Peter Benjaminson - Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motowns First Superstar

O THER B OOKS BY P ETER B ENJAMINSON

Investigative Reporting
The Story of Motown
Death in the Afternoon
Publish Without Perishing
Secret Police
The Lost Supreme

Copyright 2012 by Peter Benjaminson

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-56976-248-6

www.marywellsbook.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data Benjaminson, Peter, 1945

Mary Wells: the tumultuous life of Motowns first superstar / Peter Benjaminson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references, discography, filmography, and index.

1. Wells, Mary, vocalist. 2. SingersUnited StatesBiography. 3. African American women singersBiography. I. Title.

ML420.W39 B46 2012

782.421644092--dc23

[B]

2012027104

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

My Guy

Words and Music by William Smokey Robinson

1964 (Renewed 1992) JOBETE MUSIC CO., INC.

All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI APRIL MUSIC INC.

All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

T O M ARY E STHER W ELLS, 1943-1992
and
E STHER W HITE H ARRIGAN, 1921-1990

You quote this in the book. I dont give a damn if they think Im crazy or what. The Lord built me like a machine, and that was to be an entertainer, a performer, a sex symbol. He gave me a voice to sing, He gave me the looks, He gave me the legs.

M ARY W ELLS, 1991

CONTENTS

I L EARNED W HILE R ESEARCHING this book that author and journalist Steve Bergsman had audiotaped four hours of interviews with Mary Wells between 1990 and 1992, while she was dying from cancer. He had never publicized the existence of these tapes nor had he released any of the material on them. Steve was kind enough to provide me with the tapes for use in this book. He also allowed me to interview him about his interactions with Wells during their long interview sessions. This book is also based on my own interviews with many of Wellss friends, husbands, lovers, relatives, and associates; on the transcripts from some of the interviews conducted by the producers of the TV One show Unsung for their August 2011 program about Mary Wells; and on my research in media archives and public records.

When I was a kid, if I wanted anything, I would sit on the porch and talk to the stars. And I got everything I wanted from them.

M ARY W ELLS, 1991

Y EARS BEFORE D IANA R OSS, Mary Wells was the first Motown solo superstar, a songstress popular worldwide for her hit My Guy. Her songs crossed the color line and reached huge white and black audiences in America and England consistently and repeatedly.

Wells hit number 45 on the Billboard popular music (white) chart and number 8 on the Billboard rhythm & blues (black) chart with her very first recorded song, which she wrote herself and sold directly to the Motown Record Company. And most of the succeeding songs she recorded for Motown did as well or better, with four of them becoming Top 10 hits. Altogether, she achieved an impressive career total of 20 Top 100 hits. She was the first artist on the Motown label to have a Billboard Top 10 and number 1 single, and she was the first to record an album for that label.

At the height of her career, Wells was one of the bestselling female solo singers in the world. She prepared the stage for the many female Motown vocalists who came after her, showing them what they could do and how popular they could become. As Mary Wilson of the Supremes told the TV One program Unsung in 2011, Mary Wells opened the doors for a lot of usfor me, the Supremes, and for all the other girls who have come along.

But Wells was much more than a successful singer with an alluring voice. She also displayed an irrepressible fighting spirit and a ferocious belief in her own talent. Without either of these she would never have progressed as far as she did. With them, she quickly rose to the very top of her profession.

Those same qualities, however, inspired her to leave Motown at the young age of twenty-one. And her departure gave the world its first sign that all was not sweetness and light at Americas first major black-owned music company. It also meant that for the rest of her life, Wellss career proceeded in fits and starts. She spent her post-Motown days trying to fight her way back to the top. She didnt manage to do so, but she never gave up.

Whether retaining her chart-topping position in the notoriously cutthroat music business or later struggling to survive on its lower rungs, Marys personal life remained tumultuous even by music-world standards.

She claimed early in life that she was the illegitimate child of a black father she never met. Later in life she said she had learned that her father was actually a white man. Whether or not either of these assertions was true, her mother was married to a black man Mary called her stepfather, who was often absent and to whom she never felt close. He seems to have disappeared from her life completely by the time she entered the music business in her teens. She spent most of her adult life searching for a man she could count on. But her affairs with and marital attachments to numerous men, some of whom were famous, were never able to deliver the kind of safety she appeared to be looking for.

Many of Marys romantic and other entanglements were worthy of a daytime soap opera. In 1964 she hid in fear in a hotel bathroom in New York City as her first ex-husband shot one of her business managers in the head. Later, she married a member of a well-known music family and had three children with him, only to take the unusual step of divorcing him eleven years later to move in with his brother, with whom she had a fourth child. She also attempted suicide on two occasions.

While all this was happening, Mary was spending much of her post-Motown life on the road, where she was the acknowledged Queen of the Oldies. She scratched out a living for years as a touring artist, managing to survive several dangerous illnesses and endure at least two spectacular auto accidents, complete with shouted prayers and flying animals in one of them. By her own account, she was kidnapped by crazed fans and driven halfway across America. She also made extensive use of illegal drugs.

Near the end of her life, Wells fought a drawn-out and courageous battle with throat cancer, in some ways the most frightening disease that could strike a singer who made her living, especially in her later years, by her voice alone, rather than from hit records and royalties. In the gutsiest performance of her life, she refused to lose hope and spent precious time during her last few months in an anti-cancer crusade that included testifying before the US Congress about the need to continue funding anticancer research.

Mary had her faults, but she came through magnificently when she was down on her luck and even after her luck had completely run out. As she sang with such assuredness on her very first hit, the one she wrote herself, Youre gonna want my love today. We sure do, but she is now singing elsewhere.

W E KNOW THAT M ARY E STHER W ELLS was born in Detroit, Michigan, on May 13, 1943. Her birth certificate identified her mother as Geneva Campbell Wells, a housewife, although she worked cleaning houses. It listed Marys father as Arthur Wells, and identified both parents as black. But Arthur Wells is a shadowy figure.