By Larry Getlen
The four had been smoking weed and snorting cocaine when Gaye noticed the pair sizing her up.
“I think they want to take this party to the next phase,” he said. “A small intimate orgy is just what the doctor ordered.”
He didn’t participate but acted as ringleader, urging on the sexual proceedings between his hesitant, eager-to-please girlfriend, 17 years his junior, and the couple they had just met.
After, Gaye projected his joy at the event onto Hunter. He projected something else as well.
“You loved it, didn’t you,” he asked.
“Not especially.”
“Oh, dear, please don’t deny it. You were an animal in heat. You couldn’t get enough. This was your dream come true.”
“Not my dream, Marvin. Yours.”
The next night, when the other couple returned for more, Gaye’s enthusiasm had become something else. He told Hunter, “You go off with them if you want. I can’t stop you. I won’t try.”
She refused, the couple left and Gaye told her how he really felt about the fantasy that his prodding had made real.
“To watch purity turn to perversity is a fascinating thing,” he told her. “You were once my angel. But now you have fallen. And yes, I do admit, it is exciting to watch you fall.”
“After the Dance,” a memoir by Gaye’s mistress-turned-wife Jan Gaye, written with David Ritz, recalls a love affair propelled by just these sorts of mind games. Marvin Gaye’s immense, undeniable talent for singing and songwriting, and his equally impossible-to-dismiss sex appeal, were accompanied by increasingly heavy drug use — freebasing cocaine eventually did him in — and erratic moods, a constant tug of war between thrills, love, lust and terror.
Janis Hunter met Marvin Gaye when she was 17. Her mother, Barbara, was friends with Ed Townsend, Gaye’s producer, and he brought her to the studio to watch Gaye record.
Hunter recalls her first time seeing Gaye in person.
“His face expressed a gentleness that carried the same promise as [one of his songs]: that life, lifted into melody and framed by harmony, never has to be harsh,” she writes. “His sound erased all pain.”
At the time, Gaye was estranged from his wife, Anna Gordy, sister of Motown impresario Berry Gordy. Motown was Gaye’s record label, and both Gordys had played an outsized role in Gaye’s career. The divorce from Anna, with whom he had a son, would get ugly in the years to come.
Mutually enamored, Gaye brought Hunter to an Italian restaurant in Hollywood, where he bribed the waiter $20 to bring his underage date apricot sours.
Soon after, they made love for the first time in Gaye’s sparse one-bedroom apartment, which had a “hideous gold couch” where Gaye’s assistant, a junkie named Abe, had taken up residence.
But any surprise at his living conditions was quickly overshadowed.
“The explosive power of our sexual union was incredible,” she writes. “We made love at every opportunity, night and day. We knew every inch of each other’s bodies. We never used birth control. It was clear that Marvin wanted me pregnant — and I did nothing to prevent that.”
Soon, Hunter began to see how Gaye thrived on the emotional turmoil of those around him and learned the depth of his jealousy and possessiveness.
He tried to convince her to quit school so they could spend their days together and offered to be her educator instead.
“I can teach you everything you need to know,” he said. “I’ll be a far more loving and patient teacher than whomever the school provides.”
Being together, though, was not his only motive.
“I don’t want to share you,” he said. “There are all those strapping young high-school football players looking to love on you. They’re my competitors.”
One day, he picked her up from school and said he needed to make a stop. He was taking her to pick up his son — at Gordy’s house.
He went inside to get the boy, and Hunter, frightened, waited in the car. Anna Gordy came outside to see the pretty young girl her husband was ditching her for.
“Anna was scary,” Hunter writes. “Her eyes burned with anger. Her eyes focused on me.”
Gordy “ordered” Hunter to roll down her window. She opened it just an inch.
“I just want to see what someone like you looks like,” Gordy told her, before turning to address Gaye. “Now that I’ve seen it,” she told him, “don’t ever bring it back here again.”
Hunter found herself pregnant soon after and noticed a troubling tendency in Gaye. Expressing his joy at the news, he told her, “A son. We will have a son.” Anytime they discussed their child, Gaye referred to him as a boy, and expressed a preference for such. When she mentioned the possibility of a daughter, he said, with a forced smile, “We’ll see.”
Hunter suffered a miscarriage, and Gaye consoled her by telling her, “God gives and God takes away. We praise him for his goodness and trust that next time he will bless us with a healthy boy.”
Their first child was born in September 1974 — a girl named Nona. Hunter’s first words to Gaye upon his seeing the child were, “I’m sorry.”
Gaye complimented Nona’s beauty and compared it to Hunter’s, but Hunter saw the disappointment in his eyes. Instead of joy at the birth of her first child, she spent days in tears, upset that she had disappointed the man she loved.
But if Gaye grew quickly accepting of his daughter, his attitude toward Hunter — specifically her new, just-gave-birth body — changed.
Appraising her stretch marks, he said, “Surely there is a way to rid yourself of those things.”
The couple did have a son, Frankie, a little over a year later. Gaye got over his body hangups (for a while), and they settled into family life, spending their days high on coke and pot as Gaye wrote and produced new music.George Clinton and Bernie Worrell would often drop by to shoot hoops and drop acid with Gaye. The couple were invited to watch Ike Turner in the studio, where he “carried around his coke supply in a suitcase.”
They also partied with Richard Pryor, who invited them one night “to watch bikini-clad dancers having sex with each other.”
“The evening was uncomfortable for me, but I went along with the program,” writes Hunter.
Another night at Pryor’s, the comedian “got so coked up that he hit his wife over the head with a wine bottle and called everyone at the table ‘a f—in’ whore’ except me. Marvin laughed and said I should be flattered.”
Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall invited them to Studio 54, and after meeting Ryan O’Neal at a popular LA eatery, Hunter was dismayed to find the “Love Story” actor, who was standing behind her, making an awkward and unwanted connection.
“He made his move with great subtlety, but there was no mistaking the feel of his penis against my neck,” she writes. “As he spoke with Marvin, he kept pressing ever so slightly. I didn’t know what to do or say. So I did nothing.”
She didn’t tell Gaye for fear of starting a fight, but in time, she learned the effect may have been opposite. Gaye developed a habit of steering Hunter toward other men, whether out of some perverse masochism or genuine delight.
Noting a chemistry between Hunter and Maze singer Frankie Beverly, Gaye did everything he could to set up an illicit liaison between the two. When Beverly came for a visit, Gaye not only booked him a room at a local motel but booked the adjoining room for Hunter, saying he needed her out of the house so he could focus on music.
As Hunter and Beverly smoked a joint in Hunter’s hotel room, well aware of the awkwardness, there was a loud bang at the door. It was Gaye, seemingly hoping to catch them in the act. Beverly crawled back to his room on his hands and knees, and Gaye found Hunter alone.
After a long, ugly and expensive legal battle, Gaye was finally divorced from Anna Gordy, and married Hunter — now Jan Gaye — in October 1977. Soon after, he was once again telling her that he loved her but was not in love with her. Jan came to wonder if Gaye saw any commitment as “a prison.”
Gaye — now almost 40 — complained to his 22-year-old wife about her sagging breasts and her stretch marks, explaining, “There’s a big difference between pleasure and excitement. As a man, I can’t help but seek excitement.”
“I was barely 22,” she writes, “yet was convinced that I had lost my youth forever.”
They had vicious fights, including one time when Gaye, behind the wheel with both kids in the car, began to swerve and threatened to “drive this thing off the road!”
Soon after, Gaye left Jan and the kids behind on a planned trip to Hawaii with his family, beginning a pattern that would repeat over the years of Gaye leaving LA and his family behind, only to implore them to join him once at his destination.
In time, torn by Gaye’s cruel treatment, Jan slept with Beverly and also hooked up with Teddy Pendergrass, Gaye’s main musical rival.
Gaye’s jealousy turned violent. One day, high on a blend of psychedelic mushrooms and cocaine, he started to talk about Jan’s betrayals and became “enraged.”
“He took a kitchen knife and put it to my throat,” she writes. “I was petrified, paralyzed. I thought it was all over.”
Gaye told her, “I’ve loved you too much. This love is killing me. I beg you to provoke me. Provoke me right now so I can take us both out of our misery.”
Gaye’s rage subsided before he could do physical harm, but for Jan, this was the final straw. She took the kids and fled.
The next five years saw Gaye, Jan and their children embroiled in nasty back-and-forth battles, including, after Jan brought the kids to see Gaye in Hawaii, his refusing to let Frankie leave, causing Jan to not see her son for over a year.Gaye, out of his mind on cocaine, would tell Jan that the “end days” were approaching or accuse her of sending her father or gang members to try to kill him.
Financially broken from battles with Anna and the IRS, he wound up living with his young son in “an abandoned Helms Bakery truck.”
Jan, now working odd jobs and couch-hopping with her daughter, filed for divorce in 1982. Gaye, destitute, paid no child support.
Gaye was shot to death in a brutal fight with his father on April 1, 1984.
Jan writes that it took her years to forgive herself for her own role in the insanity her life had become, but in time she learned to feel “more deeply for Marvin than ever before.”
“That I lost myself in someone else — someone as remarkable as Marvin Gaye — is no longer cause for self-condemnation.”
