St. Marvin Of Motown

OK, I finally got to see this TV documentary on the last 24 hours of Marvin Gaye's life, and it yanked one of the few remaining certainties out from underneath me. See, since April Fool's Day 1984, once I could be convinced that it was not an unusually tasteless joke, I have been crystal clear on the fact that Marvin Gaye was murdered by his father. There were a bunch of witnesses and everything. It was rock-solid proof to me that the world is an ugly, hopeless place. That truth stayed firm until last night.

WHEN IS A MURDER REALLY A SUICIDE?

Yes, the great man's biographer managed to reframe it as a suicide. Pretty convincingly, too. All they had to say was that the Reverend Marvin Gay Sr.'s kids were raised with the admonition that if they ever struck their father, he would "take them out." Friends knew Marvin Jr. had been thinking about ending it, and this was a way to do it. So he knocked his dad down and kicked him in the ribs, and about an hour later he was riddled with bullets and dying. Even I can connect those dots. His biographer described hearing the radio announcement and thinking immediately that THAT was how he'd been planning to kill himself. He considered it to be typical Marvin -- perversely brilliant, he said.

But I'm not totally convinced. He was staying with his parents because he'd had a terrifying premonition that he was going to be shot dead, and he went everywhere for weeks with six friends acting as bodyguards. They finally dropped him off with his parents, believing nobody was going to hurt him there. And he went along with it. If he'd seen this coming he wouldn't have gone near the house, would he?

WHEN IS A MURDER REALLY A NEOPLASM?

The Reverend got off the hook with a suspended sentence because someone did a brain scan on him, and found a tumor in a place that "might have" affected his judgment and self-control. It struck me when I learned about this, from another source entirely, that Marvin Jr's life was sort of bookended by brain tumors -- remember the one that killed Tammi Terrell and almost ended his career? It was the first of his devastating professional setbacks. And this brain tumor of his dad's was the last and most devastating one.

WHEN IS A MURDER/SUICIDE/NEOPLASM REALLY MORE OF A MERCIFUL RELEASE?

Maybe when you really wanted to die a lot of the time anyway, and it showed the world what kind of a man your father really was all along, and when it brought you back together with a dear, dear friend you hadn't seen in many years.

SO WHICH IS IT?

Go ask Marvin. I dunno.

Probably everyone else on earth knew about this conundrum before I did, but I just thought it was a nice illustration of the fact that NOTHING IS TRUE.

Yes, now you know why I live under the Manoogian Mansion and not underneath, say, St. Peter's Basilica. I am a Motown girl.