Hazel Gordy is the daughter of Motown founder Berry Gordy and his first wife, Thelma Coleman, and she became a public figure as the first wife of Jackson 5 singer Jermaine Jackson. They married on December 15, 1973, in one of the most talked-about entertainment weddings of the decade, and the marriage lasted until 1988. Together they have three children: Jermaine Jr., Autumn, and Jaimy. Her marriage sits at the center of a famous moment in music history, when the Jackson brothers left Motown for Epic and Jermaine chose to stay. She has kept a very private life since, appearing mainly at Motown family tributes. Get the verified facts on her family, her wedding, her life since the divorce, and the inaccurate claims that circulate about her online.
Who Is Hazel Gordy?
Hazel Joy Gordy is the daughter of Berry Gordy Jr., the songwriter and entrepreneur who founded Motown Records in Detroit in 1959, and his first wife, Thelma Coleman. She is generally described as the eldest of Berry Gordy’s children, and she was born in Detroit in the mid-1950s. One widely repeated date for her birthday is August 24, 1954, but that detail appears mostly on secondary sites, so it should be treated as unconfirmed.
What is not in dispute is how Hazel Gordy entered the public eye. She was never a recording artist or a Motown executive in the way some of her relatives were. Her public profile came through family: first as the daughter of the man who built the most successful Black-owned record company in America, and then as the wife of Jermaine Jackson, one of the most recognizable young stars in the country. That dual identity is the reason her name still draws curiosity decades after her wedding.
Hazel Gordy’s Family and the Gordy Dynasty
The Gordy family is often described as a dynasty, and for good reason. Berry Gordy grew up in Detroit in a close-knit, ambitious household, and several of his siblings worked in and around the family’s music enterprises. His sister Anna Gordy co-founded the Anna label and later married Marvin Gaye, while other relatives held roles across Motown’s growing operation. Hazel Gordy was raised inside that world, where business, music, and family were hard to tell apart.
Her father’s later relationships widened the family tree considerably. Berry Gordy’s children include Hazel and her brothers Berry IV and Kerry, along with other siblings and half-siblings such as Rhonda Ross Kendrick, the daughter of Diana Ross, and Stefan Kendrick, better known as Redfoo of the group LMFAO. Rockwell, the singer behind the 1980s hit “Somebody’s Watching Me,” is also one of Berry Gordy’s sons. For anyone trying to understand Hazel Gordy’s place in the family, the key point is that she belongs to the first generation of Gordy children, the ones who watched Motown grow from a small Detroit house into a cultural force.
Growing Up in the Motown Universe
Motown began in 1959 with a modest loan from the Gordy family and a converted house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit that became known as Hitsville U.S.A. By the time Hazel Gordy was a child, the label was producing hits by the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Marvin Gaye. Being the child of the person behind all of it meant growing up around artists who were becoming legends.
In the early 1970s, the center of gravity at Motown moved. Berry Gordy shifted much of the company’s operations from Detroit to Los Angeles, chasing film and television opportunities and a bigger stage for his artists. That move is important to the Hazel Gordy story, because it put the Gordy family in the same Southern California orbit as the Jackson family, who had relocated to Los Angeles after Motown signed the Jackson 5 in 1969. Two families whose lives revolved around the same record label were now living in the same city.
How Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson Came Together
Jermaine Jackson, born December 11, 1954, in Gary, Indiana, was the fourth child of Joseph and Katherine Jackson and one of the lead voices of the Jackson 5. By the early 1970s the group had scored a run of number-one singles, and Jermaine, who sang lead on a number of their songs alongside his younger brother Michael, was a teen idol in his own right.
Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson were close in age, and accounts suggest the two were engaged when they were around eighteen or nineteen. Detailed, firsthand accounts of the courtship are thin in sources that can be trusted, and a lot of what appears online is padded with speculation. What can be said safely is that their relationship developed within the shared world of Motown, where the Jackson brothers were the label’s brightest young stars and the boss’s daughter was part of the extended family circle around the company.
The 1973 Wedding of Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson
Hazel Gordy married Jermaine Jackson on December 15, 1973, a few days after his nineteenth birthday. Photographs preserved in the Getty Images archive place the ceremony in the Beverly Hills area, and captions describe Berry Gordy standing alongside his daughter on her wedding day. Other images from the occasion show Michael Jackson attending with his mother, Katherine, and his sisters Janet and La Toya, along with his brother Randy.
The wedding was treated as an event, not just a family affair. It joined the first family of Motown to the family that had become the label’s biggest success story, and the press covered it as a marriage between two entertainment royal houses. For Hazel Gordy, it marked the moment her public life truly began. She was now a Jackson as well as a Gordy, and every step of the marriage that followed would be watched through the lens of both names.
Hazel Gordy and the Jackson 5’s Break With Motown
The marriage soon intersected with a major turning point in music business history. In the mid-1970s, the Jackson brothers grew frustrated with their royalties and their lack of creative control at Motown. Their contract ended in 1975 and 1976, and the group signed with Epic Records, a move that required them to change their name to the Jacksons because Motown owned the Jackson 5 name. Randy Jackson took Jermaine’s place in the lineup.
Jermaine chose to stay with Motown. The official reason he gave was loyalty to the company and a belief that it was better positioned to promote Black music. Some observers, including writers cited in standard biographical accounts, have argued that his marriage to Hazel Gordy was also a deciding factor. Both explanations can be true at once, and nobody outside the family can say precisely how much weight each carried. What is clear is that Hazel Gordy’s marriage placed her at the center of a story that fans still debate: the split that sent the Jackson brothers in one direction and Jermaine in another.
Jermaine eventually rejoined his brothers for the Motown 25 television special in 1983 and for the Jacksons’ 1984 album Victory and the tour that followed, a reunion that closed a chapter that had opened with the 1975 departure.
Hazel Gordy as a Mother: Jermaine Jr., Autumn, and Jaimy
During their marriage, Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson had three children. Jermaine La Jaune Jackson Jr., known as Jay, was born in January 1977. Autumn Joi Jackson was born in July 1978. Jaimy Jermaine Jackson arrived in March 1987. All three are adults today, and they have appeared with their mother at family events connected to the Gordy legacy.
One example comes from a Heart Foundation event honoring Berry Gordy, where Hazel Gordy was photographed with her children and her brother Kerry Gordy. The image is a useful reminder that the Gordy family has stayed closely connected across generations, and that Hazel Gordy has remained part of the circle of relatives who gather to celebrate the family’s contribution to American music.
It is worth noting that a different woman named Autumn Jackson became known in the 1990s in connection with an unrelated legal case. Autumn Jackson has no connection to Hazel Gordy’s daughter, and the two are sometimes confused by careless websites. Readers who come across that mix-up should treat it as an error.
The End of the Marriage in 1988
The marriage of Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson ended in 1988, after about fifteen years. Jermaine went on to marry Alejandra Oaziaza in 1995 and Halima Rashid in 2004, and he has said and written a great deal about his life in interviews and in his memoir. Hazel Gordy, by contrast, has kept a far lower public profile.
The reasons the marriage ended have not been laid out in any detail in sources that can be verified, and this profile does not guess. Some websites claim to know the private story behind the divorce, but those claims are usually unsourced and contradict one another. The safest summary is the one that the reliable record supports: the couple married in 1973, divorced in 1988, and share three children.
What Hazel Gordy Has Done Since
After the marriage ended, Hazel Gordy stepped largely out of the headlines. One website reports that she has worked as a licensed real estate agent in Southern California, but that claim comes from a single secondary source, and it could not be confirmed through a major outlet, so it should be treated as unverified. Other pages describe her as a fashion designer or a philanthropist, yet those descriptions tend to appear on near-identical pages that repeat each other, which is a common sign of recycled content rather than reporting.
What can be confirmed is that Hazel Gordy has continued to appear at events honoring her father and the Motown legacy. Getty Images shows her attending the Motown Family Night performance of Motown: The Musical at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City in April 2013. Those appearances fit a pattern of someone who stays connected to her family’s history without seeking the spotlight for herself.
Hazel Gordy and the Gordy Family Legacy
Part of what keeps interest in Hazel Gordy alive is the way the Gordy family continues to be honored as a unit. Berry Gordy’s contributions to American culture have been recognized through major tributes, a Broadway musical built around his story, and countless retrospectives on the sound of Motown. At the family gatherings tied to those celebrations, the children of the label’s founder often appear together, and Hazel Gordy has been among them.
Those moments matter because they show a side of the Motown story that chart histories tend to skip. The label’s rise was not only a story of producers, songwriters, and singers. It was also a story of a family that lived alongside the business, with children who grew up hearing demo tapes at home and watching their father turn a small Detroit operation into an institution. Hazel Gordy’s presence at tributes to that history ties her to the part of the story that belongs to the people who lived it from the inside.
How Hazel Gordy Is Remembered by Fans of the Jackson Family
For fans of the Jackson family, Hazel Gordy occupies a distinct place. She appears in wedding photographs alongside Michael Jackson and the rest of the family, and she is part of the background of the years when the brothers were reinventing themselves after leaving Motown. Fans of Jermaine Jackson’s solo work from the late 1970s and early 1980s, which he recorded for Motown, often connect those years to the period of his marriage.
Interest in her tends to spike whenever Jermaine Jackson or the wider Jackson family is in the news, because readers want to know who the people around the famous brothers were. The honest answer about Hazel Gordy is that she has been far more reserved than most people connected to either family, and that her restraint is itself part of her story. In an era of constant public sharing, she remains a figure whose life is known mainly through a handful of verified milestones.
Separating Fact From Fiction About Hazel Gordy
Because Hazel Gordy has lived a mostly private life since the 1980s, there is a gap between public interest and public information, and low-quality websites have rushed to fill it. Some of these pages claim that she died in 2011. That claim is contradicted by photographs showing her at a public event in 2013, and it is a good example of why unsupported statements about a person’s life should be questioned.
The same pages disagree with one another about basic details. Some say Jermaine Jackson’s second wife was a dancer, others a model, and others someone else entirely. Some say Hazel Gordy was six years older than Jermaine, while others say he was older than her. These contradictions show that many of the pages are written by automated tools or copied from one another rather than drawn from interviews, memoirs, or news coverage.
A good rule for anyone writing or reading about Hazel Gordy is to trust details that appear in established biographical references, contemporaneous photo archives, and the accounts of the family members themselves, and to be cautious about anything that appears only on pages with generic titles and repetitive phrasing.
Why Hazel Gordy Still Matters in Motown History
Hazel Gordy never sought to be a headline figure, yet her name remains attached to some of the most discussed moments in the history of Motown and the Jackson family. Her wedding brought together two of the most prominent families in American music. Her marriage sat at the heart of the debate over why Jermaine Jackson remained at Motown while his brothers moved on. And her children carry forward both the Gordy and Jackson names into a new generation.
For readers trying to understand the human side of Motown, the story of Hazel Gordy offers a reminder that behind the famous names and chart-topping records were families with their own milestones, pressures, and private chapters. She was a daughter of a founder, a young bride at the center of a famous wedding, and a mother whose children link two musical legacies.
Conclusion
The most accurate way to describe Hazel Gordy is as a figure whose significance comes from where she stood in music history rather than from a career of her own in the spotlight. She was raised in the world Berry Gordy built, married into the family that defined Motown’s most successful era, and has since chosen a quieter life. Anyone writing about Hazel Gordy owes readers care with the facts, because so much of what circulates about her is guesswork. What the reliable record shows is a clear and interesting outline: a Detroit-born daughter of Motown’s founder, a famous 1973 wedding, three children, a marriage that ended in 1988, and a lasting place in the story of two legendary families.
FAQs
Who is Hazel Gordy?
Hazel Gordy is the daughter of Motown founder Berry Gordy and his first wife, Thelma Coleman. She is best known as the first wife of Jackson 5 singer Jermaine Jackson.
How long were Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson married?
They married on December 15, 1973, and the marriage ended in 1988, a span of about fifteen years.
How many children do Hazel Gordy and Jermaine Jackson have?
They have three children: Jermaine Jr., Autumn, and Jaimy.
Why did Jermaine Jackson stay with Motown when his brothers left?
Jermaine cited loyalty to Motown and its ability to promote Black music, and some biographical accounts argue that his marriage to Hazel Gordy also played a role.
What is Hazel Gordy doing now?
Hazel Gordy has kept a low public profile and appears mainly at events honoring the Gordy family and Motown. A report that she works in real estate could not be confirmed through a major outlet.
