“You can’t imagine how overwhelming the Jackson 5’s success was. It was like Beatlemania with young kids, none of us had ever seen anything like it.”
Motown founder Berry Gordy had a galaxy of star executives helping him build the company into the powerhouse it became, but not many of them shone as brightly asJoining the company relatively late in its heyday, de Passe moved from her native Harlem to Detroit in 1968 and soon convinced a skeptical Berry to sign a group of kids calling themselves the Jackson 5.
Coming up for Suzanne and de Pass-Jones Entertainment are a Marvin Gaye biopic produced in conjunction with Dr. Dre and Alan Hughes; a series based on the Diana Ross-starring film “Mahogany” with Lee Daniels’ company; a film based on the life of legendary South African singer Miriam Makeba at Netflix with Kerry Washington’s Simpson Street company, and more.
It was impossible to explain to them that I wasn’t in with a bunch of New York nightclub gangsters — the Cheetah didn’t serve alcohol and was actually a very wholesome place to be, although I’m sure there were things going on that I didn’t know about. It really was a fantastic experience — we hosted the musical “Hair” before it went to Broadway. If it’s true that life is a game of inches, I was definitely in proximity to the next phase of my life.Yes.
Over Christmas 1967 I went to spend the week with Cindy and the gang in Miami at the Deauville Hotel, where the Supremes were appearing. Every night, I sat with Mr. Gordy and his kids and his entourage, and that’s when I really got to know him.
Joseph [Jackson, father and manager] was very instrumental in bringing them to a certain point, no doubt about that. But the Motown machinery, of which I was a very big part… Mr.
You were one of the only women in a role like that at the time, and at such a young age. Did you encounter a lot of sexism? [The song, an instrumental, was the group’s first hit, reaching No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1974.] Did things like the Jackson 5 cartoon series and Motown acts being on television so often bring you more into that world?
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