The Story of Motown by Peter Benjaminson

Author:Peter Benjaminson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2018-11-07T02:12:11+00:00

Chapter Fourteen—Gordy Arrives

The man who built the Motown machine changed a great deal as his company changed.

He became increasingly less accessible to his own employees, the press, and the general public over the years—to the point of paranoia. He began to dislike revealing his own age. He turned down many industry awards because they would have required him to appear in public. He declined to be pictured on the cover of a weekly news magazine.

He traveled under assumed names (D. Thompson was one) and sometimes in disguise. Wearing dark glasses and a phony beard, he once found himself boarding a plane to Europe with movie producer Otto Preminger, who was wearing a brunet wig and dark glasses. The two men recognized each other under the disguises and laughed. Gordy later grew a real beard.

Gordy tossed a cloak over his family as well. When his mother died in 1975, he refused to reveal her age (about seventy) and didn’t attend the funeral, perhaps to avoid publicity. But in an era when rich men hired bodyguards to protect themselves and their families against ransom-seeking kidnappers, such reclusiveness was easily understandable.

(In the late 1970s, Gordy began to relax. He attended the first meeting of the new Black Music Association in 1978 and was elected honorary chairman of the organization’s advisory board. In April 1979, when Diana Ross gave a concert in Atlanta, Gordy attended the National Conference of Black Mayors, which was being held at the same time in that city.)

In any case, Gordy didn’t have long to get used to earning a lot of money. In 1959, he was earning $47.70 a week and was heavily in debt. By 1960, he had worked his way up to $110 a week. By 1973, however, he was earning $10 million a year. He was said to be the richest black man in America.

“Insecure and Frightened”

“He’s insecure, frightened about what he’s got, and unsure of whether he can control what he’s got,” a former Motown executive said. “He couldn’t possibly be prepared for all the money that came to him.”

Gordy may have been frightened on some levels, but his ego wasn’t cowed. Even as a young amateur boxer from Detroit, he was described as a “cocky don’t-give-a-hoot so-and-so” by one of his boxing coaches. Sudden riches made him even more cocky. “I earned $387 million in sixteen years,” he told people. “I must be doing something right.” (“You must be doing a lot of things right” was the common response.)

His ego was so large, in fact, that he modeled himself on Napoleon Bonaparte. His older sister, Esther Edwards, gave him an oil painting of himself as Napoleon. He hung it in his house. The portrait showed Gordy standing by a chair, his hand in his vest, wearing a sword, grenadier boots, and full imperial regalia. “It’s like something you’d see in Mad magazine,” said one person who saw the portrait. But Gordy’s sister gave it to him in the best of faith, as if she knew it was in keeping with his personality.

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