The Family Spirit — Adam White

PROFILING MORE OF MOTOWN’S FORMIDABLE FEMALES

Bandleader Earl Van Dyke, for one, remembered how Motowners regularly gathered on Friday nights for marathon poker games at the Detroit home of Rebecca Jiles. “We would be there the whole weekend,” he told author Nelson George, “just drinking, eating barbecue, lying, dancing, playing cards and just enjoying ourselves.”

Such hospitality wasn’t one of the “official” duties of Jiles, who was Berry Gordy’s secretary and personal assistant for a remarkable 34 years. But it was another reason why she was a familiar figure to so many company employees. Then again, controlling access to the boss would, on its own, ensure such familiarity.

Jiles was among the many women who shaped and steered Motown from its earliest days, as previously noted (A Woman’s Way) in West Grand Blog. So, yes, this is another edition devoted to those female backroom believers, whose contributions rarely received much public attention. Jiles is one of three spotlighted here, the others being a later Gordy gatekeeper, Edna Anderson, and the 25-year custodian of Motown’s tape library, Fran Heard.

Jiles’ fleeting appearance in Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go? actually did merit a media mention, albeit for the wrong reason. When the book was published in 1986, former Motown publicist Al Abrams reviewed it for The Windsor Star in 1986, taking the author to task for a number of small mistakes, including the “unintentionally hilarious” misspelling of her surname as Jowles.

Anyway, she became what Gordy called “my very first real secretary” in 1961. “Often working into the wee small hours with me,” he wrote in To Be Loved, “Rebecca seemed to fall easily into my work style without complaint.” His second wife, Raynoma, was responsible. “When it became clear to me that he needed a personal secretary,” she detailed in her autobiography, “I used my magic touch and caused the wondrous Rebecca Jiles to materialize. Extremely able and incredibly warm-hearted, Rebecca was one of the very few to become a permanent part of everything to come.”

In the absence of Jiles’ own account, it’s difficult to imagine the specifics of organising Gordy’s regular workdays at Hitsville. As the company grew, so did the demands on his time, within and without. Increasingly, he needed – and was expected – to deal with other people’s problems, such as Marvin Gaye’s frustrations with the sales department, which led to a stormy encounter on the very day that President Kennedy was shot. Did Jiles hear Gordy furiously sweep everything off his desk and shout at Gaye, then watch nervously as her boss stomped out of the building amid the mood of disbelief that was settling on the nation?

Was she present when Gordy pressured Eddie Holland to quit as Motown’s A&R chief, handing him a resignation letter (did she type it?) and immediately driving one of his most talented creators from the premises? Or, more positively, was she amused to watch attendees due at every Friday morning’s Quality Control meeting as they hustled to be inside before the door was closed? “Rebecca used to sit there and lock the door,” Barney Ales once told me. “I think there’s only one time I got in afterwards.”

REBECCA JILES AS SONGWRITER

Also unknown is Jiles’ part in the two songs in the Jobete Music catalogue which bear her name: Freddie Gorman’s “The Day Will Come,” co-written with Janie Bradford and Stanley Ossman, and the Contours’ “Move Mr. Man,” co-authored with Gordy himself (it was the flipside of “Do You Love Me,” so would have generated substantial royalty income). In both cases, her credit is shown as Rebecca Nichols, which perhaps was her married name at the time.

Then Jiles had to relive her 30-plus years in Gordy’s employ for the transcription and organisation of “hours and hours” of audio- and videotapes for his memoir, a task she completed “to near perfection and without complaint,” he later acknowledged. Soon after that, she retired, and he hosted a celebratory lunch for her and husband George at Los Angeles’ historic Wilfandel House. The highlight of her career, said Jiles on that day, was helping to bring To Be Loved to fruition.

For Edna Anderson, her time working for Gordy “ultimately satisfied my quest for being a proud black person,” she told Vanity Fair in 2008 for the magazine’s feature about Motown on the eve of its 50th anniversary year. “I wanted [Motown] to be respected throughout the world for what it is,” she declared. “I’m very proud to say I’ve been involved with this. It’s like I had an opportunity to walk with Dr. King; it has such great meaning throughout the world.”

The glowing rhetoric was in contrast to Anderson’s attitude 36 years earlier, when she declined to interview for the position of Gordy’s assistant because, as she told Rebecca Jiles, “black people can’t make it to the top” at Motown. The post had become available as Jiles was busier than ever with Gordy’s family and administrative matters. “I needed a strong executive secretary,” he recalled, and considered Anderson because of the strength of her personality – to say the least – and the fact that she worked for Junius Griffin, Motown’s sage head of publicity and community relations. Anderson had secured that job circa 1970 because, it transpired, her teacher father had paid for Griffin’s final semester at college.

Gordy was irritated by Anderson’s refusal. “I sent word back: ‘It’s because of people like you that black people have a hard time making it anywhere. If you’re not up here in 15 minutes, you not only won’t have this job, but no other one here.’ She moseyed up, with an attitude, proceeding to interview me.” The outcome was a three-month trial for Anderson as Gordy’s administrative assistant in Los Angeles, beginning in April 1972 – followed by a career in the post which lasted for decades.

That would have been rather different to Rebecca Jiles’ experience in Detroit, given how Gordy was sought after and glamourised in Hollywood. “He wasn’t really interested in the record business anymore,” claimed Barney Ales. “He was a celebrity.” Even so, Edna Anderson “kept him focused on where we came from,” her husband, Curtis Owens, told Hailey Branson-Potts at the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “She wanted to make sure that black folks had a right to participate in the whole matrix of the American experience, and wanted to make sure our experiences were being exposed in the proper fashion.”

That included the “matrix” of being fooled by one of Motown’s superstars. Skilled at imitating Berry Gordy’s voice, Stevie Wonder called Anderson one day in the 1970s: “Give Stevie a check for $50,000 right away,” he said. “What?” she replied. Wonder repeated the instruction – and was evidently convincing enough that Anderson later called Gordy to double-check: “Boss, $50,000 is way over my signing limit. You’re gonna have to sign this check yourself.” Both laughed at the realisation of what had occurred.

EDNA ANDERSON AS MOTHER FIGURE

Anderson continued at Gordy’s side long after he sold Motown Records in 1988, serving as co-CEO of TGC Management, handling his intellectual property assets, and as director and corporate secretary of the Berry Gordy Family Foundation. When Motown The Musical played on Broadway, she was portrayed therein – perhaps the ultimate public recognition of her importance in his life. “After Edna died on June 13, 2015,” wrote Eddie Holland in Come and Get These Memories, “Berry told me that she talked to him like she was his mother, and all I could say was, ‘You, too?’ Because Edna could say anything she wanted to me, and I took it.” She was rational, he added, she was reasonable.

Like Anderson, Fran Heard was a southerner, Alabama-born. Like Rebecca Jiles, she joined Motown early on, recruited by Raynoma Gordy to run the tape library. “I trained her to handle the tapes,” wrote “Miss Ray” in her autobiography, “and with time, Fran found a niche with the company that lasted for 25 years.”

***Fran Heard gets gold (photo: Linda Stelter/The Birmingham News)***

Motown recording engineer Russ Terrana confirmed that talent. “There were thousands and thousands of tapes and masters,” he told Mary Colurso at The Birmingham News some years ago. “But she was always so organised, and so easy to get along with. That library was her baby. I’d say, ‘Fran, I need this and – boom! – there it was, like it was the only thing on her shelf.” Likewise, the Temptations’ Otis Williams endorsed Heard’s skillset to the newspaper. “She had her stuff together, making sure that library was in order to her satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of Mr. Gordy. She was on it. And she was just a wonderful spirit, walking around Motown. She always had a smile on her face.”

That positivity was evident in Heard’s modest, self-published 2010 memoir, I Remember Motown. So was her commitment to the job, as when a substantial snowstorm had blanketed Detroit, but – public transport being out of action – she walked the mile-and-a-half from home to Hitsville. “I was surprised to find no one was there, and the door was locked.” When a colleague showed up, both agreed there was no point in staying, and she walked home. Within a day or so, Heard received a commendation from Gordy – and a week’s salary bonus. “Needless to say that at our next company meeting,” she wrote, “loyalty to the company was the discussed topic, and the two of us were recognized as employees of the month.”

I Remember Motown is made engaging by such stories, and the company’s family spirit – which has since become a cliché, but was clearly genuine at the start – runs throughout. Heard writes less about the specifics of her job than about her colleagues and working alongside them: how, for instance, Stevie Wonder gave her an expensive stereo system when she got married; how Gordy fired her when she wouldn’t reveal the name of a fellow staffer who had mistakenly picked the wrong master for release, but stayed put at Raynoma’s direction; how company staff and all available artists were expected to take part in a “weed picking party” in front of Hitsville one Saturday.

FRAN HEARD LEADS A PRAYER

Heard was religious, too, and at Motown’s annual Christmas party in Detroit, she would be the one to call for a moment’s silence, and would lead a prayer. No surprise, then, that after leaving the company in 1986, she joined her husband in fulltime ministry in Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t think any of us realised at the time, the magnitude of what Motown would become,” Heard told Colurso. “We knew that we were special because of the artists who came our way. But it was just a job that I loved and the people I worked with were close, like family.”

Fran Heard, Edna Anderson and Rebecca Jiles spent more than 100 years working for Berry Gordy’s business, when their tenure is combined. Whether carrying out assigned duties or hosting poker games, pressing for racial justice or leading prayers at Christmas, these were remarkable women, like many at Motown. The music may be the company’s legacy, but such people were its spirit.

West Grand Blog is taking an Easter break. See you on the other side, with luck.

Music notes: The songs of Rebecca Jiles (Nichols) were included in the first couple of volumes of The Complete Motown Singles, namely, “Move Mr. Man” by the Contours and “The Day Will Come” by Freddie Gorman, so they can be heard on digital platforms today, as can Mary Wells’ version of the latter from her album, The One Who Really Loves You. Fran Heard wrote one song published by Jobete, “Day Dreamer,” and presented it to Lamont Dozier, as described in her book: “He thought the lyrics were good, and added melody to it.” The result was cut in June 1962 by Eddie Holland, whose name appears as its songwriter alongside Dozier and Heard. His recording was eventually released on the Ace Records compilation of Holland’s work, It Moves Me. That came out on compact disc in 2012, but isn’t available for streaming.