Marvin Gaye: The Final 24 (Full Documentary) The Story of His Final 24 Hours

[Applause] marvin gaye was a superstar a motown legend [Music] he was the prince of motown he was truly that that kind of a person he had that kind of charisma where the ladies just loved him but the smooth exterior and golden voice hit another very different marvin gaye paranoid suicidal addicted to cocaine when he was good he was really really good and when he was bad he just wanted to get the hell out of the way in 24 hours a lifelong family feud would finally come to an end marvin will be dead shot by his father march 31st 1984 marvin gaye is one of the most successful recording artists in the world after a gruelling year-long tour he's retreated to his parents house in la in less than 24 hours he'll be dead for the past six months marvin has been struggling with a growing depression there came a time when he just put on a a bathrobe and was just there in the house he was just he just never left it was crazy marvin gaye is addicted to cocaine since moving in with his parents his use has increased steadily it's caused tension with his father having junkies and dealers constantly coming to the house when marvin came back to l.a he just wanted to be left alone but everybody came out of the woodwork so there was constant traffic at the house day and night you know yeah we could party here yeah any normal household doesn't have 20 or 30 people coming and going all day long every day and it gets old very quick and father was just tired too much activity for him he'd like to remain peaceful in his room without any activity going on around him marvin and his father have been locked in a power struggle since he was a child but now marvin is the breadwinner he bought the family home in la a fact his father resents there's a struggle between who is going to be the head of that family and theories life and religion and everything else all the blow and everything that's going on there in his house his father would think i guess which it was the one person who's always held the family together is marvin's mother she has her own bedroom between her husband and her son i think the deal that marvin had was he started putting his mother in the middle of it because you know i can't fight you back data but i can get mama for you and she loved him to death and uh he he basically used his mom you know against his dad marvin's mom in many ways was a peacemaker and a negotiator and a referee and a nurturer i think that she was his anchor i think that she was the one place that he felt loved my father always knew there was a closeness between um marvin and his wife he always knew that marvin's father is jealous of their relationship and his son's success they were like in two different worlds they didn't acknowledge each other i've never seen such a strained relationship between two people you could kind of feel the vitriol you know there seemed to be some love there but it just they were always in conflict they were always seemingly in conflict in 22 hours the bitter hatred between father and son will explode in violence [Music] 45 years before in washington dc marvin pence gay was born the second of four children the son of a preacher my father was a very strict man he believed in discipline very much so and being a minister in a church and you know what people say about preachers children sometimes feel the worse i've heard that all my life so he was determined we were not going to be the worst he just wanted the perfect family and everything had to run the way that father wanted it because he had this dream of you know the perfect family [Music] marvin's father enforced his will through violence [Music] we were punished and marvin received more punishment than the rest of us because he was a maverick i always called him that even as a child he did things differently marvin would test father frankie would tell me marvin would testify that a lot a lot the power struggle that they had actually was in many ways a way that marvin sought approval and acceptance from his dad [Music] instead of using compassion softness tenderness then he began to dictate and dominate and he became a force a power in his family which turned his children [Music] from age seven marvin suffered routine whippings he also had to endure the shame of having a father who wore women's clothing his father was not only a cross-dresser but he was a very flamboyant and um out there cross-dressing he'd have his little you know ladies slippers on bumps you know slide around sandal things and waltz around he was proud of it so he didn't care neighbors knew about marvin's father kids called him names [ __ ] and homosexual the image of his dad as a preacher this powerful cross-dressing church front preacher who would come home and wear his wife's clothes the shame that that imposed upon war marvin's childhood was a daily torment full of pain and confusion his salvation was music [Music] at age five marvin began singing gospel his voice won him instant praise people were amazed at his voice lovely all the attention he was getting all the nice things they were saying to my mother and father why where does this boy get such a beautiful voice marvin's voice was his ticket out of his father's house by his late teens marvin was singing for money his father was furious to him it was the devil's music he did not sanction his son going into the secular world and that was one of the things that hurt him so bad he was permitted to do it or to venture into that field by his mother she supported him she encouraged him um and i think that that is one of the primary reasons that she was so important in his life he she symbolized for him what it would be like unconditional love resented by his father indulged by his mother this dynamic would define marvin gaye's life but it was his father's ominous threat that would end it [Music] my father has always taught us even from children that we don't talk back number one and we certainly don't act as though we want to do any harm number two and he's always said if we did anything to raise our voices at him in that manner or to strike that he brought us in this world he can take us out he told us that we were little kids the children knew to take his threat seriously and on the last day of marvin gaye's life his father would prove himself a man of his word los angeles california it's late afternoon seoul superstar marvin gaye has just 18 hours to live he's staying with his parents her father who beat him as a child and a mother who's always been his strongest support marvin and his mother had a wonderful relationship they were really close and you know shared a lot of things together and they love to laugh together you could walk you know down the hall in the house and you would hear laughter coming from the bedroom and they they had a good time together but there was always tension in the house it doesn't take much for things to erupt you know that so that particular day of course was a day that my father had been drinking and there was an argument with my mother over some business papers unpaid taxes and two divorces have forced marvin to sell off his properties gay senior is worried his home might be in jeopardy there's just a lot of everything folding the studio's gone you know the how hidden hills is going this is going that's going it's all it's all gone what else is going to go and i think it might have been in the back of father's mind plus him just trying to make sure that he his son knew that he was a failure no matter how famous he know my was he probably raised his voice at my mother i don't think marvin would have intervened if he didn't think he had to protect my mother from something hey what are you thinking what are you talking about what are you looking at and he probably told him not to talk to his mother that way dr hey and knowing my father he probably told him to stay out of my way i know when mom and dad get and he probably stayed in it listen look don't you ever get out get out marvin marvin please don't speak to the father marvin's reliance on cocaine is making him edgy volatile and paranoid he's convinced someone is trying to kill him he had a 38 pistol in his pocket at all times loaded i told him about how worried i was the fact he was doing these drugs and he never came out of the house and walked around with this loaded pistol and i said i'm really worried about this oh dave you don't have to be worried but there's good reason to worry the house is stockpiled with weapons when marvin moved back home six months ago he gave a gun to his father you know one of the biggest ironies is that marvin thought he was being chased and followed and pursued and someone was looking to kill him so he gave his father a gun so his father might shoot the person looking to kill marvin it was a fateful decision marvin had put the gun in the hand of his killer [Music] 23 years before motown the music industry machine that would soon churn out a dizzying number of hits was just finding its feet in 1960 motown was the only record label that gave black artists a shot at becoming superstars marvin gaye was chasing that dream he was a drummer and you know he hung around the studio and he was looking to get noticed and the competition was keen you know his initial struggle at motown was to get people to pay attention to him marvin's boyish good looks caught the public's eye his velvet voice made them listen in just over a year he had a hit song stubborn kind of fellow gay was making a name for himself but with the spotlight came hurtful rumors they came to my dressing room and said you have a car backstage and i went to the phone and when i got there they said uh did you know that marvin was gay and i just hung up the phone cause i i got upset about it but people people teased him about the g.a.y marvin wasn't gay but questions about his sexuality brought back the shame he felt as a child as the son of a cross-dresser [Music] before going on tour gay added an e to the end of his name but on stage there was no confusion to his female fans marvin gaye was a sex symbol [Music] i remember on one of the motown reviews the fans went crazy and i'm walking down this big hallway and i hear somebody say ken weston kill western oh man am i glad to see you and i look around here mom and hiding in the doorway and i said what are you doing he said everywhere all the girls were after him so he was going to walk with me to find out where i was going as soon as we walked out the door there was a bunch of them he said oh there he is and he just didn't know what to do he tried to run but they got him so i walked onto the bus and said thank you i better go rescue marvin because they got him back there [Music] marvin had his pick of admirers in 1963 he chose anna gordy sister of motown head berry gordy she was 17 years older than him there was a mother image there and i think he saw things in her that he may have desired his mother to have because his mother was very passive and anna was yeah she was out there anna was more than a mother figure she was a powerful woman who could help his career like everything else in morgan's life i think marvin's relation to anna was really complicated i think they loved each other deeply but she was a gordie you know and he saw in her a way to climb the ladder of success and give him a head start and everybody else soon marvin got top billing and became one of motown's biggest names he had a unique style it was so unusual that his recording of i heard it through the grapevine was initially shelved [Music] it was so different we just could not picture it in the top ten we knew it was good we it was super good but it just it was just way too different and so finally they decided to recut the song on gladys knight in the pips i heard it through the grapevine was a hit for gladys knight and the pips the song's success convinced motown to release marvin's version in 1968. it immediately outsold gladys knights and became motown's biggest single ever selling nearly four million copies what it did for marvin was it gave him clown and he'd set him up for his next move which was i'm going to do what i want to do i'm not going to be producing any anybody else i'm going to write this suite of songs that pays no attention to what they're uh playing on the radio these days i'm going to become an artist with a capital a and that means my first allegiance is to my art and not to commerce and not to making mr gordy happy or anybody else happy that i have to make my own sort of personal uh muse happy and i have to answer to god not to the motown corporation so herded through the grapevine was the key that unlocked the door to marvin's independence the success of grapevine freed marvin of the controlling influence of barry gordy and allowed him to record the songs that would make him a superstar evening has fallen on los angeles marvin gaye has just 15 hours to live he is staying with his parents in la where he spent the afternoon in a bitter argument with his domineering father marvin is addicted to cocaine in his paranoid delusions he believes someone is trying to kill him for protection he stocked the house with guns but now fears his brother who lives next door wants to harm him where's my gun do you need a gun what do you mean i need you people are after me you don't need a gun frankie said marvin you don't need a gun and he goes oh even you've turned against me now i can't trust you calm down i knew where the gun was so i went and got it i made sure what's in it and i gave frankie the gun because i saw how upset marvin was getting give me my gun and what's your name he took the gun from franklin oh you got what you want so he got really upset because he wouldn't want to help him and then he walked out the door and before he slammed it he just said even you're not my friend anymore you've turned against me you are not my brother desperate frankie calls their friend dave simmons to come up with a plan to help marvin dave hey it's frankie listen man we were just determined to do something we had no idea what we were going to do exactly whether we had to actually physically restrain him we had no idea where we're gonna try to take him to but we just knew that we had to do something frank was just like you know what what have i done wrong you know i'm just trying to protect him frankie knew what state of mind he was in and how he was just being tormented inside and was totally miserable and he just didn't want to see him get in more trouble he was crazy he had gotten really really just gone really crazy you know the way frankie described the way he looked physically you know he said he was just had his coat all buttoned kind of crazy and he was just out of it gone you know dave and frankie are convinced marvin needs treatment marvin had told my mother he was going to go to a hospital and dry himself out and she was holding him to that promise and he was gearing up towards it too so he never went but he was going to in reality marvin's cocaine abuse is getting worse in the last few years he'd started freebasing the drug was killing him slowly it was crazy because it destroyed him basically because you know all of most of the membranes in his nose were gone he'd burn out and uh you know i i don't know i don't know i know you know he always smoked but that was nothing you know just smoke but then i think he probably smoked less and just did more more cocaine just got to the point where this just took over everything and you know he was just just not himself at all you know many black people um have a very high tolerance for discomfort i believe that you know we feel bad we feel bad all the time and that's just the way it is for us and we'll deal with it so i'm not surprised at all that marvin gaye never sought treatment because i think that he believed that he should be able to do this on his own in the final hours of his life marvin was a slave to his addiction and at war with his father the deadly combination of drugs and conflict would soon end his life [Music] 14 years earlier the vietnam war was at its height and marvin gaye was about to hit his peak with the successor i heard it through the grapevine marvin had won creative control over his next album marvin had a lot of talent and a lot of creativity but he had more ability than most of the producers that were there at the time marvin took inspiration from the vietnam war to write one of the most successful concept albums of all time what's going on was a tribute to his brother frankie who fought in the war what's going on marvin dedicated to frankie because of all his stories he gave him the inspiration to write that album [Music] it was a masterpiece with what's going on marvin resurrected deeply held spiritual beliefs he was delivering a message about poverty racism and war marvin was the type of man who carried the world on his shoulders everything affected you he felt he wanted to do something about it and the only way he could do anything about it he thought was through music marvin wanted his music to matter that he would be the voice of someone that would inspire social change but motown was about upbeat dance music barry gordy hated what's going on he refused to release it barry gordy's reaction was was one of of how would a marvin gaye fan relate to this marvin came to to my hotel room after i left motown and he told me he says kim he says i recorded the best album i've ever done and nobody likes it not my wife not barry gordy nobody likes it and i said marvin did you do you like it he says it's the best thing i've ever done marvin swore he'd never record another song unless motown released what's going on they did in 1971. it was an immediate sensation half a million copies sold in the first day [Music] tonight i am so proud to have the greatest singer in the world in the auditorium tonight it's marvin gaye the next year marvin made a triumphant return home washington dc proclaimed may first marvin gaye day it gave marvin something he'd never had before the respect and admiration of his father to be held by his father in public oh yes that was a wonderful thing for my father to walk up to him and say son i'm so proud of you this is wonderful you have really caused me to be very proud of you and so that was a good thing very good i wasn't there for marvin gaye day in 1972 but but i have a feeling it was you know he talked about it a lot and i think it was a big deal i think it was like a little happy moment actually uh one of these uh polaroid pictures where mommy and daddy and marvin were reunited and i think it was sweet everyone in the community came and it was a big deal and then wham and you know people in motown and others may not have known marvin's family how well saw and i think it just they were in the public's eye so i think he wanted to do the right thing and i think he really you know just had a change of heart he was going to give it his good shot he was going to do his part if dad would do his part i think it's one of those nap shots um additive life of perhaps what could have been had there been true harmony between mom and dad and marvin had there been some kind of reconciliation had there been some kind of deep understanding on that day it was okay but that day was a very isolated day and a very extraordinary day and a day not at all typical tragically this was a fleeting moment of happiness father and son would never find a lasting peace the years of conflict and violence had left scars too deep to heal [Music] it's early morning in l.a marvin gaye has less than four hours to live yesterday's argument over money has been simmering since last night she tells her to give it to marvin even this small act of favoritism is seen as an insult by marvin's father please please you could just tell you could tell when father's mom just by the the glare down the hallway he was upset that mother didn't give father the breakfast instead of giving marvin the breakfast because i believe father built up a jealousy over marvin and mother's relationship because she paid so much attention to marvin marvin was her baby and uh you know if there's any choice between the two it would always be marvin and you know he loved her so much and if there was any animosity or jealousy it would be would have been on the father's part because i don't think marvin felt that you know she favored the father over him at any time as she sets down the breakfast marvin's sister-in-law notices he's in a bad way marvin didn't look well he looked absolutely wiped out he looked like he hadn't slept for days he just looked tired it was almost like he just wanted to give up make sure you have some later okay it'll make you feel better in fact over the last few weeks those who knew him well believed marvin was contemplating suicide he had a desire not to live and so when i think of it in terms of the uses of drugs and everything he was basically trying to take himself out but he was a very strong individual as he wakes marvin is in pain physically and mentally he's exhausted his body wrecked by years of drug abuse he was a man looking for a way out [Music] ten years earlier marvin was at the top of his game what's going on had secured his place among the greats of soul music with his career on track he tried to make a fresh start with his family he moved to hollywood and bought his parents a house in l.a but his success failed to bring the gay family closer together once we moved into what we call the big house on gramercy things started deteriorating i would say i noticed that my father was becoming more and more recluse which meant he didn't want to go anywhere or do anything and it was my mother who was going places and doing things my mother would accompany my brother on his tours but it's not that he never asked my father he would always ask him and he would always say no marvin's father still frowned on his son's career even though he lived off his royalties his father withheld the approval to his son to the point of destroying him unfortunately i beg to differ on father i think he was uh he was he was very very poisoned by negativity and his import it was important to him to play takeaway with his with people that wanted something from him and uh marvin really wanted it from him he he hated him he loved him at the same time you know it's just he didn't want any acknowledgement from him then he really wanted everything from him so it was just like it just became a curse on marvin you know and it just drove him into everything in his life like that his music his relationships his his kids everything marvin pulled away from his father again and immersed himself in the la music scene la in the 1970s had this kind of coke play you know wherever you know everybody was tooting and rooting and going crazy with cocaine and particularly in the in the music world it wasn't long before marvin was addicted to cocaine i saw it increase first it was just a little bit here and there if there were parties or this and that was it became just off the hook eating it you know smoking it you know any kind of way you can take it it made him real nervous and uptight and paranoid all the symptoms of those of that type of a drug you know marvin's marriage to ana gordie fell apart and he hooked up with sixteen-year-old janice hunter she was this is absolutely gorgeous uh teenager they met while marvin was recording let's get it on his tribute to sexual freedom she became his second wife and marvin set about creating his ideal woman i think he saw and jan a way to mold a woman you know take this teenager and turn her into what he thought a woman should be marvin's ideal woman was his mother but it was an image no one could live up to i believe that he held her up as a standard by which he gauged the morality the the ability to commit the perseverance the the charm the grace that his mom had and then he in turn created a self-fulfilling prophecy that um you know nobody's going to be able to do it for me as janice failed to meet his expectations their relationship blew apart infidelities led to jealousy and quickly turned to rage i had to go under underground with my sister uh for a week or two because he was threatening to kill her until he called one day and said all right uh it's over i want to see my girl and she went back to him and you know then they went on another vacation marvin had this ability to shoot himself in the foot uh marvin had this uh ability or this uncanny uh psychological mechanism uh which would undermine happiness and he would figure out a way to complicate his life he loved drama he loved emotional drama um he went for pain um he found ways to hurt himself over and over and over again it's very common that um addicts and alcoholics will sabotage their own success because it's a lot easier to kind of stay in the addiction and get applause for doing 50 percent whereas if you're supposed to have it together the expectation is that you're going to do 100 with a constant supply of cocaine marvin was becoming the violent controlling man who had tormented him as a child his father [Music] on his last day marvin and his father are locked in a power struggle seething at opposite ends of the house a lifetime of resentment will soon end in tragedy it's late morning marvin gaye has just two hours to live marvin is staying with his parents in l.a addicted to cocaine he's suffering paranoid delusions he thinks someone wants to kill him his father is fed up with his son's madness and drug use when he can't find some important business papers his anger explodes when he storms into marvin's room another bitter quarrel erupts marvin his whole life was told what to do not just by his father but by motown and everybody else and when he came back home things from the past just sort of built up [Music] and when he failed bobby kicked him for what my mother said and then he got up to his room marvin's father leaves the room humiliated all respect for his authority gone a lot of young men they grow up in homes where they're under the thumb of an oppressive critical parent who had convinced them all their lives that they weren't good enough and so part of their growing up and coming into their own and being successful is an opportunity for them to say to the parent screw you i got the power now sick i knew in my heart that if my brother or any of us struck my father [Music] that he would do something terrible because my father had always told us that he would if we ever did five years earlier ravaged by his cocaine addiction marvin's career had stalled and he was on the run from the taxman federal agents had seized his house in la for failure to pay taxes and he was living out of a van in hawaii [Music] i'm trying to think of a good word to use how he saw money he was very free with it for one thing and he didn't take it truly serious he didn't he wasn't the person that cared about money so you couldn't lure him into doing this and doing that it was just he was a kind-hearted person he bought himself a rolls-royce and bought himself a couple houses and a place in jamaica and never went to jamaica i mean he just lived in chaos in hawaii marvin was running from his problems he was at war with everyone his wife janice motown and the irs that's where he fell into really great depression and his cocaine habit uh [Music] worth it you know he was getting high all the time i guess the whole thing about hawaii was just sort of like take the people that were into the same kind of sadness and self-destructiveness and do it for a while [Music] after seven months mounting debt forces marvin gaye back onto the stage but a tour in britain ended in scandal when gay skipped a concert and left princess margaret waiting for hours [Music] once again marvin went into hiding this time in belgium [Music] away from the pressures and temptations of la marvin began to rally in 1982 cbs paid 1.5 million dollars to buy out his contract with motown [Music] and it was in hosting where marvin began to recover and build up enough strength to make you him certain by us come back marvin was off cocaine but his failed relationships with women haunted him ritz visited him in belgium where he saw gay's apartment filled with sader masochistic drawings i think he was tortured by the fact that he never had a good romantic female relationship and i remember saying to marvin this is sick what you really need is sexual healing and he said i love that idea you know just sort of write a poem about it so i wrote these lyrics and he and he immediately took him and put a melody to it sexual healing and the album midnight love became the first hits marvin had had in nine years winning him two grammys but back in l.a he became hooked once again on cocaine on his final concert tour marvin's addiction spiraled out of control while millions of fans reveled in his performance backstage marvin was self-destructing it was not an easy tool to keep control and become pathetic because you had loved ones ringing in drugs you couldn't keep it away from it i went to a couple of concerts but i was not on the tour i wouldn't even go close to it it was crazy he thought someone was trying to kill him marvin insisted on having his brother beside him at all times as a decoy for his imagined killer they looked so much alike the cocaine was driving marvin insane that is very consistent with heavy daily cocaine use and actually one of the the number one reasons that we see um addicts in a psychiatric unit is for a drug induced psychosis it's the beginning of i think the most tortured part of his life when he loses his mind and out of his mind constructs a kind of a screenplay of his own death and uh it all begins i think on this uh final tour as the tour ground on marvin began stripping down to his underwear while seeing sexual healing and to me it was very sad because it showed that he wasn't feeling the love that people were offering him and he was feeling like an object ultimately he didn't understand that he was deeply loved by his fans deeply loved for who he was this complicated character after the tour a broken marvin gaye retreated to his parents house it was a fatal mistake he returned to the uh source of his psychological dilemma and by now it's worse it's exacerbated by uh his drug use by his dad's alcoholism uh there's no clarity [Music] marvin gaye has less than one hour to live in a violent argument marvin has just struck his father for the first time in his life some believe he knew exactly what the consequence would be kicking your father [Music] son i told him if you keep bothering your father he means it when he says i brought you in this world and if you ever get me out i'll take you out after bringing breakfast to marvin his sister-in-law is back in her apartment next to the main house marvin's brother frankie is with her they're unaware of the fight going on next door [Music] by beating his father some believe marvin had found a way to end his life marvin was really and truly as he explained to me knowing certain times he didn't want to live [Music] without explanation i'm just shy i heard the pops of the gun [Music] what shot i didn't hear a thing no i heard two gunshots like two seconds ago are you sure and he said oh no that was just a car on the freeway it must have been and i said frankie it sounded like a gun to me and he said no we live right next to the freeway you know [Music] [Music] frankie she collapsed in my arms and i'm asking her what's wrong what's wrong and all that i could hear was shocked and i'm like you're shot and she said no father shot apart marvin gaye has been shot twice once in the shoulder once in the chest one of the bullets has damaged several vital organs and he's losing blood fast marvin's brother frankie rushes into the house but he's cautious scared that his father may attack again marvin is conscious when frankie finds him he yells to irene to call to 911 his father is still armed and in the house he was conscious when frankie was holding him paramedics arrive in under 10 minutes but they refuse to enter the house while marvin's father and the gun are still inside father so i found father he was sitting on his bed and i'm asking him where did you put the gun father a gun and he was just sitting there very calm and he looked up at me and said good gun it was just like there was nobody home and i said the paramedics are here and they need to come in and they won't come until the gun is outside please tell me where the gun is and he just bowed his head i was going through his drawers and everything looking for the gun and i flipped his pillow and it was under his pillow marvin is dying in his brother's arms a full 20 minutes pass before paramedics can get to him if marvin didn't die on the spot he died on his way to the hospital [Music] i remember the one at the end of the stretcher asking me did i know his name and when i said it's marvin gaye he looked at me twice and he said you don't mean the marvin gaye and i said yes and he just started to cry you can't really describe the hurt and the pain because when you love someone [Music] it's just a hurt that you cannot describe i remember coming out of a baseball game on that day on april 1st april fool's day and hearing on the radio marvin gayes you know father had shot and killed marvin and i thought to myself that's how he's going to do it oh my god that's so marvin that's so perversely brilliant [Music] the official time of death is 101 pm april 1st 1984. the next day marvin gaye would have turned 45 [Music] marvin gaye senior pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received a five-year suspended sentence his son remains one of the most influential musicians of his time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Id: 27UN_59f7H0

Length: 52min 2sec (3122 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020