Smokey Robinson Is 83 and Still Having Sex and He Will Tell You All About It

“When people think of gasms, they think of orgasms first and foremost…I tell everybody: ‘Whatever your gasm is, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,’” he told The Guardian this week in a prerelease interview. 

His gasms are certainly of the “or-” variety, as he made very clear in the interview, claiming that he had an affair long ago with Diana Ross while he was married to his first wife, The Miracles bandmate Claudette Rogers Robinson. (VF has reached out to a representative for Ross for comment.) 

While he denied that he and Aretha Franklin ever had a romance (though he clarified that “she was fine”), he said that he and Ross had “a thing” for about a year. 

“I was married at the time. We were working together and it just happened,” he said. “But it was beautiful. She’s a beautiful lady, and I love her right ’til today. She’s one of my closest people. She was young and trying to get her career together. I was trying to help her. I brought her to Motown, in fact. I wasn’t going after her and she wasn’t going after me. It just happened.”

Ross eventually broke it off with him, he said, “because she knew Claudette, and she knew I still loved my wife. And I did. I loved my wife very much.”

While Robinson was about as open as the book could be throughout the interview, he was curiously noncommittal about a certain urban legend: that he and Ross had a secret baby, and that that secret baby was Michael Jackson. 

“Oh, my God! I never heard that one, man! That’s pretty good. That’s funny! That’s funny!” He said he would call Ross and ask her if she’d heard the theory. Which, again, not a no, just saying. 

While the alleged Ross affair was decades ago, much of the interview centered on Robinson’s decision to center his new record on the 83-year-old libido. Then again, age is, as they say, only a number. He told The Guardian that “I feel 50.” He discussed how his sexuality has changed since his teenage years: not much! 

“I still feel the same way, only I’m wiser with it,” he said. “When you’re young and you have those exploratory feelings about sex, you haven’t lived long enough to know the value of it. So yes, I have a different attitude to it, but I still feel sexual. And I hope I’ll always feel like that. Okay, chronologically, I’m 83, but it’s not really my age.”

You know what? Good for him. Robinson joins the proud tradition of elder statesmen of entertainment sharing tales of their sexual exploits, with Paul Newman as a notable entry in the genre. In his posthumous memoir, Newman detailed his absolute horniness for wife Joanne Woodward and the dedicated sex room that they dubbed “the Fuck Hut.” 

“Joanne gave birth to a sexual creature,” he wrote. “We left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and public parks and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.”

And if you’re sitting here clutching your pearls gasping, “think of the children!” it’s fine—Newman and Woodward’s daughters are totally cool with all of us knowing details of their parents’ frequent trips to Bonetown. 

“I mean, I knew they were affectionate,” Melissa Newman told VF. “You could sense that that was there all the time…. I always say, ‘They had two doors on their bedroom. With bolts.’”

And the…hut? “Oh, I love the Fuck Hut,” she said. “I was just like, that’s very funny.”

Given this new and apparently fertile territory of celebrity content to mine, we’d like make a humble suggestion to our aging entertainment icons. Why not add a bullet point to the estate planning? When they sit down with the lawyers and the notaries to make sure that specific taxidermied pets and beloved couches go to the proper recipients, they should also have the option to put their bedroom (or hut) exploits on the record, with a plan for how and if they’d like those tales to be released. A gasm to remember them by. Please.