared, “I’m disappointed with America, with governments. To govern people is a tremendous responsibility. It should be in the hands of those who are righteous, moral, and sane.” He then added, “But I’m disappointed in myself. Because perhaps I’m selfish, perhaps I’m spoiled.”

During his stay in Ostend, Marvin started pulling himself together, jogging and riding his racing bike along the beach every day, spending quiet evenings with the Cousaert family. His drug taking was tempered, but it continued while long-distance negotiations went on between Motown and CBS, who finally
bought Marvin’s contract from Berry Gordy for $1.5 million. Said senior VP Larkin Arnold, “He was one of ten or fifteen tremendously gifted artists. Once I heard he’d become disenchanted, I leapt at the opportunity.” Early in 1982 Marvin began recording in Brussels.

Biographer David Ritz gave Marvin the idea for the song “Sexual Healing” during a visit to Ostend. “Gaye’s apartment was filled with sadomasochistic magazines and books by Georges Picard, a European cartoonist in whose drawings women were sexually brutalized,” Ritz said in
Divided Soul.
“I suggested that Marvin needed sexual healing, a concept which broke his creative block.” His old friend and first mentor, Harvey Fuqua, was brought in to produce the album
Midnight Love.

When the song was released in October 1982,
Billboard
magazine announced that “Sexual Healing” was the fastest-selling soul single in five years. It stayed at the number-one spot for four months, bringing Marvin Gaye back to Los Angeles and back into the much-desired but damning spotlight.

Breaking new musical ground in three different decades just wasn’t enough for Marvin. Never deeply satisfied, he fretted over the obscene success of Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
and Lionel Richie’s middle-of-the-road triumphs. When I ask Frankie if Marvin had a competitive nature, he responds with a knowing grin, “Oh yeah. It’s a chess game. It was his craft. I don’t think any artist is ever satisfied.” Still, when CBS wanted him out on the road, Marvin’s paranoia kept him home. When I ask Frankie why, he has a simple answer:

“Drugs. Paranoia goes hand in hand with drugs.”

While Marvin enjoyed visits with his first wife, Anna, he went on relentlessly pursuing Jan. Despite constant hassles with the IRS, he spent a lot of peaceful time with his children and at the family home in Gramercy with his mother. Then Father returned from six months in Washington and the atmosphere once more became unbearably strained.

Marvin’s inner tumult was obvious, but there were some happy times. His divine rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star game brought people to their feet and to tears. In February “Sexual Healing” finally earned Marvin two long-overdue Grammys, but Uncle Sam was always on his case. Realizing that the endless string of bills had to be paid, Marvin reluctantly went back on the road soon after his forty-fourth birthday, in April 1983. He knew that nobody expected him to complete the tour, which was the only reason he vowed to see it through. New York’s Radio City Music Hall was sold out eight nights in a row, but on opening night Marvin turned up an hour and a half late, shouting until the curtain rose about how much he hated to perform. He took his preacher and his drug dealer on the road, running madly back and forth from one illusion to the other. “There was more coke on that tour than on any tour in the history of entertainment,” said one of the musicians. “Marvin was smoking it, even eating it.” Onstage he prowled the stage in a robe and, in a sad sex-symbol parody, stripped down to his underwear during the “Sexual Healing” finale. He was hospitalized again, missing several shows. Marvin didn’t trust anyone, even claiming that he was being stalked, that Jan was conspiring to have him murdered. He took to wearing a bulletproof vest, insisting that one of his roadies carry a submachine gun. There were armed guards in the wings and standing watch at his hotel room door. Marvin’s paranoia was total but uncannily clear. He believed wholeheartedly that he would soon be gunned down and killed.

Toward the end: Marvin finally gets his Grammy. (RON WOLFSON/LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)

When he got back to Los Angeles in August, facing half-filled houses, Marvin was a shattered shell and, despite the presence of Father, crawled back to his mama’s house and shut the door forever. He stayed in bed all day, frozen with fear, waiting for the devil. He wanted his mother to sleep by his side every night. Strange people kept coming by, selling him drugs and all kinds of guns. He spent hours sitting against the wall holding a pistol. He rarely ate because he believed somebody was trying to poison him. Marvin took so many drugs, he lost track of who he was. Sometimes girls came to visit, but Marvin Gaye didn’t feel he deserved the company of women. His mother, Alberta, told David Ritz that Marvin roughed up a couple of women who came to pay him a visit. “He lost control and hit them. My son, my poor son, turned into a monster.” One of his girlfriends, Carole Pinon Cummings, had recently filed a six-figure lawsuit, claiming Marvin had beaten her repeatedly. He couldn’t dress himself. He couldn’t feed himself. With the shades always drawn, Marvin snorted coke and watched pornography. In the room next door Father drank his vodka. During semilucid moments Marvin ranted at Father to leave the Gramercy house, and Father told the family he would kill Marvin if he came near him.

It was April 1, 1984, the eve of Marvin’s forty-fifth birthday, when Father called upstairs for his wife to help him locate an insurance company letter. Alberta was lying beside Marvin in bed, attempting to comfort her tormented son. Marvin hollered back to Father that if he wanted to speak to Mother, he’d better come upstairs. When the elder Gay got there and reprimanded his wife, Marvin became enraged and attacked Father, pushing him into the hallway. Only moments later Father was back. In his hand was the .38 revolver that Marvin had given him a few months earlier. He level the gun at his son and
pulled the trigger. Marvin stumbled back against the wall, and as his son lay dying, Father walked closer and shot Marvin one more time at very close range. Alberta was afraid for her own life and begged Father not to kill her, too. But Father had no intention of doing so.

I ask Frankie if Marvin’s friends and family attempted to get him some help during those hellish final few months. “He didn’t really feel he needed that much help,” he asserts. “We were very much into God taking care of us if you asked Him, as far as healing goes, especially as far as the spirit. Man can help you as far as helping you come down from drugs, but to be really strong comes from your faith.” Through all of his private turmoil, did Marvin ever question his faith? “You have to ask yourself, ‘Did Moses question
his
faith?’ It’s always the battle between good and evil, and it’s how strong you are whether you win that battle or not. You always pray to Jesus for your strength because nothing else matters. If you have Jesus with you, you can win anything with Him, but it’s a constant battle. Lucifer has conquered stronger men than me and Marvin and my father.”

The sins of the father: Marvin Sr. in handcuffs after killing his firstborn. (AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)