Alberta Gay

Following her son's murder, Alberta Gaye filed for divorce from her husband after 49 years of marriage. Two days later, however, she posted a bond to bail him out of jail after his arrest for their son's murder, because she still sympathized with him and didn't believe he should suffer any longer. At her son's funeral, she kissed her son on his forehead. Alberta struggled with bone cancer for the remainder of her life and was taken care of by her daughter Jeanne at her Burbank home. In 1986, Alberta founded the Marvin P. Gaye, Jr. Memorial Foundation in dedication to her son to help people with drug and alcohol problems. Before the memorial opened, however, she died on May 8, 1987, at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California, after years of suffering from bone cancer, at the age of 74.

During Gaye's final years alive, he and Alberta slept together in Alberta's bedroom. Around that time, Gaye's parents had virtually separated, with Marvin Sr. sleeping in an adjacent bedroom. By the time of the events of April 1, 1984, the couple hadn't slept in the same bed for almost a decade.

On March 31, 1984, Alberta and her husband had an argument over misplaced business documents, including an important insurance policy, which Alberta was blamed for misplacing. When the argument spilled over to Marvin's bedroom, Marvin awoke from a sleep and immediately took his mother's side, demanding his father to leave her alone. Gay, Sr. left the room without incident that afternoon but, according to Alberta, carried on rambling through the house.

In October 1982, Alberta Gay was rushed to a hospital in Los Angeles after falling critically ill to a near-fatal kidney infection that required surgery. Her sons Marvin and Frankie rushed from Belgium to be by her side, but Gay Sr. was in Washington, D.C., to fix up and sell their old house in Varnum Place and unwilling to return to California to support Alberta during her surgery or recuperation. Marvin believed that Alberta was owed half the money in the sale of the old Washington, D.C., house, but Gay, Sr. would not acknowledge that he had sold it.

Alberta often found herself caught up in the middle of her husband's level of brutal "disciplining" of their children. She also confided that her husband hated young Marvin. She told Ritz in 1979, "My husband never wanted Marvin. And he never liked him. He used to say he didn't think he was really his child. I told him that was nonsense. He knew Marvin was his. But for some reason, he didn't love Marvin and, what's worse, he didn't want me to love Marvin either. Marvin wasn't very old before he understood that." By the end of her husband's ministerial period, he developed an addiction to alcohol and began developing an interest in cross-dressing. Alberta later explained that her husband "liked soft clothing. Soft things of all kinds attracted him. He liked to wear my panties, my shoes, my gowns, even my nylon hose. Marvin saw him like that sometimes."

By 1979, Marvin had moved his belongings there and David Ritz interviewed him at the house that year as they worked on a biography. Noting her son's battle with depression, Alberta spent months with her son in Maui and in London.

When Gaye married his first wife, Anna, his duet partner and friend Kim Weston said that Anna reminded him strongly of his mother. Gaye continually supported his mother throughout his life, and after becoming successful, he moved his parents out of the by now derelict projects and into a large house that he had bought for them on Fifteenth and Varnum in the black middle-class section of Washington, DC. In 1973, he moved his parents to a residence at 2101 Gramercy Place in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, and the rest of the family moved to California as well.

Marvin Sr. and Alberta had four children. The first, Mable Jeanne, was born in 1937. Marvin Pentz, Jr. followed on April 2, 1939. A younger son, Frances "Frankie", followed in November 1941, with a younger daughter, Zeola (named after her aunt), following in 1945. With her husband, she converted to the strict House of God, an eccentric Christian sect that took its teachings from Hebrew Pentecostalism. Since her husband barely worked jobs, Alberta worked as a domestic worker, cleaning houses in the Maryland and Virginia areas to provide income for her family. Gay, Sr. fathered another son, Antwaun Carey Gay, in 1970 by another woman during one of his extramarital affairs without Alberta's knowledge.

At 20 years of age, she had a child, a son named Michael. As a result, her mother sent her to live with a relative in Washington, D.C., where she met minister Reverend Marvin Gay in 1934. After a year of dating, the couple married on July 2, 1935. The young couple first settled at an apartment located at 1617 First Street SW, only a few blocks from the Anacostia River. The First Street neighborhood was nicknamed "Simple City" owing to its being "half city, half country".

Alberta Cooper Gay (January 1, 1913 – May 8, 1987) was an American domestic worker, schoolteacher and the mother of five children including American recording artists Marvin Gaye and Frankie Gaye. Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, she married minister Marvin Gay, Sr., after relocating to Washington, D.C., in her early twenties.

Alberta was born Alberta Williams Cooper on New Year's Day, 1913, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She had three sisters, Pearl, Tolie and Zeola, and a brother, Aster, but she endured a troubled childhood while growing up in North Carolina: her father once shot at her mother during an argument. Although her mother survived, her father later died in a psychiatric hospital. Alberta told David Ritz that she felt she really didn't have a father, and her family didn't put her in a school until she was eight years old.