by Berry Gordy
One thing was certain: I had to drastically cut my costs. Coming up with a cost-cutting program was rough, very rough. We all knew we were too fat—way overstaffed. But many were like my family. Some were my family.
At the time, Alan Salke, my personal business adviser, had an answer. He wanted to save the company. And if I was really serious and really wanted to cut costs, I would have to “be dramatic.” He suggested I get rid of half the employees by listing them in alphabetical order and firing every other name on the list—regardless.
“Great,” I said, “but what if my name falls in the wrong place?”
“Too bad,” he said. “Just do it!”
Instead, I put through a 15 percent cut for all of the executive salaries and outside consultants.
Alan Salke’s next recommendation was to sell Jobete, the highest offer being $27 million. Seeing no alternative, I seriously considered it. But because of contractual complications one thing led to another, so I decided, instead, for the first time in my life to get a business loan from the bank.
The bank. That’s a place where you should only borrow money when you don’t need it. Because then, they will give it to you on the best terms and with the best attitude. But when you do need it, like I did, everything is just the opposite. They even required that the money we got from our distributors go directly to a locked box at the bank where they would pay themselves first, then us. I had no option but to go for it.
And so, as a new decade began, I finalized the details of the loan and I teetered on a tightrope into the eighties.
Smokey had always wanted to come through with a big hit when the company needed it most. And with the release of “Cruisin’” from his hit album Where There’s Smoke, he did.
More help came from Diana with her album entitled Diana, which had two hit singles, “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out.”
Less than a year after the disappointing Plants album, Stevie redeemed himself with the sizzling Hotter Than July, which included “Happy Birthday,” the song he had written in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King. Stevie, totally dedicated to the fight for human rights, was one of the main activists behind the campaign to establish Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday. That made us all proud.
After a year, I was able to pay off the bank loan.
By this time, I had hired Jay Lasker as president of the record company. A veteran in the business, he was known for his marketing genius, tough leadership ability and dogmatic, hard-hitting personality.
I had been looking for a czar to run Motown and Jay was just that—a strong, cigar-smoking powerhouse. At his first meeting as president he brought all the department heads together. “If anybody disagrees with me and goes to Berry Gordy and he agrees with you, that’s fine,” he told them, “but if he doesn’t, you’re fired.”
Some of the employees couldn’t get out of the meeting fast enough to tell me what he had said. They thought this would bother me, but it didn’t. Jay was just the kind of guy I was looking for.
While Jay was outspoken and direct, he proved to be someone I respected and valued highly. He was forthright and honest and a great packager, taking many of our biggest hits from over the years and re-releasing them in new “best of” compilations.
Not only were we getting hits from some of our established artists and revenue from Jay’s marketing techniques, we were also starting to break some new acts.
Lionel Richie, who by then had left the Commodores, became very hot in the eighties. His first album, Lionel Richie, was a smash—as was its #1 single, “Truly.”
Another new act who struck gold with their second album, All This Love, was DeBarge, a family of youngsters led by a gifted singing and writing talent, El DeBarge. And then there was outrageous Rick James, taking our music in a totally new direction, coining phrases I had never heard before. Cocky and wild, he was considered the King of Punk Funk, coming out with smash hits like “You And I” and “Super Freak.” His live shows were so daring they shocked me.
Rick did it all—singer, musician, writer, arranger, producer. Watching him work in the studio was amazing. He was innovative and could come up with some of the greatest rhythms and vocal arrangements in his head, on the spot. Aside from producing himself, he produced the Tempts, the Mary Jane Girls—whom he brought in—and a discovery of mine, Teena Marie, a young, white, talented singer who became a brilliant writer and producer in her own right.
As good as everything was it wasn’t enough, but I knew we were on the right track.
Then the unthinkable happened.
In December of ’80, shortly after Diana (no longer married to Bob Silberstein) started dating Gene Simmons of Kiss, a heavyset stranger came to see me. He said he was the group’s merchandising man. He walked into my office, announced himself as a representative of Diana, and got right down to business. He told me I had the “inside track.” He was giving me the first option to match a $20 million offer if I wanted to keep her.
My mind was reeling. “Very interesting,” I said.
After Mahogany, I knew things were bound to change somewhat between us, but never in my wildest dreams did I see her leaving the company. I had taken her for granted. I somehow thought the careers of Diana Ross and Berry Gordy were linked forever.
Only a few months before she’d had the biggest album of her career, Diana, and her current single, “It’s My Turn,” was reaching the Top 10.
It was the title song from a movie, ironically, about a woman going off on her own.
I told the man, “I can’t comment any further until I talk to Diana.”
A few weeks later he returned with Diana and she assured me that he was representing her.
After a long discussion in which I went over the benefits of her staying with the company that knew her and knew how best to work with her, she gave me the hopeful feeling that she would come back and work things out.
She did come back, for a meeting at my house between the two of us. But when I met her at the door, the firm set of her jaw and the sharp click of her high heels on the wooden floor told me that working something out was probably not what she had in mind. I was calm, but not happy.
The two of us sat down in my library. Eyes not connecting. Cups clinking against saucers. Clothes being smoothed that were already smooth.
Looking at her face I saw many emotions: a mixture of respect, defiance, nervousness and yes, love, though it was impossible to know what she was really thinking. When she called me “Berry,” instead of “Black,” the affectionate nickname we had used for each other all these years, I knew she was leaving.
“This isn’t easy for either of us,” I thought she may have said, but what I heard more clearly was a young Diana laughing playfully as she jumped up on my lap while I sat mixing in the Hitsville studio control room. That skinny kid had blossomed into a magnificent creature who romanced the entire world. Images were going off in my brain like flashbulbs—Diana victorious on stage, raising her hands in triumph; me protecting her as we dashed through mobs of screaming fans; her face in close-up—serene, sexy, beautiful, sad and bluesy. She, dancing around me, soft and sensuous, and now, for the first time, moving away. Going for the big money, money I could not match.
“Money is only a part of value,” I said softly. “Value is everything you have—your team, people who know you—love you.” I wanted to remind her of what we’d accomplished together and what we could do in the future, but I knew it was too late. “If RCA is willing to pay you that kind of money, I guess you should take it.”
In May of 1981, she signed a deal with RCA. I could understand logically and rationally why she did it, but it killed me. After twenty-one years, all of a sudden, she was gone.
MOTOWN 25
A little over a year and a half later.
“Gotta run, boss,” Suzanne de Passe said as she stood up from the chair in front of my oak wood desk. “I’m meeting Richard Pryor for lunch.”
Great, I’ve got crises c
oming out of my ears and one of my top executives has to cut short a meeting with me to go and hobnob with celebrities.
“Lunch? Again?”
In our ongoing mentor-mentee relationship, Suzanne and I had mastered communication with each other to a seamless art, so when I said, “Lunch? Again?” she knew I was making a dig about her upwardly mobile lifestyle and the frequency of her “doing” lunch with entertainment notables. From the moment that Motown had made its move to California, Suzanne had set her sights on becoming an important player in Hollywood. And now, as the head of Motown Productions, she was.
“But didn’t you hear what I said? I’m meeting Richard Pryor for lunch.”
“I heard you.”
“Want me to cancel?”
“Oh, no, no. You made a date,” I said, “you keep it. Far be it for me to stop you from your social affairs.”
Ignoring my sarcasm, she told me this was far from being a social affair. She was going to ask Richard to emcee a TV special she was trying to put together in honor of me.
“First of all, I don’t want to be honored,” I said. “And secondly, you’re wasting time that could be used to help me with what I want to be helped with.”
She told me the artists loved and respected me and this was a chance for them to show it.
“If they want to show it,” I said, “why do they forget to mention me when they’re on TV?”
“It’s not that they forget mentioning you,” she said, “they avoid it. And it’s all your fault.”
“Oh?”
“Competition!” She told me the very thing I had done to make them strong was now coming back to haunt me. “Some may have left, but none ever stopped competing. They compete with each other, the outside world, themselves, but mostly with you—the big guy, the father figure, the giant who once controlled their lives. Nothing they did was ever quite good enough for you.”
She was right. I had never stopped pushing. Suzanne said she knew how they felt because she was one of them. She had gone through rougher times with me than most and had become a star in her own right. However, she explained, “Just because I understood the greater purpose didn’t make it any less painful.” Just before she headed out the door, she said, “You’ve created a great desire in all of us. It’s called ‘Beat the Teacher.’”
“Say hello to Richard for me,” I said.
Four months later, Motown 25 was about to happen. I found myself getting excited. With the date for the taping less than three weeks away, Suzanne, the executive producer of the event, swept into my office and told me she was thrilled by how much the artists wanted to do it for me. “But,” she added, “I want to fill you in on a few details.”
“Okay.”
“First,” she said, “Lionel Richie won’t be able to attend, but will do a video.” He would sing a song to the little poster girl for sickle-cell anemia—which the TV special was a benefit for.
“Wonderful. And?”
“Stevie thought it was a great idea. He’ll definitely do it. That is, if he can postpone his trip to Africa.”
I knew Suzanne was building to something so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Oh, there’s a little problem I need your help with. Two holdouts.”
“Yeah?”
“Marvin and Michael.”
“Oh, I thought it was gonna be someone important.”
She laughed nervously.
“They don’t want to do it, huh?”
“Oh no,” she said, “they want to do it all right but I think Marvin wants you to ask him personally. And Michael said he was overexposed on TV but would definitely sit in the audience to support you.” She said she was sure I could get them to do it if I would just talk to them.
“You want me to ask them to honor me. Are you crazy? There is no way I would ever do that.”
March 25, 1983, I was comfortably seated in the balcony at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium waiting for the show to start—our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.
More than just about anything, the night of Motown 25 has been the hardest for me to write about.
How do you clearly remember a night when so much of it was spent remembering? A night when you have the most complicated series of emotions you ever felt—images of the past and present constantly colliding.
Earlier, backstage, artists whom I hadn’t had contact with for years were hugging and kissing each other and me. Old-home week. Because of so many of them in one place, there were nowhere near enough dressing rooms, enough makeup people, enough anything. Like those old Motortown Revues—everybody packed like sardines. No one cared. They loved it. That was a sure sign that these stars, no matter where they were in their careers now, were still Motowners all the way.
It was awkward sitting next to Diana for the first part of the show. We hadn’t seen each other since she had left the company about two years before and neither of us could think of much to say. But then there were other feelings of having her at my side again for that night—sentimental, affectionate, warm.
Nostalgia came over me as the show began with some old film clips and I saw the caption “Detroit 1958” and that HITSVILLE USA sign on our little building at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. With some dramatic music in the background, I heard an announcer’s voice: “Hitsville. It started here twenty-five years ago, the sound that rocked the world…”
Yep, I guess we did.
Smokey was the first Motown artist to appear on stage. He had been with me from even before there was a Motown, more than twenty-five years ago. Where had all the years gone?
When Smokey introduced Richard Pryor and said, “Once a Motowner always a Motowner,” it brought back memories of how I had become Richard’s manager back in 1965 after seeing him at the Apollo Theater on an amateur show. Seven years later I had hunted him down in California to play Piano Man in Lady Sings the Blues. And now he had been the first to commit to doing the show.
As crazy as I knew he could be, he took that whole night very seriously. Richard is a funny man in his soul who cannot not be funny. I got such a kick out of him as I watched him brilliantly and sensitively deliver his rendition of The Motown Story… A Fairy Tale:
“Once upon a time in a kingdom known as Detroit there lived a young warrior named Berry.
And as a youth he fought in arenas with padded gauntlets for small sums of money.
He got his brains beat out.
So Berry took employment at a local chariot factory called Ford and learned skills of the assembly line.
But his heart, alas, was not in his work. No, no, no.
He took on the ways of the minstrel then and he began to write songs for others to sing.
And a local celebrity, Sir Jackie of Wilson, heard some of the songs and put them on circular platters called discs.
The townspeople liked the sounds that emanated from the pressed discs and turned them into something called hits.
But Berry realized something was astray—a bit awry here. Oh yes.
You see the great wealth he had anticipated never materialized.
He was busted.
So Berry went out on a great quest and he found Miracles and Wonders and Marvelettes.
And he brought the discoveries to a secret place called Hitsville and there he taught them wondrous things.
There was young Smokey of Robinson, and Mary of Wells and Martha of the Vandellas, Marvin of Gaye and Tammi of Terrell, and there were Pips and Knights named Gladys, and Temptations and Tops, Contours, Spinners.
And before anyone realized what was happening, it happened.
Hitsville became like its name—a house from which…”
Richard had lost his place on the TelePrompTer and quickly came out with something sounding like, “Loshfloshkosk,” looking at the audience smiling, “but you know what I mean.” They knew what he meant and they knew what had just happened and they loved it. Richard continued as though it was all planned:
“And Berry said to himself once more, ‘Sel
f, this is a lot better than being punched in the head by padded gauntlets.’
And all was going well at Hitsville when our young hero met three fair maidens from the projects of Brewster.
He groomed them, he gowned them, he nursed them, rehearsed them, then gave out the news: that Motown gave birth to the Supremes.
It was like something out of a fairy tale.
And the family grew and everything they touched turned to gold—and bulging pockets.
And Berry he had climbed the beanstalk to face the great giant and captured the goose that laid the golden records.
And after five and twenty years, there’s a chance—and everyone wants it—that it will happen to them and all will live happily ever after.”
“We love you Berry, very much.”
That show was one thrill after another. When Dick Clark said he was pleased to have been “in some small way” a part of the Motown story, it humbled me.
Some small way! Is he kidding?
When he talked about the revolution Motown had created in the world of music, I thought about the revolution he had made in my life on that day back at Loucye’s house when I first heard Jackie Wilson singing “Reet Petite” on his show. And what a part he had played in the Supremes’ history, when they went out on his Caravan of Stars as nobodies and came back as stars.
Before I could recall all the times that Dick was there for us, the show had moved on and Motown artists were singing their way through great moments of my life.
One minute it was Smokey and the Miracles—who had not performed together for over a decade—with “Shop Around” and “Tears Of A Clown.” This moment was especially exciting to me because Claudette was there. One of the original members, along with Pete Moore, Ronnie White and Bobby Rogers, she was the real first lady of Motown.
Then Smokey moved me up to another era, when he later came back with Linda Ronstadt singing “Ooo Baby Baby” and “Tracks Of My Tears.” It was strange for me sitting there watching the present but quickly falling back into the past—Detroit of the sixties. There was Martha Reeves, strong and soulful, with “Heat Wave.” Her performance knocked me out that night as it always had. Next Mary Wells sang “My Guy” and Jr. Walker growled out “Shotgun.” Those memories blended into recent California years with some of the newer faces—like the Commodores, who had captured the feeling of the past few years with “Brick House.”