television executive; music executive
Personal Information
Born 1948, in New York, New York; raised in Harlem neighborhood; of West Indian descent. Married actor Paul Le Mat, 1978. Education: Attended Manhattan Community College.
Education: Attended Manhattan Community College.
Career
Music, television, and film executive. Became assistant to Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, 1968; began to work in talent acquisition for Motown, 1970; became director of West Coast creative division of Motown, 1970s; became vice president of Motown Industries, 1970s; became president of Motown Productions, 1981; produced award-winning CBS-TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, 1989; founded de Passe Entertainment, 1992.
Life's Work
Suzanne de Passe remains remarkably little known in view of her impressive list of accomplishments. As an executive at Motown records during the company's second set of glory years in the 1970s, de Passe nurtured the careers of some of the greatest entertainers of the modern era, including Michael Jackson and Commodores' lead vocalist Lionel Richie. As one of Hollywood's hardest working and most respected independent television producers, she brought to fruition one of most-watched and most artistically acclaimed television miniseries of all time, the eight-hour Western epic Lonesome Dove, broadcast in 1989.
Suzanne Celeste de Passe was born around 1948, to West Indian parents in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Her parents divorced when she was three, but her father, a salesman for the Seagram liquor firm, continued to play a strong role in her life after his remarriage six years later. Ambitious from an early age, de Passe attended a private school (the New Lincoln School) in New York, and set her sights on becoming a writer. Majoring in English, she attended Syracuse University, and then transferred to Manhattan Community College.
Booked Talent for Disco
She had talents outside of school, though, and these grew so fast that they ultimately took precedence over the completion of her college education. While still in school, she had held down a job at New York's fashionable Cheetah Disco; there her ear for new music and musicians impressed the management so much that she was hired as talent coordinator, a position that gave her invaluable experience in both mechanics and the artistic side of the music business. From the Cheetah Disco, de Passe moved on to New York's Howard Stein talent agency, and at a party she met Berry Gordy, who would become her mentor and the most important inspiration behind her own creative career.
Gordy at the time was riding high as the founder and chairman of Motown Records, the pioneering Detroit label that brought black popular music to a level of nationwide success that it had never before achieved. After hiring de Passe in 1968 and bringing her to the company's new headquarters in Los Angeles, Gordy groomed her in the creative side of the business. Though known as a stern taskmaster, he was patient with his new charge. "Gordy let me mess up a lot of things [and] spend a lot of his money," de Passe told Forbes magazine.
Not far into her twenties, de Passe worked to develop new talent as the vice president of Motown's West Coast creative division. One day she encountered a unique act consisting of five singing brothers--the Jackson Five--headed by an incredibly energetic youngster. "I was just knocked out," de Passe told People. "There was this little guy [Michael Jackson] attacking some of the most mature R&B material that existed." De Passe honed her management skills as she supervised the Jackson Five's music and choreography, and must be given considerable credit for the initial flowering of Michael Jackson's mercurial career.
Scripted Billie Holiday Film Bio
The multitalented de Passe put her writing skills to work on another major project for Motown: she was the co-writer for the 1972 Billie Holiday film biography Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross. She rose through the ranks at Motown, becoming vice president of Motown's West Coast division, and then vice president of Motown Industries as a whole. Some of the work was rewarding and glamorous, but some was less so: in the 1970s, one of de Passe's duties was to act as go-between for Gordy and vocal diva Diana Ross, then a much-publicized show-business pairing. "It was a highly combustible situation," de Passe recalled in a People interview. Despite the touchiness of the duty, Ross and de Passe became good friends; the singer served as matron of honor at de Passe's 1978 wedding to actor Paul Le Mat.
Lending her writing and production abilities to two other Motown-generated stage productions, Mahogany and The Wiz, de Passe was rewarded for her ability to realize so many complex projects when she was named president of Motown Productions in 1981. This new division of the company was intended to broaden the music-oriented company's reach into television and movies. Starting modestly with several television movies, de Passe gained recognition for producing the Motown retrospective Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, the first in an ongoing series of Motown television specials that continued to bring the company revenue through associated music album releases. Even after leaving Motown, de Passe produced specials recognizing the company's 30- and 40-year landmarks.
In 1989, de Passe raised eyebrows with a daring move: she produced a CBS television network miniseries of Larry McMurtry's sprawling Western novel, Lonesome Dove. The odds seemed stacked heavily against the series's success: most observers thought that in those early days of video and cable competition for television, a four-night, eight-hour presentation was doomed to failure. It also seemed that de Passe, an urban-raised woman who had devoted her life to African American culture, might have been an unlikely choice to helm a project steeped in the lore of the old West.
Grabbed Rights to McMurtry Novel
But de Passe had read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in manuscript even before it reached publication, and, according to Forbes, "instantly saw in it a modern-day classic." While other studios held back, discouraged by the book's length, de Passe had cannily snapped up the television and movie rights to the book for a mere $50,000 in 1985. Her judgment was vindicated when Lonesome Dove won rave reviews, top ratings, and Peabody, Golden Globe, and Emmy awards. The one event that marred de Passe's triumph was the bankruptcy of a company associated with the making of the film; de Passe's own fee was among the casualties.
Yet de Passe has been known to sacrifice part of her own pay at times, in order to help bring success to projects she is committed to. There is a streak of creative idealism in de Passe's character: a writer herself, she has done what it takes to bring projects to completion, even with uncertain financial underpinnings. "In this business, if you believe in something enough, sometimes it requires a gesture to get other people involved," she told Newsweek.
She founded her own company, de Passe Entertainment, in 1992, but continued a close association with Motown. She produced other successful programs based on McMurtry's novels, branched out into weekly programming with the ABC network series "Sister, Sister," and continued to created and produce projects that told parts of the always compelling Motown story. One of these, a two-part 1998 program on the career of the Motown vocal group the Temptations, had a budget of over $16 million.
A true leader, de Passe has been the focus of two studies of her personal management style, conducted by the Harvard Business School. Compared with other influential entertainment-industry figures who find their lives made the stuff of gossip columns, de Passe has gained less recognition and perhaps less remuneration. "I've made a lot more money for others than for myself," she admitted to Newsweek in 1998. "I can't retire." American entertainment, however, has been all the richer for her contributions.
Further Reading
Books
- Henderson, Ashyia N., and Shirelle Phelps, eds., Who's Who Among African Americans. 12th ed. Gale, 1999.
- Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book II. Gale, 1996.
- Periodicals
- Forbes, January 23, 1989, p. 58.
- Newsweek, November 2, 1998, p. 48.
- People, March 22, 1991, p. 64.
- Time, January 30, 1989, p. 51.
— James M. Manheim
