Let George Do It

REPRESENTING ‘A SMALL RECORD COMPANY’ IN DETROIT

The man who helped to deliver Motown’s first film soundtrack album had a backstory like few others at the company.

      George Schiffer was Berry Gordy’s copyright attorney and legal advisor during the Detroit years, with a particular involvement in international markets. He was someone who could be blunt in pursuit of the firm’s interests, and similarly outspoken when it came to racial issues and civil rights.

      On one occasion, Schiffer gave a Motown colleague a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (otherwise known as the “Little Red Book”), while he introduced another to the works of Charles Dickens. His onetime girlfriend was said to have been head of the American communist party’s California branch.

Motown’s first soundtrack album

      Schiffer also had dealings with Buddy Holly, Golden World’s Ed Wingate and Joanne Jackson, and Stax Records. And he served as a lawyer for activist group, the Congress for Racial Equality.

      But first, that soundtrack album. Nothing But A Man was an independently produced 1964 movie, directed by German émigré Michael Roemer, telling of the travails of a fictional, young, black couple living near Birmingham, Alabama, in the early ’60s. Ivan Dixon played a railway labourer who settles down and marries a minister’s daughter, portrayed by Abbey Lincoln, and strives to find dignity and independence in a racist South.

      The Motown connection came by way of Schiffer’s work then as an attorney in New York and for whom the record company was a client. He and Roemer were former college classmates at Harvard, and had a common background as young Jewish refugees from the Nazis who eventually settled in the United States (Schiffer was born in Vienna in 1928) by way of England. In 1963, Roemer was editing Nothing But A Man at a location near Schiffer’s Manhattan office. “I went down to have lunch with him,” Roemer told the New York Times, “and he said, ‘I just started representing a small record company in Detroit. Maybe you’d like to hear their music?’ I went back to his office with him, and he handed me a stack of these 45s.” The filmmaker’s reaction? “This stuff is great!”

      The music evidently proved to be a suitable, contemporary soundtrack for the on-screen narrative, and Roemer paid Motown $5,000 for those rights. The album, including tracks by the Miracles, Martha & the Vandellas and Mary Wells, came out in March 1965, a few months after Nothing But A Man was released to cinemas. Although not a commercial success, the picture was critically well-received and a prize winner at the Venice Film Festival. It was profitably re-released in 1993, gaining further kudos by being added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry the following year.

CHASING BUDDY’S MONEY

      Exactly how Schiffer connected to Motown is unknown to all, perhaps, except Berry Gordy. After graduating from Harvard in the mid ’50s, he joined Warner Bros. in New York to handle copyright matters, then moved over to prominent entertainment attorney Harold Orenstein’s firm. It’s thought that Gordy knew Orenstein from his pre-Motown songwriting years, and became a client when his start-up needed legal representation at home and abroad. Orenstein assigned the account to Schiffer, who by that point had experienced the music business through trying to get Buddy Holly’s royalties from manager Norman Petty. (Both Holly and Jackie Wilson were signed to Coral/Brunswick Records.)

      By 1962, Schiffer had his own law practice in New York. “George left [Orenstein] to go on his own,” the late Motown executive, Barney Ales, once recalled for me, “with Motown as a client.” The following year, Schiffer worked on the contract which saw the Detroit company appoint EMI Records as its licensee in the U.K. and several other overseas markets. He also dealt with Jobete Music’s various international subpublishers, helming a meeting of those in Paris in April 1965, after the Motortown Revue played the city’s Olympia theatre.

      Schiffer and Ales spent time together on another European trip, when the lawyer introduced the salesman to the literature of Charles Dickens, “and he also got me into liqueurs, namely, Armagnac.” Ales subsequently began collecting the Victorian author’s work. “I had probably the best collection of Dickens in the United States,” he said. “In London, there was a little store on Bond Street that used to keep in touch with me about any new collectibles of his which came in.”

Radio Caroline: the boat that rocked

      It was in 1965 that John Marshall, then at EMI Records and later to become Motown’s London-based international director, first encountered Schiffer, by correspondence. “One of my duties was to field royalties questions from licensors,” he said. “I answered his letter in a way which upset him – I can’t remember why – and he complained, resulting in me being told to be a little more careful.”

      The two men subsequently met. “He was a big, Jewish guy, wore glasses, intellectual, very bright, like most good American lawyers are,” continued Marshall. “He had a slight European accent and, of course, a lot of New York twang. He was very straightforward and a bit brusque in manner, and to me, who had never before met a U.S. lawyer from New York, a little bit scary.”

      Soon, Marshall was Tamla Motown label manager at EMI’s London headquarters. “George was extremely knowledgeable about the international scene, which surprised me. For instance, EMI wasn’t in a position to deal with pirate radio then, and George had made arrangements to supply samples to Ronan O’Rahilly [of Radio Caroline] and the other pirate ships. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of doing this. It turned out to be a good move for Motown overall.” Marshall also learned that Schiffer was very left-wing, politically. “We went to Speaker’s Corner [in London] to listen to some of the verbals. He also presented me with Mao Tse-tung’s little red book. That must tell you his political leanings, and why a lot of his colleagues found that ‘disturbing.’ Personally, I found it quite intriguing, and in my business discussions, it never impinged on his loyalty and desire to forward the Motown cause.”

      Just as intriguing was the fact that Ed Wingate and Joanne Jackson of would-be Motown rivals Golden World Records once sought Schiffer’s advice, travelling to New York to do so. “He was expert in drawing up contracts on anything to do with the music business,” Jackson is quoted as saying in a Golden World profile on the Soulful Detroit website. “He was very frank with us, and warned us of the high mortality rate that existed in that field, although Motown was beginning to do well, and so were companies in England.”

AHEAD OF HIS TIME?

      For all the wisdom Schiffer imparted, it soon became obvious to Wingate and Jackson that he had a conflict of interest in the discussions. “We respected that and eventually found another lawyer with similar credentials,” Jackson said.

      “George was smart,” recalled Barney Ales, who was by no means an admirer of Schiffer, despite their parallel loyalties to Gordy. “Maybe too smart, maybe ahead of his time.” He also remembered attending a party with Schiffer in New York. “George took me there to meet the woman he was going with. She was the head of the communist party in California, and she worked for Warner Brothers or one of those picture companies. I was sitting at the piano, and this woman came and sat next to me, and said ‘Who are you?’ I explained. Then she said something like, ‘How would you feel if I slapped your face?’ I said, ‘I would probably slap you back.’ Take it from me, George was a strange communist.”

A ‘long-standing friendship’ with Eddie Holland

      Even so, Schiffer’s fidelity to Gordy’s business was never more apparent than during the company’s internal dispute with Holland/Dozier/Holland. “George and I got on well,” Eddie Holland wrote in Come and Get These Memories, citing their “long-standing friendship.” But when Holland kept pressing the lawyer about H/D/H getting their own label within Motown, something snapped. He remembered Schiffer saying, “Eddie? Look. We have contracts on you, we have contracts on your brother and we have contracts on Lamont. We don’t have to give you anything.” The tone of everything changed after that.

      John Marshall retains positive memories of Schiffer, not least because when the Englishman told him that he was considering leaving EMI Records, the lawyer called Barney Ales – who, by that point, was Motown’s executive VP and general manager – to suggest finding ways to keep Marshall on side. “He also immediately arranged for me to see the Temptations in New York during an early appearance of Dennis Edwards.” Soon afterwards, Marshall was hired directly by Motown as its man in Europe.

      Schiffer seldom sought the media spotlight, although he caused a ripple in 1970 by writing to The Harvard Crimson, the newspaper of his alma mater, to criticise publicly the college’s suspension of black students who were protesting racially-discriminatory practices. This squared with his earlier stint as lead attorney for the Congress of Racial Equality.

      When Motown relocated to Los Angeles, Schiffer followed, giving up his New York practice for a post as the company’s planning director and, in 1975, as a vice president. Soon afterwards, though, he quit and turned his hand successfully to artist management, with Ashford & Simpson and Candi Staton among his clients – both signed, coincidentally, to a division of the firm he joined upon graduating from Harvard.

      And Stax Records? In 1976, Schiffer testified on its behalf during bankruptcy proceedings in Memphis, making the case for the future. “Stax should be put back into operation, not torn up into little pieces,” he told the judge in the case, presenting a plan for its reopening.

      Eventually, ill health took its toll. John Marshall remembered that Schiffer “had some sort of breathing problem, which also somewhat influenced the way he spoke.” In 1982, the lawyer suffered a stroke and retired in Massachusetts, the state to which he had, more than 40 years earlier, emigrated from war-torn Europe. On December 12, 2002, he died of heart failure at age 73.

      George Schiffer’s backstory was, indeed, like few others at Motown.

Music notes: Motown’s 1965 soundtrack album for Nothing But A Man is something of a rarity in vinyl form. It’s also not available on streaming services, at least as of this writing. But since the long-player was a compilation of previously-issued Hitsville material, this West Grand playlist captures both its content and track sequence. As Joshua Hargreaves wrote in the original liner notes: “Proven pleasurability to the listener being a pre-built-in ingredient, this soundtrack, when related to Nothing But A Man in its entirety, makes this album an outstanding adjunct to a true depth of feeling and understanding in the area.” For sure.

Trivia notes: those with an appetite for Motown minutiae may recognise the title of this particular WGB as the name of the campaign song which Berry Gordy co-wrote for the husband of his sister Esther, George Edwards, when he ran for re-election to the Michigan state legislature in 1958. Jackie Wilson recorded “Let George Do It,” and it can be heard here. As for entertainment attorney Harold Orenstein, mentioned above, he was well-known for representing the work of Broadway composer Frank Loesser. Which may explain why Motown released the original cast album of the 1976 theatrical revival of Loesser’s Guys and Dolls with an all-black cast. George Schiffer might even have handled negotiations for the recording.