Some girls give me jewelry, others buy me clothes, some girls give me children I never asked them for.
—“Some Girls,” Rolling Stones, by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (1978)
While Rick later became a rampant womanizer, his initial forays into serious relationships, which took place around 1969, were much more conventional.
He met Syville Morgan, a young African American woman, at a party in Hollywood in the late 1960s. They rented a Hollywood apartment together. Syville “had the ability to cook her ass off,” Rick wrote in his autobiography, The Confessions of Rick James. “I mean, there was never a time when I didn’t wake up to a serious meal. That’s how she kept me there.”
“We were pretty hot and heavy,” Syville says. “He was fun, funny, intriguing, had a great sense of humor, and always kept me laughing.” She became pregnant soon after they moved in together. However, their relationship became rocky after a few months because Rick was snorting a lot of cocaine and smoking a lot of pot.
Late in 1969 Rick, who was doing a lot of traveling around for singing gigs, got work at a club in Toronto and met Kelly Misener, a pretty, white eighteen-year-old Canadian student at the North Toronto Collegiate Institute. They soon began an affair.
On July 13, 1970, Syville gave birth to her and Rick’s daughter in Los Angeles. Tyenza Matthews, now known as Ty James, was Rick’s first child. About two years later, Syville became pregnant with Rick’s second child, Ricardo Matthews, now known as Rick James Jr. Soon after Syville became pregnant, Rick admitted to her that he had been having an affair with Kelly, and he and Kelly moved into a house in Toronto together.
Syville was angry. “Can you imagine Rick telling me that he was going to be with this girl in Canada when I was pregnant with his child?” she says. Rick added insult to injury by marrying Kelly a couple years later. Syville remarks, “He married Kelly and wouldn’t marry me, when I had his children and I was in love with him!”
Kelly was very attractive, but Chris Sarns says Rick’s motivation for breaking up with Syville was deeper than that. “Rick didn’t want anything to do with parenthood,” he says. After growing up without a father, Rick had no desire to be one—he had no idea how it was done. Syville began raising Rick’s children alone.
Rick’s attorney, Stan Weisman, says Kelly was “very beautiful. . . . I’ll compare her with any girl out there, ever.” He also describes her as being “very nice, probably too nice for Rick,” and adds Kelly “was a wise, intelligent, and clever woman.” He admits he was surprised when Kelly took up with Rick.
Rick Abel had similar recollections of Kelly. “She wasn’t wild,” he says. “I think she smoked pot, but it was never like she was the party girl.” He also opines that Kelly “didn’t seem like the type of person that would be with Rick at all.”
Levi Ruffin says Kelly cultured Rick somewhat. “Remember, Rick wasn’t a really educated guy,” Ruffin says. “She taught him how to order wine, things like that, things that he would never have learned because he never had the opportunity. She taught him how to be a gentleman.” Nevertheless, even after this training, “sometimes Rick would be an asshole ’cause he was just Rick,” Ruffin says. “He couldn’t help it sometimes. But we were crazy about Kelly.” Kelly and Ruffin’s wife, Jackie, became very close.
So why was this lovely and intelligent woman with Rick? In a statement that perhaps explains how Rick got (and got away with) most things, Kelly once told Nick Warburton that Rick “had an uncanny knack of endearing himself to people. He was quite a charming guy.”
This charming guy was about to create his best band yet.