The anguished life of Marvin Gaye ended on April 1, 1984, at the home in Los Angeles he had bought for his parents, when a bullet from a .38 calibre revolver fired by his father tore into his heart. With the kind of savage irony that seemed to permeate every area of Gaye's life, the death weapon had been a gift some weeks previously from the singer to his father.
"I think that giving the gun to his father was quite intentional," considers David Ritz, the author of Divided Soul, a startlingly rich and infinitely detailed biography of the singer. "Marvin knew what he was doing: he wanted to die. Only four days before he was shot he'd jumped out of a car that was travelling at 60mph along a Los Angeles freeway."
Originally hired as Gaye's official biographer, Ritz eventually fell out with his subject, but not before he had talked with Gaye extensively and been given access to his family. As a result, after the killing Ritz possessed a goldmine of material for what is unquestionably a definitive pop music biography.
In the news reports of Gaye's death, the singer's father was painted as a God-fearing preacher, exacting Old Testament retribution on an unrepentant, hardened sinner. Little about Marvin Pentz Gay Sr, could have been further from the truth – except, that is, for the Old Testament aspect. For the church in which he was a minister, the House of God, was an eccentric Southern sect that drew equally from orthodox Judaism and Pentecostal Christianity: the Sabbath is held to be Saturday; from Passover to Harvest Festival women wear only white, their pillbox hats adorned with pale blue Stars of David; on the Day of Atonement, disciples of the House of God fast and pray in church for the entire 24 hours.
As with so many soul singers, it was in church that Marvin Gaye gave his first vocal performances. But even here lay the roots of one of the myriad contradictions that collided ceaselessly within him: for his father's church saw the use of music for secular purposes as an unredeemable sin. Here, in the certainty that he was not fulfilling his spiritual potential, lay the cause of much of the self-disgust that shadowed Gaye for most of his career. As Ritz says: "Marvin was constantly enraged at himself for not developing as an artist in a religious way. He was angered by his lack of self-discipline, by the fact that-he could never give up cocaine, which he started doing in the early years of Motown."
A history of violence ran like a curse through the Gay (Marvin added the 'e' to his name) family on his father's side. Ritz again: "Marvin's mother told me that there was all kinds of violence in the family in Kentucky. She said that one of her brothers-in-law had actually killed a woman. Marvin was haunted by this background: he felt he must have inherited his father's sin. But it was just as bad on the mother's side: her father actually once shot her mother, though he didn't kill her, and he died in a hospital for the insane."
And, if this wasn't enough, a thick vein of sexual confusion ran through Gaye's family life. Ritz: 'His father was the only one of several brothers who was not openly gay. But all the same he loved dressing up in women's clothes and would frequently wear dresses, suspender belts and stockings around the house. I think he must have passed this on to his son, because Marvin told me that he himself had a fascination with dressing up in women's clothes, and would from time to time indulge himself."
The merciless, sadistic beatings that his frequently drunken father would deal him as a child led to Gaye growing ever closer to his mother, a relationship that only intensified the turmoil within him. And the family surname helped not one jot: "The name Gay was far too close to home. He was intensely frightened that he'd also inherited that tendency of his father's family, but it was something he was determined to ignore or repress. I remember once after one of his concerts a man shook his hand in what could only be described as a gay way. As we drove off Marvin was protesting to me that he should have beaten the shit out of the guy. There was an awful lot of over-compensation – it wasn't anything he wanted to confront at all."
Marvin Gaye's personal battle, says Ritz, took place on that thin line that separates spirituality and sensuality, the difference between the truth of his masterpiece, 'What's Going On', and the Me Generation paean to sex of 'Let's Get It On'. "He became trapped in the image of Marvin Gaye as a sex symbol. Marvin was really a very shy, retiring man. But as the pressures on him became greater and greater, his humanity became diminished. One of the reasons he did so much cocaine was to impose upon himself the need to get out onstage and shake his cock about. In his own mind he was only a sex symbol – though that certainly wasn't merely what his audiences saw him as. But he wound up attempting to become that self-image, and so had contempt for himself.
"In the latter part of his career," continues Ritz, "he was plagued by impotence, which was the result of both the cocaine and the desire to live up to his own myth, having to live up to all those women he was supposed to satisfy: if you had 1,000 naked women lying there in front of you, your dick might crawl away and hide. Also, Marvin by nature was not a promiscuous man, and he just couldn't pull off the act. But he could never really see women as human beings – they were either angels or harlots: his mythologising of women caused him immense pain."
Never comfortable with the superstud ethos of black ghetto life in Washington where he grew up, Gaye didn't lose his virginity until he was 17 when he enlisted for a short time as a regular in the USAAF. And this first sexual encounter was with a prostitute in the local cathouse, a cathartic experience, as he told Ritz: "I felt betrayed. Sex was crude and frightening. Suddenly I could see a world of pure sex where people turned off their minds and fed their lusts, no questions asked. The concept sickened me, but I also found it exciting."
On the road in later life, as desirable women clamoured for a piece of him, Gaye would frequently ignore their offers and return alone to his hotel room, to wake in the arms of whichever hooker he had hired for the night. "Prostitutes protect me from passion," he said in an interview with Actuel magazine the year before he died. "Passions are dangerous. They cause you to lust after other men's wives."
Ritz does not however confine his story to the sordid and salacious details of Marvin Gaye's life. Rather, he examines them in the context of Gaye's art, a large body of work he sums up in the penultimate paragraph of Divided Soul: "He had the rare courage to pour the pain of his troubled life into his art, and, as a result, his art was expanded and enriched. His creations, like prayers, were filled with a longing for love, not selflove, but a far wiser, far larger love, a love that transcends ego and turns our hearts back to the source of art itself. Marvin's music – the sexual as well as the spiritual – is God-given, God-inspired, God-blessed."
"I think that giving the gun to his father was quite intentional," considers David Ritz, the author of Divided Soul, a startlingly rich and infinitely detailed biography of the singer. "Marvin knew what he was doing: he wanted to die. Only four days before he was shot he'd jumped out of a car that was travelling at 60mph along a Los Angeles freeway."
Originally hired as Gaye's official biographer, Ritz eventually fell out with his subject, but not before he had talked with Gaye extensively and been given access to his family. As a result, after the killing Ritz possessed a goldmine of material for what is unquestionably a definitive pop music biography.
In the news reports of Gaye's death, the singer's father was painted as a God-fearing preacher, exacting Old Testament retribution on an unrepentant, hardened sinner. Little about Marvin Pentz Gay Sr, could have been further from the truth – except, that is, for the Old Testament aspect. For the church in which he was a minister, the House of God, was an eccentric Southern sect that drew equally from orthodox Judaism and Pentecostal Christianity: the Sabbath is held to be Saturday; from Passover to Harvest Festival women wear only white, their pillbox hats adorned with pale blue Stars of David; on the Day of Atonement, disciples of the House of God fast and pray in church for the entire 24 hours.
As with so many soul singers, it was in church that Marvin Gaye gave his first vocal performances. But even here lay the roots of one of the myriad contradictions that collided ceaselessly within him: for his father's church saw the use of music for secular purposes as an unredeemable sin. Here, in the certainty that he was not fulfilling his spiritual potential, lay the cause of much of the self-disgust that shadowed Gaye for most of his career. As Ritz says: "Marvin was constantly enraged at himself for not developing as an artist in a religious way. He was angered by his lack of self-discipline, by the fact that-he could never give up cocaine, which he started doing in the early years of Motown."
A history of violence ran like a curse through the Gay (Marvin added the 'e' to his name) family on his father's side. Ritz again: "Marvin's mother told me that there was all kinds of violence in the family in Kentucky. She said that one of her brothers-in-law had actually killed a woman. Marvin was haunted by this background: he felt he must have inherited his father's sin. But it was just as bad on the mother's side: her father actually once shot her mother, though he didn't kill her, and he died in a hospital for the insane."
And, if this wasn't enough, a thick vein of sexual confusion ran through Gaye's family life. Ritz: 'His father was the only one of several brothers who was not openly gay. But all the same he loved dressing up in women's clothes and would frequently wear dresses, suspender belts and stockings around the house. I think he must have passed this on to his son, because Marvin told me that he himself had a fascination with dressing up in women's clothes, and would from time to time indulge himself."
The merciless, sadistic beatings that his frequently drunken father would deal him as a child led to Gaye growing ever closer to his mother, a relationship that only intensified the turmoil within him. And the family surname helped not one jot: "The name Gay was far too close to home. He was intensely frightened that he'd also inherited that tendency of his father's family, but it was something he was determined to ignore or repress. I remember once after one of his concerts a man shook his hand in what could only be described as a gay way. As we drove off Marvin was protesting to me that he should have beaten the shit out of the guy. There was an awful lot of over-compensation – it wasn't anything he wanted to confront at all."
Marvin Gaye's personal battle, says Ritz, took place on that thin line that separates spirituality and sensuality, the difference between the truth of his masterpiece, 'What's Going On', and the Me Generation paean to sex of 'Let's Get It On'. "He became trapped in the image of Marvin Gaye as a sex symbol. Marvin was really a very shy, retiring man. But as the pressures on him became greater and greater, his humanity became diminished. One of the reasons he did so much cocaine was to impose upon himself the need to get out onstage and shake his cock about. In his own mind he was only a sex symbol – though that certainly wasn't merely what his audiences saw him as. But he wound up attempting to become that self-image, and so had contempt for himself.
"In the latter part of his career," continues Ritz, "he was plagued by impotence, which was the result of both the cocaine and the desire to live up to his own myth, having to live up to all those women he was supposed to satisfy: if you had 1,000 naked women lying there in front of you, your dick might crawl away and hide. Also, Marvin by nature was not a promiscuous man, and he just couldn't pull off the act. But he could never really see women as human beings – they were either angels or harlots: his mythologising of women caused him immense pain."
Never comfortable with the superstud ethos of black ghetto life in Washington where he grew up, Gaye didn't lose his virginity until he was 17 when he enlisted for a short time as a regular in the USAAF. And this first sexual encounter was with a prostitute in the local cathouse, a cathartic experience, as he told Ritz: "I felt betrayed. Sex was crude and frightening. Suddenly I could see a world of pure sex where people turned off their minds and fed their lusts, no questions asked. The concept sickened me, but I also found it exciting."
On the road in later life, as desirable women clamoured for a piece of him, Gaye would frequently ignore their offers and return alone to his hotel room, to wake in the arms of whichever hooker he had hired for the night. "Prostitutes protect me from passion," he said in an interview with Actuel magazine the year before he died. "Passions are dangerous. They cause you to lust after other men's wives."
Ritz does not however confine his story to the sordid and salacious details of Marvin Gaye's life. Rather, he examines them in the context of Gaye's art, a large body of work he sums up in the penultimate paragraph of Divided Soul: "He had the rare courage to pour the pain of his troubled life into his art, and, as a result, his art was expanded and enriched. His creations, like prayers, were filled with a longing for love, not selflove, but a far wiser, far larger love, a love that transcends ego and turns our hearts back to the source of art itself. Marvin's music – the sexual as well as the spiritual – is God-given, God-inspired, God-blessed."
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