Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.

In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.

When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004.

Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.

Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes her trademark celebrity portraits. But it also features personal photographs from Leibovitz’s life: her parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews, and Sontag. Leibovitz, who has called the collection “a memoir in photographs,” was spurred to assemble it by the deaths of Sontag and her father, only weeks apart. The book even includes photos of Leibovitz herself, like the one that shows her nude and eight months pregnant, à la Demi Moore. That picture was taken in 2001, shortly before Leibovitz gave birth to daughter Sarah. Daughters Susan and Samuelle, named in honor of Susan and Leibovitz’s father, were born to a surrogate in 2005.

Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”

–Rachel Somerstein

Rachel Somerstein is a writer who lives in New York.

Narrated by family member Cass Warner Sperling (Harry Warner’s granddaughter), the 60-minute film gives an insider look at these original Hollywood independent filmmakers and their varied personalities and business sense: the little-known major player, Harry Warner; Albert or “Honest Abe”; visionary Sam; and volatile Jack. Rare archival footage, family photos, and documents trace their scrappy rise from nothing, along with the personal tragedies and professional battles they overcame along the way.

From opening their first storefront theater by hanging a sheet on the wall and borrowing chairs from a funeral parlor to creating one of the top studios in America, these four brothers built an empire on a dream and revolutionized Hollywood, and were the first to use mass media to “educate, entertain, and enlighten.”

Visit Warner Sisters online to learn about Cass Warner Sperling’s production company.

To order The Brothers Warner on DVD, call 1-800-336-1917.

The colorful 85-year legacy of Warner Bros. is documented in an unprecedented series, You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story, a presentation of AMERICAN MASTERS. The five-hour film is a Lorac production in partnership with Warner Bros. Entertainment and premieres nationally, September 23, 24 and 25, 2008 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Award-winning filmmaker and film critic Richard Schickel is the director, writer and producer. Clint Eastwood is the executive producer and narrator.

“I think it’s wonderful and fitting that Richard Schickel, who produced his first big series The Men Who Made the Movies for public television in 1973, is returning to public television with this project – the epic and historic and thoroughly juicy Warner Bros. story,” says Susan Lacy, Creator and Executive Producer of AMERICAN MASTERS, a five-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series.

The film is the centerpiece of a year-long celebration of the studio’s 85th anniversary. A companion book of the same title, written by Schickel and George Perry with an introduction by Eastwood, will be published worldwide this September by Running Press.

Take the Warner Bros. movie quiz!

Through movie clips, rare archival interviews, newly photographed material, and insightful on-camera discussions with talent such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Sidney Lumet, Jack Nicholson, and many others, You Must Remember This gives us the history of 20th century America on the big screen. Each episode focuses on a specific period in the studio’s momentous history: the silent movie days and the development of sound, the Depression, World War II, the advent of television, the onset of new technologies, and the broadening and diversification of media companies in recent years.

In the 1930s and ‘40s Warner Bros showed the country holding itself together under terrible economic and societal pressures, then celebrating its triumphs over evil in the war years. Film classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, Casablanca, Now, Voyager, Mildred Pearce, and To Have and Have Not portrayed the era with palpable realism.

Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and into the ‘70s, the studio fought the looming threat of television with new technologies, new sensibilities and the launching of a new breed of movie star. You Must Remember This tells the studio’s story from Cinerama and Eastman Color to Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and through some of Hollywood’s most magnificent stars – John Wayne, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and Jane Fonda.

By the next decade, Warner Bros. was again the hottest, most adventurous studio in town, right back where it had been in the 1930s and ‘40s. Breaking new ground with the music documentary Woodstock and Oscar-winning films such as All The President’s Men, Dog Day Afternoon, The Exorcist, and Batman, the studio moved toward the 21st century, capturing the imagination of a new generation of audiences. From Dirty Harry to Harry Potter, Warner Bros. created a string of blockbuster productions that thrilled spectators around the world while the excitement of The Fugitive, the complexities of Reversal of Fortune and the edginess of The Matrix also led the way to a new Hollywood establishment that includes Clint Eastwood, George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

Part One: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 9pm ET

You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet (1923-1935)

Episode One introduces the four brothers and the characters and films that established their studio’s success.

Good War, Uneasy Peace (1935-1950)

Warner Bros. becomes home to celebrated stars Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and more. The studio – like the world – faces the twin catastrophes of the Depression and World War II, as well as the blacklists and political witch-hunts.

Part Two: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 9pm ET

A New Reality (1950-1970)

TV arrives. Warner Bros. fights back with new technology (CinemaScope, 3-D, Eastman Color) and new stars (girl-next-door Doris Day and teen icon James Dean). The studio releases breakthrough films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bonnie and Clyde.

Woodstock Notions (1970-1989)

What the ’60s start, the ’70s bring to flower. The film Woodstock signals a new era, while new talent (including Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick) and management spark a return to taking chances and setting trends.

Part Three: Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 9pm ET

The Big Tent (1980-Present)

Tent-pole films. Weekend grosses. Megabudgets. The ’80s usher in modern moviemaking and marketing. Box-office smashes Superman, Batman and The Matrix become franchises. The Harry Potter series enthralls the world. Clint Eastwood creates a succession of Oscar®-winning instant classics. And studio collaborations with George Clooney and more new talents pave the way to a future as fabled as the past.

July 25th 1958 was an especially hot day.  I was called into the office of the summer camp I was attending for a call from my father.  As I stood listening to the news of my Grandpa Harry’s passing a thud happened in my universe. I could feel myself grabbing for fond memories that were turning from color to black and white without the presence of my grandfather in them.

Harry Warner was the benevolent patriarch of our family as well as Warner Bros. studio.  He helped create a most caring, solid foundation on which I stand.  I was deeply influenced and inspired by his presence in my life.

At the end of the windy road, and after what seemed like hours of sisterly squabbles and some carsickness, there was the serenity of grandpa’s ranch waiting for us.  We’d start out first thing in the morning and arrive in time for brunch, as there was no freeway from Los Angeles to his beloved ranch in the San Fernando Valley.  Pepper trees lined the mile-long driveway leading up the hill where ol’ Prince, the St. Bernard, greeted us with his massive clumsy, furry body and wet kisses.

After successfully stuffing myself with the usual brunch goodies of lox and bagels, potato pancakes with apple sauce, cole slaw, pickled herring in sour cream and onions, fresh fruit salad, and, of course, most importantly the desserts — poppy seed cake, assorted breakfast rolls, beautifully molded jello, and frosted lemon cake, I’d excuse myself to go and mount my favorite life-size deer.  She rested on her hunches with her legs tucked looking out at the panorama. As I stared with her at the racetrack, the barn and the gentleman farm below, I truly felt immortal, definitely privileged, and without borders or boundaries. Reflecting like this became something I cherished and learned to do well.  By the time I had fully indulged in this form of personal dessert, my food had digested so that I could get permission to swim.

The mention of going to the stables with Grandpa to go riding assisted greatly in getting us out of the pool.  Grandpa’s pride came shining through as he walked us down the hill or drove us on his tractor pointing things out as he went.  His pride and joy were his sleek racehorses in their immaculate stalls.  He’d stick around and make sure that we learned to stay in the saddle by gently yelling instructions as we trotted around him on old nags that were always saddled up and waiting.

I’ll never forget how honored I felt when Grandpa showed me a prize colt and told me he had named her after me.  She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.  Putting his arm around me as we both admired her, he told me that he KNEW she was going to be “a winner”–a moment that remains as vivid as if it happened yesterday, and a constant reminder of his belief in me.

His love and reverence for Nature and his land was mystical. His love for his animals and growing vegetables and collecting eggs, and showing us how well his fruit trees were growing were all part of knowing his kind soul.

He was the undisputed boss at the studio, but in a crowd he’d pass for a retired businessman living on a modest income.  Nothing about his appearance, manners, habits or conversations suggested a motion picture magnate.  He was described as being “folksy, without pretensions, somewhat self-conscious, sober, willful, conservative, proud, shrewd, a devoted family and a great dreamer.”  He was constantly preoccupied with his own thoughts.  He loved music, and was expressly devoted to opera. He never went in for athletics, but he was extremely fond of dancing.

The last time I saw him he laid on a perfectly starched bed in an antiseptic smelling bedroom.  A mysterious force drew me to him as if he were a candle in the dark.  It was a gentle force.  His eyes were opened and moved to take me in.  A slight smile came across his lips.  I watched his hand start to slowly move across the sheet toward mine.  My hand immediately wrapped around his.  The enormously kind look in his eyes embraced me as it always did.  I felt his grip strengthen, transmitting and sealing an important request–something of great value was being entrusted to me.  I squeezed back.  A promise was made!  It’s taken me many years to understand the magnitude and meaning of that moment.

The feeling is I was given a beautiful, strong seedling to plant, and it’s now a tree full of delicious fruit.  In other words, my understanding of my family has bore many a delicious meal.  My search for who these brothers really were, and how and what they created and why began over 40 years ago.

Brother Albert was three years younger than Harry.  He was massive, genial, but not very articulate due to him being self-conscious about his lack of education, but he carried himself like the Lord of the Manor.  He was 6’2” and over 200 pounds. He was a conservative dresser, he loved horses and he shunned personal publicity.

Early on, he worked as a soap salesman.  His idea of giving one bar of soap free for every five ordered revolutionized the business.

In 1903, he saw his first motion picture, and realized that, “If these pictures have such an appeal for me that I never miss one, I thought, it ought a be a pretty good business to be in.”  When Sam and Harry had the same idea the whole family pooled their resources, and their father pawned his watch and ol’ Bob, the horse who pulled his meat delivery wagon to buy their first projector.

In a Screenland article dated 1928, it states the Warner slogan was:  “One for all and all for one.”  They quote Albert stating, “I attribute our success absolutely to the fact that we brothers have stuck together, a mandate that our father taught us early on.  One of us always managed to work and supply the rest with money while the others were digging something up.  We landed in Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1890’s.  Father was a shoemaker, and Harry and I learned the trade with him.  None of us brothers finished public school.  We had to help keep the home fires burning.”

He was the Vice-President and in charge of sales and distribution and was known as “Honest Abe.”  He liked to think of the studio as “The Ford of the movies.”

Brother Sam was four years younger than Albert.  At ten years old he sold papers, and later worked as a fireman on the Erie Railroad.

At the age of 16, he obtained the position of manager of an amusement company that played “The Great Train Robbery”, the famous one-reeler of its day, which inspired him to get into motion pictures.

He was a “charming personality with self-sacrificing qualities,” and was known for his fair business dealings and geniality.  Sam had always been “the plunger.”  He was reckless.  He had ideas.  He could visualize empires.  He saw what could be done, but sometimes he couldn’t get his plans beyond dreams.  His biggest contribution to the quartet was his visionary quality.  It was said, “he needed his brothers as stabilizers.”

He was six feet tall, a snappy dresser, was a great hit with the girls, an idea man with a wild sense of humor, and the best-read of the clan.  He was charming, self-sacrificing, fun loving, and managed to keep the peace between Jack and Harry until his untimely death.  He was “the dreamer who could grab a handful of clouds and weave them into a magic rug.  He never talked big, but his mind was like a periscope.  He could look around corners and see things coming.”

And then there was baby brother, Jack, who was four years younger than Sam.  Bitten by the showbiz bug, at the age of twelve he earned $12 a week as a boy soprano singing illustrated song-slides in a nickelodeon and later joined a vaudeville troupe for $18 a week.  He warbled with an adolescent trill, thus making him an effective crowd-chaser between acts.

Jack said, “Music must’ve been the catalyst that brought out the ham in me.  I clowned, sang, danced, and talked.  My mother once became so exasperated with my behavior that she offered me two bits if I would keep quiet for five minutes.”  He said singing helped keep him from becoming a full-time hood. He was a member of a gang in Youngstown, Ohio, a teenage mob led by a junior Dillinger whose name was “Toughy McElvey.”

He was always tan, physically strong, and very conscious of himself, which he tried to cover up by making jokes. He has been called “a frustrated standup comic and a notorious prankster hiding an inordinate sensitivity behind a clown’s mask,” as well as “a tragic character in Macbeth.”

He looked at making movies like it was any other kind of factory production requiring discipline and order rather than temperament and talent.  His job was to make 60 pictures a year.  His specialty was hitting budgets on the nose.  His philosophy was “Let’s compromise.  Let’s do it my way.”

The richness of these characters, their dreams and the difference they made in communicating through film lives on.

–Cass Warner Sperling authored the book, The Brothers Warner formerly known as, Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story, and is President of her independent film company, Warner Sisters.

But Helen Keller grew up, and it is her fascinating life as a Deaf Blind adult that this film explores. She was a socialist, a fighter for workers and women’s rights, a roving ambassador for our government, and a celebrity. Helen Keller’s life offers us a chance to better understand society’s response to disability and difference. Beyond biography, American Masters: Becoming Helen Keller challenges the viewer to imagine the context of her times and bring disability into contemporary focus.

American Masters: Becoming Helen Keller preimeres on PBS fall 2010.

When Marvin Gaye died in 1984, he left behind one of the great legacies in American music. More than a superb vocalist and subtle composer, he was a visionary who expressed the tenor of his times. Both radical and romantic, a self-taught singer with a flair for autobiographical revelation, he thrived on confession and loved candor. Marvin had the unique talent of turning the listener into a confidante, of making you feel his immediate presence. His aura combined spiritual and sensual essences. In his music, the combination worked wonders; in his personal life, the two strains clashed. He succeeded in translating his contradictions into complex and beautiful music.

I adored Marvin Gaye. As we worked on his life story together, I saw him as a man of quick wit, rare wit and light-hearted humor. His boyish charm and infectious smile were irresistible. His paradoxes were fascinating. In the middle of conversations, he’d stop to meditate or pray, his words turning into songs. As a collaborator, he was fabulous — right there, in the moment, an ingenious improviser and natural storyteller.

Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr. was born April 2, 1939, in Washington, D.C. (He added the “e” after entering show business.) His father was a charismatic storefront preacher, his mother a domestic worker. Family life was marked by friction. Marvin grew up singing in his daddy’s Holy Roller church, the place he said, “where I learned the essential joy of music.” After working with Bo Diddley, Gaye left high school to join the Moonglows, an important doo-wop group of the fifties. It was Harvey Fuqua, the group’s leader, who took Gaye to Detroit in the early sixties. There Marvin met Berry Gordy, who just started Motown, and married Berry’s sister Anna, a woman 18 years Gaye’s senior.

Emerging from a generation rooted in conformity, Gaye was a non-conformist, an anti-authoritarian artist — shy, ambitious, mellow but fearful, brooding and serious. He began as a session drummer but soon was singing. He fashioned himself a Sinatra-styled balladeer determined to buck the Motown machine. Yet his early attempts at Nat Cole-flavored material failed. Gordy couldn’t crack the adult market and Marvin crossed over the same bridge as all the other Motown acts — red-hot rhythm and blues. Motown’s committee of crack producers helped create a slew of major hits for Gaye. The title of the first, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” was blatantly self-descriptive.

Gaye’s sixties success centered on a series of brilliant singles supervised by various producers. Those songs established Marvin as a solo star. His work with Smokey Robinson (”Ain’t That Peculiar,” “I’ll Be Doggone”), Holland-Dozier-Holland (”How Sweet It Is,” “Can I Get A Witness”) and Mickey Stevenson (”Hitch Hike,” “Pride and Joy,” “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”) are among the crown jewels of early Motown. The productions explode with energy. Because of his flexibility and inherent musicality, Marvin was a producer’s dream. “You give Marvin material,” said Smokey, “and he’d improve, sculpt it, turn it into something bigger and better.”

His flexibility was also demonstrated as a duet partner. His most successful teaming was with Tammi Terrell, the standard against which all R&B duos are measured. As the country plunged into the Vietnam War, as race riots broke out across the land, the duets became escapes from reality. Marvin was a master of make-believe.

Meanwhile, his solo career found its greatest expression in the work of writer-producer Norman Whitfield. Both Gaye and Whitfield could be strong-willed and testy. But somehow the fiery blend of hostility and harmony came together in “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Marvin’s bone-chilling rendition carries all the pathos and pain of epic opera. “That’s the Way Love Is” and “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby” are also splendid examples of the wonders of Whitfield-Gaye.

“His Eye Is On the Sparrow” is a rare and moving instance of Marvin singing a spiritual non-pop song in the sixties.

The sixties was a producer-driven decade. In the seventies, Gaye changed all that. Now he thought in terms of concept albums, none more breathtaking than What’s Going On, the suite that reinvented soul music. After nine years of watching other producers, Marvin was ready to produce himself. The opinions of Motown’s marketing men, convinced What’s Going On would fail, didn’t matter. “What mattered,” said Marvin, “was the message. For the first time, I felt like I had something to say.”

Released in 1971, the self-produced suite reflects a whirl of crosscurrents — silky rhythm-and-blues, string-laden pop, gospel sensibilities, free-form jazz. Tenorman Wild Bill Moore raged beneath the vocals with the fury of Pharaoh Sanders. Dave Van dePitte wrote and arranged the orchestrations; others helped Marvin write the songs; but in the end it is Gaye’s vision, Gaye’s passion, Gaye’s singular statement as an independent artist that creates this new aesthetic of American pop.

Marvin moved to Los Angeles in 1972 where he wrote his first score. Trouble Man was the film, its theme song an ironically autobiographical blues. (”I didn’t make it playing by the rules,” he sings. “Only three things that’s for sure — taxes, death, and trouble.”)

With few exceptions, the rest of the seventies was devoted to major suites. One exception is “You’re the Man,” a sparkling footnote to What’s Going On, written and produced by Marvin during President Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. Another rare Gaye recording is “Where Are We Going?,” from his only session with producers Freddie Perren and Fonce Mizell. Heard [on The Very Best of Marvin Gaye (2001)] for the first time, Mavin’s version is the original to Donald Byrd’s, from the jazz trumpeter’s best-selling album Black Byrd. It has the sweet feeling of What’s Going On-light.

In 1973, Marvin finally answered What’s Going On with Let’s Get It On. Written in collaboration with Ed Townsend, the title song was an instant smash. The style is loose, funky and cavalier. Marvin basks in sensuous pleasures. He’s just met the young woman who would become his second wife, Janis Hunter, 18 years his junior. (Marvin and Anna wouldn’t divorce until 1977, by the time he and Janis had two children.) The suite is more than a celebration of sex. By the final chorus, Marvin seeks the spiritual, asking his lover is she understands what it means to be “sanctified.” “Distant Lover” stands as a towering ballad in the history of soul.

In the middle of the decade Marvin moved into his custom-built studio in the heart of Hollywood. In spite of the luxury of the new facility, though, Gaye suffered writer’s block. It took Leon Ware, a vastly underrated singer-songwriter, to break the block. The result was Ware’s scintillating production, I Want You. The title track is among Gaye’s most extravagant statements on physical longing, the album an euphoric and gorgeous piece of harmonic hedonism.

In 1977, Marvin needed a hit. The age of disco was in full flower. “Motown was screaming disco at me,” Gaye told me, “but I couldn’t be bothered.” Never one to chase fashions, Marvin was reluctant to concoct anything that remotely smacked of trendy dance music. Yet “Got To Give It Up” became a tremendous dance hit — #1 R&B, #1 Pop — and an eccentric success; it survives as a brief moment of levity during a period of Gaye’s personal despair.

Marvin and Anna finally divorced. Settlement negotiations were brutal. Here, My Dear, in 1979, documents that marriage and remains the most personal and intriguing of the great Gaye suites of the seventies. A meditation on emotional turmoil, “Anger” is a highlight from that monumental work.

“Ego Tripping Out” was the single selected from Love Man, a blatantly commercial album Marvin decided to shelve. The song can be seen as Gaye-styled rap, a testimony to the crippling properties of ego. It also denounces the drugs that are slowly killing him. “The toot and the smoke,” he sings on the concluding vamp, referring to cocaine and marijuana, “won’t fulfill the need.”

“Praise” is from Gaye’s final Motown album, In Our Lifetime, a series of wildly divergent musical essays, which, at their core, are unrelentingly dark. By then Marvin’s world was collapsing — his second marriage fell apart, his drug addiction flared out of control, the IRS seized his property. He moved from Los Angeles to Hawaii to London to Ostend, Belgium. With a contract from Columbia Records, he fashioned a dramatic comeback.

“Sexual Healing” remains an unanswered prayer. It is everything Marvin wanted, everything he needed, the reconciliation of his deeply divided soul. “Sexual Healing” meant serenity. When he recorded the song in Belgium in 1982, he was hopeful that such serenity was possible. It wasn’t meant to be.

In the end, despite a triumphant return to the U.S. on the heels of “Sexual Healing,” Marvin would not find happiness. His death at the hands of his father on April 1, 1984 tragically resolved a life-long struggle between the two men. Their relationship was marred by fear, jealousy, chemical abuse and fierce self-destructiveness. Their venomous antipathy was deeper than either man had understood.

A dozen years after his demise, Marvin’s contradictions remain. Discord and harmony echo through Marvin’s music like sweet incantations. When Gaye sings, the demons tyrannizing his soul are brought under control and made to conform to his elevated code of beauty. He achieves what Oscar Wilde called a “spiritualizing of the senses.” He endures; he remains an astounding artist, an inspiring poet, a man whose fabulous talents and all-too-human flaws worked together for the sake of song. The fact that Marvin lives on, now more than ever, is cause for celebration.

–
David Ritz co-wrote “Sexual Healing” and authored Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye as well as bios of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Smokey Robinson, Etta James and the Neville Brothers.