Once in a Great City Page 5
After campaigning in St. Louis, Lady Bird Johnson arrived at midday on Monday. It was her first visit to Detroit. A delegation of Democratic women waited at the Willow Run terminal to meet her, but before greeting them she slipped into an office for a phone call. She emerged without betraying the call’s purpose. Anything to do with events in Washington? No clues forthcoming. “It’s not my nature to be fearful,” she said, when someone asked whether she was alarmed. She was escorted to the Kingsley Inn near suburban Birmingham for a tea party. That evening, when she and her husband were scheduled to be at Cobo Hall, she remained at the Book Cadillac, attending a reception in the ballroom hosted by Governor Swainson and then holing up in the presidential suite, where she talked to a small group of Detroit women active in labor and politics. The vice president never made it to Detroit. President Kennedy, Henry Ford II’s first choice for the speech, ended up on national television before the banquet began, explaining to the American public that reconnaissance photos of Cuba clearly showed the construction of missile sites and that the United States would force the Soviets to stand down.
Once the big wheels of Detroit understood the gravity of the situation, they rallied around the president. HF2, writing on behalf of his colleagues, dispatched a telegram to Kennedy that night: “At a meeting of the board of directors of the Automobile Manufacturers Association held immediately following your address to the nation tonight and just before the banquet of the 44th National Automobile Show, there was a spontaneous and unanimous expression of confidence and support in the action you have just taken to ensure that peace and justice shall be maintained in this hemisphere and elsewhere in the world. My associates and I—the principal officers of the companies comprising the automotive industry—pledge to you aid and assistance in full measure in the critical days now beginning.” Walter Reuther, who had been invited to the auto banquet for the first time and sat on the dais near Ford, offered his own words of support. Reuther was JFK’s most frequent Detroit correspondent, flooding the White House with telegrams and long letters, never hesitant to provide counsel and moral guidance. “Your decision in the Cuban crisis rests upon a sound moral basis,” he now wrote. “During the past month when less calm and less responsible voices in America were urging premature and ill-advised action against Cuba, you demonstrated restraint and mature judgment. You acted decisively and determinedly after there was undisputed evidence to provide the moral basis for the commitment of American power. . . . You met the test of moral leadership which demands the delicate balance between your dedication to work for peace and your determination to defend our security.”
Mayor Cavanagh had prepared a brief speech for the evening, as a warm-up act for LBJ, but it turned out he had to fill in as the main speaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret that the pressure of public events has prevented the scheduled speaker, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, from attending this distinguished gathering,” Cavanagh began. This was the first national auto show held during his administration, he noted, and it revealed Detroit at its finest, reflecting the deep connection between the city and its main industry. “Detroit is proud to be called the Motor City. . . . If the automobile has had a profound effect upon the nation and the world, it has had an even greater effect upon the fortunes of the city of Detroit. Detroit was an old city long before the automobile, but it owes its present position as one of the world’s great industrial centers to the growth of the automobile industry. Fifty years ago, at the beginning of the auto age, our city covered only about forty square miles and had a population of less than six hundred thousand. Today it covers three times the area and has more than twice the population. In terms of the metropolitan area, of course, the growth has been substantially higher. I am confident that the automobile industry will continue to grow and that the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit will continue to share in that growth.”
But for Detroit to fulfill its potential, Cavanagh said, it had to look beyond automobiles to electronics and aerospace, the technologies of defense. Only two decades earlier, as America geared up for World War II, Detroit was invaluable, its auto industry transformed into the Arsenal of Democracy, the factories turning out bullets, casings, torpedoes, incendiary bombs, radios, radar units, air-raid sirens, B-24 bombers, airplane parts, tanks, trucks, landing craft, jeeps, gun barrels, machine guns, gas masks, helmets, tires, propellers, submarine nets, binoculars, smoke screens, searchlights, and tents. Now, Cavanagh said, “Detroit and Michigan are prepared to carry out the full demands of our country, whether in peace or crisis.” With Soviet missiles in Cuba and President Kennedy insisting that the Soviets stand down, the nation faced a crisis, and the arsenal could be ready again. No other region of the country had so much manufacturing capacity and technological skill for the asking, if only the government would ask. As matters now stood, the entire state of Michigan was receiving only 2.7 percent of the nation’s defense dollars.
In peace, the mayor said, Detroit was undergoing a renaissance, “on the threshold of the greatest development culturally and commercially that she has ever enjoyed.”
It was not yet on Cavanagh’s mind, and wholly beyond the sphere of the car guys in the Cobo Hall ballroom, but a vital part of Detroit’s cultural development was taking place outside a few modest houses five miles away on West Grand Boulevard, where two busloads of black musicians and singers, homegrown and stunningly talented, were preparing to leave the next morning on their first national tour.
Chapter 4
* * *
WEST GRAND BOULEVARD
MOTOWN. IN LINGUISTICS, that is known as a portmanteau, the conjoining of two words to create a new word with its own meaning. Motor and town. Cars and Detroit. The derivation came organically out of the language of the city. Long before Motown, the record company, there was Jacktown, the street name for the Michigan state prison in Jackson. There were also the ethnic neighborhoods in Detroit: Greektown, Corktown, Poletown, Bricktown, Mexicantown. Motown began as a place, but more than that it was a sound.
To get to Motown from downtown in 1962 required one turn. Drive straight up Woodward Avenue, the city’s dividing line east and west, and hang a left at West Grand Boulevard, moving past General Motors on the left and the Fisher Building on the right and farther along to the 2600 block and its row of solid two-story homes, ending with the white one at 2648 that had the large Hitsville USA sign in script above the front picture window. The boulevard was at its broadest there, a half football field across to the far curb, with the flat, wide-open feel of much of Detroit’s vast west side, a landscape that could evoke a sense of quotidian drowsiness if not for the jolts of creativity crackling out of that stretch of houses.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 23, the scene was even more frenzied than usual, apart from the deliberate demeanor of Esther Gordy Edwards, oldest sister of Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy Jr.
Mrs. Edwards, her younger charges usually called her, though sometimes they slipped into the informal “Shug,” short for “sugar.” Her seven siblings had another name for her, “Sua” (pronounced soo-uh), for “big sister.” Compact, organized, keenly intelligent, always immaculately dressed, her hair perfectly coiffed, with the Gordy family’s signature apple cheeks and twinkling eyes, she was at age forty-two twice as old as many of the artists and more than three times older than the youngest of them, the blind kid wonder. Only a few weeks earlier, she had left her job as chairman of the Recorder’s Court Jury Commission, where she had been the first African American to hold that prestigious position overseeing the selection of jurors for Detroit’s municipal courtrooms. Roberta Wright, her close friend and former college classmate at Howard University, had tried desperately to talk her out of resigning from the commission to work full time in the music business her younger brother had been running for three years. “That’s not going to work,” Wright told her. “Your brother is just playing around with those tapes. You have to have a good job.” Esther, the wife of a state representative and ste
pmother of a future federal judge, was not one for excess frivolity. But this would be fun, she said. And with a son at Western Michigan in Kalamazoo and a stepson at law school in Ann Arbor, she also needed the earning potential Motown offered. “I’ll work with you,” she told her brother. “You go up, I will. You go down, I will.” And now here she was, standing on the sidewalk, trying to bring order to the chaos before the Motown troupe left on its first long road show.
Two old buses idled outside on the street as the passengers, their luggage packed for a fifty-six-day tour, climbed aboard and found seats. Forty-five people in all: a posse of bodyguards and roadies, the musicians from Choker Campbell’s Show of Stars twelve-piece band, the comedian-emcee Bill Murry, and a vibrant collection of Motown’s solo and group singing acts, including the Miracles, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Little Stevie Wonder, the Marvelettes, the Vandellas, the Contours, the Supremes, the Temptations, Marv Johnson, and Singin’ Sammy Ward.
An ensemble busting with talent, but there was a certain pecking order. Mary Wells was the reigning queen, with a new release, “Two Lovers.” The Marvelettes remained the top women’s group two years after their huge crossover hit, “Please, Mr. Postman.” The Contours exuded the most explosive energy, rocking with their contagious “Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance),” a tune Berry Gordy wrote from experience after his early teenage years had been scarred by rejection on the dance floor. The Vandellas provided a similarly joyous sound, with Martha Reeves’s southern gospel intonations punching their rhythm and blues. Marvin Gaye brought the coolest voice with the sultriest appeal. Little Stevie, only twelve, was somewhere between novelty and genius, a legally blind wunderkind who could play any instrument but was at that stage to the later Stevie Wonder what Cassius Clay as a teenage Olympian was to the later Muhammad Ali: a young man with uncommon skill and brash charm but not yet much meaning behind it. The Temptations, still largely unknown beyond the West Grand studio walls, not long past the time when they lip-synched at sock hops as the Primes, went along for parts of the journey to sing backup, and the Supremes, who started as the Primettes, tag-along little sisters to the Primes, had to cajole just to be a warm-up act. Top billing went to the Miracles, led by William Robinson, who could do it all—sing, write, and produce—and also happened to be Berry Gordy’s best buddy and closest musical associate. That status placed Smokey and his miraculous crew, including his wife, Claudette, off the old buses and into their own Cadillac accompanying the caravan.
Their day of departure was not a typical Tuesday morning. Detroit awoke to a banner headline, “Cuba Blockaded,” with an even more alarming subhead: “U.S. Set to Sink Red Ships to Back Ban.” Motown was riding off to the future on a day when, as much as any other in the twentieth century, it seemed there might be no future, the world on the precarious brink of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the USSR. And the first stop on the tour was only two miles from the White House. Ads were already purchased in the Washington Post and Afro-American. Nothing But Stars! The Motown troupe would open at the Howard Theater on October 26, a day after the jazzmen Les McCann and Miles Davis closed.
Esther Edwards had organized the logistics of the tour with Thomas (Beans) Bowles, the trip director, a baritone saxophonist, flute player, and arranger who had come to Motown out of the Detroit jazz world. Many of the venues on the tour, especially those in the South, were strung together for them by Henry Wynne of Supersonic Attractions, a black impresario based in Atlanta who had a knack for maneuvering around race restrictions and was practiced at squeezing advance money out of local promoters. Motown artists had been on the road before; they had played at the Regal in Chicago, the Apollo in Harlem, the Uptown in Philly, and other great venues of that era. All-star revues were an established part of the American music scene. Edwards had studied the mechanics of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars to figure out how it was done. But this first Motortown Revue, as it was called, was the essence of the business model formulated by her little brother Berry—the complete sales package, all things Motown, vertical and horizontal, everything and everyone together, imported from Detroit, all in the family.
• • •
Motown eventually became synonymous with Berry Gordy Jr., but it was more the product of the entire Gordy family, especially his older sisters. He had four of them, starting with Esther, then Anna, Loucye, and Gwen. He also had three brothers. Fuller and George were older. As a boy, Berry Jr. thought his junior appellation meant that he was the chosen one—until he learned that his mother agreed to make him a namesake at his birth on November 28, 1929, a month after the stock market crash, in hopes that he would be the last Gordy kid. Even that did not work; Robert arrived last. (Fortunately, as it turned out; it was Robert who saved Berry from drowning during a boyhood swimming adventure across the border in Windsor, Ontario.) If Berry Jr. was special, his sisters made him so. Gwen and Anna smothered him with unconditional love and confidence. Loucye provided housing and math skills. And Esther was the organizer and mother hen, “the keeper of the castle,” as Berry Jr. said a half-century later in an interview for this book. She ran the family’s entrepreneurial fund and wrote the $800 family check that helped underwrite the launch of his own record company in 1959. When he doubted his manhood, comparing himself unfavorably to his father, she was the one who gave him a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and had him memorize the lines.
The Gordys may not have been a representative black family in Detroit, but their rise illuminated many aspects of the African American experience there and benefited from the particular attributes of the city. Berry Gordy Sr. and Bertha Ida Fuller Gordy—Pops and Mom to the artists of Motown—arrived in Detroit from rural Georgia in 1922 during the first Great Migration northward. Although they left the South to escape racial oppression and search for opportunity, they were by no means starting from nothing. Berry had inherited property and a financial cushion from his father, who had died young in a lightning storm as one of the largest black landholders south of Athens in Oconee County. He and Bertha had been inculcated in the self-help business philosophy of Booker T. Washington, an African American variation of the individualist capitalism strain that courses through American history and myth. Soon after arriving in Detroit, Berry Sr. established his own Booker T. Washington grocery on the east side at the corner of St. Antoine (pronounced An-twine) and Farnsworth, a loud shout from the hustle of Hastings Street, and became an active member of the Booker T. Washington Trade Association, an essential network promoting the city’s black businesses. The grocery was one of many enterprises Pops and Mom undertook over the following decades, including plastering and construction for him, real estate and insurance for her. Their children were always part of the operation; the girls worked the grocery cash register when they were so small they had to stand on a box to reach it.
Berry Gordy Jr. had neither the manual strength of his father nor the educated grace of his mother. In describing what he considered the trinity of his old man’s attributes—“He worked from sunup to sundown, he had muscles of steel, and he killed rats”—the son was being worshipful and self-deprecating, but also elevating himself from a life that he did not want to repeat. The rats part was real. In the kitchen of their east side home, rats came out at night, and Pops “would be stepping on them and banging them and the kids would be going ‘That’s great.’ ” They were all cheering except Junior, who would jump on a chair and shudder in fear, turning away from the sight. Years later, when he stood at the top of the family hierarchy at Motown and his siblings called him Chairman, the inside joke was that the name derived from the days when he jumped on the kitchen chairs to avoid the rats, the little chair man.
Bertha, who had been a schoolteacher in Georgia and later graduated from the Detroit Institute of Commerce, stressed the importance of education to her children, but Berry Jr. was more consumed by trying to overcome his insecurities than applying himself as a student. His mind worked in unconventional patterns. As a boy
he had trouble with the alphabet from A to Z but could recite it backward flawlessly. He felt intimidated by the faster-talking kids on Detroit’s east side and considered himself a square who could never get the girls, so he tried to impress his classmates by being a comedian and troublemaker. At these he was successful enough to get booted out of music, the one class he cared about, after one year. His first mentor in music was unlikely: a maternal uncle, Burton Fuller, who was even more haughty than his mother, so much so that no one else in the family could tolerate his disapproving nature. Burton played classical piano. “I asked if he would give me lessons,” Gordy recalled. “Yes, he would be glad to and was thrilled that I asked him because he had no good connections with the kids in the family because they were always talking among themselves about how he didn’t like anybody and what was he going to do with his money when he died?”
The one who liked the snooty uncle was Berry Jr., if only because of music. During his early teens, he rode the bus across town to the west side to learn how to play piano. “He lived in a fancier part of town, a nice neighborhood, and I would go to his house and play. And he had me working on the scales,” Gordy said. Quick but impatient, the nephew wanted to get on with it and play Bach and Haydn, but Uncle Burton insisted that he play the scales, hour after hour, week after week, before moving on to chords. Berry was also a daydreamer, ruminating about girls and songs about girls, and as he built his chords during practice he would linger on them and improvise simple progressions that could form the rudiments of a love song like “Paper Doll” by the Mills Brothers or “We Three” by the Ink Spots—songs about young men who were as lonely and insecure as he. “I would be playing for my uncle and he would say, ‘Yes, come on, come on,’ and I would have an idea in my head and I would not want to lose my idea so kind of hold it a little longer and play it again and he would say, ‘No.’ So at the end of that he said, ‘I cannot teach you any more. You’ve got your own ideas’—because when I hit those chords I would get these little melodies and I was thinking about girls, my mind was off the lesson. And doing the repetitious arpeggios and scales for a whole lesson just drove me crazy.” The uncle, frustrated, eventually told him, “Go out and find someone else who can help you.”