Between Genius and Tragedy
pbs masters marvin gaye
2008-05-07
by Ronda Racha Penrice

As tragic as the life and death of Marvin Gaye is, it’s a pleasant surprise for PBS’s acclaimed American Masters series to recognize his genius.

From the very beginning, "Marvin Gaye: What's Going On" captures you. Before a word is uttered, Marvin Gaye, looking Frank Sinatra dapper in a suit, takes a seat at the piano and croons “Heard It Through the Grapevine” to his own accompaniment. That’s when we hear Smokey Robinson proclaim, “Marvin Gaye was one of the most talented people I’ve ever known....One of the most musically creative minds ever... But he was a very troubled man...on the inside.”

The program doesn’t immediately launch into those troubles. Instead, it continues to wax poetic on Gaye’s genius. David Ritz, the renowned music biographer and author of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, explains Gaye’s gifts. “And one of the things that makes him such an incredibly attractive artist,” says Ritz conversationally, “is that he takes that which is raw and painful and transforms it into something that is absolutely gorgeous.” Michael Eric Dyson, the well-known cultural “critic” and author of Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye, cosigns and expounds on that with “Marvin Gaye understood how to reach the human being. He takes the mundance and breathes the transcendent into it.”

To show and prove their words, images of Gaye’s performances are interwoven between the conversations and presented as exhibit A. Marvin Gaye himself even testifies. When asked how he reacts to someone calling him a “legend,” he responds, “I think [of] a legend as what it is; it’s a story and I’m quite sure I have a story, how important it is or how terrific it is, I’m not so sure. It’s full of drama and life.”

That was an understatement. Family and friends aren’t mum about his chaotically short life, adding additional insight. It’s precisely that level of intimacy that makes this production so special. We don’t have to speculate on his temperamental behavior during his early years at Motown because he tells us. The many faces of Marvin Gaye literally emerge before our eyes. At times, he’s handsome and debonair and, at others, he’s frayed and unsure.

He’s an artist and that is abundantly clear, especially through his contradictions. He could be sweet but yet, according to Michael Eric Dyson, was competitive with Stevie Wonder, who was a child and blind. He marries Anna Gordy, Motown owner Berry Gordy’s sister and his first wife who is 36 to his 21 when they become an item, and, years later, at age 34, he falls for Janis Hunter, a young girl 17 years his junior whom he later married and had two children with. Nona Gaye is the product of that union. 

His upbringing was tumultous. His father was a pentecoastal minister who cross-dressed. He never gave Marvin the attention and approval he sought. Instead, his father filled him with tales of fire and brimstone, feeding Marvin’s internal war with the sacred and secular. It appears that he used drugs, alcohol and rolled with entourages to shield him from those demons. That didn’t work because his demons hit too close to home. Jeanne Gay (Marvin added an “e” to his last name), Marvin’s sister, is especially candid, recounting their childhoods and Marvin’s clashes with their father. It’s easy to see why Marvin was a mama’s boy and how his mother’s words, that he would one day be a sta,r nourished him. As for his father, regardless of the circumstances surrounding he and Marvin’s fatal clash, it’s hard to comprehend how any father could shoot his son dead. The fact that it occurred April 1, 1984, a day before Marvin’s 45th birthday, makes it all the more perplexing.

That’s what feeds Marvin’s legend, his story. Although we are never in suspense as to how this story will end,  we are shocked and saddened all over again. Perhaps because we still hear all the beautiful music: “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing Baby” and all those other duets he did with Tammi Terrell that a generation fell in love with and to. We feel Marvin’s loss when a brain tumor kills Terrell at age 24, when she was still so full of love and life to give. We feel his outrage at the Vietnam War and all war for that matter, mainly because we find ourselves nearly 40 years later still asking, ‘What’s Going On.’ When he switched our focus once again to making love instead of war, we couldn’t wait to “get it on” with him. We can’t fathom, even as Mary Wilson tells the story, that he worried whether “Sexual Healing,” a huge comeback single for him, would hit or not.

"Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On" doesn’t have to sell us on Marvin Gaye’s genius and it knows that. Through the intimate interviews, the music and the countless hauntingly beautiful photographs of Marvin, living, loving and sharing his gift, it makes us want to holler all over again, even if it’s because it was so wonderful that we experienced him at all.

Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On premiers on May 7, 9 p.m., nationally on most PBS stations.

Veteran freelance writer and self-diagnosed television junkie Ronda Racha Penrice is the author of African American History For Dummies, which includes chapters on film/television and music.