All Families Have Fights
ANOTHER, TRAGIC SIDE OF MOTOWN LIFE
The stories of Motown marriages – not to mention the songs they inspired – could fill a book.
True, there’s no shortage of such material in the existing Hitsville literature. In the 1980s, for example, we read about the marital joys and miseries of Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson, followed in the ’90s by those of Martha Reeves (two unions, both annulled in short order!) and the Chairman himself (the latter’s autobiography preceded by a memoir-mugging by his second wife, Raynoma).
This century, there have been accounts of other woeful wedlocks, including that of Mary Wells and Herman Griffin. Not forgetting how Brian Holland went candidly on the record in 2019’s Come and Get These Memories about his turbulent times with Sharon Pierce – they married as teenagers – and his infidelity to her with Diana Ross.
Brian and Sharon Holland on their wedding day
Mind you, others had already documented a particular incident involving Brian, Sharon and Diana: the night when his wife swept into Detroit’s 20 Grand nightclub – where the Supremes were appearing – with the aim of derailing their lead singer’s dalliance with her husband. “According to witnesses,” writes J. Randy Taraborrelli in Call Her Miss Ross, “Sharon Holland shouted obscenities and screamed at Diana, ‘If you don’t stay away from my man, you are a dead woman.’ ”
Taraborrelli may have sourced his account from Mary Wilson’s autobiography, published three years earlier. “Sharon kept saying she was going to kick Diane’s butt,” Wilson remembered in Dreamgirl, “and for a few minutes, we had to hold Diane back – she was raring to go. We could see that it would be no contest, but we were also concerned that Sharon might take a swing at one of us.”
No contest? Another eyewitness claimed that it was Ross who came off worst. In A Woman Like Me, Detroit soul dame Bettye LaVette recalled being at the 20 Grand that same summer’s night, in the company of Martha Reeves, with Holland and Ross at an adjoining table. “At about two a.m., the mellow evening suddenly got messy when Brian’s wife, Sharon, came storming in.”
LaVette mentioned the screaming of obscenities, plus Sharon’s purported command to Brian (“you, get in the goddamn car”). Then, “with amazement and delight, Martha and I watched Sharon beat down Diane with such thoroughness, tearing off her clothes with such ferocity, that America’s Supreme sweetheart was left standing in her slip, panties, and bra.” (Perhaps surprisingly, Reeves made no mention of the drama in her autobiography.)
A BIPOLAR CONDITION
Undergarments were absent from Holland’s own account. (No one specifies the date, either, but it’s likely to have been during August 1964, when the Supremes were booked at the 20 Grand.) Sharon and her sister, Saundra, were waiting outside the club, noted Holland, and they came over as he and Ross were leaving. “There was an argument and suddenly Sharon lashed out and hit Diana in the face. I jumped between them and managed to break them up. Diana was finally able to leap into her car and leave.”
Come and Get These Memories adds another piece of previously-unreported information, that Berry Gordy advised Ross to sue Sharon Holland over the assault. Legal action was initiated, according to Brian, but subsequently scrapped. Throughout the book, he strived to be fair but honest about his late wife, even as he revealed the marriage’s difficulties – which were, Holland believed, largely the result of what today would be called a bipolar condition, and terrible migraine headaches. “Looking back, I could and maybe should have been more understanding about what Sharon was going through,” he conceded, adding, “Maybe I should have done a lot of things. Instead, I got on with my life and put up with it.”
Mrs. Bowen’s Motown debut
Sharon, too, got on with her life. Among her interests was Detroit’s Restoration Theatre Group, which presented Shakespearean plays for various organisations and societies connected with the arts and drama. It also embarked on a couple of overseas trips, including one to the U.K. in the summer of ’65. During that visit, she met up with Dave Godin of the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, which he later referenced in the club’s newsletter. “Sharon told me,” he wrote, “how sometimes Brian will get up in the middle of the night to go to the piano and play a theme which has come into his head.”
The Hollands’ marriage ended in 1974. Six years later, Sharon committed suicide, at the age of 38. “Family members at the funeral said they were puzzled by the incident,” reported Jet magazine at the time, “because Mrs. Holland didn’t seem to be disturbed about anything.”
Brian Holland was also acquainted with the second principal character of this special West Grand marital edition: songwriter/producer Jeffrey Bowen. He is thought to have joined Motown in 1966 after a spell as an artist at Mercury Records, supervised by Quincy Jones. He cut tracks with the Underdogs and Brenda Holloway, but his first significant credentials at Hitsville came as co-producer of the Temptations’ album, In A Mellow Mood; he also co-wrote Marvin Gaye’s 1968 R&B hit, “You.”
When Holland/Dozier/Holland quit Berry Gordy’s business, Bowen followed, working in an A&R role at their Invictus and Hot Wax labels. “I could not have done any of it without Jeffrey,” Eddie Holland offered in Come and Get These Memories. “He was the best I’d ever seen at finding and persuading acts – he was that good, that talented.” Anxious to keep his services, Holland also empowered Bowen to sign and manage a new English artist, Ruth Copeland – whom he was shortly to marry.
THE GEORGE CLINTON CABAL
Her well-regarded Invictus debut was 1971’s Self Portrait, but it did not sell in significant quantities; nor did the first album (on Invictus) by George Clinton’s Parliament, which Copeland co-produced. By 1972, it appears, she was divorced from Bowen, and he was engaged to Jenifer Franklin, sister of Mallia Franklin, another member of the Clinton cabal.
Soon enough, Bowen was back at Motown after its move west. “Everyone came to Jeffrey’s house [in Los Angeles] to record,” recalled Mallia Franklin in The Girl Is Bad: The Story of the Women of Parliament-Funkadelic, penned by her son, Seth Neblett, “and I met so many people in the industry there.” Among the acts working with Bowen at this point were the Commodores, whose “I Feel Sanctified” he co-wrote and produced; Sly Stone’s sister, Rose Banks, whose album, Rose, he produced; and, once again, the Temptations. This was to be the group’s first post-Norman Whitfield project, and Bowen not only produced a cohesive, chart-topping album, A Song For You, but also three consecutive Top 10 R&B hits, including “Happy People,” co-written with Lionel Richie. Bowen played a part, too, in Motown’s signing of Rick James in 1977.
Jeffrey Bowen (top left) with Rose Banks (lower left), among others
By contrast, Bowen’s personal life is harder to log. It’s not clear, for example, how harmonious was his brief marriage to Ruth Copeland, or whether or not he actually married Jenifer Franklin. What is evident: that he wed Bonnie Pointer in 1978, and co-produced (with Berry Gordy) the first of her two solo albums for Motown. The first of these yielded a provocative Top 10 R&B success, “Free Me From My Freedom/Tie Me To A Tree (Handcuff Me),” and a Top 20 pop shaker, “Heaven Must Have Sent You.”
“Jeffrey considered himself quite the badass gangster, dressing flashy, acting tough, and talking out of his ass most of the time,” declared Ruth Pointer in her 2016 memoir, Still So Excited! “Whenever the Pointer Sisters were in Philadelphia, Atlantic City or New York, we’d invariably bump into people looking for him and Bonnie because they owed them a ridiculous amount of money. My sister and her husband wreaked havoc wherever they hung their hats.”
The havoc apparently extended to recording deals. In September 1981, Motown felt obliged to sue Bowen for threatening Berry Gordy’s life and for libel over claims that it had defrauded the producer and his wife of royalties. Thus, Pointer’s career at the company came to an end, although the couple’s marriage continued. In 1996, Bowen was prosecuted for spousal battery, amid claims that he hit his wife and her sister June during an argument at the latter’s home. He was later acquitted of the battery charges, but convicted of misdemeanours and sentenced to probation and community service. “All families have fights,” Bonnie Pointer suggested.
In 2004, Jeffrey Bowen and Bonnie Pointer separated, and were divorced in 2014. “Their marriage was bizarre from the start,” suggested her sibling, Ruth. “The wedding ceremony had taken place at our folks’ house in Novato, with our mother presiding. And immediately after exchanging sacred vows, the newlyweds adjourned to the master bedroom to smoke crack.”
Indeed, the stories of Motown marriages could fill a book.
Music notes: oddly, Bonnie Pointer’s two Motown albums don’t figure on streaming services, although “Heaven Must Have Sent You” can be found on at least one compilation. What is digitally available is her 1984 album, If The Price Is Right, made for Joe Isgro’s Private I label (Isgro himself was a former Motown promotion man) and a more recent entry, Like A Picasso. The singer died on June 8, 2020, as a result of alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis.
Picture notes: Jeffrey Bowen was a largely invisible member of the Motown clan, whether in the 1960s or ’70s. The above photo (wherein he’s a dead ringer for Sly Stone) originates from 1976, when Rose Banks signed to the label. With Bowen and Banks are Motown vice presidents Suzanne de Passe and Paul Johnson. Centre is Hamp “Bubba” Banks, Rose’s brother, and Sly’s onetime manager.