Divided Soul : The life of Marvin Gaye

"By the time I was ready to start high school," Marvin said, "things between me and Father turned from bad to worse. I'd reached physical maturity. Even though I'd grown taller and stronger than Father, he was still beating me. I wanted to strike back, but where I come from, even to raise your hand to your father is an invitation for him to kill you."

"If it wasn't for Mother, who was always there to console me and praise me for my singing, I think I would have been one of those child suicides you read about in the papers."

"I mumble things into the microphone," Marvin told me. "I don't even know what I'm saying, and i don't even try to figure it out. If I try, it doesn't work. If I relax, those mumbles will finally turn into words. It's a slow, evolving process, something like the way a flower grows."

"I can't see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies," he wrote. "I think we make far to much of it... SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE. When combined, they work well together, if two people are of about the same mind. But, they are really two discrete needs and should be treated as such... I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies. Have your sex, it can be very exciting, if you're lucky."

"Music, not sex, got me aroused."

"I also believe that women feel music much more deeply than men. Women are rooted in the earth and in the spirit. They're more sensitive than we are."

Did he see a therapist?
"Are you kidding?" he answered with a laugh. "What am I going to tell a stranger? And what's a stranger going to tell me? Never! Besides, the cure is already inside us. All we have to do is bring it out."

"I looked up the word 'schizophrenic' when I went into my withdrawal period in Detroit", Gaye told me. "Someone said the term applied to me, so I thought I better see what the books say about it. Schizophrenia is fascinating. It's not just having a split personality. It's a sickness that scrambles your feelings until you lose all emotional balance. That balance, especially in my case, is very delicate."

"All i could do was admit how much i hated show business. Show business is shit - the pressures and the hypocrisy, the endless hustle and the ass kissing. That wasn't me. Neither was performing. I was tired of going out and getting the women to scream."

No matter how poetic the expression, though, Gaye's heart over-flowed with pain. His polarities tore at him unmercifully. 'The voice of an angel', I jotted down one night after he spoke to me of his traumatic childhood, 'trapped in the body of a man'.