He was one of the most celebrated musicians in American history. His voice had sold more than 60 million records. He had survived addiction, bankruptcy, two shattered marriages, and years of self-imposed exile in Europe. He had come home. He had moved back in with his parents.
And on the morning of April 1, 1984, his father walked into his bedroom and shot him twice.
Marvin Gaye would have turned 45 years old the very next day.
The story of what happened inside that house on Gramercy Place in Los Angeles is not, at its heart, a story about a gun. It is a story about a father and a son who spent their entire lives at war with each other—a war that began when Marvin Gaye was a small child, never truly stopped, and ended in the only way it was always threatening to end.
It is a story about a man whose voice could make strangers weep, but who was never once able to reach the one man whose approval he needed most.
And it is a story about how much damage one childhood can do—damage so deep that, decades later, it could still kill you.
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PART ONE: THE VOICE THAT MOVED THE WORLD
Before we go back to the beginning, we have to spend a moment at the end.
On the morning of April 1, 1984, the neighbors on Gramercy Place in Los Angeles’s West Adams neighborhood heard two gunshots from the house at 2101. They heard screaming. Then they heard nothing.